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LET THEM EAT GRASS

The
Atlantic Monthly | May 2003 

 Back To Grass 
The old way of raising cattle is now the new way˜better for the animals and better for your table

by Corby Kummer 

Beef has come to seem a hazardous
substance. If years of warnings about the dangers of saturated fat and
heart disease weren’t enough, Eric Schlosser’s book Fast Food Nation (2001)˜with
its graphic and disturbing picture of the inhumane working conditions of
meatpackers and the contamination from criminally rushed slaughtering and
processing˜made clear that it is unwise if not foolhardy to eat beef ground
by anyone but yourself. Then an article last year by Michael Pollan, in
The New York Times Magazine, told us that corn-fed beef, the presumed gold
standard for tender, luxurious steak, is far from wholesome. It isn’t very
good for the people who eat the fat-streaked meat that corn produces, and
eating corn is terrible for cattle, which are ruminants meant to chew grass.
Corn leaves their digestive tracts susceptible to E. coli and other pathogenic
bacteria. Almost all cattle raised for beef are force-fed corn (which costs
less to buy than it does to grow, thanks to federal farm subsidies), and
the resulting stress makes it necessary to keep them on high doses of antibiotics.
“Finishing” for corn-fed beef takes place on vast feedlots, where cattle
raised in many parts of the West are trucked to a miserable end. This force-feeding
provokes moral hesitations like those raised by that notorious product
of force-feeding, foie gras. At least geese are designed to eat corn.

    
Whatever the current troubles of McDonald’s and other burger purveyors,
beef remains America’s most popular meat. Many meat lovers, alarmed by
Schlosser’s book and Pollan’s article, have decided to go organic˜a choice
always to be applauded, for the benefits that chemical-free farming brings
to the environment and the health of farm workers, and a choice made easier
by the adoption last October of a national organic standard. But organic,
vexingly, will not necessarily satisfy people who care about flavor and
freshness. Once the food industry saw there was a profit to be made, “organic”
stopped being a guarantee of attention to flavor or individual care. In
the case of beef, “organic” can mean “raised in confinement and given organic
corn.” And a last-minute legislative provision passed in February, allowing
farmers to give livestock non-organic feed and still certify their meat
as “organic,” threatens to rob the term of all credibility.

    There
is an alternative: grass-fed beef. Ideally this refers to animals raised
in open pastures and fed grass and silage all their lives after weaning.
Grass feeding results in far lower levels of saturated fat and high levels
of both omega-3 fatty acids (more commonly found in fish, and thought to
help prevent heart disease) and the newest darling of the nutritional world˜CLA
(conjugated linoleic acid), polyunsaturated fat that may help prevent cancer.
These benefits, and also higher levels of antioxidants, appear in all food
from all animals that eat grass, milk and cheese as well as meat.
  

As with “organic,” though, the lure of a new market willing to pay a premium
has led to fudged definitions. Some meat producers use “grass-fed” to describe
animals that are raised in pens on industrial feed, including corn, and
finished on rations of grass in feedlots far from home. A similar confusion
still surrounds “free-range,” which can refer to animals that roam where
they please or to animals kept in barns and allowed to range in circumscribed
yards. No one regulates the use of these terms, and given how many years
it took to achieve a national definition of “organic,” it may be a long
time before anyone does. Determined beef lovers in search of true grass-fed
beef have encountered uneven availability and, occasionally, the necessity
of buying an entire side of beef at a time (which requires both a very
large freezer and the skill to cook lesser cuts). Economic inefficiency
and shipping costs lead to higher prices˜the usual tariff for more healthful,
less industrial food. 

    The search
is worth it. Grass-fed beef tastes better than corn-fed beef: meatier,
purer, far less fatty, the way we imagine beef tasted before feedlots and
farm subsidies changed ranchers and cattle. I recently visited two ranchers
and the founder of a cooperative, all of whom have taken the purist approach
to grass-fed beef. Each has managed to meet three big challenges facing
ranchers who want to avoid sending their animals to a feedlot: finding
slaughterhouses that will accept and process just a few animals at a time
and treat them humanely; supplying meat year-round, although grass is seasonal;
and selling both prime and secondary cuts. Each offers an easy way to order
true grass-fed beef, a step that should lead to a conversion experience.
To ensure satisfaction I offer a foolproof recipe for brisket˜my mother’s.

    Any
reservations I have about the ethics of eating meat recede when I visit
a farm or ranch run by someone who cares deeply about animals and how they
live. Culling and, yes, killing a portion of a herd seems a natural
way of helping a group of animals and their habitat to thrive. This paradox
struck me when I rode last summer in the old tan Suburban of Dale Lasater,
a rancher in Matheson, Colorado, an hour or so southeast of Denver. Lasater,
a gentle, witty, contemplative man, appears briefly in Fast Food Nation
as a corrective model for the beef industry. His father, Tom, himself a
third-generation rancher, moved from Texas to Colorado in search of affordable
land, and in the 1950s took the heretical step of making his ranch a wildlife
sanctuary, refusing to kill predators and pests or, later, to use fertilizers
and herbicides. This, he hoped, would allow him to restore nutritive grasses
and water reserves to the parched, depleted land he had bought, and to
protect the ranch from developers in Denver and Colorado Springs. The Lasaters
were influenced by the ideas of Allan Savory, a guru of grasslands management,
who advocated a careful rotation of pastures to allow the natural regrowth
of grasses.

    Tom Lasater’s
unconventional methods worked. Even if his fellow ranchers couldn’t bring
themselves to copy them, let alone to install the miles of electric fence
necessary to keep animals in a land-preserving rotation, they respected
the health of his livestock, which they bought for breeding.

   Since Fast
Food Nation was published, Dale Lasater has built his mail-order meat business,
now in its sixth year, to the point where he can sell most of his animals
directly, either for breeding or as meat. The idea of selling meat,
something his family had never done (though they had sold dairy products),
was inspired by his memories of working on a cattle ranch in Argentina
while on a Fulbright scholarship, when twice a day he ate what he remembers
as the best beef he ever tasted. Argentine beef, still thought by many
to be the world’s best, is all grass-fed in the high Pampas. Now that the
ranch was raising grass-fed cattle, he reasoned, their meat should be just
as good to eat. Lasater and his partner, Duke Phillips, a former manager
of the ranch, had to find careful slaughterhouses, and also refrigerators
where they could dry-age meat for fourteen to twenty-one days. Dry-aging,
a step that was long a luxury reserved to the wholesalers and customers
who could pay the added costs of storage and surveillance, enhances flavor
and is a necessity to tenderize grass-fed beef.

    After
we toured the miles of his ranch, where heifers and young bulls surrounded
the Suburban as if magnetically drawn, Lasater gave me cooked samples of
several cuts of meat, including the first ground beef I’d had in a long
time. It was so lean that it tasted like some other kind of meat, perhaps
game (wild animals are naturally lean and of course grass-fed, too, if
they are herbivores). But I quickly became accustomed to the more intense
flavors, and began to appreciate what I had been missing. I found that
the brisket˜a secondary cut that has more fat and lots of collagen fibers,
which turn gelatinous and tender when cooked˜had the deepest and most rounded
flavor of everything we tasted. Lasater wasn’t surprised: it’s his favorite
cut too.

    Tom Gamble
has much in common with Dale Lasater. His grandfather went into cattle
ranching in the early 1900s, near Napa, California, and one of his father’s
goals in continuing the business was to preserve the land from encroaching
urban development. When I met Gamble at his house in Napa last fall, he
described stumbling through many of the difficulties that Lasater and Phillips
faced five years ago: where to process the meat, how long to dry-age, which
cuts to offer, how to distribute. A slaughterhouse that would treat the
animals with the care Gamble wanted proved very hard to find; when we spoke,
Gamble was preparing to spend the next day trucking several steers to one
in Chico˜nearly three hours away. 

   His partner
in the meat business is Bill Davies, the scion of a highly regarded winemaking
family. Gamble compared the nascent grass-fed-beef business to the Napa
wine industry in the 1960s. “There’s no infrastructure for the little guys,”
he said. He is optimistic that the market will flourish once consumers
understand how grass feeding contributes to the environment and to flavor,
and he looks forward to changes that will help small ranchers. Mobile bottling
lines have saved small wineries from having to buy and maintain expensive,
hard-to-clean, space-hogging machinery; Gamble dreams of mobile slaughtering
facilities that will go from ranch to ranch. He himself went door to door
to the area’s nationally known restaurants, which were more accustomed
to calls from neophyte winemakers. He was proud to have created an enthusiastic
local market for secondary cuts such as skirt steak, sirloin tips, and
even fajita strips. (“Go next door,” he said of one local restaurant, “and
have an enchilada with beef in it˜it’s an incredible thing.”) Speaking
in a vocabulary familiar to his winemaking peers, Gamble described the
shift from corn-fed to grass-fed beef as being “like going from insipid
hearty burgundy to a Cab that maybe needs more age but has more complexity.”

    Ridge
Shinn, the founder of the New England Livestock Alliance, in central Massachusetts,
has big ambitions: to show New England dairy farmers who join his cooperative
that by switching from milk to meat they can survive in a steadily more
difficult economy. He scoffs at the idea that freezing winters like this
past one are an obstacle: “Deer don’t live in barns,” he says, “and cattle
have much thicker layers of fat.” While working as a farmer at Old Sturbridge
Village, in central Massachusetts, Shinn learned nineteenth-century agricultural
practices and became a believer in the superiority of New England grass
to any other grass in the country˜a superiority, he told me recently, that
ranchers visiting from elsewhere enviously confirm. As for the short grazing
season, Shinn advocates “long-cut silage,” meaning hay baled as soon as
the grass is cut rather than after it has been allowed to dry.

   Shinn found
a slaughterhouse that was willing to follow techniques recommended by Temple
Grandin, the autistic woman who has pioneered humane treatment in the country’s
livestock-handling industry. The slaughterhouse, in Stafford Springs, Connecticut,
is just two and a half hours from New York City, the country’s largest
market for top-quality meat. About a dozen farmers have agreed to follow
Shinn’s rules, which include feeding calves on mother’s milk for at least
two months and then on just grass or hay, and adopting certain other humane
raising methods. To ensure the quality of the meat on which he is betting
the cooperative’s reputation, Shinn goes from farm to farm with an ultrasound
machine that evaluates the fat and muscle structure of each animal at slaughter
weight. Big industry, he points out, grades meat after slaughter; but the
cooperative’s machine enables farmers to choose in advance only those animals
that will meet the standards of the cooperative’s Pasture Perfect brand.

   Like Lasater
and Gamble, Shinn believes that in the long run the only way to guarantee
quality is through careful breeding; his chief concentration is on finding
breeds best suited to the New England climate. So far he is a successful
competitor in the luxury market on grounds of flavor: in a recent tasting
of filets mignons, Wine Spectator rated Pasture Perfect’s best.

     
Before ordering and cooking grass-fed beef, you have to decide you’re ready
for the real taste of beef˜a taste that corn-fattening has for decades
blanketed with an unpleasantly sweet, bland, rich coating. Losing the flavor
of corn in beef is like scraping away a gooey glaze. The usual complaint
is that grass-fed beef is stringy rather than tender. This can be addressed
by careful cooking, and by buying cuts naturally higher in fat. It can
be erased by my mother’s famous brisket.

    Every
family has its treasured pot roast, of course, and mine has special significance.
At the beginning of their marriages my mother shared the recipe for it
with her best friend from high school, who had moved to northern California
from the Connecticut town where they grew up, and who liked it so much
that it became her company dish. After my mother died, my family had the
luck of continuing to enjoy it as prepared by her friend, who became my
stepmother.

    Homey
recipes like this have periodic revivals, especially in insecure times,
and they are at the heart of two appealing new books: The Way We Cook,
by Sheryl Julian and Julie Riven, full of wonderful, simple recipes based
on their northeastern upbringing and wide cooking experience, and Marian
Burros’s Cooking for Comfort, with reliable, barely reconstructed recipes
from the 1950s and 1960s and her own Connecticut Jewish childhood (shockingly,
Burros adds ketchup, brown sugar, and tomato puree to her mother’s spare
original brisket).

   For my family’s
recipe, season both sides of a medium brisket˜Lasater’s are just the right
size, three to five pounds, and well trimmed˜with salt, pepper, paprika,
and, if you truly want to revisit the sixties, Ac’cent. Heat the oven to
350°. In an uncovered heavy Dutch oven sear the meat fat side down
over medium-high heat in a film of hot olive oil. Turn it when it is quite
brown and remove as much fat as possible. Strew over the meat one or two
medium onions, chopped; two or three medium carrots, peeled and sliced;
one large tomato, skinned, seeded, and chopped; a bell pepper, peeled,
ribbed, and sliced (green for period authenticity, though I prefer red);
and a medium clove of garlic, peeled and minced. Add two cups of water
or stock (my stepmother makes fresh, unsalted chicken stock for this dish),
cover, and cook in the oven for three and a half hours. After two hours
add peeled and halved potatoes if you wish, being careful not to crowd
the pot lest they steam rather than roast. An hour later add one cup of
sliced button mushrooms (my mother used canned sliced mushrooms, drained˜a
practice my stepmother follows despite her Californian emphasis on freshness),
a quarter to a half cup of red wine, and half a teaspoon of Gravy Master.
You can omit the Ac’cent, of course, now that we know about MSG headache,
and water is fine in place of stock. But you should really add the Gravy
Master. When the pot liquor is skimmed, it makes an incomparable gravy
for a dish that will ever withstand the test of time.

Lasater brisket and other
cuts can be ordered at http://www.lasatergrasslandsbeef.com or by phone, 866-454-2333.
The site for Tom Gamble and Bill Davies’s fajita strips and fancier cuts
is http://www.napafreerangebeef.com, and the number is 707-963-6134. Information
for ordering Pasture Perfect steaks and other cuts, and also on grasslands
farming as practiced by members of the New England Livestock Alliance,
is at http://www.nelastore.com, and the number is 413-528-3767. 

 

BEEFHEART.

Party Of Special Things To Do

  when the stiff wind blows 

the flag dont wiggle

in the party of special
things to do

I met the ace of love

she took me to her plantation

for the love without separation

in the party of special
things to do

it could happen to me

it could happen to you

I met the ace of love

she said I want you to go

to the party of special
things to do

and when you’re through

Ill be right here waiting
for you

here take these sparks 

so my distant cousins can
get along with you

watch out for the mirror
man

and elixir sue

when I got to the party
of special things to do 

it wasnt hard to find Elixir
Sue

I met all the cards 

the wild cards 

the one-eye jill

the red queen

she turned her head

you know what I mean 

she turned it back and said

“I got a brand new game
I want to lay on you”

I met them all 

at the party of special
things to do

when I was done

I was far from through

I returned to the ace of
love

now wouldnt you?

I met them all

the camel wore a nightie

the camel wore a nightie

at the party of special
things to do

….elixir sue

it wasnt hard to find liquor
at the do

I met all the cards 

the wild cards 

you know what I mean 

then she turned it back
and said 

“I got a brand new game
I think I want to lay on you”

I met elixir sue

at the party of special
things to do

its so special

SICK POLICY.

01 MARCH 2004: SICK POLICY.

Gouging
the Poor

By Barbara Ehrenreich

 

The Progressive, February
2004 Issue 

There’s been a lot of whining
about health care recently: the shocking cost of insurance, the mounting
reluctance of employers to share that cost, the challenge–should you be
so lucky as to have insurance–of finding a doctor your insurance company
will deign to reimburse, and so forth. But let’s look at the glass half
full for a change. Despite the growing misfit between health care costs
and personal incomes, it is not yet illegal to be sick. 

    
Not quite yet, anyway, though the trend is clear: Hospitals are increasingly
resorting to brass knuckle tactics to collect overdue bills from indigent
patients. Take the case of Martin Bushman, an
intermittently insured mechanic with diabetes who, as reported in The Wall
Street Journal, had run up a $579 debt to Carle Hospital in Champaign-Urbana.
When he failed to appear for a court hearing on his debt rather than miss
a day of work, he was arrested and hit with $2,500 bail. Arrests for missed
court dates, which the hospitals whimsically refer to as “body attachments,”
are on the rise throughout the country. Again, on the half full
side, we should be thankful that the bodies attached by hospitals cannot
yet be used as sources of organs for transplants. 

    
Mindful of their status as nonprofit charitable institutions, hospitals
used to be relatively congenial creditors. My uninsured companion of several
years would simply work out a payment arrangement–on the scale of about
$25 a month for life–and go on consuming medical care without the least
concern for his freedom. No longer, and it’s not just the dodgier, second-rate
hospitals that are relying on the police as collection agents. Yale-New
Haven Hospital, for example, has obtained sixty-five arrest warrants for
delinquent debtors in the last three years. 

    

Of course, if you work for Yale-New Haven, it’s not your body that gets
“attached.” On a recent visit to Yale hospital workers, I met Tawana
Marks, a registrar at the hospital, who had the misfortune to also be admitted
as a patient. Unsurprisingly, her hospital-supplied health insurance failed
to cover her hospital-incurred bill, so Marks now
has her paycheck garnished by her own employer–a condition of debt servitude
reminiscent of early twentieth century company towns. 

    
To compound the sufferings of the sick and sub-affluent, hospitals now
routinely charge uninsured people several times more than the insured.
The
Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel reports that one local hospital charged an
uninsured patient $29,000 for an appendectomy that would have cost an insured
patient $6,783. According to the Los Angeles Times, in one, albeit for-profit,
California hospital chain, the uninsured account for only 2 percent of
its patients, but 35 percent of its profits. The explanation for such shameless
gouging of the poor? Big insurance companies and HMOs are able to negotiate
“discounts” for their members, leaving the uninsured to pay whatever fanciful
amounts the hospital cares to charge, such as, in one reported case, $50
for the use of a hospital gown. 

        
Back in 1961, psychiatrist Thomas Szasz noted the “medicalization” of behavior
formerly classified as crime or sin, such as drug addiction or what was
defined as sexual deviance. Rather than seeing this as a benign and potentially
merciful trend, the crotchety Szasz complained about the growing concentration
of power in the hands of a “therapeutic state.” How quaint his concern
sounds today, when instead of the medicalization of crime, we are faced
with the criminalization of illness. 

    
Because almost everyone, no matter how initially healthy and prosperous,
is now in danger of falling into the clutches of the medical/penitentiary
system. It could start with a condition–say, high blood pressure or diabetes–serious
enough to be entered into your medical record. Next you lose your job,
and with it your health insurance–or, as in the case of 1,000 or so freelance
writers (including myself) once insured through the National Writers Union,
the insurance company simply decides it no longer wants your business.
You go to get new insurance, but no one wants you because you now have
a “pre-existing condition.” So when that condition flairs up or is joined
by a new one, you enter the hospital as a “self-pay” patient, incur bills
four times higher than an insured patient would, fall behind in paying
them, and, given the hospitals’ predatory collection tactics, wind up in
jail. 

    
Sociologists have long seen a connection between sickness and criminality,
classifying both as forms of deviance. Certainly, the relevant vocabularies
have been converging: Note the similarity between the phrases “pre-existing
condition” and “prior conviction,” as well as the use of the terms “record”
and “case.” A doctor once told me that, although he had detected a new
and potentially life-threatening condition, he would refrain from prescribing
anything to correct it, lest my record be marred by yet another pre-existing
condition. 

    
The day will come when we look back on such small acts of kindness with
nostalgia. Even as I write this, some bright young MBA at Aetna or Prudential
is no doubt coming to the conclusion that a great deal of money and valuable
medical resources could be saved through the simple expedient of arresting
people at the first sign of illness. Skip the intermediate stages of diagnostic
testing, hospitalization, and attempted debt collection, and proceed directly
to incarceration. The end result will be the same, unless you succeed in
concealing that cough or unsightly swelling from the cop on his or her
beat. 

    
I’m prepared for this eventuality, having been raised by a mother who was
in turn raised by her Christian Scientist grandparents, and had thus been
trained to greet her children’s symptoms with contempt and derision. I
was conditioned, in other words, to conflate physical illness with moral
failure. Should a rash or sore throat arrive, I stand ready, at some deep
psychic level, to serve my time. 

    
But for those of you who still imagine that illness and pain should elicit
kindly responses from one’s fellow humans, I have one last half full observation:
Our prisons do offer health care–grossly inadequate care to be sure–but
at least it’s free, even for child molesters, ax murderers, and those miscreants
who have the gall to be both sick and uninsured. 

John McLaughlin: Zen and the art of guitar-playing

John McLaughlin’s new LP was 12 years in the making. Meditation kept him sane, he tells Martin Longley

26 February 2004 The Independent

 The career of John McLaughlin
is full of extreme musical contrasts. When his guitar was electric – as
with the Mahavishnu Orchestra and Tony Williams’s Lifetime – he gave us
frenetic runs at awesome speeds, cloaked in murderous feedback. But when
he moves to an acoustic guitar, he is one of the most delicately sensitive
players, exploring Indian classical music with Shakti, or reinventing flamenco
with Paco de Lucia.

    
The Yorkshire-born McLaughlin flew to New York in 1969; two days later,
he was playing with Miles Davis on the sessions for In a Silent Way. McLaughlin
stayed in Manhattan for 15 years, but has now lived in Monaco for the past
20. When we meet, his thumbs are encased in sticking plasters. Has he been
playing too much vigorous axe, fast and intricately picked? Er, no: he
hurt them during a spell of DIY.    McLaughlin recently released Thieves and Poets, an ambitious work for orchestra and
improvised guitar that was 12 yearsin the making. McLaughlin considers
it a monumental effort. “That was without doubt my magnum opus,” he says.
“I never worked so hard on a recording.”

    Improvisation lies at the heart of McLaughlin’s playing. “I’m improvising a lot. I’m
not a classical player. I don’t want to be a classical player. I love to
improvise, because things happen that never happen anywhere else.”

    The standards on the album are all identified with jazz pianists. “I started off as a
piano-player,” McLaughlin says. “I was 11 when I started guitar. Blues
came, and I was blown away by that. And then, in the space of four years,
flamenco, jazz and Indian music. By the time I was 16, I was already under
the influence.” All those are improvising forms, of course.

    
In the late Sixties, McLaughlin and the Wolverhampton-born bassist Dave
Holland shared a flat in London, before both were discovered by Miles Davis.
“Can you get more lucky than that, for a European jazz musician? We were
sitting in this club, and Miles turned round and said, ‘It’s time you formed
your own band.’ This is the most honest man I ever met. Brutally honest.”

    In 1997,
Zakir Hussain was invited to tour by the Asian Music Circuit and given
free rein to choose his musicians. The tabla-player met McLaughlin and
suggested a Shakti revival. “I’m hooked again,” McLaughlin says. “Shakti
are phenomenal players. I have a great affection for Indian culture and
music. They’re delightful people just to be with – there’s a wonderful
atmosphere in the group.”

    That wasn’t the case with the Mahavishnu Orchestra. Between 1980 and 1985, McLaughlin
tried to re-form the original band because it had ended in such acrimony.
“This really pissed me off, because music’s not about that – it’s not about
your ego. It’s about joyful experience or moving experience. We were together
only two years. I think we had too much success too quickly. I’d just finished
this Love Devotion Surrender tour with [Carlos] Santana. All was not well.
Jan [Hammer] and Jerry [Goodman] would not talk to me any more, which was
very weird. We went on stage for the first concert and they still weren’t
talking to me. We had a break and I said, ‘I don’t care if I’m the worst
sonofabitch in the world, but spit it out! I don’t want to play with people
who don’t speak to me.’

    
But they just turned round and walked out of the room. Next time I saw
them I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on with you, but I don’t want to
live like this. If you don’t want to talk to me, then we’ll fold the band
and you do what you want, and that’ll be the end of that.’ They went their
own way and formed their own band, but they were soon at each other’s throats.
Human nature!

    “It was
a great band. Jerry came to me some time later and said that he couldn’t
believe he was responsible for the break-up. He regretted it deeply.”

    McLaughlin
gave up trying to re-form the original Mahavishnu Orchestra. John and Jerry
renewed their friendship, but Jan never called. “I must have been a little
weird at that time,” McLaughlin says. “I was studying meditation with Sri
Chinmoy and had a spiritual name. Maybe that got up their noses, I don’t
know. I didn’t ask them to meditate with me, or pray. I don’t care, they
could have as many girls as they want, do drugs. Everyone’s got to live
the way they want to.”

    McLaughlin’s
spiritual quest is central to him. “I have a profound affection for
Buddhism, and Zen Buddhism’s particular ways of meditating. This is the
way I want to live, because it makes me feel good. I’m an old hippie: I
did a lot of acid, a lot of grass, a lot of other things. By
the end of the Sixties it was clear to me that to have an altered state
of consciousness is very important, for sanity’s sake. For
my own sanity, let’s say. I can only speak for myself. I didn’t want
to have an altered state of consciousness by ingesting chemicals, or mushrooms,
or stuff like that. This became part of my life by the end of the Sixties.
I will do it until I’m gone. I’m convinced that it helps me not just mentally,
intellectually or spiritually, but physically.” He must be right, judging
by his trim, youthful appearance.

  Shakti will tour again this summer, probably in a double bill with Jeff

Beck. “My old comrade-in-arms, another one who’s about as deaf as me. Listen,
when you put everything up to 11, your ears pay for it eventually…”

    The two
toured together regularly in the 1970s, and McLaughlin says Beck is his
favourite guitarist. “He’s looking for new formats, and I identify totally
with that. My next record’s going to be completely bonkers. I want to go
more underground. I think the jazz critics will really crucify me this
time.”

    All McLaughlin’s
musical incarnations are brought together on a new box set of live recordings
made at the Montreux Jazz Festival between 1974 and 1999. McLaughlin hadn’t
heard that music since it was played. “It was very emotional for me, to
hear this music, these bands. I don’t have time to listen much to what
I do. It was so powerful, very nostalgic.”

     
McLaughlin is also recording a DVD guitar tutorial, documenting the content
of his masterclasses. “Teaching is a very strange thing. I believe that
all we can do is show how we do what we do, starting with the basics. How
to master improvisation, exercises, development of phrases.

    “I’m
62 years old. I’ve got a lot of stuff in my head and I don’t know when
I’m going to go. Jazz musicians are not known for their longevity. I want
to get it down, so people have access to it.”

 

‘Thieves and Poets’ is
out now on Emarcy; Verve is reissuing his 1992 album ‘Que Alegria’; and
the 17-disc box set ‘The John McLaughlin Montreux Concerts’, is available
through Warner Jazz 

“It’s easy to wallow in misery, it’s the most comfortable place to be. But it’s always worth trying to get out of it.”

Gruf Rhys’ track by track guide to Super Furry Animals’ Phantom Power album 

Hello Sunshine

The voices at the beginning are a sample of Wendy and Bonnie. There’s a sense of loss in the sample: a sense of longing. I suppose it’s a courting ballad with a ‘been so down looks like up to me’ mentality. It’s easy to wallow in misery, it’s the most comfortable place to be. But it’s always worth trying to get out of it.Liberty Belle
For this I devised cartoon characters called Liberty Belle and Memory Lane, and Liberty Belle I suppose
represents the bells of freedom and Memory Lane represents history’s harsh lessons that Liberty Belle always forgets. Liberty Belle represents the American Dream, which is all conquering and has no fear. She’s young, innocent and carefree, skipping along. Memory Lane is the flipside, the one that’s learnt from history’s harsh realities. It’s sung from the perspective of a bird living almost in a parallel universe to humans, oblivious to the
gravity of the games which are being played around us. I think that’s how I feel a lot of the time, and a lot of other people do too.

Golden Retrieve

I listen to a lot of people like Davey Graham, a lot of British folk and bluesmen and European acoustic musicians from the 50s and 60s, and musically Golden Retriever has that kind of feel. The lyrics are a blues parody – “I met the devil at the roundabout”. I tried to update blues vocabulary, because I think that one of the things that bothers me most about rock and roll music is that people keep regurgitating the same words. I try to make my own clichés, you know? It also coincided with passing my driving test a few years back, which had a great affect on my life. In studying for my theory test I had to absorb a lot of road sign and driving theory vocabulary, which has made its way into songs like Golden Retriever and Valet Parking.

Sex, War & Robot

Bunf discovered the pedal steel during the recording of the last album and he’s played it on Hello Sunshine and Bleed Forever. On this one we got a pedal steel player from Cardiff called John ‘Catfish’ Thomas for this track. There are a lot of songs on this record about broken relationships and war, and I think they go hand in hand, but always with a positive outlook to the future.


Piccolo Snare
Piccolo Snare is a song about societies torn apart by war and the waste of human life for nothing, pawns in a worthless game. A lot of the vocabulary for that song comes from the Falklands War, the Malvinas War, whatever you want to call it: ‘Tumbledown’ and ‘Skyhawks’, etcetera. It could be about any war, but that was a war I remembered from when I was a kid where people from my area were dying, as the media tried to maintain some ridiculous degree of jingoism Apart from using the vocabulary it’s generally a song about people’s misguided
belief in flags. All flags are tarnished; they were only invented so that people wouldn’t shoot their own side in the war. It’s a song in at least three parts. It starts off folk rock in feel, and builds up to a cosmic funk coda!


Venus And Serena
It’s about a child, who can’t communicate with his elders, growing up with two pet tortoises called Venus and Serena. But he feels that the reptiles understand. I suppose it’s similar to Liberty Belle in that sense, in that in this day and age the turtle seems to take on an image of wisdom compared to the people elected to governors. It uses tennis vocabulary to make the point. Venus and Serena have beautiful names and they seem to have exemplary powers. I think it’s about making pictures in people’s minds.I’m trying to get into balladeering and narrative in songs, but I don’t think I’ve perfected it by any means.
You can put this one down to my struggle with narrative! After a song like Piccolo Snare you need a bit of light to make sure that people don’t go out and jump off the nearest bridge. We feel we have some social responsibility
to uplift people. 


Father Father #1 and #2These were in the DADDADtunings. I think it puts some breathing space in the album. They also help
to join songs together in mood, they help to bring the album down, or build
it up again and give it some kind of consistency. They were originally
the bookends of the song-cycle.

Bleed Forever

Bleed Forever is about the
radiation that descended all over North Wales after Chernobyl, and the
general proliferation of nuclear power stations in the area. There was
a huge increase in leukaemia in children and some livestock are still not
allowed to be sold on the market. There’s even a Geiger counter feel to
Cian’s synth on this song! This was recorded pretty much live. Often during
a live take I sing the wrong lyric, so the line about the skin care consultant
ended up staying in. I suppose we didn’t care necessarily if it was in
tune or not just as long as it sounded human. I suppose it’s about how
you don’t see radiation and how you don’t really know if it’s affecting
you or not. And how it could wipe whole cultures out. Another invisible,
or ‘phantom’, power source. 

Out Of Control

It’s our most Iron Maiden
song. I think Golden Retriever is pretty heavy rock as well. I think it’s
pre-metal, if you want to get technical. ‘Ninja Jihad’ sounds like a ridiculous
cartoon character. They’re very flippant lyrics, they just regurgitate
what we see: everything seems out of control. It’s like an over-dramatic
theme to a current affairs programme! Again it’s in DADDAD. It balances
out the album musically it wakes it up when it could fall asleep. 

Cityscape Skybaby

When we went to Colombia
in 1997 we got invited to this Marxist village, they were having this five
day fiesta to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the murder of the local
landowner. It’s a song inspired by that, but moved to a Russian pre-Revolutionary
setting! We have such a derivative chorus at the end to counterbalance
lines like “she came in smelling of cabbages”. 

Valet Parking

The album builds up to an
uplifting ending, into an euphoric climax. I think Valet Parking lifts
it up a gear. It’s a song I actually wrote while driving, which I wouldn’t
recommend to anyone if they want to keep their license. We tried to recreate
a traffic jam in rural Monmouthshire we mic’d up four of our cars, and
revved them in time to the track. It’s about a road trip from Cardiff to
Vilnius. It’s a love song to the process, to the road. Apart from Autobahn
by Kraftwerk not enough songs have been written about the glories of pan-European
travel. The title is also a reference to the Brazilian songwriter Marcos
Valle, who this song is dedicated to.

The Undefeated

It’s about underdogs, and
over-dogs. It’s a real simple lyric. “Noise pollution solution”… It’s
a pop song with biblical references, and no specific issue or event in
mind, although I probably wrote it when the Welsh football team were going
through their worse period of results in their history. It just shows how
sometimes
your fantasies can come true, and now the song, apart from the title, doesn’t
fit at all. It’s about, even at your lowest, seeing a ray of light. 

Slow Life

It’s the most epic song
on the album it was either going to start it or finish it because it dwarfs
all the other songs. It starts off with an electro cop show style intro,
which we jammed on top of and Sean O’Hagan did some amazing strings the
lyrics are just regurgitating what we hear on the news, recycled, vomiting
them all back. I like the idea that even the mountains have memories and
that people don’t forget things easily.

 “Speakers and microphones work on phantom power, there’s no batteries and they’re not connected to the mains, and yet they work. Similarly, as a band our make up is the same as anybody else and yet we write songs and play music to people, and we have no idea why. It’s a mysterious power source. I like the idea of it, a phantom power that nobody understands.

“‘Phantom Power’ also sounds like a sinister power source that controls the world from beyond people’s comprehension. And a lot of the things that go on today seem completely illogical and I think we watch the world go by with disbelief. We seem to be living in such a heavy time. We’re just absorbing all the words thrown at us from the TV and regurgitating them back.”I suppose it’s almost unavoidable that lyrics like that are coming out at this point when almost all our entertainment is based around war. Musically as a band we tend to regurgitate what we absorb from our record collections, and lyrically I suppose the same goes, the topics of conversations over the last couple of years have been based around violence more than usual. We’ve been put on high-paranoia alert by the media! There are a lot of songs on this record about broken relationships and war, and I think they go hand in hand. But always with a positive outlook to the future.”Phantom Power was recorded in our own studio late at night in an office block in Cardiff. We’d erect
tents in the corridors at nights to record acoustic guitars and we’d have to take them all down in the morning before other people our neighbours came to work.”There’s a dressmaker next door, an interior designers the other side, on the floor above is No.Brake,
the people who do our website and have been producing the DVD, so we could work on the visuals and the sound simultaneously. Our percussionist Kris Jenkins has a studio downstairs and he was working on our remixes and the
dressmaker was made some balloons for one of the films. I think the whole building was involved at some point.

“We didn’t really feel any

pressure to show off, we just wanted to impress ourselves. The last record
was the first for our new label, and we wanted to make a completely over
the top ambitious album because it might have been the only chance we’d
get to make the sort of album where we could hire engineers and expensive
studios for a crazy length of time. We took full advantage of it – that
was our brief to ourselves. It was a similar approach to our first album
where we were used to recording in Gorwel Owen’s house. We saw Fuzzy Logic
as an opportunity to spend six weeks in a residential studio with a Jacuzzi
and three meals a day. I think we would have made a better sounding album
back in our Gorwel Owen’s house. And we did with Radiator.

“Similarly with this album
we didn’t feel any pressure to make a follow up to Rings Around The World
production-wise, we were able to follow our own noses and experiment with
engineering it ourselves. I think it’s warmer; we wanted to make a more
human record. The last one was made by scientists and a computer. To a
certain extent there’s less to talk about and more to listen to on this
album.”

JESUS BUILT MY HOT ROD, OR AT LEAST SPONSORED IT, BUT THEN I RAN OVER A CONE AND SLID INTO THE GRASS AND…

Keeping the faith

In NASCAR, lines blurred between racing and religion
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. (AP) — When Bobby Labonte takes the green flag in Sunday’s Daytona 500, he’ll be racing for victory — and the Lord.
The hood of Labonte’s car is both a shameless movie plug — The Passion of the Christ, coming soon to a theater near you — and some new-style proselytizing for the Gospel.  
Yes, witnessing has moved from the revival tent to the fast lane.
“It’s a chance to get the word out,” Labonte, who grew up in Corpus Christi,Texas, said about the ad on his car. “Someone who is curious about Jesus and has never been saved sees the race and says, ‘Hmmm, I’d like to see what that’s about.’ … Maybe we can change their minds.”  
NASCAR racing and the Christian faith have often worked hand-in-hand, from infield services for drivers, crewmen and officials to the pre-race invocation to the annual break in the schedule for the Easter holiday.
Now comes a car promoting The Passion of the Christ, a soon-to-be-released movie that already has drawn lavish praise from conservative clergy — including the Rev. Billy Graham — but angry denouncements from Jewish groups fearing it will stir up anti-Semitism.
For Labonte, it was a no-brainer to plug Mel Gibson’s film on the No. 18 car, especially since the movie focuses on the seminal event in the Christian faith — the crucifixion of Jesus. 
“I know how much it has impacted my life and my family’s life,” said Labonte, a former NASCAR Nextel Cup champion.
Stock car racing is unapologetic about its ties to Christianity, which isn’t surprising for a sport that grew up in the Bible Belt. But, mirroring NASCAR’s attempts to diversify the good ol’ boy image, the word has gone out that all religions are welcome.
“Walking through the garage, yes, I’m unashamed about being a Christian,” said Dale Beaver, a chaplain for Motor Racing Outreach, which conducts half-hour chapel services before events. “If you’re not a Christian, that’s OK. We can still get along.”
NASCAR has attempted to maintain symmetry between its predominantly Christian fan base and those of other faiths.
Hal Marchman, a retired Baptist minister who has given the pre-race invocation since Daytona International Speedway opened in 1959, always ends his prayer with “shalom and amen,” incorporating the Hebrew word for “peace” into his Christian beliefs.
“We’re not the only ones,” Marchman said. “I respect the Jewish religion. I respect every religion.”

But it’s not always easy for NASCAR to pull off the balancing act.
Two years ago, Morgan Shepherd put a Jesus decal on the hook of his racing truck before a race in Darlington, S.C. NASCAR officials received complaints — “maybe it was the atheists,” Shepherd said — and asked him to remove the logo. He complied, prompting a backlash from Christian fans.
A few weeks later, NASCAR told Shepherd he could put the logo back on his race vehicles. It’s been there ever since.
“I commend NASCAR and the sport I’m in,” Shepherd said. “They’re not afraid to stand up for what’s right. They let us come in and worship with MRO. We can pray before races. I know they’ve taken a lot of heat.”
He praised retired NASCAR chairman Bill France for resisting any attempts to eliminate religion from the race track.
For instance, it’s hard to imagine NASCAR levying a $5,000 fine on a competitor for wearing a cap with a cross during interviews, which happened with NFL quarterback Jon Kitna in December (the fine was rescinded last week by the league).
From Shepherd’s perspective, NASCAR’s alliance with the Christian faith gives the sport a more wholesome, family oriented image.
“I guarantee you’re never going to see anything like what happened with Janet Jackson,” Shepherd said, referring to the singer whose breast was exposed during the Super Bowl halftime show. “Those things are not going to happen in our sport. Not while Bill France is around.”
While Shepherd said he’s received plenty of praise for his Victory In Jesus racing team, that hasn’t translated into financial backing. His hopes of qualifying for the Daytona 500 were scuttled by a shoestring budget.
“Why does corporate America spend so much money … supporting things that don’t have moral values?” Shepherd asked. “And here we are, trying to serve the Lord. There’s nothing bad in the Bible. Even if you don’t believe in God, if everyone would just live by the Bible and the Ten Commandments, see how much better the world would be.”
Labonte has plenty of financial backing. In fact, the idea to use the No. 18 car as an advertising vehicle for “The Passion of the Christ” came from his primary sponsor.
Norm Miller, chairman of Interstate Batteries, has teamed up with Hollywood to promote other movies, including Toy Story 2 and The Hulk. But Gibson’s project took on special meaning after Miller saw the film at a screening in California.
He doesn’t believe the movie portrays Jews as being solely responsible for the death of Christ — a concept blamed for centuries of anti-Semitism.
“The Bible is clear: Jesus was volunteering when he laid his life down,” Miller said. “I don’t feel it’s near the issue people are trying to make out of it.”
And, said J.D. Gibbs, who runs the team, this marketing campaign isn’t intended to keep other faiths in the pits.
“We want everyone to look at this as their sport,” Gibbs said. “It’s not just a Christian sport.”
Labonte Overcomes Early Problems to Earn 11th in Daytona 500
DAYTONA BEACH, Fla., Sunday, Feb. 15, 2004 ˆ Bobby Labonte overcame early problems in the Daytona 500 and fought back to finish 11th in the 46th Daytona 500 Feb. 15 at Daytona International Speedway. 
Labonte, who started 13th in „The Passion of the Christ Interstate Chevrolet, had worked his way up to sixth by the time he pitted on Lap 30. However, as Labonte entered pit lane, he ran over a cone and slid through the grass between pit road and the frontstretch before entering his pit stall.
“That wasn’t very good on my part. (Fatback, crew chief Michael McSwain) said ‘Pit if we can pit,’ and I was on the high side and I didn’t know if I’d run out of gas or not, so I figured it’d be better to try and pit rather than just stick it out, because if you run out of gas on the backstraightaway or something, I’d be in worse shape,” Labonte said.
Shortly thereafter, Labonte suffered damage to the front of his car when he bumped another Nextel Cup competitor while trying to avoid a spinning car. The car suffered damage to the oil cooler duct and the Interstate Batteries Racing Team began to repair the car during a pit stop. 
Labonte had fallen to 40th when the race restarted on Lap 37, but managed to work his way up to 30th when a caution on Lap 58 enabled Labonte to get is lap back. 
“The guys did a good job of getting me out,” Labonte said. “We lost a lap, but we were fortunate on the ‘Lucky Dog’ situation, and we got to make it back up.”
 A 10-car accident on the backstretch helped Labonte gain several positions and by the halfway  point of the race, he had worked his way back to 12th. 
With the final 300 miles taking-place under green and the field spread out, Labonte could not crack the top 10 and wound up 11th. It was a major improvement from a 41st-place finish in 2003.
“It was almost a top 10,‰ Labonte said. “I think last year we finished like 80th or something like that, so it was better than that. I wish we could have finished a lot better. This racing was pretty good today, for me. Early in the race, we could pass a little bit better than at the end. I don’t know why it didn’t get any better toward the end.” 

    
“For us and a lot of guys, it seemed single-file, I don’t know if it was the wind [OR SATAN!!!!] or what. If we could have made up a little bit on one series of runs, maybe we could have caught a couple of cars, maybe we would have been in the pack of cars in front of us.”

Mark Swaney on the History of Magic Squares

16 FEBRUARY 2004

from

http://www.netmastersinc.com/secrets/magic_squares.htm

Mark
Swaney on the History of Magic Squares

4 9 2

3 5 7

8 1 6

This is a magic square of
order 3 (three numbers to the side of the square).  If you add up
any row, column, or diagonal, it sums to the same number, 15.  There
are magic squares of order 4, 5, 6, etc.

    See this link for a listing of magic squares of order 3 through 11:

   My friend Mark Swaney has been working on the history of Magic Squares and has said yes
to my passing on some of his preliminary results with the following warning:

“You gotta tell them tha

it’s just ripped hot off the neurons, and may have a detail or two out

of place. I’m reading all this stuff and then roaring off an epistle. Later,
I always think I should have done it differently, but what the hell? Also,
I find that I like to write a lot of text when I’m feeling radioactive.”

 

The history of magic squares
is murky, mysterious, and has not been well researched by academics. Consequently
the claims are contradictory, and in some cases exaggerated. Very little
is known about the origin of magic squares. Next to nothing is known about
the movement of the idea of a magic square before about 1300 AD. Three
cultures are known to have created magic squares, the Chinese, the Indian,
and the Arabic. In each culture they were viewed as having supernatural
properties….

China

The first magic square in
history was created in China by an unknown mathematician, probably sometime
before the first century AD. Called the Lo Shu square, it is a magic square
of 3 that was said to have  appeared on the back of a turtle that
came up out of the river. Lo Shu supposedly means “river map” and the story
of the appearance of the turtle had to do with a sacrifice to the river
god. Right from the beginning we are seeing an essentially mathematical
construction combined with the supernatural. I have not found an analysis
of the story of the turtle and the Lo Shu square from the point of view
of folklore or mythology that would shed more light on the story. The Lo
Shu square is later associated with the floor plan of a mythical palace,
that of Ming’tang. Again, this is fragmentary, I have seen a diagram that
shows the floor plan, but no explanation as to what the thinking about
the square was, why it was used as a floor plan for a palace, or other
information to flesh out the picture. The Lo Shu square is also connected
to the I-Ching, though there is no explicit plan of correspondence that
I know of. The oldest documents that refer to the Lo Shu square are ambiguous,
but one reference lists a Shu Ching in 650 BCE who makes a reference to
the “river map” which may be the magic square of 3. In 500 BCE, and 300
BCE, the river map is mentioned, but no explicit magic square is given.
In 80 AD Ta Tai Li Chi gives the first clear reference to a magic square.
In 570 AD Shuzun gives an actual description of a magic square of 3. Not
until 1275 do we hear of the Chinese making squares of order larger than
3. Norman Biggs says that this is because the Chinese regarded the Lo Shu
square as an object of the supernatural, rather than as an object of human
curiosity, and it was therefore not a subject for study. 

India

We find the first magic
square of 4 in the first century in India by a mathematician named Nagarajuna.
This is all that I know at the moment about the early development of the
magic square in India. However, India is the birthplace of much superior
mathematics, and was advanced in other areas of combinatorics at an early
date. I would be surprised if it did not eventually turn out that India
has an older tradition involving magic squares. Still, this approximate
date is interesting for other types of analysis. The next known date in
the Indian development is an 11th or 12th century Jaina inscription that
includes a magic square of 4. This particular magic square of 4 has unusual
properties not found in other magic squares before that time, and the whole
class of squares having these properties is called “Jaina squares”, including
squares of order larger than 4. I have no information on the document,
why it includes the magic square, or what connection it has to the Jaina
religion in medieval India. Much remains to be explained. 

Islam

The first magic squares
of 5 and 6 appear in an encyclopedia in Baghdad about 983 AD by Ikhw’n
al-Saf’ Ras’il, though several earlier Arab mathematicians also wrote about
magic squares. How it came to pass that the Arabs acquired knowledge of
magic squares is unknown. It is not known if they invented them separately
or if they were introduced to them by another culture. Biggs assumes that
the Arabs got the idea from the Chinese, though he doesn’t know how the
connection was made. I think it far more likely that the Arabs got magic
squares from the same source that they got decimal arithmetic, namely India.
The Arab Jihad of the 7th century succeeded in conquering portions of India,
and the Arabs absorbed a great deal of Indian mathematics and astronomy.
It is known that many other aspects of combinatorial mathematics passed
from India to the Arabs in this way. Al-Buni was an Arab mathematician
that worked on magic squares and also believed in the mystical properties
of magic squares, though no details on this number mysticism are available.
Al-Buni did his work on the squares about 1200 AD. Sources have also referred
to the Arabs using magic squares in making astrological calculations and
predictions, again no details are given. The association of the squares
with astrology and the heavens appears to be original with the Arabs, but
again, much is unknown concerning the Indian tradition. 

Europe

It is from the Arabs that
the West finally receives the idea of magic squares. In 1300 Manual Moschopoulos,
a Greek Byzantine scholar, writes a mathematical treatise on the subject
of the magic squares. Moschopoulos’ book builds on the work of Al-Buni
who preceded him. Western authors are quick to point out that Moschopoulos
treats the squares in a purely mathematical way in contrast to the mystical
ideas of the Arabs. Moschopoulos is generally considered to be the first
westerner to know of the squares. A mistaken attribution of knowledge to
Theon of Smryna in about 130 AD has continued to be cited, but the “square”
in question is definitely not a magic square, being just a natural square. 

    After
Moschopoulos, in the 1450’s Luca Pacioli of Italy worked on magic squares
and owned a large collection of examples of magic squares. With Pacioli
we come to the doorstep of the known Western mystical tradition concerning
magic squares. What Pacioli himself believed about the squares I don’t
know, but in the 1480’s Italy was to see the birth of the Renaissance which
revolutionized European thinking. Marsilio Ficino wrote about and propounded
a school of magic based on his translations of thd Hermetic documents that
were at the time believed to be as ancient as Moses. Pico Della Mirandola
wrote the “Nine Hundred Theses” – much of it based on the translations
of older Jewish Kabbalistic texts. Artists like Albrecht Durer eagerly
absorbed the new perspective painting based on the mathematical developments
of Della Franscisca, who was popularized by the later books of Pacioli. 

    In about
1510 Cornielius Agrippa, that problematical character, wrote “De Occulta
Philosophia” in which he expounds on the powers of the magic squares, and
supplies examples of them in the orders 3- 9. This book became famous throughout
Europe and was very influential until the counter-reformation and the witch-hunts
that followed. Most what is commonly thought of about Agrippa is the result
of the witch-hunts and propaganda, i.e. he was a sorcerer, he was in league
with the devil, etc. The truth about Agrippa and his book is much more
complex than that, and in the explanation of Agrippa’s book we get the
first inkling of a detailed worked out system of mysticism concerning magic
squares. However, though we find out some details about the squares in
their role as supernatural devices, we are still left with conflicts and
unanswered questions.

   In 1514
Albrecht Durer made his famous woodcut “Melancholia I,” which features
a magic square of 4 on the wall behind the “brooding genius” that became
the archetype of all the “thinker” type sculptures in later years. The
reason for the magic square of 4 being included in the woodcut has been
analyzed by the authors of “Saturn and Melancholy”. Briefly, the square
of 4 is the square of Jupiter. The planet jupiter was considered beneficial
and was associated with the “sanguine” humor. Even today we speak of someone’s
being “jovial” at a party. Durer’s brooding genius
suffers from melancholia, which we call depression, and the square of Jupiter
was thought to bring down the influence of the planet Jupiter, thereby
helping to cure the depression. 

The Squares and the Planets

This is an example of the
theory of magic propounded by Marsilio Ficino. Ficino’s magic is a kind
of sympathetic magic where objects, colors, sounds, etc. are all categorized
as to what “influences” they excite. Ficino’s influences come primarily
from the planets, the Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn.
The magic is aimed at “drawing down” the influence or power of specific
planets in order to accomplish some end, such as protection from disease
or a psychological cure. In this magic we see the role of the squares as
being the mathematical archetypes of the planets themselves. As each square
has a set of characteristic numbers, these numbers then also carry the
influences of the various planets. In this way certain numbers can be said
to be “Solar” or “Lunar” numbers.

    In this
system, for our study, the important issue to understand is how the particular
planets come to be associated with particular squares. More than one source
has it that the correspondences between the squares and the planets were
the invention of Agrippa himself.  The description of Agrippa and
his book by Francis Yates makes it appear that Agrippa made no original
contributions to magical theory in his book, but merely collected the thought
of others. Other sources simply say that the Arabs assigned the squares
to the planets. David Fidler in his book “Jesus Christ, Sun of God” says
that the arrangements came from the Babylonians. The ancient system of
cosmology had 7 planets, each in a concentric shell that rotated around
the earth. The Babylonians believed that the closest planet was the moon,
followed by Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. They placed
the order of the squares such that the smallest squares were associated
with the farthest planets, thus Saturn is 3, Jupiter is 4, etc. This relationship
is important for several reasons, but the one reason that is most striking
is the fact that the system assigns the square of 6 to the sun. By making
this assignment, the system is made to resonate with one of the most ancient
of numerological systems, namely that of the Sumerians. It was the Sumerians
with their Solar worship and their sexigesimal counting system that firmly
fixed the hours of the day at 24, sun nominally rising at 6:00AM and setting
at 6:00PM, and who gave us the still used 360 degree circle. The association
of the number 6 with the sun is a very ancient western tradition. Pythagoras
on account of numerical theory called 6 the first “perfect” number. In
view of these facts, the magic square of 6 with a sum total of 666 must
have made quite an impression even in the 14th century, the earliest
date that modern conventional scholarship will allow a western knowledge
of magic squares.

    – 

Mark Swaney, January, 2000

Note from someone else:

See if you can find out
anything about the psycho-spiritual/brainwashing disciplines [Hasan i Sabah’s]
Assassins used, would you. Maybe the same methods were used in working
with the squares, a la the Rabbi of Damascus and his Kabbalistic system
for meditating on the squares.

Mark Swaney writes: 

The really interesting thing
about Sabah for our studies is that in addition to being a military genius,
he was also known to be a scholar. The organization he created, the Hashishim,
or Assassins, was a “Masonic” military organization. By the way, the words
Assassin and Hashishim and Hashish are all thought to be corruptions of
Sabah’s first name, Hassan. The Assassins were in essence Kamikaze’s. They
were trained to strike an enemy and not escape, but stay and fight to the
death. So you can see why these people were so feared.

    
But the organization was not solely based on military/political adventures.
That’s the mystery. Sabah was known to have amassed a large library
in his fortress. He was known to have had an interest in mathematics, and
to have encouraged the study of mathematics and philosophy by his followers.
The
Assassins practiced initiation rites, and had strict grades of hierarchy,
so that modern historians have described them as “Masonic” in nature. Sabah
and the Assassins also had intriguing contacts with the Crusaders that
I am now trying to find out more about. All this is hugely interesting
for all the obvious reasons.

    
The initiation rites are the probable source of the story about Sabah’s
use of drugs to fool initiates into thinking they had gone to heaven when
in reality they were only in Sabah’s garden. This story was written by
Marco Polo who passed through the area of the Eagle’s Nest 150 years after
Sabah and the Assassins. There is no other documentation to back it up,
and so it must be taken with a grain of salt. Personally, I think that
no matter how much hash someone ate, it is very unlikely that they would
wake up after falling asleep and think themselves to be in heaven. But
the available evidence does indicate that the Assassins practiced some
form of discipline that may have bordered on modern theories of mind control.
Another example of Sabah’s

prescient inventions.

    After
the Mongols conquered the Eagle’s Nest in the late 13th century, the Assassins
and the Ismailis in general declined from any power in the political sense.
The Mongols burned the library at the Eagle’s Nest, so no books by Sabah
or the Assassins survive today. The whole essence of the organization built
by Sabah rested on obedience, faith, and above all else, secrecy. We should
not be surprised that a great deal of the knowledge of the Assassins was
lost. We should also keep in mind that secrecy was one of the hallmarks
of the gnostics and other early mystery cults.

 

“BROWN ACID FOR THE TODDLER SOUL.”

Bright colors, silly jokes:
A moment from “H. R. Pufnstuf,” one of the Sid and Marty Krofft series
being shown on TV Land.

 The Evil Geniuses of KiddieSchlock

By EMILY NUSSBAUM

February 15, 2004 Sunday New York Times

Have you ever thought you
liked a terrible song just because you remembered it, mistaking mere recollection
for actual nostalgia? That’s the way it is for me and “H. R. Pufnstuf.”
I thought I had fond memories of the show until I had a chance to see it
again, to hear the shrieks of an angry Witchie-Poo (the actress Billie
Hayes in a ketchup-red wig), to be assaulted by swirling Day-Glo colors
and a Freudian plot featuring a talking flute. Turns out that when I was
7, I had really, really bad taste.

    Then
again, maybe that’s the glory of being 7 years old: there are no clichés,
and the crassest riddles rock your world. The brighter the colors, the
better the set design. This was the evil genius of Sid and Marty Krofft
˜ the Canadian-born 70’s TV hucksters whose invariably short-lived Saturday
morning series included “H. R. Pufnstuf,” “The Bugaloos,” “Electra Woman
and Dyna Girl,” “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,” “Land of the Lost” and
the
deeply strange “Lidsville.” They weren’t making shows that parents
could watch with their kids. They were making shows that kids could watch
alone, while severely addled by Cap’n Crunch. In another league entirely
from the witty Muppetry of “Sesame Street” or the gentle pleasures of Mr.
Rogers and “The Magic Garden,” the Kroffts dished up a swirl of psychedelia,
vaudeville and cheesy production values that might be described as brown
acid for the toddler soul.

    A marathon
of the Krofft series runs this Tuesday, from 8 to 11:30 p.m. on TV Land,
culminating in a variety show featuring the Brady Bunch performing “Proud
Mary.” And if the marathon won’t win any awards for educational value,
it reaffirms that the Kroffts were to children’s television what Joe Eszterhas
is to the erotic thriller: schlock auteurs with a vision. To an adult,
the Krofft jokes might seem fairly idiotic, like an endless comic routine
featuring an owl asking, “Who?” (Or foolishly offensive, like an Indian
tree saying, “They not call me redwood for nothing!”) The plots made little
sense, and just when things seemed to have reached their lowest ebb, a
character would burst out into a song like “Oranges Poranges.” 

   But there was
some sort of guiding Krofft aesthetic ˜ a bonk-on-the-nose entertainment
value. Most often, there was a grossly cute monster, created by propping
a puppet head on an actor: H. R. Pufnstuf; the one-toothed, googly-eyed
Sigmund; or Chaka in “Land of the Lost.” There was a crush-inducing child
hero, like Johnny Whitaker in “Sigmund,” Jack Wilde in “Pufnstuf” or the
adorable Kathy Coleman of “Land of the Lost.” There was a scary shrieking
villain ˜ frequently a Phyllis Diller-like mean old lady vamping around
and stomping her feet. Most Krofft shows centered on an alternate universe
like Lidsville, Living Island, Tranquility Forest or the prehistoric wormhole
in “Land of the Lost.”

    That
people left their children alone with these shows is either a shameful
indictment of our culture or encouraging evidence of the resilience of
young brains. From an adult perspective, “H. R. Pufnstuf” is the weakest
of the bunch, if only because Pufnstuf himself is so hard to look at, with
his big pumpkin head and creepy giggle. “The Bugaloos”
is a lot more fun, a fantasy of a super-groovy British pop band consisting
of four low-key bugs: Joy, Harmony, Compassion and IQ. The winged Bugaloos
live in Tranquility Forest (“the last of the British colonies”), singing
their truly addictive theme song and battling their nemesis, Benita Bizarre
(Martha Raye). 

   “Sigmund and
the Sea Monsters” had a similar laid-back appeal, with its mellow seaside
surfer ambience. “Electra Woman and Dyna Girl” was a cheesy Batman rip-off
with a feminist undercurrent. And “Lidsville” gets points for sheer
insanity, set as it was in an alternate universe inhabited by talking hats
˜ a typical conceit for these shows, which were filled with imagery that
would be right at home in 60’s drug comic books.
    
The best of the Krofft series is probably “Land of the Lost,” which had
insanely bad special effects but a premise with genuine fantasy appeal.
A family of three (the mop-topped forest ranger dad, Marshall, his tight-trousered
son Lynn and the young Holly, with her blond braids, overbite and excessive
spunk) are white-water rafting on “a routine expedition” when they’re pulled
into a whirlpool ˜ a vortex into another dimension, one in which Claymation
dinosaurs roam the earth. They are forced to build a new life, with only
their homesteading skills and the companionship of the Wookie-like Chaka.
The villains are Sleestaks: hissing lizard monsters who lurk in caves,
fondling magical glowing crystals. As a child, I found this show terrifically
exciting, despite its slow pace ˜ and frightening as well.
    
It would be nice to say that the Krofft productions had a rough and anarchic
genius, that they were punk rock to “Sesame Street’s” Beatles. But the
truth is, they were more like “Beatlemania.” Long before “Teletubbies”
and “Boobah,” the Kroffts were happily demonstrating the very thin line
between a child’s innocent imagination and the deepest neurological damage. 

THE CHAMPAGNE UNIT.

An Absence in Alabama

As Bush’s military service
re-emerges as an issue, here is what we know˜and don’t know 

  By MARK THOMPSON and JAMES CARNEY 
Posted Sunday, February
8, 2004

Time Magazine

From the start, Bush’s military
record shows evidence of favoritism, beginning with the way he won a coveted
spot in the Texas Air National Guard in May 1968˜a time when nearly 300
Americans a week were coming home in body bags. “I’m saying to myself,
‘What do I want to do?'” Bush told a Texas interviewer in 1989. “I think
I don’t want to be an infantry guy as a private in Vietnam. What I do decide
to want to do is learn to fly.” 

   
After graduating from Yale, Bush leaped to the top of a 500-man Texas Guard
wait list, despite scoring poorly on a pilot aptitude test. At the time, Bush’s
father was a G.O.P. Congressman from Houston, and Ben Barnes˜who was speaker
of the Texas House in 1968˜testified in 1999 that he had put in a good word for Bush with Guard officials at the request of a Bush family friend. Bush got into the Texas Guard’s “champagne unit” (along with the sons of other Texas politicians, like John Connally and Lloyd Bentsen) and was trained to fly the F-102 Delta Dagger. After spending more than a year in training, Bush was obligated to report for duty one weekend a month at Houston’s Ellington Air Force Base, protecting the Gulf Coast of the U.S. from aerial attack.
“No one used political influence to get him into the Guard,” Walter B.
(Buck) Staudt, Bush’s commanding officer in the Texas Guard, insisted last
week. “He passed all the tests, did all the stuff that’s required. I thought
he was a success.” 

    The Texas
Guard immortalized Bush’s first solo flight in an F-102, issuing a press
release at the time celebrating the patriotism of the freshly minted jet
jockey. “George Walker Bush is one member of the younger generation
who doesn’t get his kicks from pot, hashish or speed,” it began. Bush
got all the high he needed, it continued, flying the F-102. “I’ve always
wanted to be a fighter pilot, and I wouldn’t want to fly anything else,”
the 23-year-old Bush said. 

    But the
thrill soon wore off. Bush spent two years flying part time with the Texas
National Guard and then in May 1972, he headed to Alabama to work for six
months on the unsuccessful Senate campaign of family friend Winton Blount,
who had resigned as chairman of the U.S. Postal Service to seek the seat.
Bush applied to perform “equivalent” service with the Alabama National
Guard during the campaign. But Bush, a self-admitted carouser in his younger
days, apparently played some hooky: no official record of his Alabama service
has ever surfaced. Because the Alabama Guard did not fly F-102s, Bush
accepted “non-flying status” in Montgomery, according to Texas Guard records.
And because he was not flying, he elected not to get his annual flight
physical, which forced the Guard to bar him from flying. …

    Bush
returned to Houston after Blount lost his Senate race in November 1972.
But there is no official record that Bush performed Guard drills during
the next six months. In May 1973, Bush’s superiors in Houston wrote that
they could not give Bush his annual evaluation because he had “not been
observed at this unit during the period of this report”˜from May 1, 1972,
to April 30, 1973. Also in May 1973, the Texas Guard issued two “special
orders” directing Bush to report for duty. Over the next three months,
Bush returned to his original Texas Guard unit and crammed in 36 days of
active duty, apparently fulfilling the Guard’s demands. In October 1973
he received an honorable discharge˜nearly eight months early˜so
he could attend Harvard Business School. 

   Senator John
Kerry, the Democratic front runner, received an early discharge from military
service too˜because he had earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and
a Silver Star during 11 months in Vietnam. 

˜With reporting by Douglas
Waller with Kerry

U.S. Nixes Subpoenas Against Protesters

12 FEBRUARY 2004


By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: February 10,
2004

Filed at 6:14 p.m. ET

 

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) —
Federal prosecutors withdrew a subpoena Tuesday ordering Drake University
to turn over a list of people involved in an antiwar forum in November,
as well as subpoenas ordering four activists to testify before a grand
jury.

    Brian
Terrell, leader of the Catholic Peace Ministry and one of the four, told
a crowd of about 100 cheering people outside the federal courthouse: “We
made them want to stop, and we have to make sure they never want to do
this again.”

   The U.S. attorney’s
office had no immediate comment on why the subpoenas were withdrawn just
one day after federal prosecutor Stephen O’Meara issued a statement acknowledging
an investigation was under way.

    O’Meara
said the focus of the probe was alleged trespassing at the Iowa National
Guard headquarters in Johnston that happened while a protest against the
war in Iraq was taking place nearby on Nov. 16. He said the protest, in
which 12 were arrested, was not the problem.

    The antiwar
forum at Drake University was held the previous day.

    Al Overbaugh,
a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, said the investigation was
not over, but he would not comment further.

    As part
of the probe, prosecutors had served a subpoena last week asking the university
to turn over the names of participants in the forum.

    It also
requested campus security records about the forum, sponsored by the Drake
chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, which included sessions on nonviolence
training and the Iraq war.

    Drake
was preparing legal motions to fight the subpoena when Steve Serck, a lawyer
representing the school, received word it had been dropped.

    “We
would have argued that it chilled the First Amendment rights of free speech
and free association of our students,” he said.

    Civil
liberties advocates welcomed the withdrawals, but said troubling questions
remain. The Iowa Civil Liberties Union pledged to file legal motions
and “use other avenues” to find out why the subpoenas were served in
the first place.

    “If
it was just a trespassing investigation, why seek the membership records
of the National Lawyers Guild?” asked Ben Stone, executive director of
the ICLU. “If this was an attempt to chill protests
through the aggressive policing of a run-of-the-mill crime, we’ve got a
serious problem in America.”