War crimes and Lebanon – a letter written by JOHN BERGER and signed by some of the planet's smartest people of conscience

Thursday August 3, 2006
The Guardian

The US-backed Israeli assault on Lebanon has left the country numb, smouldering and angry. The massacre in Qana and the loss of life is not simply “disproportionate”. It is, according to existing international laws, a war crime.

The deliberate and systematic destruction of Lebanon’s social infrastructure by the Israeli air force was also a war crime, designed to reduce that country to the status of an Israeli-US protectorate. The attempt has backfired. In Lebanon itself, 87% of the population now support Hizbullah’s resistance, including 80% of Christian and Druze and 89% of Sunni Muslims, while 8% believe the US supports Lebanon. But these actions will not be tried by any court set up by the “international community” since the US and its allies that commit or are complicit in these appalling crimes will not permit it.

It has now become clear that the assault on Lebanon to wipe out Hizbullah had been prepared long before. Israel’s crimes had been given a green light by the US and its loyal British ally, despite the opposition to Blair in his own country.

In short, the peace that Lebanon enjoyed has come to an end, and a paralysed country is forced to remember a past it had hoped to forget. The state terror inflicted on Lebanon is being repeated in the Gaza ghetto, while the “international community” stands by and watches in silence. Meanwhile, the rest of Palestine is annexed and dismantled with the direct participation of the US and the tacit approval of its allies.

We offer our solidarity and support to the victims of this brutality and to those who mount a resistance against it. For our part, we will use all the means at our disposal to expose the complicity of our governments in these crimes. There will be no peace in the Middle East while the occupations of Palestine and Iraq and the temporarily “paused” bombings of Lebanon continue.

Tariq Ali
Noam Chomsky
Eduardo Galeano
Howard Zinn
Ken Loach
John Berger
Arundhati Roy

ARTHUR EMAIL BULLETIN No. 0048

“COMMAND PERFORMANCE”

The Arthur Magazine Email Bulletin

No. 0048

August 24, 2006

Website:

http://www.arthurmag.com

Comments:

editor@arthurmag.com

Merrily merrily merrily,

1. TONIGHT AT LITTLE JOY TONIGHT

Arthur Magazine and The Journal of Aesthetics and Politics

present

THE ECHO PARK SOCIAL(IST) & PLEASURE CLUB

tonight (August 24, 2006) and every Thursday night

9:55pm-close

at

Little Joy

1477 Sunset Blvd in Echo Park

tonight’s topic:

figuring out how to take it easier

tonight’s bartender:

Arthur “Do the Math” columnist Dave Reeves

tonight’s DJs

sorry charlie, we are no longer pre-announcing djs — just show up and enjoy each other’s company

SPECIAL PAT ON THE BACK TO ALL OF LAST WEEK’S DJS:

R.A. Pleuger, Chris Robinson, Chad Brown, Devendra Banhart, Zach Cowie

SELECTIONS SPUN LAST WEEK BY ARTHUR CONTRIBUTOR R.A. PLEUGER:

Vashti Bunyan – Lately

Notwist – Neon Golden

West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band – Shifting Sands

Beach Boys – Good Vibrations (alt. take never released in US)

Beau Brummels – Gentle Wandering Ways

Can – Half Past One

Radio Birdman – Die Like April

Radio Birdman – Heyday

Tav Falco & Panther Burns – Bourgeois Blues

Monster Magnet – Spine of God

Monster Magnet – Zodiac Lung

Xu Xu Fang – Good Times

2. THIS SATURDAY — AUGUST 26 — IN CENTENNIAL, WYOMING

7th Annual Upland Breakdown

Presented by Laramie Beverage and Arthur Magazine

Beartree Tavern (ph 307.742.2410)

Outdoors, all ages, kids free (weather permitting; if indoors, 21+)

$10

Set times:

2:30 – 2:50 KELLY TRUJILLO & JOHN MARTZ

3:00 – 3:30 GARY SISCO

3:40 – 4:20 SPOT

4:30 – 5:15 MICHAEL HURWITZ & THE AIMLESS DRIFTERS

5:30 – 6:15 STOP & LISTEN BOYS

6:30 – 7:30 MICHAEL HURLEY

7:45 – 8:30 THE PLACES

Here’s the latest bulletin from organizer Joe Carducci:

“Dave and I will be on Don Woods KUWR FM Thursday 10:30 am.

And Michael Hurwitz will be playing live on KUWR Friday,

also at 10:30am I think.  There maybe some play on the

Saturday bluegrass show, and the Country station Y95 as

well. Spot and The Places may also appear on the Friday

afternoon KRFC show. Both KRFC and KUWR are streamed live.

See you soon.”

3. FRIDAY, SEPT. 8 IN PHILADELPHIA

“VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS”

A film by Jaromil Jires

Czech, 1970, 16mm, 72 minutes

Live soundtrack by members of Espers, Fern Knight, Fursaxa and Grass

(also featuring Mary Lattimore, Charles Cohen and Jesse Sparhawk)

Opening act: Marissa Nadler

Friday, September 8, 2006

Doors 7 PM

General admission: $15

Advance tickets will be sold

Philadelphia International House

3701 Chestnut St.

Philadelphia, PA 19104

Tel: 215-387-5125 • Fax: 215-895-6535

http://www.ihousephilly.org/programs-music-at-IHouse.htm

http://www.GregWeeks.net/TheValerieProject

From Joseph A. Gervasi:

“On Sept. 8, members of the Philly psychedelic folk (or “acid folk”) band Espers (including Greg Weeks, who co-conceived the idea with me, and Brooke) and folks from the bands Fern Knight, Fursaxa and Grass (along with Mary Lattimore, Charles Cohen and Jesse Sparhawk), are going to be performing a live soundtrack to the film VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS. Valerie… is a 1970 Czech hallucinogenic dark fantasy/vampire film from New Wave director Jaromil Jires. We’ll be running my 16mm print of the film at the  International House in Philadelphia, where I screen films on a monthly basis with my repertory cinema group Exhumed Films. The band has been composing this music for the last couple months and is now perfecting it for the live performance. Several of the band’s members don’t live in this state, so they’ve had to work on their parts from home until the week before the show. It will be 72 minutes of new music that will interpret the events depicted in the film, which is 

subtitled so one may still follow the (admittedly non-linear/image rather than narrative driven) film while the band performs. They are to have two full-sized harps in the band, a flute and some strings (including a cello) as well as the customary rock instruments. The music will be performed by 8-10 people. The opening act will be acclaimed dark folk goddess Marissa Nadler.

“This will be a one-time performance in Philadelphia and will be a part of the Fringe Festival. Scrumptious vegan food will be provided by Zinnia Piotrowski and drinks and snacks by Bull and the Mariposa Food Co-op of West Philadelphia.  A wide variety of DVDs will be sold in the lobby by Philly’s own Diabolik DVD.  Right now a documentary is being shot about the production and there will be a multi-camera shoot of the live performance. All of this should appear on a DVD to be released by Drag City Records, home of Espers and many other bands. The hope is that the DVD release will feature the film from a 35mm source (unlike the current Facets DVD) with multiple sound options, the live performance, documentary, amazing cover art by Tracy Nakayama, etc. The band may take the performance on the road for a few other gigs in non-traditional music venues (like movie theatres). For now, however, the Philly show is the only confirmed gig.”

4. BE THE BOSS OF WORMS: A MESSAGE FROM MOLLY FRANCES, AKA “THE NEW HERBALIST”

“if you have a backyard in Los Angeles or you know someone who does, tell them about this!

turn your food scraps into a gold mine

nature’s gold….fertile and luxurious dirt

http://www.lacity.org/san/bc-binsaleflyer060811.htm

for only 20 dollars you too can have a compost bin!

you have to bring a dwp bill and 20 bucks

and the city gives you your very own composter

worth upwards of 70 dollars on the open market

then you’re in business

make all the dirt you need for your garden

if not for the garden

do it for the worms in your garden

unlimited growth potential

work from home

be your own boss

the boss of worms”

5. OCT 19-22 IN LOS ANGELES: ARTHUR NIGHTS…

Tickets are now on sale for this event at Ticketweb.com

There’s a link to the specific Ticketweb page at

arthurmag.com

Here’s the latest on the lineups… remember all shows are ALL-AGES!!!… all artists will play FULL SETS…  3 venues in short walking distance in the beautiful Echo Park area of Los Angeles…only $24/night… more stuff to be announced…

Thurs. Oct. 19, 6pm

Devendra Banhart

Bert Jansch

Espers

Watts Prophets

Jackie Beat

Belong

Yellow Swans

Buffalo Killers

Grouper

* plus more TBA

Friday, Oct 20, 6pm

Tav Falco & the Unapproachable Panther Burns

Boris

Heartless Bastards

The Hidden Hand

Be Your Own Pet

Awesome Color

Wooden Wand

The Howling Hex

Charalambides

Tall Firs

* plus more TBA

Sat., Oct 21, 3pm

* headliner TBA

OM

Money Mark

White Magic

Six Organs of Admittance

Ruthann Friedman

Mia Doi Todd

Living Sisters (Inara George, Eleni Mandell & Becky Stark)

Josephine Foster

Residual Echoes

Future Pigeon

Noel Von Harmonson

* plus more TBA

Sun., Oct. 22, 3pm – ALL AGES WELCOME – $24

Comets on Fire

The Fiery Furnaces

The Sharp Ease

Archie Bronson Outfit

The Nice Boys

SSM

The Colossal Yes

* plus many more TBA

Arthur Nights will also feature DJ sets by

The Numero Group

Brian Turner (wfmu)

Dub Club djs

dublab DJs

* and many more TBA…

Tickets are now on sale for this event at Ticketweb.com

There’s a link to the specific Ticketweb page at

arthurmag.com

That’s just great,

Happy Arthur Campers

Los Angeles, California

WHAT ENDLESS WAR MEANS AT THE INDIVIDUAL LEVEL.

Marine Corps to start involuntary troop recalls

By Kristin Roberts

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Marine Corps will start recalling thousands of inactive service members in the coming months to counter a steady decline in the number of non-active troops volunteering for duty, the service said on Tuesday.

Col. Guy Stratton, head of the Marine Corps’ manpower mobilization plans, said the service is short some 1,200 volunteers over the next 18 months to fill roles in the war on terrorism. The total shortfall fluctuates regularly, he said.

To meet critical needs, Stratton said President George W.Bush authorized the Marine Corps to issue involuntary recall orders to members of the Individual Ready Reserve, part of the non-active force. It will be the Marine Corps’ first involuntary recall since the ground invasion of Iraq in 2003.

No more than 2,500 Marines may be involuntarily activated at once under the new authorization, Stratton said. About 35,000 Marines are available to be recalled involuntarily.

While the length of each activated servicemember’s duty is capped, there is no time limit on the Marine Corps’ authority to involuntarily recall Marines for jobs in the “Global War on Terror” — a war whose parameters remain largely undefined.

“The authority is until GWOT is over with,” Stratton said. “Until we’re told to do otherwise, we’ll use it.”

The Marine Corps’ move comes almost five years after the September 11 attacks that led the United States to declare “a war against terrorism of global reach” and more than three years after the Iraq war began.

Many Marines have performed three tours of duty in Iraq since March 2003. While the U.S. Army has provided most of the ground forces fighting an insurgency there, the Marines have carried a heavy load and been deployed in one of the most dangerous parts of Iraq, Anbar province.

Beyond Iraq, the broader war against terrorism is expected to last many years, defense officials regularly say.

The Marines and Army have been meeting monthly recruiting goals. But some analysts have questioned the military’s ability to sustain long-term operations with its all-volunteer force.

The Army has previously taken steps to keep soldiers from leaving, such as temporary “stop loss” orders that prohibited troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan from retiring for a set period after arriving at their home bases.

Such moves have been criticized by some as a form of back-door draft.

Stratton, however, said the Marines’ involuntary recall was not a back-door draft and that Marines on non-active status should always expect that they may be called when needed.

Under a general contract, a Marine serves four years on active duty and four in reserve. While on reserve, Marines may volunteer to return to active duty to fill needed roles.

But the number of Marines volunteering outside their active-duty service requirement has been steadily declining for two years, according to Stratton, who said he could not say why Marines were not volunteering.

"Magic is an essential component of theatre. It's the space in which unexpected things can happen on a human scale."

Rudi Stern, Who Made Theatre Out of Light, Dies at 69
By Robert Simonson, Playbill
18 Aug 2006

Rudi Stern, who manipulated light and neon to create theatrical environments for everyone from Joseph Chaikin to Timothy Leary to the Doors, died Aug. 15 in Cadiz, Spain, where he had lived for the last few years. The cause was complications from lung cancer, the New York Times reported. He was 69.

Mr. Stern had a career that could only have been born in the 1960s. Trained as a painter, he met future partner Jackie Cassen in the mid-60s. They began experimenting with light and were soon asked by LSD guru Timothy Leary to collaborate on the latter’s “Psychedelic Celebrations.”

Describing one such show, set in a former Yiddish Theatre on Second Avenue, Mr. Stern said, “Our marquee, ‘Psychedelic Celebrations and the Death of the Mind,’ replaced Ben Bonus and the Yiddish Follies. On that night, there were thousands of people and thousands more out on Second Avenue. Of course, the audience was high. They came in high and they left higher. It was that time when everything was fresh—no violence in the air, no aggression.”

Around the same time, Mr. Stern created “experimental light environment workshops” with Joseph Chaikin’s Open Theatre, light shows for The Doors, The Byrds and The Rascals, and created 3,000 images to accompany Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress.” Later, he created neon signs for the Broadway musical Kiss of the Spider Woman, and work for shows by Laurie Anderson.

In 1972 he and Cassen founded the Soho galley Let There Be Neon (now located on White Street in Tribeca). There they resuscitated the lost art of neon imagery, which has fallen into decline after its heydey in the 1920s and ’30s, creating art-oriented installations as well as more prosaic signs for bars and restaurants.

Mr. Stern—a long-haired, rangy presence redolent of the decade that birthed his career—returned to the theatre in 1999, creating Theatre of Light, a wordless, plotless light show which had a run at the Flea Theatre and later played in New Jersey. In the visual fantasia, which involved 36 projectors and more than 5,000 hand-painted slides, Stern cast his visions of swirling light upon four rotating, circular screens of various sizes. Accompanying the slightly hallucinogenic presentation were a series of eclectic musical selections.

“It’s theatre because the intention of theatre from the beginning, which is long lost now, is magic,” Mr. Stern said at the time. “Magic is an essential component of theatre. It’s the space in which unexpected things can happen on a human scale.”

COURTESY DAVID COTNER!

COPE ON METAL IN THE GUARDIAN.

Bassoons, flamenco, monks’ cowls … welcome to the new rock underground

Julian Cope explains why heavy metal, so often maligned, is at the heart of today’s rock avant-garde

Friday August 18, 2006
The Guardian

In April this year, after my half-hour stint as a guest vocalist for the US doom metal band SunnO))), I left the stage at Brussels’ Domino festival and removed my burka. Backstage, I remarked to the band’s biographer, Seldon Hunt, how open-minded heavy metallers had become: they were accepting, as festival headliners, a band without a drummer, a bass player or guitars, and with every bearded, long-haired musician among them clad in the habit of a Christian monk. Percipiently, Seldon commented that because the support acts had contained all of those ingredients (except the habits), SunnO))) considered it their duty to reject every metal cliche, replacing each of the archetypal rock instruments with Moog synthesizers, downtuned enough to bring the plaster off the theatre’s ceiling.

SunnO))) are taking metal to places you never imagined. Their music inhabits the territory that once was the preserve of meditative, ambient and experimental music alone. And they are doing it through the most critically reviled music of all. More remarkably, they are not alone. Across the world, underground scenes are using the shell of heavy metal – the volume, the grinding riffs, the imagery, the nomenclature – to test rock’n’roll perceptions and explore boundaries, all the while shamelessly subsuming other vastly different musical styles into their own work.

In a worldwide underground music scene that encompasses artists playing improvisatory music, folk, psychedelic and free jazz, metal is the common thread. You don’t hear much about this music in the mainstream press, especially in Britain, where the kingmakers of the music press have inadvertently created generations of musical whores, all doing their utmost to produce what they think the NME will want, rather than the music they want to make. But why is metal the link? Because the avant-garde musicians in the vanguard of today’s experimental underground scene grew up on it. They spent their late childhoods/early teens playing noisy computer games, watching 24-hour news of the first Gulf war and listening to grunge and metal. As they are mostly in their late 20s and early 30s, their strongest cultural landmarks are the suicide of Kurt Cobain in 1994, and, before it, the overwhelmingly loud sludge of Slayer, Megadeth and Metallica. Therefore the “inner soundtracks” of the new avant gardists are informed by grinding metal bands, just as the sound of the Velvet Underground’s Sister Ray informed that of my own punk generation. Older readers who equate the term heavy metal with the brash, stupefying 1980s anthems of Def Leppard and Bon Jovi will do well to remember that these bands are long out of the equation, having been at their height over 20 years ago.

Let’s go furthest away from metal first in our tour of the new underground, to acoustic music. In northern Portugal, the Galician separatists Sangre Cavallum accompany their often improvised songs of national identity with traditional instruments such as bagpipes, lyres, Iberian flutes and chanters, each song sung with an aching and a longing more reminiscent of Sardinia’s traditional Tenores music than anything current. We move closer to metal’s metaphor with the drum and hunting horn-led Saxon acoustic folk of Waldteufel, which conjures up an ancient atmosphere of Woden’s wild hunt careering through a dark-age forest. But the hand of metal is clear by the time we get to Wolfmangler, from Germany. Their album art may look like every other Germanic death metal trudge-o-thon, but the music of their latest record, Dwelling in a Dead Raven for the Glory of Crucified Wolves, features a six-piece line-up replete with trombonist, bassoonist, flautist and two bass players.

As slow and brooding as compost with a grudge, Wolfmangler are the bridge between pure ritual and “death folk”, a hybrid music whose best representatives are probably Austria’s Cadaverous Condition. This band began as a black metal act way back when, but have, in recent times, brought forth a delightful acoustic side that no one could have been prepared for. Indeed, the only surviving black metal element in Cadaverous Condition’s current performances is the Cookie Monster vocals of singer Wolfgang, whose delivery is performed with such a straight edge that it demands we take him entirely seriously. Once past the initial smirk of discomfort, we find ourselves a party to the hopes, fears and shattered dreams of a loathsome troll destined to live out his days under a haunted bridge awaiting the occasional victim, and singing to himself of how he dreads their piteous cries as he gnaws at their bones.

But the clear leaders on the acoustic side are an American band, Ben Chasny’s ensemble Six Organs of Admittance, who record incredibly dark gnostic meditations. Propelled by Chasny’s masterful acoustic guitar, the tumultuous clamour of Six Organs of Admittance inhabits a heathen netherworld reminiscent of the Lucifer Rising soundtrack recorded by Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, their 20-minute mantras never once falling into the cod-raga of so much so-called 1960s-informed folk music.

America’s underground leads this immense musical experiment. Its gargantuan land mass and the localised nature of its media ensure that no musician can rise beyond their local throng without having first paid their dues. And it is American bands of the past – not necessarily underground bands – that inspire many of the underground artists elsewhere. In Spain, for example, Viaje A800 take inspiration from America’s biggest live act of the early 1970s, Grand Funk Railroad, as well as the proto-metal group Blue Cheer, to play a brooding, soul-based slow metal. They bring their own origins to bear by having the singer always employ his own, unique Spanish style (and taking an age in the process). Another band, the trio Orthodox, take the Spanish angle on metal even further. They have recontextualised the doom metal sound associated with the Nordic nations, and the methods of SunnO))), by dressing in the Ku Klux Klan-like cowls of the Easter parade in their home city of Seville (complete with ropes around their necks). They perform extremely long, arduous pieces accompanied by a female flamenco dancer, and separate themselves from the Wodenist, pagan traditions of the Nordic bands by appearing in press shots hailing brightly enamelled statues of the Virgin and child.

Second after America, probably, comes Japan, whose underground has inspired America’s own. (The Yoshimi of the Flaming Lips’ album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots is a former member of the Boredoms, and now has a group called OOIOO). Here, too, metal is at the heart of things. The prolific Acid Mothers Temple commune/band rose from the ashes of proto-metal bands such as Mainliner and High Rise. Their international success has, in turn, inspired Japan’s psychedelic ritual cult act Death Comes Along, whose free- fuzz sonic avalanches take such titles as Psychedelic Inferno, Children of the Death and Death Death Death. Led by the mysterious Crow, Death Comes Along have also modelled themselves on earlier, more politically motivated 1960s commune bands, such as Berlin’s Amon Düül – who shared living space with the Baader-Meinhof gang – and the communist agitators Les Rallizes Denudes, whose own career was forced underground after their bass player hijacked a JAL airliner and took it to North Korea in March 1970.

Politics informs much of this underground music, especially that made by musicians working in repressive social conditions. My travels through southern Armenia in 2003 put me in touch with Iran’s progressive trio Kahtmayan, whose violent marriage of krautrock, the French Zeuhl music of Magma, and early Metallica contains samples of US pilots’ radio communiqués as they prepared to attack northern Iraq. Recent pictures of these guys show them making signs of the horned god, and images of Tehran’s business centres sprayed with Kahtmayan’s own heavy metal graffiti – which all inclines me to believe the rumour that one member was recently murdered by Iran’s secret police. But I digress …

The journey from acoustic to electric brings us back to Ben Chasny, who is not just the leader of Six Organs of Admittance. He’s also the guitar player in the Santa Cruz psychedelic band Comets on Fire. Even without a real songwriter among the lot of them, Comets remain the rising stars of the underground scene – they are signed to a big independent label, Sub Pop, and even manage to get reviewed in papers like this one. They are the real thing, for shit damn sure. Commencing their career as a radical mix of Creedence Clearwater Revival, 13th Floor Elevators and Slade,they just got better. You didn’t know what they were singing about – which was possibly nothing, but what an electrifying nothing. This euphoric noise got the band signed to Sub Pop, where someone told the band’s yawping, howling singer Ethan Miller that he had to write some songs. He couldn’t, but maybe he thought he could. Mercifully for us, and luckily for Comets on Fire’s career, Ethan spewed out these efforts as a side project entitled Howlin’ Rain.

Which brings us to the brand new Comets album, Avatar. In Comets terms, it’s been an age coming, but compared to your average English rock underachiever, it’s way ahead of schedule. The production sucks, but then so does mine. Ethan’s not singing enough, but then he never did. Avatar’s only great crime is the “everything playing at once” lack of dynamics that Jim Morrison always accused Jefferson Airplane of having. Once their flavour-of-the-month status has passed, however, Comets on Fire’s continuity will return and we can look forward to 30 years of classic barbarian space travel barfed out every nine months. Lovely.

The underground is in better shape than it’s been for years – and greedy for the prizes. Today’s underground collective chant would probably go something like: “Where are we going?” “Everywhere!” “When are we going?” “Now!”

· Avatar by Comets on Fire is out now on Sub Pop. You can read Julian Cope’s writings about the rock underground at http://www.headheritage.com

THAT'S NO WAY TO LIVE.

The New York Times

The Rise of Shrinking-Vacation Syndrome
By TIMOTHY EGAN
Published: August 20, 2006

SEATTLE, Aug. 19 — In August, when much of the world is hard at work trying to do nothing, Jeff Hopkins and his wife, Denise, usually take a week to chase fish in Olympic National Park — a ferry ride and two tanks of gas from here with a boat in tow. But this year, their summer vacation is dead, a victim of $3-a-gallon gas and job uncertainty.

“This is our vacation,” said Mr. Hopkins, loading up his drift boat for an evening of fishing in the city just after getting off work at the Boeing plant, where he has been employed for 15 years.

Even before toothpaste could clog an airport security line and a full tank of gas was considered an indulgence, Americans had begun to sour on the traditional summer vacation. But this summer, a number of surveys show that American workers, who already take fewer vacations than people in nearly all industrial nations, have pruned back their leisure days even more.

The Conference Board, a private research group, found that at the start of the summer, 40 percent of consumers had no plans to take a vacation over the next six months — the lowest percentage recorded by the group in 28 years. A survey by the Gallup Organization in May based on telephone interviews with a national sample of 1,003 adults found that 43 percent of respondents had no summer vacation plans.

About 25 percent of American workers in the private sector do not get any paid vacation time, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. Another 33 percent will take only a seven-day vacation, including a weekend.

“The idea of somebody going away for two weeks is really becoming a thing of the past,” said Mike Pina, a spokesman for AAA, which has nearly 50 million members in North America. “It’s kind of sad, really, that people can’t seem to leave their jobs anymore.”

Shrinking-vacation syndrome has gotten so bad that at least one major American company, the accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, has taken to shutting down its entire national operation twice a year to ensure that people stop working — for about 10 days over Christmas, and 5 days or so around the Fourth of July.

“We aren’t doing this to push people out the door,” said Barbara Kraft, a partner at the firm in the human resources office. “But we wanted to create an environment where people could walk away and not worry about missing a meeting, a conference call or 300 e-mails.”

The company tracks vacation time so that when employees fall behind, they are reminded through an electronic nag that they should be getting out of the office more. And posters evoking lazy days away from work were put up in the New York offices. Hint. Hint.

The heightened pace of American life, aided by ever-chattering electronic pocket companions, gets much of the blame for the inability of many people to take extended periods of forced sloth.

“I thought I would take at least five days off and go somewhere, but I couldn’t find the time,” said Tina Yang, who teaches first grade at Fruit Ridge Elementary School in Sacramento. She has the summers off, but her days are filled with catch-up work, conferences and projects, she said.

“I realize I just go to work and then home, work and then home — it’s no way to live,” Ms. Yang said.

The Travel Industry Association, the largest trade group representing the industry, found that the average American expects his or her longest summer trip to last only six nights. And it takes three days just to begin to unwind, experts say.

Company leaders at PricewaterhouseCoopers said they started their nationwide shutdown because people were not getting their batteries recharged. Now that the entire work force of about 29,000 takes a vacation, company officials say they are seeing positive results.

“It has taught our people what it is like to have unencumbered time,” Ms. Kraft said.

JAMES PARKER IN THE BOSTON PHOENIX ON PINCHBECK, JENSEN, ARTHUR.

The Phoenix – Aug 17, 2006

The New New Age

The movement pulls away from the mainstream and gets apocalyptic

By: JAMES PARKER

“In the United States,” wrote novelist and poet Jim Harrison in 1976, “it is a curious habit of ours to wait for the future when it has happened already.” Thirty years on, how much deeper is that swoon of postponement, and how much more pressing the crisis. In weather systems, in belief systems, the planet condenses with rage; the blandest recital of the facts can shake the air like a Yeatsian prophecy. Faces averted, we peck out text messages. At the political level the most complex issues are debated in the style of barking dogs, while at the counter of your local Starbucks a man is placing an order as nuanced and sophisticated as a 17th-century sonnet. And on the street the Hummers roll, driven by small, blond college girls, as if America had invaded itself.

But if the future won’t stop happening, neither will the past. Because here’s both the good news and the bad: the ’60s never ended. That decade’s chaotic drive toward collective rebirth — stalled, dissipated, betrayed, backlashed, and broken down — was not (it turns out) the endpoint, but the augury. “The Sixties,” says Daniel Pinchbeck, author of 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin), by phone from New York City, “were an attempted voyage of initiation on a mass-cultural level, but at that point it couldn’t be completed. The maps weren’t there, there were no guides, and a lot of people kind of lost it.” Pinchbeck, a thirtysomething former journalist who has transformed himself — with the help of mind-ripping pharmaceuticals and organic hallucinogens like iboga and ayahuasca — into a multi-disciplinary critic of the “design problems” in Western civilization, is standing by for the next stage. “There’s some kind of process of assimilation that required those currents which came out so powerfully in the ’60s then to go underground and become subliminal,” he says. “But they’ve had a major effect on people in the West, whether through access to indigenous shamanism or in the extraordinary growth of yoga, and in a way they’ve been preparing the container so that if we were to go through another kind of initiatory level, there would be people ready to hold it together.”

Shamanism? Yoga? Welcome to the New New Age — the just-in-time resurgence of the holistic, anti-materialist worldview, garbed in esoterica, brandishing its own style of drugs and music. And brace yourself for a major paradigm shift: at the vanguard of the armies of transformation is … Sting! “Daniel Pinchbeck’s 2012,” he blurbs on the book jacket, “is a dazzling kaleidoscopic journey through the quixotic hinterlands of consciousness.” Yes indeed, someone got his message in a bottle. “I became friends with Sting after my last book [Breaking Open the Head],” says Pinchbeck. “He got in touch with me and I actually stayed with him in his house in Italy.

“He’s had contact with indigenous shamanism, and he’s aware of the importance of the material. He’s kind of like an elder statesman, and he’s been giving me a lot of support.”

The sins of the old New Age, of course, are still with us: Celtic muzak, little polished rune-rocks, bumper stickers that say THE GODDESS IS ALIVE AND MAGIC IS IN THE AIR! Seeking balm for the psychic wounds they had sustained in the ’60s, ex-hippies opted en masse for a sort of consoling and watered-down paganism: ancient energies were domesticated, to the point where almost anyone could have a print from the Mahbarata on their kitchen wall, or an Odinist living downstairs. “The original New Age was a little bit on the flimsy side,” says Pinchbeck. “Channelling, UFOs … all that stuff was kind of floating out there. What I’m trying to do with the new book is to show that it’s possible for someone with a rational modern intellect to go through this material in a reasonable way, and to integrate Western philosophy with this shamanic/psychedelic worldview.”

What most viscerally separates the New New Agers from the old is their crisp and eager apprehension of imminent system crash — what our inheritors, stumping for food in the poisoned mud flats, may well call The Great Unraveling. Take, for example, the words of eco-philosopher Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame, in a recent interview. Asked if he truly wants civilization as we know it to fall, Jensen responds: “If civilization had come down 200 years ago, the people who live here would still be able to support themselves. But if it comes down in another 30 years, 50 years, 60 years … So even from the purely selfish human perspective, yeah, it would be good for civilization to end. The sooner this civilization goes, the better, because there’ll be MORE LEFT.”

Jensen gave this interview to Arthur magazine, a lavishly appointed free bimonthly out of LA whose columnists include Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and media theorist Douglas Rushkoff. Since October 2002, Arthur’s editing/publishing team of Jay Babcock and Laris Kreslins has been busy streaming the revelations and imperatives of the New New Age into pop culture, where the kids can get at it. Arthur, called “the American counterculture’s answer to the New Yorker” by the London Guardian, has become the place where the ideas meet the music; where Jensen’s freefall apocalyptics can sit with total aptness beside a piece on nouveau hippie swooners Brightblack Morninglight. The same issue begins with a column about mint tea and ends with a list of “sensitive weapons” (e.g., shotgun shells taped to the end of a BB-gun barrel) for use when the grid collapses and Devendra Banhart fans are called upon to defend their homes and woolly hats.

Arthur has saturated itself in the ’60s, via features on the Weather Underground, the MC5, the 1967 March on the Pentagon, and also in the post-psychedelic slant of the music coverage. But there’s nothing regressive here. From the freaky folkers to the acid rockers, Arthur bands have their eyes on the advancing historical horizon: the same rumble of tribal disturbance is heard beneath the dragon-groan of SunnO))) and the fey, brilliant stylings of harpist/singer Joanna Newsom. A tastemaker and an advocate, Babcock has probably done more to promote and consolidate this intangible consensus than anybody else. He calls it “naturalismo.” [That’s a term coined by Devendra Banhart, actually. -JB]

Daniel Pinchbeck used to write for Arthur, as (full disclosure) did I. I stopped because I could no longer afford to write for free; he — rather more nobly — was fired, after submitting a post-Katrina column in which various apocalyptic scenarios of military clampdown were hypothesized.

Babcock smelled “Art Bell–style” paranoia (referring to the conspiracy-mongering host of radio’s Coast to Coast AM), and wouldn’t print it; Pinchbeck recoiled, hurt. “I think Jay’s aiming more at the mainstream,” he says. “He wants his magazine to be the new Rolling Stone.”

What is beyond dispute is Babcock’s commitment to reaching “every generation of bohemian currently living.” “When we run a piece about the MC5,” he says by phone from LA, “it’s not just to educate the youth or to remind ourselves of something. It’s also to say to the original people: your work wasn’t forgotten, and maybe you should pay attention to the kids who are interested in what you did. I think they’re going to start to come back, the ones that went back to the land and just disconnected from contemporary culture for the last twenty years — and they’re gonna find that they have more in common with these kids in their teens and twenties than they do with their fellow retirees at this point. And I don’t even KNOW where that could lead.”

Babcock’s most recent and widely-broadcast prank was an interview showdown with Sully Erna, over the use of Godsmack music in Army-recruitment ads. Unimpressed with his own generation’s efforts at protest, he is trusting to demographics to get the job done: “By 2010 we’ll have a youth bubble, a huge population under 25. And they’ll be stronger, more willing to take risks, to cope with transformation — even to demand it. Who will be their leaders? What kind of culture are they going to inherit? So that’s part of what we’re doing — to try and preserve, elevate, incubate if you like, these ideas.”

The imminent crisis, the next initiatory level — Pinchbeck’s “prepared containers” and Babcock’s wised-up and transformation-ready youngsters. What the New New Agers all agree on is that change is not over there, but here: vast, cruelly accelerated, streaming with possibility. “I’m trying to define this transformative process,” says Pinchbeck, “but it’s already under way.” “Right now,” says Babcock, “we’re like the Beatniks of the Fifties — a little isolated, a little dispersed, driven a little crazy by the culture.

“But different, too. Because unlike the Beats, we have the benefit of knowing that the hippies are coming.”

AUG 31-SEPT 4 'TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS' FESTIVAL IN ATLANTA FEATURING WORLD PREMIERE OF IRA COHEN'S REMASTERED 'THE INVASION OF THUNDERBOLT PAGODA.'

TABLE OF THE ELEMENTS FESTIVAL NO. 4 “BOHRIUM”
August 31 – September 4, 2006 (Labor Day Weekend)

Day 1: Sea Changes & Coelacanths
Thursday, August 31

John Fahey Tribute/Record Release Concert
Loren Connors (New York)
San Agustin (New York/Atlanta)
John Fahey/Elizabeth Cotten video
Keenan Lawler (Lexington)

Day 2: Carnivals of Ecstasy
Friday, September 1

An Evening in the 1960s Underground
Hosted by Tony Conrad (New York)
World Premiere, a film by Ira Cohen, “Brain Damage”
World Premiere, a film by Ira Cohen, “Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda”
(Expanded Edition)
Also featuring films by Jack Smith, Tony Conrad and Piero Heliczer
Hubcap City (Atlanta)

Day 3: Propellers in Love
Saturday, September 2

Rhys Chatham’s Guitar Army (Paris)
Deerhunter (Atlanta)
One Umbrella (Austin)
Film and video featuring Charlemagne Palestine

Day 4: Slow Dazzles
Sunday, September 3

World Premiere, Rhys Chatham’s Essentialist (Paris)
Tony Conrad (New York)
Leif Inge (Oslo) 24-hour concert “9 Beet Stretch”

Day 5: The Thundergods
Monday, September 4

Japanese New Music Festival, Ver. 4
Acid Mothers Temple SWR (Tokyo)
Ruins Alone (Tokyo) with
Akaten, Zoffy, Zubi Zuva X, Seikazoku, Shrink Wrap (Tokyo)

Fourth Annual Esplanade Memorial Goat Roast/Low Country Boil

Eyedrum / 290 Martin Luther King Jr. Drive SE / Atlanta, Georgia /
30312 / USA

All acts subject to change without notice.

FIVE-DAY FESTIVAL PASSES ON SALE NOW:
www.tableoftheelements.com