June 26, 2006 New York Times

By ERIK ECKHOLM

GARY, Ind. — The teller’s eyes widened as a customer poured thousands of pennies onto the counter, an intentionally obnoxious way to pay a high heating bill. Still looming in line at the utility payment center, on a street of boarded-up buildings in this rusted city, were 10 more people carrying hefty bags of pennies, all wearing the red T-shirts of the national community organizing group Acorn.

It was a pinprick protest, intended to grab the attention of utility executives over what members of this newest Acorn chapter charged was the company’s overly quick shut-off of strapped customers.

That same day in Chicago, scores of Acorn members and volunteers fanned out in lower-income neighborhoods, gathering signatures in favor of a law that would require giant retailers like Wal-Mart to pay employees $10 an hour plus benefits. In dozens of other cities, members lobbied for the rights of Hurricane Katrina victims, protested “predatory lending” and registered low-income voters.

With offices in 106 cities and a membership reported to be 200,000, Acorn has emerged in recent years as the largest neighborhood-based antipoverty group in the country, using old-fashioned methods of door-knocking and noisy protests to push for local and national causes. It plans to open an office in 20 new cities each year for the next five years, an expansion in response to the strong grip conservatives have in Washington and to the travails of the working poor.

“We feel the Acorn program is popular wherever we go,” said Wade Rathke, 57, who founded the group 36 years ago in Arkansas and goes by the title of chief organizer. “It’s like a hot knife in butter.”

Conservative critics say Acorn and similar groups are pushing antimarket, unrealistic answers that will not help the poor in the long run.

But the increased mobilizing efforts, often in alliance with the growing union movement among low-end service workers, have earned the attention of Democratic politicians.

Those scheduled to speak at Acorn’s annual meeting in July include Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York; former Senator John Edwards, who has worked with Acorn on minimum wage initiatives; Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts; and John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.

The expansion of Acorn, whose formal name is the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, is part of a broader surge in populist organizing around the country centered on issues like wages, gentrification, environmental disputes and immigrant rights.

“Over the last 10 years we’ve seen pretty explosive growth in the number and scale of community groups working in poor communities and with people of color,” said Deepak Bhargava, of the Center for Community Change, a Washington-based support center for local organizers. Mr. Bhargava said the activism was “approaching a scale that could have a transforming effect on American politics and society.”

But the number of people involved is still limited, and while many groups share similar “social justice” philosophies, they are often fragmented.

Mr. Rathke said he had no illusions about the strength of “government policies promoting inequality.” But he added: “If there is going to be a change in politics in a progressive direction, we are going to be part of that. That wasn’t true 10 years ago.”

Mr. Rathke spoke at the bustling Acorn headquarters in New Orleans, where the group has sought to involve poor, displaced residents in the Hurricane Katrina recovery effort. He had just returned from a week in India, where he met with private groups worried about the possible entry of Wal-Mart and similar chains.

Acorn has a budget this year of $37.5 million, which does not include its spinoff research and housing organizations. Only $3 million of that comes from membership dues. Most of the rest comes from foundations, private donations and “partnerships” in which onetime corporate targets, like the Household Financial Corporation, pay Acorn to run programs, in this case to educate people about mortgages and loan terms.

Local offices pursue local issues of concern, like pressing an agency to clean up a vacant lot or, in the case of the powerful chapter in New York, opening schools and cosponsoring the Working Families political party.

What sets Acorn apart from most community groups, said Peter Dreier, an urban planning expert at Occidental College in Los Angeles, is its ability to combine local projects with coordinated national action on larger issues.

In a current campaign in several cities, for example, Acorn is demanding that the Sherwin-Williams paint company contribute to lead paint abatement.

The utility protest in Gary illustrates how Acorn creates a new chapter. Eric Weathersby, 43, is a church leader in Gary who wanted to get more involved in politics. After brief training in Chicago, Mr. Weathersby started as head organizer for Acorn in Indiana on April 17.

Heating bills soared last winter, and many poor residents resented their utility, the Northern Indiana Public Service Company, for what they saw as harsh policies for delinquent payers. Mr. Weathersby used the issue to recruit, going door to door himself, and by early June had 113 members.

Oscar L. Buggs Jr., 69, who lives on a pension from his career as a sanitation worker, was drawn in. He said he had inherited a house with past-due bills, had found himself owing $1,300 that he could not pay and had had his utilities cut off for several months. He used a flashlight to see at night.

“It seems like they do good deeds for people who need help,” Mr. Buggs said of Acorn. “Maybe I can do some good for somebody else.”

In early June, as members began unloading their pennies at the payment center, a company officer quickly appeared. He promised to relay to the company’s president Acorn’s demands for more aid to poor customers and a moratorium on shut-offs, and to try to set up a meeting with him.

In an e-mail response to a query by The New York Times, the company condemned Acorn’s tactics and claims.

“They use threats of protests and other attention-grabbing techniques to bully local utilities and get media coverage,” Tom Cuddy, a spokesman for the utility, said in the e-mail message. “Most of Acorn’s ‘demands’ are already addressed in existing assistance programs.”

The wage campaign in Chicago, where Wal-Mart is opening its first store this fall, had a visceral appeal for many residents and has gained the support in principle of a majority of the City Council.

Steven Malanga, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and author of “The New New Left” (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), said this campaign, for a law tailored specifically to giant retailers, showed how out of step Acorn was with the national mood and economic realities. “The only thing such laws ever do is to deprive shoppers in low-income neighborhoods of those stores,” Mr. Malanga said.

Illustrating the philosophical divide, Madeline Talbott, a veteran Acorn organizer in charge of the Chicago office, said of Wal-Mart, “They’re the world’s largest employers, and if they can’t pay a living wage, who can?”

Ms. Talbott added, “If we’re going to have a middle class in the city of Chicago, we have to set some kind of standard in the sectors of the economy that can’t just move to China.”

JAMES TURRELL: New Work – May 20–August 26, 2006 at Griffin Gallery in Los Angeles

GRIFFIN is pleased to announce an exhibition of new works by internationally acclaimed artist James Turrell. The exhibition will constitute the American debut of the artist’s Tall Glass series with three new works, along with End Around, a new work from his Ganzfeld series.  This exhibition of new work highlights the most recent developments in Turrell’s forty-year exploration of light and human perception. It also serves as a bracket to the artist’s previous GRIFFIN exhibition, which featured the light projection works from the 1960s that constituted his earliest experimentations with the medium.  As with that exhibition, the interior space of the gallery will be completely reconstructed to accommodate the new works. 

In his Tall Glass series, Turrell adds a temporal element to his perception-altering oeuvre. Each piece consists of a core of LEDs individually programmed by Turrell to carry out a subtle shift in color over time, similar to the deliberate but beautiful fashion in which the sky changes from late afternoon to night. However, these works’ careful construction insures that the viewer will see only a large floating, subtly changing field of light – a revelatory experience of photons as tangible entities and physical presence.

Also on exhibition will be End Around, one of Turrell’s Ganzfeld works. Upon entering the chamber housing the artwork, viewers instinctively approach what appears to be a faint wall of light in the distance. But upon reaching the light source, one’s entire visual field is consumed by an apparently limitless field of blue light. Turrell engineers the Ganzfeld works to eliminate all visual cues that the human brain uses to process depth. As a result, one is unable to tell whether the ethereal blue field he sees from the platform extends for inches, feet, or into infinity. The loaded act of “moving toward the light” and the subsequent experience of limitlessness reopen the spiritual dialectic that has perpetually surrounded Turrell’s light works.

Although light is used as the raw material, James Turrell believes human perception to be his true medium (in his own words, “My art is about your seeing”). His investigation into this field has extended well beyond the walls of the world’s foremost galleries and museums. Since 1972 Turrell has been transforming Roden Crater, a natural volcano located in northern Arizona, into a monumental artwork. Like Stonehenge and other great structures of civilizations past, Roden Crater is built to reveal and enhance celestial phenomena. Comprised of several “sky spaces” tunneled into the rock, the crater acts as an observatory so advanced in its design that one experiences not simply a sunset, but rather the revolution of the earth through space. Its completion will mark a historic achievement in the arts – not just of the modern age, but in all of recorded history.

James Turrell was born in 1943 in Los Angeles. Since his first solo exhibitions at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967 and the Stedelijk in 1976, Turrell has been the subject of over 140 solo exhibitions worldwide. He has received numerous awards in the arts, including The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1984. He currently resides in Flagstaff, Arizona.

New York Times – June 11, 2006

By ANDREW JACOBS

“DIPPY Hippie Bang Bang.” That was the front-page headline in The Daily News, gleefully reporting the shooting of a commune leader on Staten Island by a disgruntled former member. Other newspapers described the recent incident with a mix of curiosity and condescension, likening it to the 1978 mass suicides in Jonestown, Guyana, or reminding readers that Charles Manson’s mayhem was born on a free-love commune in California.

The message was clear: Communal living is a dangerous petri dish of sex, rampant drug use and occasional spurts of violence.

For the tens of thousands of Americans who make their homes in shared living arrangements, the lurid coverage obscured the recent surge in what promoters of cooperative housing call “intentional living.” After decades of contraction, the American commune movement has been expanding since the mid-1990’s, spurred by the growth of settlements that seek to marry the utopian-minded commune of the 1960’s with the American predilection for privacy and capital appreciation.

More than 1,100 such settlements, known as eco-villages and co-housing communities, have been built or are in the planning stages, according to the Communities Directory. That is more than double the number a decade ago, and Tony Sirna, a resident of the Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in northeast Missouri who helps maintain the directory, said he received about 15 to 20 listings a month for new communities. Many of them, he said, are started by disaffected baby boomers who have grown weary of car-dependent, McMansion-filled sprawl.

The new breed of cooperative living, however, is far from radical. In co-housing, the fastest growing segment, participants design their own subdivision with an emphasis on closely spaced, modest homes and Norman Rockwell-style social interaction encouraged by communal areas and pot-luck dinners. Eco-villages, many with solar-powered homes that are constructed with hay bales, are driven by an environmentally minded ideology. Residents are likely to avoid meat, wear hemp-fiber clothing and resemble the hippies of yore.

“There are plenty of people in the mainstream seeking an alternative to the alienation of suburban living, people who want more connection and community in their lives,” Mr. Sirna said, as he prepared a stir-fry for three erstwhile strangers with whom he now shares a home and pooled income. “For them, it’s not such a far-fetched idea to want to share resources and cooperate with their neighbors.”

Although a few dozen traditional communes continue to thrive, including Ganas, the 100-member community on Staten Island whose founder was wounded last month (and whose members say their lives are much more mundane than the headlines would indicate), and Twin Oaks, a 30-year-old colony in rural Virginia, most new projects are like ElderSpirit, seven co-housing communities under development that are being marketed to older people.

At others, like Earthaven Eco-village in Black Mountain, N.C., residents revel in their off-the-grid existence, growing much of their own food, recycling wash water and debating the merits of straw-bale versus rammed-earth home construction.

“These days, you don’t have to live in the boonies, chop wood, walk around nude and pool all your money to live an alternative lifestyle,” said Diana Leafe Christian, an Earthaven resident who edits Communities magazine, the quarterly bible of the intentional living movement.

The on-again off-again passion for counterculture living is a thread that runs through American history, starting with the Puritans, who were chasing the dream of utopia.

Although most utopian settlements eventually failed, each generation seems to strive for a way out of the status quo. “These communities serve as a mirror for the mainstream to see what others view as society’s problems,” said Christian Goodwillie, a curator at the Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Mass. “They offer the best-case scenario of what society would look like if mankind did away with personal ambition and greed. The problem is, they never seem to last very long.”

Not surprisingly, adherents of modern-day communitarianism believe a new era has arrived. The few communes that survived the 1970’s have come to appreciate pragmatism (budgets, bylaws and background checks are a good idea; banning cars and personal possessions, maybe not).

Purveyors of the new breed of intentional-living developments have learned to scale back on ideology and dogmatism. “Americans want to be able to close their doors, pull down the blinds and sell their home, but at the same time, they want more opportunities for community,” said Raines Cohen, a board member of The Co-housing Association of the United States. “A lot of people also realize that not everyone has to have their own washer and dryer, their own lawn mower and their own backyard pool. Sometimes it makes sense to share.”

Some say the time is ripe for a less atomized and wasteful existence. They cite an aging population that is seeking to downsize, the high cost of new housing and a surge in energy prices that will make old-school suburban life untenable.

Albert Bates, a lawyer from Connecticut who hitchhiked to The Farm, a commune in Tennessee, in 1972 and never left, says a flood of visitors seeking to learn about the 200-member community led to the creation of an eco-village training center that each year draws hundreds of people from around the world.

When gas hits $20 a gallon, Mr. Bates said, suburbia will wilt and Americans will flock to tight-knit, energy-efficient communities where they can walk or bike to stores that sell pesticide-free produce. “That time may not come for another 10 years,” said Mr. Bates, 59. “But at some point people are going to look for alternatives.”

Q: I read all of these stories about people obtaining opiate-like highs from some sort of preparation of poppy seeds. Is such a thing really possible? I knew about the false positive the seeds can give on drug tests, but are they actually psychoactive?

A: Yes, many poppy seeds that are sold in grocery stores are the seeds of P. somniferum, the opium poppy. These seeds contain small quantities of psychoactive opiates, primarily morphine. Some people make tea out of relatively large quantities of poppy seeds in order to get the effects of the morphine.

…

You mean I can actually grow Opium Poppies from grocery store seeds?

Yes you can. The very same seeds that you find on any poppyseed bagel are Opium Poppy seeds.

The seeds you buy in the grocery store are of a variety commonly called the “Breadseed Poppy”. This type of poppy is indeed Papaver Somniferum, and will produce fluffy flowers and decent sized pods. As long as the seeds have not been cooked, they will still grow. Culinary seeds however are often not as viable as commercial seeds, but chances are you will still get a decent germination rate from them. The quality and potency can also vary greatly.

But in the end, it’s better than nothing! And if you’re only growing poppies for their beauty as a flower, then they’re a perfect place to start.

So if you can’t find any at the flower shop, just go to the spice rack!

Summer of Love Redux
By WILL HERMES

ASA IRONS of the Vermont musical collective Feathers is stroking his beard. It is formidable beard; a biblical beard. He and his band mates — who mainly operate out of a rural farmhouse without cellphones, Internet, manager or booking agent — are at WNYC radio to perform their enigmatic, pixie-ish folk-rock on the long-running show “Spinning on Air.” Today their instruments include a lap harp, a toy xylophone, a Middle Eastern hand drum and an acoustic guitar hand-painted with animals and rainbows.

Ruth Garbus, a dark-eyed 24-year-old whose T-shirt depicts tractors flying through space, is talking about conjuring mystery with music, “that whole psychedelic thing of letting your mind go where it will.” Mr. Irons, 24, his long hair tied up in a bun, chimes in with a story about working as a carpenter and about growing up with parents who were “woods hippies, not town hippies.”

“I’m all about the old world, man,” Mr. Irons says with a mischievous laugh.

Perhaps. But he and his band mates are also about a new world: one of the most creatively vigorous strains of underground music. Initially dubbed “freak folk,” it looked like a trend of the moment a couple of years ago, when two California artists, Joanna Newsom and Devendra Banhart, attracted attention with charmingly shaggy, deceptively whimsical, largely acoustic albums.

But the scene they spearheaded has grown steadily and expanded sonically, getting less folkie and more, well, freaky. It has also gone international. And this season — the Summer of Love 2.0 — it comes into full, wild bloom with releases, tours and festival appearances that promise nothing less than a new age of Aquarius.

The new music is more a mind-set than a genre. It usually employs acoustic instruments, though it’s as likely to have roots in progressive rock, free jazz or Brazilian pop as in Appalachian ballads.

Vocals tend toward the willfully eccentric, arrangements toward the exotic, lyrics toward the oblique. The sound can range from gentle ensemble music befitting a Renaissance fair to electric psychedelia befitting an acid test. The musicians often conjure the 60’s in grooming and countercultural/utopian/back-to-the-land vibe. Many are friends, cultivating a communal network of informal collaboration: they tour together, play on one another’s records and sing one another’s praises. But with a tendency toward art that’s both homespun and solipsistic, and that shows little interest in music industry trappings, they can seem less interested in Making It Big than in keeping it small.

Still, the music is on the rise: for every backwoods group of musicians like Feathers, there are equally beguiling bands like Lavender Diamond, which is based in Los Angeles. This summer kindred bands like the darkly pastoral Espers, the gorgeously lyrical Vetiver, the raging Comets on Fire, the entrancing Six Organs of Admittance, the boogie-rocking Howlin Rain, the molasses-grooved Brightblack Morning Light, the computer-enhanced Tunng, the improvisatory Wooden Wand and the noisily experimental Grizzly Bear are all releasing CD’s, as are others — Jolie Holland, Ane Brun, Cibelle, Juana Molina and M. Ward — less connected to the scene but reflecting its aesthetics. And that’s not to mention promising artists like Alela Diane (www.myspace.com/alelamusic) who are popping up almost daily on Internet showcases.

These acts mainly play clubs, and their records remain tiny blips on SoundScan. But that may soon change. Virtually every major indie-rock label has embraced the style, including many veteran marketers of punk attitude that would recently have avoided anything vaguely “hippie.” Even Warp, the standard-bearer of British techno, has signed the woodsy Grizzly Bear. And Mr. Banhart is now signed to the hot British XL label, home to the White Stripes and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

If the major labels are lagging — well, that’s what major labels do. But with the endless-summer, hippie-folk-lite of Jack Johnson hitting No. 1 on the charts earlier this year, they probably won’t be for long.

Mr. Banhart, who got so much attention in 2004, remains the king of the scene and has extended his reach beyond it. He was recently invited to perform at a Chanel fashion show, to help organize the British alternative-pop festival All Tomorrow’s Parties and to perform at this weekend’s Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee. He was even romantically linked, for a moment, to the starlet Lindsay Lohan. Along the way the neo-hippie revival he represents is gaining cultural traction. Vice, the magazine, clothing line, record label and all-around hipster franchise, has scheduled psychedelic-rock acts (the veterans Blue Cheer and Roky Erikson, and Boredoms, a Japanese band) among the top acts at the Intonation Festival it sponsors next weekend in Chicago. And “Just Another Diamond Day,” a 1969 song by Vashti Bunyan — an eccentric British singer who’s a folksy patron saint of the new scene — is now playing in a T-Mobile ad.

To make the most of all this interest, archival labels are busy bringing out albums that have been out of print for decades. “We’re living in the age of the reissue,” said Michael Klausman, a buyer for Other Music in New York, a store that is a major source of experimental folk. “For some of the younger musicians, these old records are their formative influences. You see them engaging with the music of their parents’ generation almost like it’s a contemporary phenomena.”

This summer’s version of freak folk tends to be darker and more experimental than first-wavers like Mr. Banhart and Ms. Newsom. The guitarist Ben Chasny is a Northern Californian whose pleasantly droning electro-acoustic recordings date back to the late 90’s. He appears on three impressive new records this season: “The Sun Awakens,” a haunting mix of fingerpicking and feedback by his main creative vehicle, Six Organs of Admittance (who perform at the Mercury Lounge in New York on July 6); “Black Ships Ate the Sky,” an “apocalyptic folk” song-cycle by the former industrial rockers Current 93; and “Avatar,” a ferocious psych-rock set by Comets on Fire (out Aug. 9).

Mr. Chasny, like many musicians on the scene, is a self-confessed record geek. “The whole thing for me at first was getting the beautiful, mysterious record that made you wonder, ‘Who are these guys?’ But then I’d mail-order these crazy psychedelic folk records and feel, ‘Well, that wasn’t really crazy enough.’ So I started making the records I wanted to hear.”

Mr. Chasny’s work with Comets on Fire of Santa Cruz represents the noisier side of new psychedelia, as does the self-titled debut by Howlin Rain, a side project of the Comets’ guitarist Ethan Miller. Their screaming guitars are worlds away from the laid-back sound of most modern “hippie rock.”

“I come from the biggest hippie area in the world,” said Mr. Chasny, who grew up in Arcata, Calif. “But they don’t listen to the real hippie music. They listen to Phish and that groove stuff. I love the old psychedelic music because it wasn’t just imagery.”

“It was music that meant something,” he added.

Precisely what the music meant then, and means now, is an open question. “It’s a very Aquarian thing,” explained Jay Babcock, editor in chief of Arthur, a free-distribution music magazine (with articles on progressive politics and herbalism) that has become the central voice of the new scene. “Hallucinogens, rock ‘n’ roll, love of nature, interest in social justice. These are all people basically fleeing in horror from the homogenizing, materialist, bottom-line corporate monoculture that’s overtaking America.”

Greg Weeks of the Philadelphia electro-acoustic group Espers said, “There’s an element in this community that’s tied in to the most valid aspects of the counterculture and learning from the mistakes of the earlier generation.”

For one thing, he notes that “there isn’t so much reckless abandon” with regard to drug use; just alcohol, marijuana and the occasional psychedelic, most say. Politics, meanwhile, tend to be expressed subtly, through the way people live rather than through explicit song lyrics. “You don’t have to have a grand statement,” Mr. Weeks said. “You can just do things in your own little way, put them out there, and if people respond, it’s going to have a chain reaction. And I think that’s kind of what’s happening.”

Nathan Shineywater and Rachael Hughes of Brightblack Morning Light are an example of that. Hailing from Alabama, they have spent the last couple of years living in tents (and a renovated chicken coop) near Lagunitas, Calif. Their group — whose Crystal Totem tour, with Espers, comes to Brooklyn’s Southpaw on Wednesday and the Mercury Lounge on Friday — will release a marvelously hypnotic self-titled CD this week that’s awash in liquid slide guitar and burbling Fender Rhodes progressions.

“Most of the album was written on hikes at Point Reyes National Seashore and is about interacting with the wilderness,” said Mr. Shineywater from a truck stop en route to Joshua Tree, where he, Ms. Hughes and their dog planned to do some camping with friends (including Mr. Babcock).

As he speaks about nature worship and what psilocybin mushrooms “could do for our collective consciousness,” he obviously relishes his role as hippie ambassador. But he and Ms. Hughes are clearly sincere back-to-the-landers: they work with the eco-activist group Earth First! and organize the Quiet Quiet Ocean festival, an annual music event in California. Naturally, their friends Mr. Banhart and Ms. Newsom drop by.

Community building is an important feature of the scene, both in the United States and abroad. Members of Feathers single out the Finnish experimental folk scene for praise, specifically artists like Lau Nau and Islaja and labels like Fonal, and talk of forthcoming collaborations. Juana Molina of Argentina, whose “Son” is one of the year’s top electro-acoustic records, plans to record this month with Mr. Banhart and Andy Cabic of Vetiver (whose new CD, “To Find Me Gone,” showcases some of the new scene’s best songwriting).

Judging from the number of international artists exploring similar sounds, collective consciousness may be at work. Last month the debut CD by a Swedish singer named Ane Brun was released in the United States; its slightly surreal folksiness suggests the influence of Mr. Banhart’s music, though Ms. Brun says she had not heard it. And in England, Adem and Tunng expand on folk influences with electronics. “You may be in a London basement with a laptop and a guitar, but you can make the city your rural area through music,” said Mike Lindsay of Tunng, which will release its second set of clattering fusion music, “Comments of the Inner Chorus,” in the United States in August.

Tunng, like many of the scene’s players abroad, use loops and digital beats more prominently than its stateside counterparts, an impulse that may have to do with electronic music’s larger cultural presence outside America. But the experimental appetite of the new music is inherently broad. “It’s not about genre,” said Cibelle, a Sao Paolo musician whose recent CD, “The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves,” was partly produced by Mr. Lindsay and features a duet with Mr. Banhart. She says the current movement has much in common with tropicalia, the omnivorous Brazilian cultural movement of the late 60’s. (Os Mutantes, the reunited tropicalia act, is also touring this summer, performing at Webster Hall on July 21.) “This new state of mind,” she said by phone from London. “Even if musicians don’t know tropicalia by that name, they are still making music that way, by intuition, without rules, following their own uniqueness.”

Perhaps that is as good an explanation as any for the new aesthetic, which is not everyone’s cup of herbal tea. Critics and listeners raised on punk’s supposed anti-hippie credo can be suspicious, if not wholly dismissive of the scene, while some 60’s folk fans find the new incarnation too politically disengaged. As one critic wrote in The New Republic, artists like Ms. Newsom and Mr. Banhart “tend to communicate nothing except self-absorption.”

Other old-schoolers, however, are impressed. Neil Young has invited Ms. Newsom to perform with him, and the Black Crowes singer Chris Robinson has been a devoted supporter of the scene. “For me,” he wrote in an e-mail message, “the collection of artists involved in the so-called psych-folk revival serve as a reminder that in the corporate morass of today’s sterile music industry, there are artists unafraid, confident and talented enough to flourish creatively in a homegrown environment.”

And so it seemed last month while watching Feathers perform at Tonic, a New York club known for its openness to the new music. With five singer-songwriters, the members constantly exchanged instruments — clarinet, violin, mandolin, flute and an electric guitar that threatened like an approaching thunderstorm — and sang of searching for a home “in the fields” and “in the air.”

When they finished, they packed up quickly. One needed to be back in Brattleboro by morning for an early shift at the local food co-op; others were visiting friends in Connecticut. But they took time to exchange hugs with members of the audience, leaving a little pixie dust behind before heading back to the woods

From ROZ PAYNE:

I’ve been working on a two-disk DVD which includes three Newsreel films on the Black Panther Party along with Black Panther stories, photos, and FBI documents It contains never before seen interesting historical material.

The Newsreel films are “Mayday” and “Off the Pig,” both made by San Francisco Newsreel along with “Repression” made by Los Angeles Newsreel.

“Off the Pig” contains interviews with Party leaders Eldridge Cleaver and Huey Newton describing why the Party was formed and its goals. It includes footage of Panther recruitment, training, demonstration opening day of Huey’s trial and the Party’s original 10 Point Program laid out by Bobby Seale.

“Mayday” (Black Panther) film: On May 1, 1969 the Black Panther Party held a massive rally in San Francisco with speakers Kathleen Cleaver, Bobby Seale, attorney Charles Garry, and Bob Avikian. The footage includes footage of the police raid on the Panther headquarters a few days prior to the rally and the Panther’s Breakfast for children Program.

“Repression,” recently discovered, was made by Los Angeles Newsreel and has never been distributed. It is about the police attack on the Los Angeles BPP office including footage of the shoot out, breakfast program, confrontation between Panthers and Ron Karanga’s US group , the funeral of Bunchy Carter and John Huggins, and music by Elaine Brown.

Additional interviews with the following will be included along with the Newsreel films:

* FBI Special Agent WAC (William A. Cohendet) , San Francisco case agent who opened the FBI file on the Black Panther Party. He was responsible for the bi monthly reports to FBI headquarters. He is the only FBI agent to reveal his role against the Panthers. He was a great writer and knew all the gossip. This is the only interview he gave.

* Donald Cox , Field Marshall of the Black Panthers presently exiled in France and wanted for murder in the USA. DC was in charge of the Panther military and discusses politics, military actions, and other events that most Panthers have not talked or written about.

* Attorney Beverly Axlerod was responsible for getting panther leader Eldridge Cleaver out of jail. The book “Soul on Ice” by Cleaver is dedicated to her and includes her letters. The famous picture of Huey sitting in the chair with the gun and spear was shot in her home and the first BPP newspaper was made on her mimeograph machine. (This interview was shot a year before she died)

* Attorneys Jessie Berman and Jerry Lefcourt discuss the New York Panther 21 trial . After two years in the court the 21 Panthers were found Not Guilty.

* Attorney Bob Bloom tells the story of Panther Geronimo Pratt who was released from jail after being held for 21 years.

* Attorney Robert Boyle discusses Panther Dhoruba bin Wahad and how he was released after 17 years in jail.

* Attorney Mike Meyers tells a story of the Detroit Panthers.

Interviews with Newsreel members and supporters of the Black Panther Party:

* Marilyn Buck (presently in jail) Newsreel member, Black Panther and Black Liberation supporter

* The Falk family and friends including Newsreel members Nancy Falk, Michael Falk, Gay Falk and children Christipher and Melanie Falk. Along with Phil Spinelli. Including a story of the New Haven woman’s march and demonstration in support of the New Haven Panthers.

* Vince Tao, talking about NYC Panther support

* Cindy Fitzpatrick and Christine Hansen from Los Angeles Newsreel talk about LA Panthers

* Debra Shaffer Newsreel member and Academy Award Winner talks about Detroit Newsreel and Panthers.

* Dozie McFadden and Gail Dolgin, San Francisco Newsreel members tell NR/Black Panther stories.

* Marty Kenner, was the major fundraiser/money manager for the Black Panther Party. He spent time in Algeria with Panthers in Exile, confidant of Huey and more.

* Peter Kuttner, Chicago Newsreel member footage of Chicago Black Panthers .

* Roz Payne Newsreel member, Newsreel third world section tells her Black Panther story with photos she shot.

* FBI Drawings of Black Panther members from FBI files.
* Important FBI documents and Cointelpro files
* Photos of arrest of Curtis Powell Panther 21
* Photos of opening day of Huey P Newton trial in Oakland
* Panther 21 trial demonstrations
* Photos of Panther reunions and other events
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Walter Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published in a new translation, suggest the possibilities–and limits–of intoxication

By Matthew Price | June 11, 2006 The Boston Globe

AT FIRST GLANCE, Walter Benjamin, the bespectacled, bushy mustached, deeply serious, and influential German literary critic, may not strike you as a likely drug user. Indeed, he considered drugs a “poison,” and a rather disreputable one at that. As Marcus Boon writes in his introduction to “On Hashish,” a slim English translation of Benjamin’s writings on drugs, just published by Harvard University Press, “Drug use was hardly seen as something worthy of celebration in Benjamin’s intellectual milieu” in the Berlin of the 1920s and early `30s.

And yet, surprisingly, few writers have approached the experience of intoxication with Benjamin’s earnestness, profound wonderment, and sense of purpose. Neither a recreational user nor an addict, he had a studious, deliberate, almost scholarly approach. In 1927, persuaded by some doctor friends to take part in their research, Benjamin began to dabble in a range of drugs-opium, hashish, mescaline-and recorded his experiences in a series of fragments and “protocols”: observations in Benjamin’s hand alternating with the musings of his medical pals.

In the writings collected in “On Hashish,” some composed during a drug session, others afterwards in recollection (Benjamin only published two drug-related texts in his lifetime), the often forbidding theorist appears in a playful, relaxed mode. “Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic-obsessive anxiety complexes. All those present take on hues of the comic,” he writes in “Main Features of My First Impression of Hashish” from 1927. He can also be downright silly-“oven turns into cat”; “I can see why, when one is hiding in the grass, one can fish in the earth”-proof that an intellectual on drugs can sound little different than, say, your average stoned college kid.

Still, despite such loopiness, these writings can be read profitably as an extension of Benjamin’s particular take on modern culture. For Benjamin, drug experiences were not an escape from the tumult and decadence of Weimar Germany, they were a vital adjunct to his lifelong quest to unlock the secrets of modernity. In a 1928 letter to his close friend and confidante, the theologian Gershom Scholem, Benjamin wrote that his hash-inspired note-taking “may well turn out to be a very worthwhile supplement to my philosophical observations, with which they are most intimately related.”

Born in 1892 to a well-to-do Jewish family in Berlin, Benjamin was a sober, strait-laced child. He enjoyed the trappings of upper middle class life: private tutors, boarding school, university in Freiberg and Bern, where he completed his thesis, “The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism,” in 1920. Though Benjamin possessed all the grave habits of an academic, he instead opted for the perils of freelance life, a decision that ultimately served him well. In a few years, he had emerged as one of Germany’s leading intellectuals, writing for newspapers and magazines on a vast range of topics-politics, history, literature, theology, aesthetics, and a hodgepodge of offbeat esoterica such as astrology and the collecting of old letters. (He even proposed, fittingly, a “theory of distraction.”)

A difficult, at times opaque stylist whose work would inspire the intellectuals of the `60s New Left and become a touchstone of contemporary cultural studies, Benjamin fused a deeply mystical turn of mind with Marxist politics in what could be a heady, sometimes uneasy mix. Scholem once said that Benjamin was a “theologian marooned in the realm of the profane.”

It was to escape that realm that Benjamin turned to intoxicants, in search of what he called “profane illumination.” In a famous 1929 essay on surrealism, he tried to spell out the concept: More than just a fancy way of getting high, “profane illumination” is a “materialistic, anthropological inspiration, to which hashish, opium, or whatever else can give an introductory lesson.”

Benjamin can be perversely elusive-sometimes you wonder if you need to be on drugs to get him-but he hoped to show that certain habits of mind lent themselves to the pursuit of profane illumination. “The reader, the thinker, the loiterer, the flaneur, are types of illuminati just as much as the opium eater, the dreamer, the ecstatic.” The flaneur in particular-the urban nomad who wanders from place to place, collecting images “wherever they lodge”-was a key figure for Benjamin, a phenomenological detective, always peeking around the corner into the shadows, trying to summon the spirits of a place and break through the clutter and bric-a-brac of modern life.

Hashish, Benjamin believed, gave its user a similar kind of perception-a sort of X-ray vision providing access to the inner workings of time and space, culture and history. In a 1933 entry, he writes, “There is no more valid legitimation of crock”-Benjamin’s code word for hashish-“than the consciousness of having suddenly penetrated, with its help, that most hidden, generally most inaccessible world of surfaces.” Beyond the veil, Boon explains, lay “secret transcendental forces” that Benjamin hoped might point to revolution.

Benjamin tried to harness these states of intoxication for the purposes of his inquiry into the nature of capitalism. He hankered, as Boon notes, for a “left wing politics of intoxication,” and indeed he turned sharply towards Marxism after the rise of the Nazis. But his drug writings are too inward, scattered, and serene to point towards any revolutionary upsurge.

Like others before and since, his desire to wed mysticism to a revolutionary politics failed to produce satisfying results. (There is a reason Benjamin’s drug texts are not among his most influential writings-and why his ambition to mount a large-scale project on hashish remained unfulfilled.) Benjamin’s drug experiments may have honed his sociological and literary senses-“feeling of understanding [Edgar Allan] Poe much better,” he writes in 1927-but there would be no communal rush to the barricades. The revolutionary potential of the drug trance exists purely in the mind.

There are darker premonitions as well in Benjamin’s drug notes. “A formula for the nearness of my death came to me yesterday: Death lies between me and my intoxication,” Benjamin wrote in 1928-an especially haunting remark given the circumstances of his death.

In 1933, Benjamin fled Germany for Paris, where he scraped together a hand-to-mouth existence. When France fell to Hitler in 1940, he tried to escape across the Pyrenees to Spain. Hung up on the Franco-Spanish border, unable to secure a transit visa, he committed suicide by an overdose of morphine tablets, which he carried in case of capture. In the end, Benjamin was a victim of National Socialism-a political intoxication, one might say, of an entirely different order.

Matthew Price is a frequent contributor to the Globe.