AMERICA POLICE STATE NEWS.

Police Memos Say Arrest Tactics Calmed Protest

March 17, 2006 New York Times

By JIM DWYER

In five internal reports made public yesterday as part of a lawsuit, New York City police commanders candidly discuss how they had successfully used “proactive arrests,” covert surveillance and psychological tactics at political demonstrations in 2002, and recommend that those approaches be employed at future gatherings.

Among the most effective strategies, one police captain wrote, was the seizure of demonstrators on Fifth Avenue who were described as “obviously potential rioters.”

The reports provide a rare glimpse of internal police evaluations and strategies on security and free speech issues that have provoked sharp debate between city officials and political demonstrators since the Sept. 11 attack.

The reports also made clear what the police have yet to discuss publicly: that the department uses undercover officers to infiltrate political gatherings and monitor behavior.

Indeed, one of the documents ó a draft report from the department’s Disorder Control Unit ó proposed in blunt terms the resumption of a covert tactic that had been disavowed by the city and the federal government 30 years earlier. Under the heading of recommendations, the draft suggested, “Utilize undercover officers to distribute misinformation within the crowds.”

Asked about the proposal, Paul J. Browne, the chief spokesman for the Police Department, said yesterday: “The N.Y.P.D. does not use police officers in any capacity to distribute misinformation.”

Mr. Browne also said that the “proactive” arrests referred to in the report ó numbering about 30 ó involved protesters with pipes and masks who he said presented an obvious threat.

In another report, a police inspector praised the “staging of massive amounts” of armored vehicles, prisoner wagons and jail buses in the view of the demonstrators, writing that the sight “would cause them to be alarmed.”

Besides the draft report, the documents released yesterday included four final reports written by commanders to assess police performance during the World Economic Forum, which met in New York from Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2002.

The economic forum, a private organization that normally meets in Davos, Switzerland, and draws a grab bag of leaders from government, business, and academia ó as well as protesters from a miscellany of causes and movements ó was moved to the city as a gesture of solidarity after the terror attack.

Security was extremely tight around Midtown Manhattan, where the delegates were meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria, and demonstrators were kept blocks from the hotel. Officials spoke of violence during antiglobalism protests at other high profile gatherings in Seattle and Genoa, Italy. In the end, though, as one of the police reports noted, “the amount of confrontation and number of arrests were lower than expected.”

Parts of that document and others were made public, over the objections of the city, by a federal magistrate, Gabriel W. Gorenstein, who said the excerpts went to the heart of a lawsuit brought by 16 people who were arrested at an animal rights demonstration during the economic forum. The police said they were blocking the sidewalk and had refused to obey an order to disperse; the demonstrators said no one told them to move.

Many of the issues in the animal rights case, which challenge broad police tactics and arrest strategies, resonate in well over a hundred other lawsuits brought against the city by demonstrators who were arrested at war protests, bicycle rallies and during the Republican National Convention.

Daniel M. Perez, the lawyer representing the people arrested at the animal rights demonstration, argued that the police tactics “punish, control and curtail the lawful exercise of First Amendment activities.” The Police Department and the city have said that preserving public order is essential to protecting the civil rights of demonstrators and bystanders.

Mr. Perez maintains that the police documents, taken together, show a policy of pre-emptive arrests. The draft report discussed how early arrests could shape future events. “The arrests made at West 59th Street and Fifth Avenue set a ‘tone’ with the demonstrators and their possible plans at other demonstrations,” the report stated.

The disorder control unit’s commander, Thomas Graham, is listed as the author of the report, but the document is not signed and the word “draft” is handwritten across the top.

The same tactic is cited in another report, dated Feb. 8, 2002, and signed by Capt. Robert L. Bonifaci, commander of the Queens North Task Force. Captain Bonifaci wrote, “It should be noted that a large part of the success in policing the major demonstration on Saturday, Feb. 2, 2002, was due in part to the proactive arrest policy that was instituted at the start of the march at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, and directed toward demonstrators who were obviously potential rioters.”

Elaborating on the report, Mr. Browne, the police spokesman, said that plainclothes officers saw a group of demonstrators put on masks as they drew near the Plaza Hotel, then take out metal pipes and try to rush police lines.

“In addition to mainly peaceful protesters, the W.E.F. attracted hard-core, violent elements that were surveilled by the N.Y.P.D.,” Mr. Browne said, citing the incident at the Plaza. “Yes, we used surveillance techniques to track and hopefully disrupt violent elements. That’s proactive.”

About 30 people were arrested there, and virtually all their cases are now sealed, indicating that the charges were either dismissed by prosecutors or dropped after six months without further incident.

The Police Department report from Michael E. Shortell, a deputy inspector who headed a narcotics command in northern Manhattan, included a list of “positive aspects” of the Police Department’s approach. Among them: “The staging of massive amounts of equipment in the key areas (e.g. armored vehicles, command posts, prisoner wagons, Department of Correction buses, city buses).”

Capt. Timothy Hardiman also took note of what he saw as the helpful presence of city corrections buses, which are used to transport prisoners and have reinforced windows, protected by metal grids.

“It was useful to have buses with corrections officers on hand,” Captain Hardiman wrote. “They also had a powerful psychological effect.”

Mr. Browne said the main reason buses were on hand was to quickly move prisoners from an arrest scene. “If a corrections bus had a deterrent effect on someone contemplating a violent act, then that’s value added,” he said.

However, the draft report stated that the emphasis on quickly moving prisoners had not been helpful. “This hastened the process adding to the confusion and increasing the potential for mistakes to be made,” the report stated.

Mr. Perez said the show of force sent a deliberate warning to people expressing their opinions. “The message is, if you turn out, be prepared to be arrested, be prepared to be sent away for a long time,” he said. “It sounds like something from a battle zone.”

Demonstrators arrested during the economic forum were held by the police for up to 40 hours without seeing a judge ó twice as long as people accused of murder, rape and robbery arrested on those same days, Mr. Perez said.

Mr. Browne of the Police Department said that the arrests were processed as quickly as possible, and that protesters were not singled out for longer detention.

The reports, which were heavily edited at the request of the city, also discuss the use of undercover officers at the protests. Captain Hardiman wrote that “the use of undercovers from narcotics provided useful information.” And on Inspector Shortell’s list of positive aspects of the strategy, he listed “the use of undercover personnel in the ranks of the protesters.”

The power of the police to secretly monitor political gatherings was tightly controlled by a federal court between 1985 and early 2003, the result of a lawsuit by political activists from the 1960’s who charged that police undercover officers had disrupted their ability to express their opinions. Many of the restrictions from that case, known as Handschu, were eased at the request of the city in 2003.

The proposal to use undercover officers to spread misinformation ó which the Police Department says was not adopted ó recalled the origins of the Handschu lawsuit, which was based in part on the actions of undercover agents and officers who instigated trouble and spread lies among a group of military veterans who opposed the Vietnam War.

ALAN MOORE ON COMICS, FILM, BIG BUDGETS, CGI, GEORGE ROMERO, COCTEAU, JOHN WATERS, GEORGE CLOONEY AND THE TIMID WACHOWSKI BROTHERS.

from mtv.com

Alan Moore, the king of comics, is at his home in Northampton, England. He’s been working on a new story called “Lost Girls.” Actually he’s been working on it for the last 16 years, but now it’s done and due out this summer as a graphic novel, illustrated by his fiancee, the artist Melinda Gebbe. It’s a wild tale, even by the 52-year-old Moore’s standards: Three heroines of classic children’s literature — Alice from “Alice in Wonderland,” Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz” and Wendy from “Peter Pan” — meet up in London in 1913 and realize that their respective stories are actually metaphors for sexual awakening. Very erotic. Or, as Moore prefers to think of it, very pornographic.

The sex-filled “Lost Girls” may be a little too scary for Hollywood, which has heretofore adored Moore’s work and turned three of his creations (the graphic novels “From Hell” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” as well as the supernatural investigator John Constantine) into very bad movies. Moore’s densely complex 1987 graphic novel, “Watchmen” (illustrated by Dave Gibbons), has been banging around Hollywood for years (director Terry Gilliam was once attached to it), but has yet to be made. “V for Vendetta,” however, the ’80s series he did with artist David Lloyd, has — and Moore is not happy about it. He read the script and hated it and, as is now his customary practice, he’s had his name taken off the movie and directed that all profits he might be due from the film be given to Lloyd instead.

Alan Moore very rarely gives interviews, but MTV News’ Jennifer Vineyard spoke to him at length by phone recently about “V for Vendetta,” about his Hollywood problem, about the perils of working with Johnny Depp and Sean Connery, and about his latest project.

MTV: Could you see “Lost Girls” being made into a film?

Alan Moore: I don’t see how adapting it to another medium makes any sense at all. But that’s me. I am a little cranky sometimes. And it wouldn’t be fair of me to say no if Melinda [Gebbe] did want to see “Lost Girls” made into a film. My position is, I don’t want my name on it and I don’t want the money. But also, how would they get actors of any quality to appear in a hard-core sex film? We’d need Judi Dench for it, and I don’t think she’d do it. But I really doubt that any of my comics can be [successfully] made into films, because that’s not how I write them.

MTV: But you do have a very cinematic style.

Moore: In comics the reader is in complete control of the experience. They can read it at their own pace, and if there’s a piece of dialogue that seems to echo something a few pages back, they can flip back and check it out, whereas the audience for a film is being dragged through the experience at the speed of 24 frames per second. So even for a director like Terry Gilliam, who delights in cramming background details into his movies, there’s no way he’d be able to duplicate what Dave Gibbons was able to do in “Watchmen.” We could place almost subliminal details in every panel, and we knew that the reader could take the time to spot everything. There’s no way you could do that in a film.

I met Terry Gilliam, and he asked me, “How would you make a film of ‘Watchmen’?” And I said, “Don’t.” I think he eventually came to agree with me that it was a film better unmade. In Hollywood you’re going to have the producers and the backers putting in their … well, I don’t want to dignify them by calling them ideas, but … having their input, shall we say. You’re going to get actors who’ll say they don’t want to say this line or play this character like that. I mean the police inspector in “From Hell,” Fred Abberline, was based on real life: He was an unassuming man in middle age who was not a heavy drinker and who, as far as I know, remained faithful to his wife throughout his entire life. Johnny Depp saw fit to play this character as an absinthe-swilling, opium-den-frequenting dandy with a haircut that, in the Metropolitan Police force in 1888, would have gotten him beaten up by the other officers.

On the other hand when I have got an opium-addicted character, in Allan Quatermain [in “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen”], this was true to the [original] character — he showed a fondness for drugs on several occasions. But Sean Connery didn’t want to play him as a drug-addled individual. So the main part of Quatermain’s character was thrown out the window on the whim of an actor. I don’t have these problems in comics.

MTV: So why sell the film rights in the first place?

Moore: My position used to be: If the film is a masterpiece, that has nothing to do with my book. If the film is a disaster, that has nothing to do with my book. They’re two separate entities, and people will understand that. This was very naive because most people are not bothered with whether it’s adapted from a book or not. And if they do know, they assume it was a faithful adaptation. There’s no need to read the book if you’ve seen the film, right? And how many of the audience who went to see “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” thought, “Hmmm, I’ve really got to go read ‘The Odyssey’ “?

When you’re talking about things like “V for Vendetta” or “Watchmen,” I don’t have a choice. Those were works which DC Comics kind of tricked me out of, so they own all that stuff and it’s up to them whether the film gets made or not. All I can do is say, “I want my name taken off of it and I don’t want any of the money.” I’d rather the money be distributed amongst the artists. But even though [the filmmakers] were aware that I’d asked that my name be taken off “V for Vendetta” and had already signed my money away to the artist, they issued a press release saying I was really excited about the film. Which was a lie. I asked for a retraction, but they weren’t prepared to do that. So I announced I wouldn’t be working with DC Comics anymore. I just couldn’t bear to have any contact with DC Comics, Warner Bros. or any of this shark pool ever again.

One of the things I don’t like about film is its incredible immersive quality. It’s kind of bullying — it’s very big, it’s very flashy, it’s got a lot of weight and it throws it around almost to the detriment of the rest of our culture.And I have gotten tired of lazy critics who, when they want to insult a film, they’ll say it has “comic book characters” or a “comic book plot” — using “comic book” as code for “illiterate.”

MTV: They’ve probably never read a comic book.

Moore: That’s it. I’m not going to claim all comic books are literate — there’s a lot of rubbish out there. But there have been some very literate comic books done over the last 20 years, some marvelous ones. And to actually read a comic, you do have to be able to read, which is not something you can say about watching a film. So as for which medium is literate, give me comics any day.

MTV: There is one possible solution, something that Neil Gaiman is now doing with his “Death: The High Cost of Living” and Frank Miller has done with “Sin City”: Why not direct the films yourself?

Moore: I don’t have any interest in directing films of my work. If something worked perfectly in one genre, why is there any reason to assume it’s going to work as well or better in another genre that it wasn’t designed for? I’ve not seen “Ghost World,” but I’ve been told it’s very good. I’ve not been told that it’s better than the comic.

MTV: What about something that is true to the spirit of the original work, like “The Lord of the Rings”?

Moore: CGI makes me spit vitriol and bile and venom. When it comes to films, give me someone like [surrealist filmmaker] Jean Cocteau. When he wants to have somebody reaching into a mirror, he spends all of about five dollars on the special effect: He gets a tray, fills it with mercury and then turns the camera on its side. That is poetry. That is magic.

I have a theory, which has not let me down so far, that there is an inverse relationship between imagination and money. Because the more money and technology that is available to [create] a work, the less imagination there will be in it. My favorite films are those that were made on a shoestring. And they weren’t adaptations of some other work, they were original pieces of cinema. All right, [Cocteau’s] “La Belle Et La BÔø?te” is an adaptation of “Beauty and the Beast” — but it was made into something very different. And I mean, John Waters, his early films, they’re terrific! Because he was making them with some friends of his from Baltimore, with whatever cheap film stock he could borrow or steal. George Romero, in “Dawn of the Dead,” “Day of the Dead,” all the rest of them, he ingeniously used the fact that he had almost no budget to his advantage — claustrophobic sets, everyone’s trapped in the cellar and the zombies are trying to dig their way in. Very inexpensive, incredibly powerful. That is where cinema really works for me.

If you give me a typewriter and I’m having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry — that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn’t cost much to do that. But if you said, “Astonish the audience,” and you gave me a quarter of a million — well, my auntie could astonish an audience if she got that much money! Real art and the things that actually change our culture tend to happen on the margins. They don’t happen in the middle of a big marquee.

MTV: But couldn’t there ever be an exception? And since you haven’t seen it, couldn’t “V for Vendetta” be that exception?

Moore: I’ve read the screenplay, so I know exactly what they’re doing with it, and I’m not going to be going to see it. When I wrote “V,” politics were taking a serious turn for the worse over here. We’d had [Conservative Party Prime Minister] Margaret Thatcher in for two or three years, we’d had anti-Thatcher riots, we’d got the National Front and the right wing making serious advances. “V for Vendetta” was specifically about things like fascism and anarchy.

Those words, “fascism” and “anarchy,” occur nowhere in the film. It’s been turned into a Bush-era parable by people too timid to set a political satire in their own country. In my original story there had been a limited nuclear war, which had isolated Britain, caused a lot of chaos and a collapse of government, and a fascist totalitarian dictatorship had sprung up. Now, in the film, you’ve got a sinister group of right-wing figures — not fascists, but you know that they’re bad guys — and what they have done is manufactured a bio-terror weapon in secret, so that they can fake a massive terrorist incident to get everybody on their side, so that they can pursue their right-wing agenda. It’s a thwarted and frustrated and perhaps largely impotent American liberal fantasy of someone with American liberal values [standing up] against a state run by neo-conservatives — which is not what “V for Vendetta” was about. It was about fascism, it was about anarchy, it was about [England]. The intent of the film is nothing like the intent of the book as I wrote it. And if the Wachowski brothers had felt moved to protest the way things were going in America, then wouldn’t it have been more direct to do what I’d done and set a risky political narrative sometime in the near future that was obviously talking about the things going on today?

George Clooney’s being attacked for making [“Good Night, and Good Luck”], but he still had the nerve to make it. Presumably it’s not illegal — not yet anyway — to express dissenting opinions in the land of free? So perhaps it would have been better for everybody if the Wachowski brothers had done something set in America, and instead of a hero who dresses up as Guy Fawkes, they could have had him dressed as Paul Revere. It could have worked.

"My other car is a plane"

Los Angeles Times: My other car is a plane

My other car is a plane

Mercedes’ new SUV couldn’t come at a worse time. Can consumption be more conspicuous?
DAN NEIL
Automotive critic Dan Neil can be reached at dan.neil@latimes.com.

THERE’S something peculiarly egregious, something antagonizing about the 2007 Mercedes-Benz GL, the company’s new full-size, 15-mpg sport-utility vehicle, which might be described as a Cadillac Escalade with a hankering for Czechoslovakia. For one thing, it goes to show that, even though the full-size SUV market has fallen off dramatically in the last year, there are still sufficient numbers of selfish rotters out there to constitute an appealing market segment.

Mercedes-Benz executives offer this wholly meritless defense: Many of its customers leave the brand because the company does not offer a full-size SUV that meets their needs, which is to say, a seven-passenger, 17-foot 4×4 with a 9,300-pound towing capacity. At this point in the presentation in Napa Valley last week, execs showed slides of the GL pulling a 30-foot boat. So there you have it: Mercedes’ audience of water-skiing polygamists is underserved.

Needs? Did the man say needs? OK, then. I propose needs testing for the purchase of such a vehicle. You must have a Chris-Craft and three or more school-age children in the yard to qualify. Your vehicle must do double-duty as, um, a bookmobile.

Need has very little to do with it. This segment is about want, naked and unquenchable, I-got-mine-you-get-bent appetite. It’s well established that the vast majority of these vehicles never touch gravel, never carry more than a couple of people, and never tow anything heavier than the weight of their owner’s childhood traumas.

Most people who buy the GL won’t know a Class IV hitch from a Mark 48 torpedo. And I, for one, am not going to congratulate some Bel-Air singleton for his wise vehicle purchase when it is so patently purblind and morally retrograde.

Plainly, I’m disappointed that Mercedes-Benz ó the company of Gullwings and 500Es, of elegant engineering and F1 cars ó has decided to get into delivery van business. And yet I cannot fairly blame the company, which being a corporation is doing what corporations do in the absence of governance: Make as much money as is within its ken to do.

…

Purely as a piece of machinery, the GL is exemplary. …

And, while the full-size SUV segment was a lot more tempting five years ago (when the GL was planned), it is still surprisingly robust. Early returns on the new Chevy Tahoe and Escalade look good for GM. Audi just launched its own seven-passenger full-sizer, the Q7, and BMW is in the midst of taffy-stretching its X5 for the 2007 model year.

Why, in the midst of a slow-rolling energy crisis, an unpopular war in a region of the world made strategic only by its oil, and the globe’s climbing mercury, should precisely the wrong kinds of vehicles remain so popular?

One reason is surely the tax breaks associated with 3-ton SUVs: business owners get a $25,000 tax break on the purchase of full-size SUVs (scaled back from $100,000 in 2004) and five-year depreciation schedule. For people taking advantage of this cozy corner of Section 179, the GL ó with a base price anticipated to be about $60,000 ó will be virtually free. That makes your $4,000 hybrid tax break look pretty punk, doesn’t it?

The tax code is the most obvious point of inflection between vehicle choice and public policy. Another knee-point is CAFE ó that’s Corporate Average Fuel Economy standards, in case you forgot, and who could blame you?

Last year, the Bush administration proposed raising the light-truck standard ó long frozen at about 20 mpg ó to 24 mpg by 2011, an incrementalism that is marvelously measured, to say the least. Meanwhile, the administration plans to scrap the current CAFE structure in favor of a size-based regime co-written by the automakers, with larger vehicles required to achieve lower mileage.

Incidentally, some SUVs are so large that they transcend fuel-economy standards altogether. Vehicles with a gross-vehicle-weight rating over 10,000 pounds ó such as the Hummer H2 and the heavy-duty version of the Suburban ó are not counted among fleet ratings that automakers need to hit.

We have been told recently that we are addicted to oil, but we seem to be unable to do much about it. California’s clean-air bureaus are trying to regulate carbon emissions from vehicles and are being sued by manufacturers and the federal government for their trouble.

Raising fuel taxes cannot be accomplished, no matter the mood of national urgency and no matter the obscenity of oil companies’ profits. Fuel taxes are doubly problematic: For one thing, they are regressive, hurting lower-income consumers; for another, buyers of luxury vehicles are less likely to be dissuaded from their giant purchase.

What about all the alternative vehicle technologies we’ve been promised? Thanks to a decade-long stonewalling by Big Oil and the trucking industry, it has taken until this year to phase in clean-diesel requirements that will give automakers the slightest hope of meeting 50-state emissions requirements (diesel-powered vehicles can be 25% to 40% more fuel-efficient than gas-powered vehicles). Other technologies ó bio-diesel, hybrids, ethanol, plug-ins, fuel-cells ó can in the near term only nibble at the edges of our 20 million barrels per day of oil consumption.

If we were serious about oil dependence, we would dramatically raise fuel economy standards, impose gas-guzzler taxes on noncommercial light trucks and lower the national speed limit.

None of that is going to happen.

So, in the face of this enormous governmental and regulatory inaction, this paralysis and denial, a curious new market equilibrium has arisen. Call it the marketplace of shame.

SUV owners are mocked. Late-night comics have become scolds. Evangelicals have enlisted Jesus Christ himself in the “What Would Jesus Drive” campaign. The crass and criminal Sopranos ó Tony and Carmela ó drive an Escalade and a Porsche Cayenne Turbo. If you don’t think their characters are defined by these vehicle choices, think again.

The cultural opprobrium that afflicts SUV owners ó often overheated, occasionally misdirected, frequently ignored ó is virtually the only disincentive in the market, the only defense the rest of us have from these rolling hot tubs of avarice. People feel slightly embarrassed, even a little ashamed. Good.

It’s having an effect. Sales of these vehicles are declining, and it’s possible that one day they will align with actual customer need ó after all, if people truly need a full-size 4×4, they should be able to have them. Meanwhile, the carmakers are finding ways to give people the utility and all-weather agility they want without the massive steel edifice.

One day, to describe a vehicle like the Mercedes-Benz GL as a very good full-size SUV ó which it is, by the way ó will be a contradiction in terms.

*

2007 Mercedes-Benz GL450
Base price: $58,000 (est.)
Price, as tested: $67,000 (est.)
Powertrain: 4.6-liter, dual-overhead cam, 32-valve V8 with variable-valve timing and two-stage intake manifold; seven-speed automatic transmission; full-time all-wheel drive (optional two-speed transfer case in off-road package)
Horsepower: 335 at 6,000 rpm
Torque: 339 pound-feet at 2,700-5,000 rpm
Curb weight: 5,249 pounds
0-60 mph: 7.5 seconds
Wheelbase: 121.1 inches
Overall length: 200.3 inches
EPA fuel economy: 14 miles per gallon city, 19 mpg highway (est). Mixed mileage 15 mpg (observed)
Final thoughts: Steroid abuse

J. HOBERMAN ON IRA COHEN.

([This film will be released on DVD by Arthur’s Bastet imprint on June 1, 2006. More info here.)

Doctored Strange

Invasion of the party crashers: A druggie Biennial highlight
by J. Hoberman
March 14th, 2006 1:35 PM
Village Voice

The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda
Directed by Ira Cohen
Whitney Museum, March 17 and May 12

As gnarly and globalistic as V for Vendetta is, the movie would hardly seem out of place in the “Day for Night” Whitney Biennial. Selected films range from George Butler’s John Kerry doc Going Upriver to Michael Snow’s 15-minute Wavelength remake (“for those who don’t have the time,” per Snow); there are also several sub-curated shows of avant-garde movies going back to the 1930s. The ultimate comic-book attraction, however, is Ira Cohen’s 1968 Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda–part “Dr. Strange,” part Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, so High ’60s that you emerge from its 20-minute vision perched full-lotus on a cloud of incense, chatting with a white rabbit and smoking a banana.

Although The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda is basically occult masquerade in the mode invented by cine-magus Kenneth Anger (also at the Whitney), the main influence is Jack Smith. Bec Stupak’s “blind” scene-by-scene remake of Flaming Creatures– recently at Deitch Projects– isn’t just a flashback to Smith’s queer orgy but a reminder of how often it was restaged (and colorized) back in the day.

Invasion is a languidly opiated costume ball in which an assortment of masked and painted bohos, some sporting outsize elf ears, loll about a candlelit, Mylar-lined set, blowing soap bubbles and nibbling majoon. (The outdoor ending — a sort of human mandala passes around a well-deserved golden globe — is very Normal Love, complete with Beverly Grant.)

In lieu of action, Cohen uses all manner of superimposition and prismatic image-splitting; his big effect, however, is the deliquescent Mylar reflection. What saves The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda from preciosity is the vague menace of Angus MacLise’s improvised pan-piping, tabla-tapping, creature-yipping score. Although this masterpiece of Tibetan-Moroccan-Druidic trance music was reissued on CD several years ago, it truly blossoms in conjunction with the exotic smorgasbord served at Cohen’s psychedelicatessen.

A Revolutionary Proposal: Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds

by Alexander Trocchi

Published as “Technique du coupe du monde,” Internationale Situationniste #8 (January 1963)

‘And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signalling through the flames.’ — Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and Its Double, 1958

Revolt is understandably unpopular. As soon as it is defined, it has provoked the measures for its confinement. The prudent man will avoid his definition which is in effect his death-sentence. Besides, it is a limit.

We are concerned not with the coup d’etat [seizure of the state] of Trotsky and Lenin, but with the coup du monde [seizure of the world], a transition of necessity more complex, more diffuse than the other, and so more gradual, less spectacular. Our methods will vary with the empirical facts pertaining here and now, there and then.

Political revolt is and must be ineffectual precisely because it must come to grips at the prevailing level of political process. Beyond the backwaters of civilization it is an anarchronism. Meanwhile, with the world at the edge of extinction, we cannot afford to wait for the mass. Nor to brawl with it.

The coup du monde must be in the broad sense cultural. With his thousand technicians, Trotsky seized the viaducts and the bridges and the telephone exchanges and the power stations. The police, victims of convention, contributed to his brilliant enterprise by guarding the old men in the Kremlin. The latter hadn’t the elasticity of mind to grasp that their own presence there at the traditional seat of government was irrelevant. History outflanked them. Trotsky had the railway stations and the powerhouses, and the “government” was effectively locked out of history by its own guards.

So the cultural revolt must seize the grids of expression and the powerhouses of the mind. Intelligence must become self-conscious, realise its own power, and, on a global scale, transcending functions that are no longer appropriate, dare to exercise it. History will not overthrow national governments; it will outflank them. The cultural revolt is the necessary underpinning, the passionate substructure of a new order of things.

What is to be seized has no physical dimensions nor relevant temporal color. It is not an arsenal, nor a capital city, nor an island, nor an isthmus visible from a peak in Darien. Finally, it is all these things too, of course, all that there is, but only by the way, and inevitably. What is to be seized — and I address that one million (say) here and there who are capable of perceiving at once just what it is that I am about, a million potential “technicians” — is ourselves. What must occur, now, today, tomorrow, in those widely dispersed but vital centres of experience, is a revelation. At the present time, in what is often thought of as an age of the mass, we tend to fall into the habit of regarding history and evolution as something which goes relentlessly on, quite without our control. The individual has a profound sense of his own impotence as he realizes the immensity of the forces involved. We, the creative ones everywhere, must discard this paralytic posture and seize control of the human process by assuming control of ourselves. We must reject the conventional fiction of “unchanging human nature.” There is in fact no such permanence anywhere. There is only becoming. [Author’s note: The prise de pouvoir (seizure of power) by an avant garde is obviously only an early stage in a larger, more universal movement, and it must not be forgotten that our group of originators “ne pourra realiser son projet qu’en se supprimant . . . ne peut effectivement exister qu’en tant que parti se depasse lui-meme” (“will be able to achieve its goal only by suppressing itself . . . can really exist only as a party that transcends itself”).]

Organization, control, revolution: each of the million individuals to whom I speak will be wary of such concepts, will find it all but impossible with a quiet conscience to identify himself [sic] with any group whatsoever, no matter what it calls itself. That is how it should be. But it is at the same time the reason for the impotence of intelligence everywhere in the face of events, for which no one in particular can be said to be responsible, a yawning tide of bloody disasters, the natural outcome of that complex of processes, for the most part unconscious and uncontrolled, which constitute the history of man. Without organization, concerted action is impossible; the energy of individuals and small groups is dissipated in a hundred and one unconnected, little acts of protest . . . a manifesto here, a hunger strike there. Such protests, moreover, are commonly based on the assumption that social behaviour is intelligent: the hallmark of their futility. If change is to be purposive, men [sic] must somehow function together in the social situation. And it is our contention that there already exists a nucleus of men who, if they will set themselves gradually and tentatively to the task, are capable of imposing a new and seminal idea: the world waits for them to show their hand.

We have already rejected any idea of a frontal attack. Mind cannot withstand matter (brute force) in open battle. It is rather a question of perceiving clearly and without prejudice what are the forces that are at work in the world and out of whose interaction tomorrow must come to be; and then, calmly, without indignation, by a kind of mental ju-jitsu that is ours by virtue of intelligence, of modifying, correcting, polluting, deflecting, corrupting, eroding, outflanking . . . inspiring what we might call the invisible insurrection. It will come on the mass of men, if it comes at all, not as something they have voted for, fought for, but like the changing season; they will find themselves in and stimulated by the situation consciously at last to recreate it within and without as their own.

Clearly, there is in principle no problem of production in the modern world. The urgent problem of the future is that of distribution, which is presently (dis)ordered in terms of the economic system prevailing in this or that area. This problem on a global scale is an administrative one and will not finally be solved until existing political and economic rivalries are outgrown. Nevertheless, it is becoming widely recognized that distributive problems are most efficiently and economically handled on a global scale by an international organization like the United Nations (food, medicine, etc.) and this organization has already relieved the various national governments of some of their functions. No great imagination is required to see in this kind of transference the beginning of the end for the nation-state. We should at all times do everything in our power to speed up the process.

Meanwhile, our anonymous million can focus their attention on the problem of “leisure.” A great deal of what is pompously called “juvenile delinquency” is the inarticulate response of youth incapable of coming to terms with leisure. The violence associated with [juvenile delinquency] is a direct consequence of the alienation of man from himself [sic] brought about by the Industrial Revolution. Man has forgotten how to play. And if one thinks of the soulless tasks accorded each man in the industrial milieu, of the fact that education has become increasingly technological, and for the ordinary man no more than a means of fitting him for a “job,” one can hardly be surprised that man is lost. He is almost afraid of more leisure. He demands “overtime” and has a latent hostility towards automation. His creativity stunted, he is orientated outwards entirely. He has to be amused. The forms that dominate his working life are carried over into leisure, which becomes more and more mechanized; thus he is equipped with machines to contend with leisure that machines have accorded him. And to offset all this, to alleviate the psychological wear and tear of our technological age, there is, in a word, ENTERTAINMENT.

When our man [sic] after the day’s work comes twitching, tired, off the assembly-line into what are called without a shred of irony his “leisure hours,” with what is he confronted? In the bus on the way home he reads a newspaper that is identical to yesterday’s newspaper, in the sense that it is a reshake of identical elements . . . four murders, thirteen disasters, two revolutions, and “something approaching a rape” . . . which in turn is identical to the newspaper of the day before that . . . three murders, nineteen disasters, one counter-revolution, and something approaching an abomination . . . and unless he is a very exceptional man, one of our million potential technicians, the vicarious pleasure he derives from paddling in all this violence and disorder obscures from him the fact that there is nothing new in all this “news” and that his daily perusal of it leads not to a widening of consciousness, to a species of mental process that has more in common with [the] salivations of Pavlov’s dogs than with the subtleties of human intelligence.

Contemporary man expects to be entertained. His active participation is almost nonexistent. Art, whatever it is, is something of which it is sometimes even proud to flaunt an attitude of invincible ignorance. This sorry state of affairs is unconsciously sanctioned by the stubborn philistinism of our cultural institutions. Museums have approximately the same hours of business as churches, the same sanctimonious odors and silences, and a snobbish presumption in direct spiritual opposition to the vital men [sic] whose works are closeted there. What have those silent corridors to do with Rembrandt and the “no smoking” signs to do with Van Gogh? Beyond the museum, the man in the street is effectively cut off from art’s naturally tonic influence by the fashionable brokerage system which, incidentally, but of economic necessity, has more to do with the emergence and establishment of so-called “art-forms” than is generally realized. Art can have no existential significance for a civilization that draws a line between life and art, and collects artifacts like ancestral bones for reverence. Art must inform the living; we envisage a situation in which life is continually renewed by art, a situation imaginatively and passionately constructed to inspire each individual to respond creatively, to bring to whatever act a creative comportment. We envisage it. But it is we, now, who must create it. For it does not exist.

The actual situation could not be in sharper contrast. Art anaesthetizes the living; we witness a situation in which life is continually devitalized by art, a situation sensationally and venally misrepresented to inspire each individual to respond in a stoic and passive way, to bring to whatever act a banal and automatic consent. For the average man, dispirited, restless, with no power of concentration, a work of art to be noticed at all must compete at the level of spectacle. It must contain nothing that is in principle unfamiliar or surprising; the audience must be able easily and without reservation to identify with the protagonist, to plant itself firmly in the “driving-seat” of the emotional roller-coaster and switch over to remote control. What takes place is empathy at a very obvious level, blind and uncritical. To the best of my knowledge, it was Brecht who first drew attention to the danger of that method of acting which aims to provoke the state of empathy in an audience at the expense of judgment. It was to counter this promiscuous tendency on the part of the modern audience to identify that he formulated his “distance-theory” of acting, a method calculated to inspire a more active and critical kind of participation. Unfortunately, Brecht’s theory has had no impact whatsoever on popular entertainment. The zombies remain; the spectacle grows more spectacular. To adapt an epigram of [Guy Debord] a friend of mine: Si vous ne voulouns pas assister au spectacle de la fin du monde, il nous faut travailler a la fin du monde du spectacle [if you don’t want to assist in the spectacle of the end of the world, you must work toward ending the world of the spectacle] (Notes editoriales d’Internationale Situationniste, 3 Decembre, 1959. Freely adapted [by Trocchi] from the original.)

Such art as has claim to be called serious touches popular culture today only by way of the fashion industry and advertizing, and for many years it has been infected by the triviality attaching to those enterprises. For the rest, literature and art exist side by side with mechanized popular culture and, except in an occasional film here and there, have little effect upon it. Only in jazz, which retains the spontaneity and vitality deriving from its proximity to its beginnings, can we see an art which springs naturally out of a creative ambience. But already more adulterated forms tend to be confused with the authentic. In England, for example, we are confronted by the absurd craze for “trad”: a rehash of what went on in New Orleans in the early Twenties, simple, obvious, repetitious, overshadows almost completely the vital tradition of the post-Charlie Parker era.

For a long time now the best artists and fine minds everywhere have deplored the gulf that has come to exist between art and life. The same people have usually been in revolt during their youth and have been rendered harmless by “success” somewhere around middle age. The individual is powerless. It is inevitable. And the artist has a profound sense of his own impotence. He [sic] is frustrated, even confounded. As in the writings of Kafka, this fearful sense of alienation pervades his work. Certainly the most uncompromising attack on conventional culture was launched by Dada at the end of the First World War. But the usual defense-mechanisms were soon operating: the turds of “anti-art” were solemnly framed and hung alongside “The School of Athens”; Dada thereby underwent […] castration by card-index and was soon safely entombed in the histories as just another school of art. The fact is that while Tristan Tzara et al could point deftly to the chancre on the body politic, could turn the spotlight of satire on the hypocracies that had to be swept away, they produced no creative alternative to the existing order. What were we to do after we had painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa? Did we really wish Ghenghis Khan to stable his horses in the Louvre? And then?

In a recent essay [The Secret Reins, (Centre 42) Encounter No. 102, March, 1962], Arnold Wesker — concerned precisely with this gulf between art and popular culture, and with the possibility of reintegration — refers to the threatened strike of 1919 and to a speech of Lloyd George. The strike could have brought down the government. The Prime Minister said:

“You will defeat us. But if you do so, have you weighed the consequences? The strike will be in defiance of the government of the country and by its very success will precipitate a constitutional crisis of the first importance. For, if a force arises in the state which is stronger than the state itself, then it must be ready to take on the functions of the state. Gentlemen — have you considered, and if you have, are you ready?
The strikers were not ready. Mr. Wesker comments:

The crust has shifted a bit, a number of people have made fortunes out of the protest and somewhere a host of Lloyd Georges are grinning contentedly at the situation. . . . All protest is allowed and smiled upon because it is known that the force — economically and culturally — lies in the same dark and secure quarters, and this secret knowledge is the real despair of both artist and intellectual. We are paralyzed by this knowledge, we protest every so often but really the whole cultural scene — particularly on the Left — “is one of awe and ineffectuality.” I am certain that this was the secret knowledge that largely accounted for the decline of the cultural activities of the Thrties — no one really knew what to do with the philistines. They were omnipotent, friendly, and seductive. The germ was carried and passed on by the most unsuspected; and this same germ will cause, is beginning to cause, the decline of our new cultural upsurge unless . . . unless a new system is conceived whereby we who are concerned can take away, one by one, the secret reins.
Although I found Mr. Wesker’s essay in the end disappointing, it did confirm for me that in England as elsewhere there are groups of people who are actively concerned with the problem. As we have seen, the political-economic structure of western society is such that the gears of creative intelligence mesh with the gears of power in such a way that, not only is the former prohibited from ever initiating anything, it can only come into play at the behest of forces (vested interests) that are often in principle antipathetic towards it. Mr. Wesker’s “Centre 42” is a practical attempt to alter this relationship.

I should like to say at once that I have no fundamental quarrel with Mr. Wesker. My main criticism of his project (and I admit my knowledge of it is very hazy indeed) is that it is limited and national in character, and that this is reflected in his analysis of the historical background. He takes the 1956 production of Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, for example, to be the first landmark in “our new cultural upsurge.” A serious lack of historical perspective, the insularity of his view . . . these features are, I am afriad, indicative of a kind of church-bazaar philosophy which seems to underlie the whole project. Like handicrafts, art should not be expected to pay. Mr. Wesker calls for a tradition “that will not have to rely on financial success in order to continue.” And so he was led to seek the patronage of trade unions and has begun to organize a series of cultural festivals under their auspices. While I have nothing against such festivals, the urgency of Mr. Wesker’s original diagnosis led me to expect recommendations for action at a far more fundamental level. Certainly, such a programme will not carry us very far towards seizing what he so happily refers to as “the secret reins.” I do not think I am being overcautious in asserting that something far less pedestrian than an appeal to the public-spiritedness of this or that group will be the imperative of the vast change we have in mind.

Nevertheless, as one point in what remains an interesting essay, Mr. Wesker quotes Mr. Raymond Williams. Who Mr. Williams is and from what work the quotation is taken I am unfortunately ignorant. I only wonder how Mr. Wesker can quote the following and then go out and look for patronage.

The question is not who will patronize the arts, but what forms are possible in which artists will have control of their own means of expression, in such ways that they will have relation to a community rather than to a market or a patron.
Of course it would be dangerous to pretend to understand Mr. Williams on the basis of such a brief statement. I shall say simply that for myself and for my associates in Europe and America, the key phrase in the above sentence is: “artists will have control of their own means of expression.” When they achieve that control, their “relation to a community” will become a meaningful problem, that is, a problem amenable to formulation and solution at a creative and intelligent level. Thus we must concern ourselves forthwith with the question of how to seize and within the social fabric exercise that control. Our first move must be to eliminate the brokers.

At the beginning of these reflections, I said that our methods will vary with the empirical facts pertaining here and now, there and then. I was referring to the tentative, essentially tactical nature of our every act in relation to a given situation, and also to the international constitution of what we might call the new underground. Obviously, all our operations must be adapted to the society in which they take place. Methods used effectively in London might be suicidal or simply impracticable in Moscow or Peking. Always, the tactics are for here and how; never are they in the narrow sense political. Again, these reflections themselves must be regarded as an act of the new underground, a prescriptive document which, in so far as it refers for the most part to what is yet to happen, awaits baptism by fire.

How to begin? At a chosen moment in a vacant country house (mill, abbey, church or castle) not too far from the City of London, we shall foment a kind of cultural “jam session”: out of this will evolve the prototype of our spontaneous university.

The original building will stand deep within its own grounds, preferably on a river bank. It should be large enough for a pilot group (astronauts of inner space) to situate itself, orgasm and genius, and their tools and dream-machines and amazing apparatus and appurtenances; with outhouses for “workshops” large as could accommodate light industry; the entire site to allow for sponatneous architecture and eventual town planning. I underline the last because we cannot place too much emphasis on the fact that “l’art integral ne pourvait se realiser qu’au niveau de l’urbanisme” [integral art cannot be accomplished except on the level of urbanism] (Documents Situationnistes, Guy-Ernest Debord. At present, town planning is determined by and tends to reinforce conventional functions, conventional attitudes. You sleep here, eat there, work there, die there. A revolutionary architecture will take no account of functions to be transcended.) In the 1920s, Diaghilev, Picasso, Stravinski, and Nijinsky acted in concert to produce a ballet; surely it does not strain our credulity to imagine a far larger group of our contemporaries acting in concert to create a town. We envisage the whole as a vital laboratory for the creation (and evaluation) of conscious situations; it goes without saying that it is not only the environment which is in question, plastic, subject to change, but men also.

It must be said at once that this quick sketch of our action-university is not the product of vague speculation. Not only are there numerous historical parallels, past situations, fortuitous or controlled, some of whose features are manifestly adaptable to our own project. During the past decade in many countries, we have already conducted sufficient experiments of a preparatory nature: we are ready to act.

It used to be said that the British Empire was won on the playing fields of Eton. During the 18th and 19th centuries, the British ruling class was formed exclusively in such institutions; the deportment they conferred on a man was vitally relevant to the growth of England at that time. Unfortunately, the situation at Eton and similar establishments did not continue to inspire its own improvement. Inertia set in. Forms that were once fruitful hardened until they were devoid of contemporary relevance. In the age of relativity, we envisage the spontaneous university as filling the vital formative function of our times.

The Jewish settlement in Israel turned a desert into a garden and astounded all the world. In a flowering garden already wholly sustained by automation, a fraction of such purposiveness applied to the cultivation of men would bring what results?

Then, there was the experimental college at Black Mountain, North Carolina. This is of immediate interest to us for two reasons. In the first place, the whole concept is almost identical to our own in its educational aspect; in the second, some individual members of the staff of Black Mountain, certain key members of wide experience, are actually associated with us in the present venture. Their collaboration in invaluable.

Black Mountain College was widely known throughout the United States. In spite of the fact that no degrees were awarded, graduates and non-graduates from all over America thought it worthwhile to take up residence. As it turns out, an amazing number of the best artists and writers of America seem to have been there at one time or another, to teach and learn, and their cumulative influence on American art in the last fifteen years has been immense. One has only to mention Franz Kline in reference to painting and Robert Creeley in reference to poetry to give an idea of Black Mountain’s significance. They are key figures in the American vanguard, their influence everywhere. Black Mountain could be described as an “action university” in the sense in which the term is applied to the paintings of Kline et al. There were no examinations. There was no learning from ulterior motives. Students and teachers participated informally in the creative arts; every teacher was himself a practitioner — poetry, music, painting, sculpture, dance, pure mathematics, pure physics, etc., — of a very high order. In short, it was a situation constructed to inspire the free play of creativity in the individual and the group.

Unfortunately, it no longer exists. It closed in the early Fifties for economic reasons. It was a corporation (actually owned by the staff) which depended entirely on fees and charitable donations. In the highly competitive background of the United States of America such a gratuitous and flagrantly non-utilitarian institution was only kept alive for so long as it was by the sustained effort of the staff. In the end, it proved too ill-adapted to its habitat to survive.

In considering ways and means to establish our pilot projects, we have never lost sight of the fact that in a capitalist society any successful organization must be able to sustain itself in capitalist terms. The venture must pay. Thus we have conceived the idea of setting up a general agency to handle, as far as possible, all the work of the individuals associated with the university. Art, the products of all the expressive media of civilization, its applications in industrial and commercial design, all this is fantastically profitable (consider the Music Corporation of America). But, as in the world of science, it is not the creators themselves who reap most of the benefit. An agency founded by the creators themselves and operated by highly-paid professionals would be in an impregnable position. Such an agency, guided by the critical acumen of the artists themselves, could profitably harvest new cultural talent long before the purely professional agencies were aware it existed. Our own experience in the recognition of contemporary talent during the past fifteen years has provided us with evidence that is decisive. The first years would be the hardest. In time, granting that the agency functioned efficiently from the point of view of the individual artists represented by it, it would have first option on all new talent. This would happen not only because it would be likely to recognize that talent before its competitors, but because of the fact and fame of the university. It would be as though some ordinary agency were to spend 100 per cent on its profits on advertising itself. Other things being equal, why should a young writer, for example, not prefer to be handled by an agency controlled by his (better-known) peers, an agency which will apply whatever profit it makes out of him as an associate towards the extension of his influence and audience, an agency, finally, which at once offers him membership in the experimental university (which governs it) and all that that implies? And, before elaborating further on the economics of our project, it is perhaps time to describe briefly just what the membership does imply.

We envisage an international organization with branch universities near the capital cities of every country in the world. It will be autonomous, unpolitical, economically independent. Membership in one branch (as teacher or student) will entitle one to membership in all branches, and travel to and residence in foreign branches will be energetically encouraged. It will be the object of each branch university to participate in and “supercharge” the cultural life of the respective capital cit[ies] at the same time as it promotes cultural exchange internationally and functions in itself as a non-specialized experimental school and creative workshop. Resident professors will be themselves creators. The staff at each university will be purposively international; as far as practicable, the students also. Each branch of the spontaneous university will be the nucleus of an experimental town to which all kinds of people will be attracted for shorter or longer periods of time and from which, if we are successful, they will derive a renewed and infectious sense of life. We envisage an organization whose structure and mechanisms are infinitely elastic; we see it as the gradual crystallization of a regenerative cultural force, a perpetual brainwave, creative intelligence everywhere recognizing and affirming its own involvement.

It is impossible in the present context to describe in precise detail the day-to-day functioning of the university. In the first place, it is not possible for one individual writing a brief introductory essay [to do so]. The pilot project does not exist in the physical sense, and from the very beginning, like the Israeli kibbutzes, it must be a communal affair, tactics decided in situ, depending upon just what is available when. My associates and I during the past decade have been amazed at the possibilities arising out of the spontaneous interplay of ideas within a group in constructed situations. It is on the basis of such experiences that we have imagined an international experiment. Secondly, and consequently, any detailed preconceptions of my own would be so much excess baggage in the spontaneous generation of the group situation.

Nevertheless, it is possible to make a tentative outline of the economic structure.

We envisage a limited liability company (International Cultural Enterprises Ltd) whose profits are invested in expansion and research. Its income will derive from:

1 — Commissions earned by the Agency on sales of all original work of the associates.
2 — Money earned from “patents” or by subsidiaries exploiting applications (industrial and commercial) evolving out of “pure studies.” Anyone who has spent time in an art workshop will know what I mean. The field is unlimited, ranging from publishing to interior decorating.
3 — Retail income. The university will house a “living museum,” perhaps a fine restaurant. A showroom will be rented in the city for retail and as an advertisement.
4 — Such income as derives from “shows,” cinematic, theatrical or situationist.
5 — fees.
6 — Subsidies, gifts, etc., which in no way threaten the autonomy of the project.
The cultural possibilities of this movement are immense and the time is ripe for it. The world is awfully near the brink of disaster. Scientists, artists, teachers, creative men of goodwill everywhere are in suspense. Waiting. Remembering that it is our kind even now who operate, if they don’t control, the grids of expression, we should have no difficulty in recognizing the spontaneous university as the possible detonator of the invisible insurrection.

[Editor’s note: Trocchi followed this text with sigma: A Tactical Blueprint (1963?).]