UNDERGROUND††††††††††††††††††††††††

Based on Dostoyevsky’s most famous novel CRIME AND PUNISHMENT.

The story revolves around Raskolnikov, an impoverished student who commits a gruesome murder and is then forced to come to terms with his crime, himself and the society in which he lives.

UNDERGROUND explores the feverish, oppressive atmosphere and nightmarish quality of Dostoyevsky’s world by creating a highly visual work that will lead you into the labyrinthine basement of an old abattoir in Clerkenwell.

You will have complete freedom to explore corridors, stairwells and basements previously undiscovered by the public. You may follow a character or simply wander through the inter-connecting maze of spaces catching scenes, film-sequences and musical fragments as you go.

UNDERGROUND will take you into an unstable and constantly shifting world, like a hallucinatory dream where scenes, sounds, fragments, chance encounters and film images merge, transform and dissolve.

UNDERGROUND is co-commissioned by BITE:05 Barbican, London; Brighton Festival; Made in Brighton Ltd; South Hill Park Arts Centre, Bracknell.

Presented in Partnership with The Open University.

Underground
10 – 29 October
The Old Abattoir, Clerkenwell

Young Genius / BITE:05

Box office: 0845 120 7554
http://www.barbican.org.uk/bite

It’s Bush-Cheney, Not Rove-Libby

By Frank Rich The New York Times
Sunday 16 October 2005

There hasn’t been anything like it since Martha Stewart fended off questions about her stock-trading scandal by manically chopping cabbage on Ôø?The Early ShowÔø? on CBS. Last week the setting was Ôø?TodayÔø? on NBC, where the image of President Bush manically hammering nails at a Habitat for Humanity construction site on the Gulf Coast was juggled with the sight of him trying to duck Matt Lauer’s questions about Karl Rove.

As with Ms. Stewart, Mr. Bush’s paroxysm of panic was must-see TV. “The president was a blur of blinks, taps, jiggles, pivots and shifts,” Dana Milbank wrote in The Washington Post. Asked repeatedly about Mr. Rove’s serial appearances before a Washington grand jury, the jittery Mr. Bush, for once bereft of a script, improvised a passable impersonation of Norman Bates being quizzed by the detective in “Psycho.” Like Norman and Ms. Stewart, he stonewalled.

That stonewall may start to crumble in a Washington courtroom this week or next. In a sense it already has. Now, as always, what matters most in this case is not whether Mr. Rove and Lewis Libby engaged in a petty conspiracy to seek revenge on a whistle-blower, Joseph Wilson, by unmasking his wife, Valerie, a covert C.I.A. officer. What makes Patrick Fitzgerald’s investigation compelling, whatever its outcome, is its illumination of a conspiracy that was not at all petty: the one that took us on false premises into a reckless and wasteful war in Iraq. That conspiracy was instigated by Mr. Rove’s boss, George W. Bush, and Mr. Libby’s boss, Dick Cheney.

Mr. Wilson and his wife were trashed to protect that larger plot. Because the personnel in both stories overlap, the bits and pieces we’ve learned about the leak inquiry over the past two years have gradually helped fill in the uber-narrative about the war. Last week was no exception. Deep in a Wall Street Journal account of Judy Miller’s grand jury appearance was this crucial sentence: Lawyers familiar with the investigation believe that at least part of the outcome likely hangs on the inner workings of what has been dubbed the White House Iraq Group.

Very little has been written about the White House Iraq Group, or WHIG. Its inception in August 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, was never announced. Only much later would a newspaper article or two mention it in passing, reporting that it had been set up by Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff. Its eight members included Mr. Rove, Mr. Libby, Condoleezza Rice and the spinmeisters Karen Hughes and Mary Matalin. Its mission: to market a war in Iraq.

Of course, the official Bush history would have us believe that in August 2002 no decision had yet been made on that war. Dates bracketing the formation of WHIG tell us otherwise. On July 23, 2002 – a week or two before WHIG first convened in earnest – a British official told his peers, as recorded in the now famous Downing Street memo, that the Bush administration was ensuring that the intelligence and facts about Iraq’s W.M.D.’s “were being fixed around the policy” of going to war. And on Sept. 6, 2002 – just a few weeks after WHIG first convened – Mr. Card alluded to his group’s existence by telling Elisabeth Bumiller of The New York Times that there was a plan afoot to sell a war against Saddam Hussein: “From a marketing point of view, you don’t introduce new products in August.”

The official introduction of that product began just two days later. On the Sunday talk shows of Sept. 8, Ms. Rice warned that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” and Mr. Cheney, who had already started the nuclear doomsday drumbeat in three August speeches, described Saddam as “actively and aggressively seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.” The vice president cited as evidence a front-page article, later debunked, about supposedly nefarious aluminum tubes co-written by Judy Miller in that morning’s Times. The national security journalist James Bamford, in “A Pretext for War,” writes that the article was all too perfectly timed to facilitate “exactly the sort of propaganda coup that the White House Iraq Group had been set up to stage-manage.”

The administrationÔø?s doomsday imagery was ratcheted up from that day on. As Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus of The Washington Post would determine in the first account of WHIG a full year later, the administrationÔø?s Ôø?escalation of nuclear rhetoricÔø? could be traced to the groupÔø?s formation. Along with mushroom clouds, uranium was another favored image, the Post report noted, Ôø?because anyone could see its connection to an atomic bomb.Ôø? It appeared in a Bush radio address the weekend after the Rice-Cheney Sunday show blitz and would reach its apotheosis with the infamously fictional 16 words about Ôø?uranium from AfricaÔø? in Mr. BushÔø?s January 2003 State of the Union address on the eve of war.

Throughout those crucial seven months between the creation of WHIG and the start of the American invasion of Iraq, there were indications that evidence of a Saddam nuclear program was fraudulent or nonexistent. Joseph WilsonÔø?s C.I.A. mission to Niger, in which he failed to find any evidence to back up uranium claims, took place nearly a year before the presidentÔø?s 16 words. But the truth never mattered. The Bush-Cheney product rolled out by Card, Rove, Libby & Company had been bought by Congress, the press and the public. The intelligence and facts had been successfully fixed to sell the war, and any memory of Mr. BushÔø?s errant 16 words melted away in Shock and Awe. When, months later, a national security official, Stephen Hadley, took Ôø?responsibilityÔø? for allowing the president to address the nation about mythical uranium, no one knew that Mr. Hadley, too, had been a member of WHIG.
It was not until the war was supposedly over – with Ôø?Mission Accomplished,Ôø? in May 2003 – that Mr. Wilson started to add his voice to those who were disputing the administrationÔø?s uranium hype. Members of WHIG had a compelling motive to shut him down. In contrast to other skeptics, like Mohamed ElBaradei of the International Atomic Energy Agency (this yearÔø?s Nobel Peace Prize winner), Mr. Wilson was an American diplomat; he had reported his findings in Niger to our own government. He was a dagger aimed at the heart of WHIG and its disinformation campaign. Exactly who tried to silence him and how is what Mr. Fitzgerald presumably will tell us.

ItÔø?s long been my hunch that the WHIG-ites were at their most brazen (and, in legal terms, reckless) during the many months that preceded the appointment of Mr. Fitzgerald as special counsel. When Mr. Rove was asked on camera by ABC News in September 2003 if he had any knowledge of the Valerie Wilson leak and said no, it was only hours before the Justice Department would open its first leak investigation. When Scott McClellan later declared that he had been personally assured by Mr. Rove and Mr. Libby that they were Ôø?not involvedÔø? with the leak, the case was still in the safe hands of the attorney general then, John Ashcroft, himself a three-time Rove client in past political campaigns. Though Mr. Rove may be known as Ôø?BushÔø?s brain,Ôø? he wasnÔø?t smart enough to anticipate that Justice Department career employees would eventually pressure Mr. Ashcroft to recuse himself because of this conflict of interest, clearing the way for an outside prosecutor as independent as Mr. Fitzgerald.

Ôø?BushÔø?s BrainÔø? is the title of James Moore and Wayne SlaterÔø?s definitive account of Mr. RoveÔø?s political career. But Mr. Rove is less his bossÔø?s brain than another alliterative organ (or organs), that which provides testosterone. As we learn in Ôø?BushÔø?s Brain,Ôø? bad things (usually character assassination) often happen to Bush foes, whether Ann Richards or John McCain. On such occasions, Mr. Bush stays compassionately above the fray while the ruthless Mr. Rove operates below the radar, always separated by Ôø?a layer of operativesÔø? from any ill behavior that might implicate him. Ôø?There is no crime, just a victim,Ôø? Mr. Moore and Mr. Slater write of this repeated pattern.
THIS modus operandi was foolproof, shielding the president as well as Mr. Rove from culpability, as long as it was about winning an election. The attack on Mr. Wilson, by contrast, has left them and the Cheney-Libby tag team vulnerable because itÔø?s about something far bigger: protecting the lies that took the country into what the Reagan administration National Security Agency director, Lt. Gen. William Odom, recently called Ôø?the greatest strategic disaster in United States history.Ôø?

Whether or not Mr. Fitzgerald uncovers an indictable crime, there is once again a victim, but that victim is not Mr. or Mrs. Wilson; itÔø?s the nation. It is surely a joke of history that even as the White House sells this weekendÔø?s constitutional referendum as yet another Ôø?victoryÔø? for democracy in Iraq, we still donÔø?t know the whole story of how our own democracy was hijacked on the way to war.

Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center
July 15 ñ November 26, 2005
Wed-Fri, 12pm-4pm
Sat 11am-5pm

Opening Reception:
Friday July 15, 6:00
$3 admission, free for BMCM+AC members and AIA members
Exhibition co-sponsors: Rupert Ravens, nices inc., and AIA Asheville

An exhibition exploring the genius of R. Buckminster Fuller through two- and three dimensional works.

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was one of the most inventive, influential, and inspiring figures of the 20th century. Through his ideas and inventions, his teaching and lecturing around the globe, he influenced current thought in a wide variety of fields, including commercial and industrial design, mathematics, the sciences, the arts and architecture. His basic approach was to apply both scientific knowledge and creativity to think ìoutside the boxî when attempting to solve practical problems. Buckyís foremost concern was to find ways to ìdo more with lessî and to use resources most efficiently to serve humanity. He invented the term ìSpaceship Earthî to encourage people to see the entire world as one interdependent system. During his life and career, Fuller was awarded 25 U.S. patents, wrote 28 books, received 47 honorary doctorate degrees, circled the Earth 57 times consulting and lecturing, and received dozens of major architectural and design awards along with the prestigious Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in America. Buckminster Fuller taught at Black Mountain College in the summers of 1948 and 1949, and he served as the Director of the BMC Summer Institute in 1949.

The exhibition IDEAS+ INVENTIONS: Buckminster Fuller and Black Mountain College will include two-dimensional and three-dimensional works that present and explore Fullerís ideas. Also included in the show will be photographs taken of him and his students at Black Mountain College during the summers of 1948 and 1949, a Dymaxion map, and an autographed drawing of a geodesic dome. People can assemble models based on Fullerís inventions and fully experience his genius in a special hands-on area.

Radio interview on WUNC’s The State of Things
October 11th, 2005

Buckminster Fuller: In 1948, Buckminster Fuller, then a visiting teacher at Black Mountain College in Western North Carolina, built his first geodesic dome. It collapsed. The next summer he returned to Black Mountain and succeeded. Fuller later became famous for his domes and inventions, including the Dymaxion car, Dymaxion map, and World Game. A current exhibit at the Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center in Asheville looks back at those inventions and Fuller’s time in North Carolina. Host Frank Stasio talks with John Wright, board chairman at Black Mountain College Museum + Art Center in Asheville; Lloyd Steven Sieden, author of Buckminster Fuller’s Universe: His Life and Work (Perseus/2000); Jay Baldwin, author of Bucky Works: Buckminster Fuller’s Ideas for Today (Wiley/1997); and David McConville, BMCM+AC board member and co-founder of the Elumenati, a company in Asheville that designs immersive projection environments.

“CHANGE THEE WAY TO PERCEIVE AND CHANGE ALL MEMORY”

Artist: BREYER P-ORRIDGE

(Genesis and Lady Jaye…)

CURATED by LIA GANGIATANO.
At
PARTICIPANT INC.,
95 RIVINGTON STREET ( near Stanton)
(Lower East Side)
NEW YORK CITY. NY 10002
Tel: 212-254-4334

Runs from Sunday October 16th 2005 until November 15th
2005.

OPENING on Sunday October 16th 6pm-9pm.

The exhibition is of new works, sculptures,
installations, collage/paintings and mysteries
exploring PANDROGENY and their journey through mental
and medical proceedures to represent evolution through
mutation, the creation of a third being ( as Burroughs
and Gysin explored with writing to generate the Third
Mind) by the artists which they call THEE PANDROGYNE.
They also explore identity and behaviour as a
fictional muteable medium in which NOTHING especially
the physical body, is sacred. Many of the works on
show include detailed geologies of their ritual
directed orgasms and processes. This is the first
exhibition by BREYER P-ORRIDGE in the United States.

Los Angeles Times

War critics and some military leaders disapprove of the president’s carefully staged videoconference with soldiers in Iraq.

By Warren Vieth and Mark Mazzetti
Times Staff Writers

October 14, 2005

WASHINGTON ó President Bush touched off a new round of controversy over his policies in Iraq on Thursday when he conducted a videoconference interview about this weekend’s constitutional referendum with a small group of handpicked troops stationed in Iraq who reinforced his upbeat view of the conflict.

The closely coordinated exchange drew disapproval from Democratic critics of the war as well as some Pentagon military leaders.

The soldiers were carefully coached. Before the session began, a Pentagon communications official, Allison Barber, was heard asking one of them, “Who are we going to give that to?”

Barber later told reporters that the soldiers were told only about broad themes Bush wanted to discuss, not specific questions.

White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said he did not think the soldiers had been told what they could or could not say.

“The troops can ask the president whatever they want,” he said. “They’ve always been free to do that.”

Bush did not invite the soldiers to ask any questions, however, and none chose to do so.

Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita later issued a statement saying: “On behalf of these fine young men and women, we certainly regret any perception that they were told what to say. It is not the case.”

The president spoke into a video screen to 10 U.S. soldiers and one Iraqi officer seated outdoors in Tikrit, the hometown of ousted President Saddam Hussein.

“What’s your strategy, and how do you think it’s going?” Bush asked.

Capt. Brent Kennedy of the Army’s 42nd Infantry Division said U.S. and Iraqi forces were working together to secure more than 1,250 polling places for Saturday’s vote. “We’re working right alongside with the Iraqis as they lead the way in securing these sites,” Kennedy said.

With Iraqi troop readiness at the center of the war debate, Bush’s discussion with the troops was questioned by war critics such as Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), who complained that it was “highly scripted,” and by military officers.

“Officers are upset that military people would be coached as to how to talk to the president,” said a senior military official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It’s against everything that people in uniform stand for.”

Sgt. Corine Lombardo of Scotia, N.Y., told Bush that Iraqi forces had shown significant improvement over the last 10 months.

“Since we began our partnership, they have improved greatly,” Lombardo said.

Added 1st Lt. Gregg A. Murphy of Tennessee: “The important thing here is that the Iraqi army and the Iraqi security forces, they’re ready, and they’re committed. They’re going to make this thing happen.”

Capt. David Williams of Los Angeles told Bush that voter registration had increased by 400,000, or 17%, in areas patrolled by the 42nd Infantry Division. He said Iraqi citizens had indicated they “are ready and eager to vote in this referendum.”

Meanwhile, the Pentagon released its second quarterly report to Congress on the war, saying that although the number of Iraqi battalions capable of fighting alongside U.S. units had increased, infiltration of the Iraqi police by insurgents remained a significant problem.

Oct 10 Los Angeles Times
A clandestine group lets air out of tires as a form of protest. The vehicles’ owners are not amused.

By Sebastian Rotella, Times Staff Writer

PARIS ó If the French marauders known as The Deflated waged their brand of urban subversion in Southern California, the mecca of the sport utility vehicle, by now they would probably have been jailed, beaten, shot or at least sued.

But five weeks after the clandestine crew of environmentalists launched a low-intensity war on SUVs in Paris, there are no casualties to report. Except, of course, for dozens of deflated gas-guzzling vehicles, said Sous-Adjudant Marrant (Sub-Warrant Officer Joker), the mysterious, masked leader of Les DÈgonflÈs.

Under cover of night, Marrant’s troops target Jeep Cherokees, Porsche Cayennes and other four-wheel-drive vehicles parked on the tree-lined avenues and cobblestoned lanes of wealthy neighborhoods. The eco-guerrillas deflate tires without damaging them, smear doors with mud and paste handbills on windshields proclaiming that the vehicles are dangerous, polluting behemoths that do not belong in the city.

“We use the mud to say that if the owners will not take the four-wheel-drives to the countryside, we will bring the countryside to the four-wheel-drives,” said Marrant, 28, who uses an alias because angry drivers deluge his website, http://degonfle.blogg.org with e-mails threatening mayhem and questioning his manhood.

Although his nom de guerre was inspired by Subcommander Marcos, the masked Mexican guerrilla revered by leftists, Marrant insists he is not violent or even particularly serious. “Deflated” is a self-deprecating name that also means “coward” in French. The group wants to send a mischievous message while avoiding damage to the vehicles, injury and prosecution, the thin, mop-haired activist said during an interview in a corner cafe on the Seine’s left bank, longtime turf of radicals and revolutionaries.

“We emphasize the comic, the burlesque side,” Marrant said with the earnest, wide-eyed look of a prankster trying to keep a straight face. “It would be hard to take us to court. We don’t slash tires, we deflate them. Air doesn’t cost anything. As for getting cars dirty, that’s nothing. I would plead guilty to that. Our rules are to never run from the police. And always run from the owners.”

The rise of anti-SUV activism in France shows that one man’s vandal can be another man’s avenger. The deflators are on the fringe of a movement that has considerable support at City Hall, which is governed by an alliance of the Socialist and Green parties.

Christophe Delabre, the president of a French association of SUV owners, has appeared in a television debate with Marrant, who wore sunglasses, a baseball cap and a bandanna to conceal his identity. Delabre does not find his adversary amusing.

“It’s comparable to extremism, to discrimination, to inciting hate,” Delabre said. “You can’t stigmatize a category of the population with impunity under the pretext that they drive a kind of vehicleÖ. [The Deflated] put others’ lives in danger, and that’s unacceptable. It’s out of the question that this kind of action is tolerated in France. I don’t understand how the police can arrest deflators and let them go a few hours later.”

Although city leaders don’t condone vandalism, officials have gone as far as proposing that Paris ban sport utility vehicles. Deputy Mayor Denis Baupin, who oversees transportation programs, has called the SUV “a caricature of a car.”

Baupin spoke during a recent rally of about 200 activists at a Jeep dealership where the manager had agreed to shut down early for the day. The decision drew cheers from children wearing cow and buffalo masks, cyclists hoisting bikes triumphantly aloft.

“An SUV is totally useless for Paris,” Baupin said in his speech, blaming the recent devastating hurricanes in the U.S. on climate change caused by pollution. “The situation is striking: The country that refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol suffered from a climatic catastropheÖ. We all feel sorry for the dead in New Orleans. But now maybe the United States should start considering that their development pattern is not to be repeated worldwide and that it causes environmental problems.”

In the United States, sport utility vehicles account for one of every four automobiles sold, but in France, SUVs represent only about 5% of the market. The prices are high for middle-class families, but sales jumped about 20% last year.

Overt official hostility has encouraged antisocial attacks masquerading as activism, Delabre charged.

“This reflects the impact of the statements made during the last two years by Mr. Baupin,” he said. “He has told anyone listening, and the media helped him a lot, that four-wheel-drives should be banned. I criticized him because that kind of talk surprised me coming from an elected representative.”

Like other historic European capitals, Paris struggles with overwhelming traffic that challenges even the smallest cars and steeliest drivers. Double-parked delivery trucks block narrow streets. Swarms of motorcyclists zoom the wrong way on congested boulevards. Parking garages, impossibly small, seem designed by sadists.

Spurred by the take-back-the-streets attitude of the Greens, City Hall is trying to discourage cars in favor of mass transit, biking and walking. In addition, the national government has imposed a new tax on high-polluting vehicles that works out to about $300 per owner, but varies depending on emission levels.

And the Deflated are stepping up their stealthy fight. Marrant is writing a children’s song as an anthem for the cause. He also hopes to record a dance-mix version before Saturday, when activists plan an international wave of anti-SUV operations ó by daylight, this time ó in France, Britain, Canada and Australia.

“The point is to focus on consumers,” he said, spewing smoke from a Gaulois cigarette into the haze shrouding the crowded cafe. “We have to get past the idea that there’s always a single, identifiable villain: the president, the corporation, the chief executive. Our campaign has to be very marketing, shocking, provocative. I want to make it fashionable to be anti-4X4.”

Marrant is unemployed, though he has dabbled in journalism. His brother works for a major European corporation. His group numbers about 20, he said. They come from a mix of middle- and working-class backgrounds and anti-globalization and environmental groups.

The Deflated have made contact with like-minded activists in the United States. Marrant is familiar with the U.S. television advertising campaign that equated buying an SUV with financing Islamic terrorism. But he finds it too gloomy.

He says the French public supports his group’s approach. People send e-mails asking to participate or suggesting tactics, such as a special tool the activists now use for lightning-fast deflations.

“It’s a kind of key that deflates a tire very fast and completely, in two seconds,” he said. “A mechanic sent an e-mail telling us about it. He said, ‘You can do better than you have been doing.’ ”

Delabre, meanwhile, fears an eventual confrontation.

“I put myself in the place of an owner of a four-wheel-drive who sees people messing up his vehicle,” he said. “I worry that things will get out of control. We can’t accept that in our fine democracy. People have died for the freedom we have today.”

*

Claire Rocher and Achrene Sicakyuz in The Times’ Paris Bureau contributed to this report.