<a href="http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-smith23jun23,0,1838831.story"LATIMES
By Michael Smith
Michael Smith writes on defense issues for the Sunday Times of London.

It is now nine months since I obtained the first of the “Downing Street memos,” thrust into my hand by someone who asked me to meet him in a quiet watering hole in London for what I imagined would just be a friendly drink.

At the time, I was defense correspondent of the London Daily Telegraph, and a staunch supporter of the decision to oust Saddam Hussein. The source was a friend. He’d given me a few stories before but nothing nearly as interesting as this.

The six leaked documents I took away with me that night were to change completely my opinion of the decision to go to war and the honesty of Prime Minister Tony Blair and President Bush.

They focused on the period leading up to the Crawford, Texas, summit between Blair and Bush in early April 2002, and were most striking for the way in which British officials warned the prime minister, with remarkable prescience, what a mess post-war Iraq would become. Even by the cynical standards of realpolitik, the decision to overrule this expert advice seemed to be criminal.

The second batch of leaks arrived in the middle of this year’s British general election, by which time I was writing for a different newspaper, the Sunday Times. These documents, which came from a different source, related to a crucial meeting of Blair’s war Cabinet on July 23, 2002. The timing of the leak was significant, with Blair clearly in electoral difficulties because of an unpopular war.

I did not then regard the now-infamous memo ó the one that includes the minutes of the July 23 meeting ó as the most important. My main article focused on the separate briefing paper for those taking part, prepared beforehand by Cabinet Office experts.

It said that Blair agreed at Crawford that “the UK would support military action to bring about regime change.” Because this was illegal, the officials noted, it was “necessary to create the conditions in which we could legally support military action.”

But Downing Street had a “clever” plan that it hoped would trap Hussein into giving the allies the excuse they needed to go to war. It would persuade the U.N. Security Council to give the Iraqi leader an ultimatum to let in the weapons inspectors.

Although Blair and Bush still insist the decision to go to the U.N. was about averting war, one memo states that it was, in fact, about “wrong-footing” Hussein into giving them a legal justification for war.

British officials hoped the ultimatum could be framed in words that would be so unacceptable to Hussein that he would reject it outright. But they were far from certain this would work, so there was also a Plan B.

American media coverage of the Downing Street memo has largely focused on the assertion by Sir Richard Dearlove, head of British foreign intelligence, that war was seen as inevitable in Washington, where “the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.”

But another part of the memo is arguably more important. It quotes British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon as saying that “the U.S. had already begun ‘spikes of activity’ to put pressure on the regime.” This we now realize was Plan B.

Put simply, U.S. aircraft patrolling the southern no-fly zone were dropping a lot more bombs in the hope of provoking a reaction that would give the allies an excuse to carry out a full-scale bombing campaign, an air war, the first stage of the conflict.

British government figures for the number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq in 2002 show that although virtually none were used in March and April, an average of 10 tons a month were dropped between May and August.

But these initial “spikes of activity” didn’t have the desired effect. The Iraqis didn’t retaliate. They didn’t provide the excuse Bush and Blair needed. So at the end of August, the allies dramatically intensified the bombing into what was effectively the initial air war.

The number of bombs dropped on southern Iraq by allied aircraft shot up to 54.6 tons in September alone, with the increased rates continuing into 2003.

In other words, Bush and Blair began their war not in March 2003, as everyone believed, but at the end of August 2002, six weeks before Congress approved military action against Iraq.

The way in which the intelligence was “fixed” to justify war is old news.

The real news is the shady April 2002 deal to go to war, the cynical use of the U.N. to provide an excuse, and the secret, illegal air war without the backing of Congress.

Performance: Visionary Consciousness in Posthuman Times

Erik will do a freeform freak flight through visionary possibilities past and future, with visuals by Thomas Williams and music by Steve Nalepa. Gracefully hosted by Marcos Lutyens and Michael Backes.

2328 Carlyle Place
Los Angeles, CA
Monday June 27,
8 pm

Lecture: Spiritual Abstractions

Erik will do a spiritual breakdown of the Theosophical and occult roots of modern abstract art, to accompany the SMMOA show 3 X Abstraction, which features the art of Hilma Af Klimt, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin.

Santa Monica Museum of Art
Bergamot Station G1
2525 Michigan Avenue
Santa Monica, CA
Tuesday, June 28,
7pm

Pages From Chaos: A Homage to William Burroughs
QEH, London SE1

Molloy Woodcraft
Sunday June 19, 2005
The Observer

Vintage stills and film of William Burroughs play above the stage as guitarist Marc Ribot opens tonight’s tribute, part of Patti Smith’s Meltdown Festival programme. He coaxes strange drones from his guitar using a fan, then his playing slowly widens out into a clattering flamenco.

The music heads off into the realms of jazz and dies down to a minimalist fug as comic-book supremo Alan Moore begins reading his increasingly fast-paced beat biography of Burroughs.

Ribot switches to shimmering electric delay for Sinclair’s odd musing on the author’s relationship with London, sparked by his first encounter with him. It’s fond stuff, but surreal and funny.

Patti Smith takes to the stage to do a reading from Burroughs’s The Wild Boys. Ribot sets up a dirty, messed-up blues stomp and the homoerotic prose becomes slowly more rhythmic until, finally, Smith breaks into a climactic growling song. Next, she catches up a clarinet and starts skronking and stomping as Tilda Swinton reads the same passage in more muted manner.

Swinton starts the second half of the show with Burroughs’s bitter, funny ‘Thanksgiving Prayer’ before pianist Matthew Shipp comes on and is joined by Jason Pierce of Spiritualized. Big jazz chords roll out, followed by bursts of strange energy as the latter pulls atonal noises from the strings of his guitar.

Things continue in this vein, building to Smith’s extraordinary reading of Burroughs’s moving, retrospective introduction to Queer; she ends up on her knees, bellowing disjointed phrases, punishing the clarinet. Spaced-out, almost shamanistic intensity. Burroughs would have approved. And just what Meltdowns are meant for.

Stephen O’Malley, member of Sunn 0))), Khanate and Lotus Eaters, says: “I have a 74 minute audio piece collaboration with the sculpture of Banks Violette appearing in the following show. The piece is titled “Bleed.” The sound is a powerful monodrone in the spirit of the Ur cow (thanks McGrail). It should be running continuously throughout the show.

Opening is june 24th, the show runs through 19th August.
at
Barbara Gladstone Gallery
515 West 24th Street
New York, NY 10011
tel: 212 206 9300
http://www.gladstonegallery.com

Bridge Freezes before Road.
Curated by Neville Wakefield

Slater Bradley
Chris Burden
Clive Barker
Dan Colen
Anne Collier
Lali Chetwynd
John Dogg
Jeff Koons
Adam Helms
Richard Hughes
Matthew Day Jackson
Martin Kippenberger
Scott King
Nate Lowman
John McCracken
Adam McEwen
Erik Schmidt
Steven Shearer
Robert Smithson
Banks Violette
Kelly Walker
Aaron Young
Andrea Zitel

AMERICA OVER THE WATER
by Shirley Collins
192 pages (illustrated). Hardback
ISBN: 0 946719 66 7 Publication: May 2004
Price UK £20 US $30

At the age of nineteen Shirley Collins was making a name for herself as a folk singer. Whilst attending a party hosted by Ewan MaColl she met the famous American musical historian and folklorist, Alan Lomax. They became romantically involved, and before long, Collins found herself alone, boarding the S.S. America, to begin an adventure almost unheard of for a young English girl at the time.

In this highly personal and heart-rending account, she describes her affair with Lomax and their year-long trip to uncover the traditional music of America’s heartland. Travelling through Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas and Georgia they recorded Mississippi Fred McDowell, met Muddy Waters and many others.

The story that emerges is of two lost worlds. With awestruck wonder Collins recounts her and Lomax’s adventure into the cultural roots of the deep American South, interspersing this with memories of being brought up as a working class girl in War time Hastings. The result is a finely woven tapestry of one woman’s journey, both emotional and musical, and her discovery of a world of beauty and dignity, as well as deprivation and prejudice, amongst the folk musicians over the water in America.

ABOUT SHIRLEY COLLINS
Shirley Collins was a stalwart of the English folk scene with a singing voice of unparalleled tender beauty. Although no longer performing, Shirley regularly lectures and appears on radio as an authority on traditional music. Recently a 4-CD box set of Shirley’s recordings called Within Sound appeared on Fledg’ling records to great critical acclaim.

“Alan Lomax is a completely central figure in 20th century culture. Without Lomax it’s possible that there would have been no blues explosion, no R&B movement, no Beatles and no Stones and no Velvet Underground. He was the conduit, mainlining the uniqueness and richness and passion of African-American music into the fertile early beginnings of Western pop music.” –Brian Eno

“Shirley was, of course, the perfect person to take into the field because she loved every minute of it. She took wonderful notes, and was a huge help, was great with all the people and a perfect field companion. She helped me in hundreds of ways I didn’t even know being an unobservant, busy male.” –Alan Lomax

LINK COURTESY MICHAEL SIMMONS!

FRANK RICH IN THE NY TIMES
June 19, 2005

TO understand how the Bush administration has lost the public opinion war on Iraq it may be helpful to travel in H. G. Wells’s time machine back to Oct. 30, 1938.

That was the Sunday night that Orson Welles staged the mother of all fake news events: his legendary radio adaptation of another Wells fantasy, “The War of the Worlds.” The audience was told four times during the hourlong show that it was fiction, but to no avail. A month after Munich, Americans afflicted with war jitters were determined to believe the broadcast’s phony news flashes that Martians had invaded New Jersey. Mobs fled their homes in a “wave of mass hysteria,” as The New York Times described it on Page 1, clogging roads and communications systems. Two days later, in an editorial titled “Terror by Radio,” The Times darkly observed that “what began as ‘entertainment’ might readily have ended in disaster” and warned radio officials to mind their “adult responsibilities” and think twice before again mingling “news technique with fiction so terrifying.”

That’s one Times editorial, it can be said without equivocation, that didn’t make a dent. Nearly seven decades later the mingling of news and fiction has become the default setting of American infotainment, and Americans have become so inured to it that the innocent radio listeners bamboozled by Welles might as well belong to another civilization. Nowhere is the distance between that America and our own more visible than in the hoopla surrounding the latest adaptation of “The War of the Worlds,” the much-awaited Steven Spielberg movie opening June 29.

Like its broadcast predecessor, the new version has already proved to be a launching pad for an onslaught of suspect news bulletins. This time the headlines are less earthshaking than an invasion from outer space, but they are no less ubiquitous: in repeated public appearances, most famously on “Oprah,” the Spielberg movie’s star, the 42-year-old Tom Cruise, has fallen to his knees and jumped on couches to declare his undying love for the 26-year-old Katie Holmes, the co-star of another summer spectacular, “Batman Begins.” Forget about those bygone Hollywood studio schemes to concoct publicity-generating off-screen romances for its stars-in-training. Here is a lavishly produced freak show, designed to play out in real time, enthusiastically enacted by the biggest star in the business. On Friday, after popping the big question to Ms. Holmes at the Eiffel Tower, Mr. Cruise promptly dragged his intended to a news conference.

But though the audience for this drama is as large as, if not larger than, that for Welles’s, there’s one big difference. The Cruise-Holmes romance is proving less credible to Americans in 2005 than a Martian invasion did to those of 1938. A People magazine poll found that 62 percent deem the story a stunt. To tabloid devotees, the reasons for Mr. Cruise’s credibility gap are the perennial unsubstantiated questions about his sexuality and his very public affiliation with a church, Scientology, literally founded by a science-fiction writer. But something bigger is going on here. The subversion of reality that Welles slyly introduced into modern American media in 1938 has reached its culmination and a jaded public is at last in open revolt.

The boundary between reality and fiction has now been blurred to such an extent by show business, the news business and government alike that almost no shows produced by any of them are instantly accepted as truth. The market for fake news has become so oversaturated that a skeptical public is finally dismissing most of it as hooey until proven otherwise (unless it is labeled as fake news from the get-go, as it is by Jon Stewart). We’ll devour the supposedly real Cruise-Holmes liaison for laughs but give it no more credence than a subplot on “Desperate Housewives.”

Welles unwittingly set us on the path toward the utter destabilization of reality with “War of the Worlds,” and then compounded the syndrome with his subsequent film masterpiece “Citizen Kane,” a fictional biography of a thinly disguised William Randolph Hearst that invented the pseudo-journalistic docudrama. But it’s only in the past few years that Welles’s ideas have been taken completely over the top by his trashy heirs. Not only do we have TV movies bastardizing the history of celebrities living and dead, but there is also a steady parade of “real” celebrities playing themselves in their own fictionalized “reality” shows. (This summer alone, Bobby Brown, Mˆtley Cr¸e’s Tommy Lee, Hugh Hefner’s girlfriends and Paris Hilton’s mother are all getting their own series.) The Cruise-Holmes antics, not to mention the concurrent shenanigans of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, add yet another variant to this mix, shrewdly identified by Patrick Goldstein of The Los Angeles Times as “a new rogue genre in which celebrities act out their own reality show, free from the constraints of a network time slot or a staged setting, like a boardroom or a desert island.”

Politicians who dive into this game by putting on their own reality shows think they are being very clever. But like Mr. Cruise, they’re being busted by a backlash. John Kerry was the first to feel it: his stagy military pageant, complete with salute, at the Democratic National Convention came off as so phony that the greater (but more subtle) fictions of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth struck many as relatively real by comparison. George W. Bush proved a somewhat more accomplished performer – in his first term. With the help of Colin Powell and some nifty props, he effortlessly sold the country on Saddam W.M.D.’s. He got away with using a stunt turkey as the photo-op centerpiece during his surprise Thanksgiving 2003 visit to the troops in Iraq. His canned “Ask the President” campaign town-hall meetings – at which any potentially hostile questioner was either denied admittance or hustled out by goons – were slick enough to be paraded before unsuspecting viewers as actual news on local TV outlets, in the tradition of Welles’s bogus “War of the Worlds” bulletins.

But the old magic is going kaput. Mr. Bush’s 60-stop Social Security “presidential roadshow,” his latest round of pre-scripted and heavily rehearsed faux town-hall meetings, hasn’t repeated the success of “Ask the President.” Support for private Social Security accounts actually declined as the tour played out and Mr. Bush increasingly sounded as if he were protesting too much. “See, in my line of work you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda,” the president said on May 24. He sounded as if he were channeling Mr. Cruise’s desperate repetitions of his love for his “terrific lady.”

The shelf life of the fakery that sold the war has also expired. On June 7, a Washington Post/ABC News poll found for the first time that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iraq has not made the United States safer. A week later Gallup found that a clear majority (59 percent) wants to withdraw some or all American troops. Most Americans tell pollsters the war isn’t “worth it,” and the top reasons they cite, said USA Today, include “fraudulent claims and no weapons of mass destruction found” and “the belief that Iraq posed no threat to the United States.” The administration can keep boasting of the Iraqi military’s progress in taking over for Americans and keep maintaining that, as Dick Cheney put it, the insurgency is in its “last throes.” But when even the conservative Republican congressman who pushed the House cafeteria to rename French fries “freedom fries” (Walter B. Jones of North Carolina) argues for withdrawal, it’s fruitless. Once a story line becomes incredible, it’s hard to get the audience to fall for it again.

This, too, echoes the history of the Welles hoax. Three years after his “War of the Worlds,” the real nightmare that America feared did arrive. Yet some radio listeners at first thought that the reports from Pearl Harbor were another ruse. Welles would later recall in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich that days after the Japanese attack, Franklin Roosevelt sent him a cable chiding him for having cried wolf with his faked war “news” of 1938.

Such is the overload of faked reality for Americans at this point that it will be far more difficult for the Bush administration than it was for F.D.R. to persuade the nation of an imminent threat without appearing to cry wolf. Nor can it easily get the country to believe that success in Iraq is just around the corner. Too many still remember that marvelous aircraft-carrier spectacle marking the end of “major combat operations” in Iraq – a fake reality show adapted, no less, from a Tom Cruise classic, “Top Gun.” Some 25 months and 1,500 American deaths later, nothing short of a collaboration by Orson Welles and Steven Spielberg could make this war fly in America now.

The Wide Weird World Of Henry Jacobs cd/dvd

Santa Monica Museum of Art

June 11 – August 13, 2005

3 x ABSTRACTION: NEW METHODS OF DRAWING
by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin

“At this moment I have knowledge of, in the living reality, that I am an atom in the universe that has access to infinite possibilities of development. These possibilities I want, gradually, to reveal.” Hilma af Klint

“Everything happens in accordance with a specific system of law, which I feel within me, and which never allows me to rest.” Emma Kunz

“There is only the all of the all/everything is that/every infinitesimal thought and action is part and parcel.” Agnes Martin

From June 11 through August 13 the Santa Monica Museum of Art presents 3 x Abstraction: New Methods of Drawing by Hilma af Klint, Emma Kunz, and Agnes Martin. The 100 rarely seen – and in some instances the first public presentation of – paintings, drawings, and watercolors in this major historical exhibition illuminate the extraordinary contributions Hilma af Klint (Sweden, 1862 – 1944), Emma Kunz (Switzerland, 1892 – 1963), and Agnes Martin (Canada, 1912 – 2004) made to abstract art. Three artists of different generations use distinctive formal devices – particularly line, grid, and geometry – to visualize and transform complex philosophical, scientific, and metaphysical ideas into powerful and transcendent works of art.

The exhibition focuses on a specific period of production within the life of each artist – af KlintÔø?s spare and evocative compositions made between 1895 and 1920 – KunzÔø?s complex large-scale drawings based on mathematical geometries – and meditative early grids by Martin primarily from the 1960s when the grid was first emerging as a focus of her work. 3 x Abstraction introduces a wider public to the seminal, inspirational work af Klint and Kunz, and presents intriguing new perspectives on the oeuvre of Agnes Martin. The exhibition is accompanied by a fully illustrated, 275-page catalog co-published by The Drawing Center and Yale University Press.

ArtistsÔø? Biographies

Hilma af Klint
Born in 1862 in Karlberg, Sweden, Hilma af Klint studied first at The Polytechnic School, now the Swedish School of Arts, Crafts, and Design, transferring in 1882 to the Academy of Fine Arts, where she remained for five years. After completing her education, she earned her living largely through the sale of traditional landscapes, still lifes, and portrait paintings. Around 1879, just before she entered the Polytechnic, af Klint was drawn into a circle of spiritualists and began attending sÔø?ances in Stockholm, eventually becoming a member of the Theosophical Society. Around 1887, together with four women friends, af Klint formed a group known as “The Five.”

Prefiguring Surrealist practices, The Five engaged in weekly sÔø?ances during which automatic drawings – sometimes in the form of cadavre exquis group works – were made as early as 1892. af KlintÔø?s experimentation with “automatic drawings” inspired her to turn to abstraction. By 1907, when The Five ceased their practice, there were 121 books filled with notes and drawings from their sessions. af Klint also kept small-scale records of each of her larger-format paintings in a series of ten “Blue Books.” af KlintÔø?s early twentieth-century work relates to Russian and European abstract painters (such as Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, and Wassily Kandinsky), who likewise drew inspiration from theosophy as well as science.

Later, af Klint studied the work of Rudolf Steiner and became interested in Anthroposophy, SteinerÔø?s concept of life as an evolution towards a balance between opposing forces, which he also applied to forms and colors. Over the years, she cultivated her role as an artist, healer, and spiritual seeker, investigating what she considered to be the invisible sphere of existence. The evolutionary idea of so-called “dual-truth” was, according to af Klint, a longing for unity that followed from the recognition of the duality of the world and of the human condition. This longing was reflected in the evolution of the soul towards the deepest state of its “being-in-relation,” in which it would achieve mutuality and oneness. Under this conception, all religions are simply different ways towards unity: “God is not a being but a power, not a creature but an eternity, not something with form but a life that can assume an endless number of forms,” af Klint would write. Her drawings and watercolors were intended to lead the viewer onto other levels of awareness, beyond those known from two-dimensional illusionism and three-dimensional reality and onto glimpses of the fourth-dimension, in which the understanding of space would increase and illusory perceptions disappear.

af Klint died in 1944, leaving a legacy of more than 1,000 paintings and drawings with the stipulation that her “secret” production should be withheld from public presentation for twenty years after her death.

Emma Kunz
Born into a family of weavers in 1892 in Brittnau in the Swiss Canton of Aargau, Emma Kunz was a prolific artist and a powerful healer. For her, the two practices of drawing and healing were inextricably linked. Kunz had no formal art training but was for many years (from 1923 to 1939) the housekeeper for, and later the companion of, the prominent painter and art critic Jacob Friedrich Welti (1871 – 1952). In 1910, Kunz began making her first drawings in school exercise books and experimenting with telepathy, prophecy, and healing. She also took up radiesthesia, the practice of divining with a pendulum. In 1938, Kunz created the first of her series of large, square drawings on millimeter graph paper, utilizing the pendulum to start and plan each of her geometric configurations in color crayon. She completed the drawings in one continuous session that could last over twenty-four hours. The grid-based works were created in acts of abstracting and drawing from things both transparent and external to consciousness. Tracing highly complex networks of relations, the drawings are compelling notations of KunzÔø?s mental labor.
http://www.emma-kunz.com

The accumulation, the sheer prolixity, of KunzÔø?s straight lines provides an intense sensation of vibration in the viewerÔø?s scope of vision. As if pulsating and wavering, the tracings seem to engender actual kinetic movement. Kunz considered her drawings to be cognitive mappings of energy fields from which she could formulate diagnoses for her patients. To that end, she would detach a given drawing from the wall and place it on the floor between herself and the patient. The pictures functioned as diagrams and aids to meditation for the locating of the patientsÔø? so-called lifelines, guiding Kunz in the answering of their questions.

In 1953, Kunz published, at her own expense, two books: The Miracle of Creative Revelation and the New Method of Drawing, from which the subtitle of this exhibition is derived. Her first exhibition, entitled The Case of Emma Kunz, suggested that, ten years after her death in 1963, she continued to be perceived as an artistic outsider. Yet Kunz had prophetically stated: “My pictures are for the twenty-first century.”

Agnes Martin
The granddaughter of Scottish pioneers who headed West in covered wagons, Agnes Martin seemed destined for a life of hard work. Born in 1912 on a farm in Saskatchewan, Canada, she came to study in New York in 1941. Martin differs from Hilma af Klint and Emma Kunz in terms of both education and recognition, as the latter two artists were for the most part self-taught and remained largely unknown during their lifetimes. Although Martin enjoyed wide recognition, her artistic success eventually came to be felt as a burden. In 1967, she left New York to travel for a year throughout the United States and Canada. During this period, she made no art at all: “Instead I meditated. I searched for the truth. I search for the truth all the time, but I gave it extra time then.” Eventually settling in New Mexico, the artist, after a seven-year hiatus, began to paint again.

Years earlier, when Martin began painting and drawing, she found herself dissatisfied with the landscapes she was making. In the mid-1950s, she moved to abstraction and began making her mesmerizing grids. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Martin came to be interested in Asian philosophies. She read books by the Japanese scholar D.T. Suzuki and the Taoist philosophers Chuang-tzu and Lao-tzu, and listened to lectures by Jiddu Krishnamurti. Although Martin never practiced non-Western spiritual disciplines, she admired the Taoist goal of eliminating egotism – thought to be the source of all suffering – and drew on these ideas in her work.

MartinÔø?s concern with issues of wholeness and unity are evident in the way she deploys the grid. Her work has been described as leading the viewer into contemplative spaces where the processes of making and viewing become fused. A careful phenomenological reading of MartinÔø?s paintings reveals “sequences of illusions of textures that change as viewing distance changes.” Her work concerns the relational space of response in the act of seeing and sensing, the space of perception – in the sense of both awareness and vision. Martin complemented her artistic practice with extensive writings about her own work: “My work is about emotion…not personal emotion, abstract emotion. ItÔø?s about those subtle moments of happiness we all experience.”

3 x Abstraction is organized by co-curators Catherine de Zegher, director of The Drawing Center, New York, and writer and independent curator Hendel Teicher.

Spiritual Abstractions
Tuesday, June 28, 7 pm
Author and independent scholar Erik Davis explores the roots of artistic abstraction in the occult movements of the late 19th century, showing how they help found a spiritual modernism whose implications continue to reverberate today.
Free admission

Automatic Drawing Brought Forth through the Ouija Board
Thursday, July 14, 6 – 10 pm
A project by Christian Cummings, assisted by Michael Decker. Audience participation throughout the evening upon request.
Free admission

Court Won’t Review Beastie Boys Lawsuit – Yahoo! News
Mon Jun 13,11:42 AM ET

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Monday declined to consider whether a 1992 Beastie Boys song infringed on the copyright of a jazz flutist’s recording.

Without comment, justices let stand a lower court ruling against jazz artist James W. Newton. Newton contended that the punk rappers’ “Pass the Mic” included a sample from his musical composition “Choir” without his full permission.

The Beastie Boys paid a licensing fee for the six-second, three-note segment of Newton’s work, but failed to pay an additional fee to license the underlying composition.

The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed to dismiss Newton’s lawsuit alleging copyright infringement. The appeals court reasoned that the short segment in “Pass the Mic” was not distinctive enough to be considered Newton’s work.

Several members and representatives of the jazz and independent artists community Ôø? including the American Composers Forum, the Electronic Music Foundation and Meet the Composer Ôø? had filed a joint friend-of-the-court brief in support of Newton.

They urged the Supreme Court to clarify the scope of copyright law, given the growing practice of digital sampling, or recording a portion of a previously existing song, they say increasingly infringes on their ownership rights.

The case is Newton v. Diamond, 04-1219.