28 JULY 2002: [SIGH]

From The
New York Times:

 

I.R.S. Loophole Allows Wealthy to Avoid
Taxes

By DAVID CAY JOHNSTON

In recent months some of
the wealthiest older Americans have been buying huge life insurance policies
on themselves. Curiously, these people have shopped not for the cheapest
rates but for the highest rates they can find. In some cases, they delightedly
pay 10 times the lowest rates for that insurance.

    Why would
anyone willingly pay so much?

    Taxes.

    Through
a technique invented by a lawyer in New York and a chemical engineer in
California, each dollar spent on this insurance can typically eliminate
$9 in taxes. Spend $10 million on this insurance, avoid $90 million or
more in income, gift, generation-skipping and estate taxes.

    “I’m
not saying this is the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s really good
for pushing wealth forward tax free,” said Jonathan G. Blattmachr, the
New York lawyer who heads the estate tax department at Milbank, Tweed,
Hadley & McCloy and who explained the plan in a half-dozen interviews.

    The technique
is legal, blessed by the I.R.S. in 1996. But some leading estate tax lawyers,
as well as some accountants and insurance agents, say it shouldn’t be.
They say it effectively disguises a gift to one’s heirs that should be
taxed like any other gift involving millions in wealth. They also say it
is but one example of how a tax exemption on life insurance that was approved
by Congress in 1913 to help widows and orphans has been stretched to benefit
the very richest Americans.

    Several
thousand of these jumbo policies have been sold, according to agents who
sell them, all under confidentiality agreements with the buyers and their
advisors. One member of the Rockefeller family took out a policy, according
to people who have seen documents in the deal.

    The several
billion dollars of this insurance already sold, much of it in the last
18 months, means that tens of billions of taxes will not flow into federal
and state government coffers in the coming decade or so.

    In recent
months, policies with first-year premiums alone of $4.4 million, $10 million,
$15 million, $25 million, $32 million and $40 million have been sold by
New York Life Insurance, Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance and other
underwriters, according to insurance agents, accountants and tax lawyers
who have worked on these deals.

    The agents
selling the policies find them hard to resist ˜ they can earn millions
of dollars for selling just one such policy. One of them said that his
small firm’s commissions this year have already reached $20 million.

    The technique
works this way. An older person ˜ typically someone who does not expect
to live long and who has at least $10 million and usually much more ˜ wants
to avoid estate taxes, which are 50 percent with such fortunes.

    Under
tax law, money from a life insurance policy goes at death to heirs tax
free.

    The premium
paid on that life insurance is considered a gift to those heirs. Any annual
premium that exceeds $11,000 is therefore subject to the gift tax of 50
percent. Only the wealthiest Americans pay such large premiums and are
subject to this tax.

    The new
technique sidesteps the gift tax in a two-step process. First, the person
who is buying the policy reports on his tax return only a small portion
of what he really paid in premiums.

    Wouldn’t
the I.R.S. say that is cheating? No. It’s perfectly legal. The reason is
that insurance companies offer many different rates for the same policy.
And the buyer is allowed to declare on his tax return the insurance company’s
lowest premium for that amount of insurance, even if that person could
never qualify for that rate because of his age and health, and even if
no one has actually ever been sold a policy at that rate.

    A low
premium means a low gift tax. But in fact the buyer has really paid the
very highest premium offered by that insurer for that amount of insurance.
The insurer then invests the difference between the highest premium and
the lowest premium. That investment grows tax free, paying for future premiums
on the policy. At death, the entire face value of the policy is paid tax
free to heirs.

    In an
example cited by one agent, a customer paid a $550,000 premium for the
first year alone, the highest price offered by the insurance company, for
a policy that was also offered at $50,000, the lowest price. So $550,000
can be passed on to heirs tax free. Yet the gift tax is only $25,000 ˜
50 percent of the lowest premium, instead of $275,000, which is 50 percent
of the highest premium.

    The I.R.S.
would not comment officially. But an I.R.S. official who specializes in
insurance matters said he had not heard that so many people were exploiting
this loophole. He could not say whether the issue would be re-examined.

    The deal
gets better because of a second step. Under this technique, even that $25,000
tax can be avoided by shifting the gift-tax obligation to the spouse through
a trust. In 1982, Congress made transfers between spouses tax free, so
the gift tax disappears.

    If the
policy holder continues to pay huge premiums year after year, he can pass
along much or all of his fortune tax free if he lives long enough. In fact,
Michael D. Brown of Spectrum Consulting in Irvine, Calif., said, many clients
in their 50’s and 60’s, working with other agents, are now trying to do
just that.

    By far
the biggest insurance deals have been made by two insurance agents who
work together, Mr. Brown, a former chemical engineer, and Louis P. Kreisberg
of the Executive Compensation Group in Manhattan.

    The technique
was devised in 1995 by Mr. Blattmachr and Mr. Brown. Mr. Blattmachr has
since expanded his idea and other estate tax lawyers have copied his methods.

    “In 1995
I was told that this was the stupidest idea ever by a guy who is now collecting
millions in commissions from selling” such insurance, Mr. Blattmachr said.

    Among
his peers Mr. Blattmachr is renowned for his creativity in finding ways
to pass down fortunes without paying taxes and without breaking the law.

    He is
a busy man. Recently he set off to counsel clients in eight cities over
three days ˜ a trip made possible by a client who provided him with a private
jet. Afterward he spent the weekend fishing with his brother, Douglas,
whose company, Alaska Trust, helps wealthy Americans set up perpetual trusts,
some of them using Mr. Blattmachr’s insurance plan.

    One buyer
of an insurance plan like Mr. Blattmachr’s paid $32 million in the first
year for a policy that will pay $127 million tax free to the grandchildren,
according to a lawyer who worked on the deal and spoke on condition of
not being identified. No gift taxes were paid.

    Sales
of such insurance soared after the Internal Revenue Service announced 18
months ago that it was considering restrictions on similar techniques,
which are known as equity split-dollar plans.

    In Alaska,
premiums for such insurance totaled just $1.1 million in 1999, but ballooned
to more than $80 million last year, state tax records show.

    This
month, when the I.R.S. issued its proposed restrictions, it did nothing
to stop Mr. Blattmachr’s plan.

    Indeed,
the proposed I.R.S. regulations can be read as strengthening the validity
of his plan, Mr. Blattmachr and some other estate tax lawyers say.

    Mr. Brown
said that in some cases, when the policy holder dies quickly, both the
government and the heirs come out winners, at the expense of the insurance
company.

    “This
is a good deal because both the government and the heirs get 90 percent
of what they could have gotten,” he said.

    He added:
“We think it is good policy to allow this because it discourages games
like renouncing your citizenship or investing offshore.”

    But many
estate tax lawyers and insurance experts think that because Mr. Blattmachr’s
plan is similar to the plans the I.R.S. moved to stop on July 3, it should
be ended as well.

    While
the I.R.S. in 1996 approved the outlines of the Blattmachr plan, these
opponents argue that the plan as sold by agents like Mr. Brown and Mr.
Kreisberg stretches that ruling so far that it no longer provides protection
in an I.R.S. audit.

    Some
of them say it is the huge fees for everyone involved that are blinding
their competitors to aspects of the Blattmachr plan that make it vulnerable
to being banned as an abusive tax shelter.

    Commissions
for the insurance agents run between 70 percent and 200 percent of the
first-year premium when it is $1 million or so, while on the jumbo policies
commissions are typically 9 percent to 11 percent, or up to $4.4 million
on a policy with a $40 million first-year premium, Mr. Kreisberg said.

    He acknowledged
that many peers in the estate tax world say that he earned $100 million
in gross commissions last year, but said, “I wish it were half that.” Mr.
Kreisberg did not dispute a statement by someone with knowledge of payment
records that his small firm’s commissions this year have already reached
$20 million.

    Lawyers
who opine on the validity of the deals can also earn big fees. Mr. Blattmachr
gets $100,000 for his basic opinion letter and reportedly has charged as
much as $250,000.

    Sanford
J. Schlesinger of the law firm Kaye Scholer said he passed up a chance
to collect a six-figure fee for advising on one of these deals because
he thinks the deals should not pass muster with the I.R.S. “My mother taught
me that if something seems too good to be true, it isn’t true,” he said.

    Other
leading estate tax lawyers, as well as some accountants and insurance agents,
say Mr. Blattmachr’s insurance technique should fail because it is wholly
outside the intent of Congress in giving tax breaks for life insurance,
the I.R.S. ruling on the plan notwithstanding.

    “If the
I.R.S. understood this they would say that it relies on a disguised gift
˜ and if you have to pay gift taxes, then Jonathan’s insurance deal does
not work,” said an estate partner at a tax firm in New York, who like others,
said they could not be identified because they have signed confidentiality
agreements that are part of all such insurance deals.

    Another
legal expert said paying 10 times too much for insurance in a plan like
this reminds him of a matriarch selling the family business to her granddaughter
for $10 million when it was actually worth 10 times that amount. “The I.R.S.
wouldn’t let a family get away with selling the business for a dime on
the dollar,” this lawyer said, “and they should not allow it to work in
reverse through insurance.”

27 JULY 2002: BANARAS

From The
Crossing Project:

“The city of Banaras, like
Jerusalem and Mecca, is one of the world’s most celebrated pilgrimage sites,
and has been acknowledged as a center of learning for over 2000 years.
As a physical place, Banaras lies on the banks of the river Ganges. As
a psychical place, the city derives its sacredness from the intimate association
with Lord Shiva(one of the main deities of the Hindu trinity). It is believed

that Shiva lives in Banaras
through his invisible form to liberate humankind from ignorance.

    Banaras
has over 2000 temples, big and small, dedicated to Lord Shiva and to other
deities. The skyline along the riverbank is market by high spires of temples.
According to a myth, Lord Shiva performed severe austerities to sanctify
Banaras, and considers Banaras his earthly home.

    In the
imagination of the people of Banaras, Shiva is visualised as an ash-smeared
yogi who is meditating in the cremation grounds and eternally bestowing
grace and liberation on his devotees.

    The interface
between the city and the river are the long flights of stone steps called
Ghats. There are over a hundred ghats in the city, and the ghats hum with
ritual and festive activity all year round.

    From
dawn to dusk, thousands of worshippers come down to the river to perform
ablutions, and through ritual and prayer, invoke the healing powers of
the Ganges. The rituals invoke all the sense perceptions -sight, sound,
touch, smell and taste – and invoke all the elements. People propitiate
the Ganges river, the river of healing, by floating lamps and offerings.

    Some
of the most important rituals to the dying ad the dead. The ghats provide
the places of cremation. The burning embers of the cremation pyers alongside
the riverbank provide people with a powerful symbol of the integral relation
between life and death. Death in the Indian imagination is considered as
a crossing over from one state into another; and the fear of death is considered
to be an irrational fear. Once the body disintegrates, the ashes are immersed
into the Ganges. The final immersion into the womb of the Ganges symbolises
a new creation out of the waters of life.

    For 2000
years, Banaras flourished as a living center for learning. The Buddha,
Adi Sankara, (founder of the philosophy of Neo-dulaism), and Mahavira(founer
of Jainism), pondered life’s fundamental questions.

    Atop
the ghats, in the pavilions, gurus continue to transmit to students the
living experience of self-realization. Besides the religious significance,
Banaras is the home of classical music, dance and textile traditions. Banaras
artists have developed distinctive genres of artistic expression. The sounds
of the drummers and dancer’s bells provide an aural backdrop to Banaras.

    The ghats
present an incredible “multimedia” theater of activity. Together, the river
Ganges, the temple spire-lined the skyline,

the pavilions of learning,
pilgrims performing rituals, and the fires of the cremation provide a multimedia,
living stage in which the pilgrim experiences transformation. These elements
make the ghats an excellent domain for multimedia applications in learning.

    The pilgrim
is he center of the transformation, and the ghats ad its activities provide
the ” periphery”. Banaras’s ghats and its activities provide the spatial
periphery; the myths and metaphysics of Shiva provide the psychical periphery.

    Together,
the spatial and the psychical settings allow the pilgrim to “cross-over”
into the space of transformation.

25 JULY 2002: FLORIDA
INDIAN CANAL NETWORK, CIRCA AD 250

From the  July
23, 2002  New York Times:

 (right) Dr. Alison
Elgart-Berry digs at the site of a canal excavated by the Ortona.

Network of Waterways Traced to Ancient
Florida Culture

By MARK DERR

ORTONA, Fla. ˜ The casual
visitor to this small rural community about 15 miles west of Lake Okeechobee
might barely notice the broad indentations that run for seven miles from
a cluster of oak-shaded mounds through scrub pine and palmetto to the Caloosahatchee
River.

    But to
archaeologists they are monuments to prodigious engineering skill and hard
work ˜ canals that enabled Indians to travel between
Lake Okeechobee and the Gulf of Mexico.

    Around
A.D. 250, Indians inhabiting this area began digging the canals by hand,
using wooden and shell tools to create waterways 20 feet wide and 3 to
4 feet deep, said Robert Carr, the Florida archaeologist who directs excavations
at the site.

    Their
goal was not to drain or irrigate land, Mr. Carr said, but to create a
waterway to bring dugout canoes to their village, a mile north of the Caloosahatchee.
The canals also allowed paddlers to bypass rapids roiling the river.

    The two-square-mile
village at the center of this watery network was a planner’s dream, with
sculptured earthworks (one of them resembling a crescent moon holding a
star) and mounds, ponds and geometric causeways. Eventually, the people,
known today as the Ortona, added a 450-foot-long pond, shaped like a ceremonial
baton and surrounded by a beach they made with white sand.

    “In adapting
to their wetland world, the people of South Florida achieved a level of
cultural sophistication and social organization much earlier than previously
believed,” said Mr. Carr, executive director of Archaeological and Historical
Conservancy in Davie, Fla.

    And the
dates place the Ortona people squarely within an American Indian tradition,
that of the Hopewell people, whose center was far to the north, in the
Ohio River Valley. Archaeologists have long theorized such a connection,
primarily because of the design of mounds and artifacts. But they lacked
hard evidence.

    “Now,
with these dates, Bob Carr has provided the smoking gun for placing peninsular
Florida within the Hopewell culture,” said Dr. James A. Brown, a professor
of anthropology at Northwestern University, who was not involved in Mr.
Carr’s excavations.

    Humans
apparently occupied Ortona around 700 B.C. and lived there at least 1,500
years, Mr. Carr said. But the Ortona people’s
greatest cultural achievements occurred from A.D. 200 to 700, radiocarbon
dates from recent excavations indicate. Similar bursts of construction
appeared about the same time in other parts of South Florida. On one site,
at the mouth of the Miami River, Indians carved a circle 38 feet in diameter
into limestone, said Mr. Carr, co-discoverer of that site in 1998.

    With
a population of 200 to 300, the Ortona village was a major center for the
exchange of goods and religious and cultural ideas from other parts of
the country, Mr. Carr said.

    In their
dugout canoes, traders plied the rivers flowing to and from Lake Okeechobee
like spokes on a wheel. They also paddled up and down the Gulf and Atlantic
Coasts of Florida, and even beyond.

    Archaeologists
have long reasoned that a major trade route ran from Lake Okeechobee down
the Caloosahatchee to the Gulf of Mexico and up the Gulf Coast to the Apalachicola
River in the Florida Panhandle. From there it followed the Chatahoochee
River north and ultimately crossed the Allegheny Mountains at Cumberland
Gap to reach the Ohio River Valley.

    Alligator
and shark teeth and skins, feathers from Everglades birds and shells were
carried north, Dr. Brown said; flint, copper, beads and possibly effigy
pipes moved south. And travelers carried a host of ideas about the cosmos,
marriage and burial rituals and shamanistic rites.

    These
ideas and many of the goods were related to the Hopewell culture, which
originated in the Ohio Valley around 100 B.C. At its height, from A.D.
200 to 400, the Hopewell people built mounds, enclosures and causeways
in the Midwest and much of the Mississippi River Valley, and even more
extensive trade routes, Dr. Brown said.

   
But in a significant departure from the Hopewell tradition, Mr. Carr said,
the Ortona people and their neighbors in South Florida built mounds for
their homes, as well as for burials and ceremonies. “Placing structures
on mounds was a special South Florida adaptation to the wet environment,”
he added.

    The Indians
of South Florida traveled chiefly by dugout canoe, going deep into reaches
of the Everglades that many white settlers later considered impenetrable.
It is not surprising, then, Mr. Carr said, that the Ortona people built
canals to speed their travel. “The Ortona canals are the earliest we have
found devoted to transportation,” he said.

    The Ortona
canals formed a triangle, with the Caloosahatchee River as the base and
the village as the apex. A western canal ran about four miles; an eastern
canal, about three.

    Mr. Carr’s
team established the age of the canals with carbon 14 dating. The researchers
˜ Mr. Carr, Jorge Zamanillo of the Historical Museum of Southern Florida
and Jim Pepe of Janus Research ˜ published their report in the March issue
of Florida Anthropologist.

    The Ortona
canals appear to be part of a more extensive network of canals and dugout
canoe trails that crisscrossed the Everglades and ran along the coasts,
said Dr. Ryan J. Wheeler, senior archaeologist with Panamerican Consultants,
who has studied the waterways.

    Little
is known about the Ortona people, but Mr. Carr speculated that they might
have built some or all of the 20 other groups of mounds and circles around
Lake Okeechobee. He added that they were probably ancestors of the powerful
Calusa, who occupied southwest Florida and controlled tribes around Lake
Okeechobee, and the Mayami, who lived south of the big lake. Those tribes
flourished from around 1200 until Spanish settlement in the early 16th
century.

    By the
time Spain ceded Florida to England in 1763, virtually all of Florida’s
indigenous people had vanished, victims of warfare and disease, particularly
smallpox. Their cultures and histories were lost with them. When American
surveyors discovered the Ortona earthworks in the early 19th century, they
thought they were Spanish fortifications, Mr. Carr said.

    Seminole
and Miccosukee Indians were driven into the Everglades region during the
Seminole Wars of the 19th century.

    The landscape
and earthworks of the earlier Floridians have changed drastically as well.
Hamilton Disston, a toolmaker from Philadelphia, destroyed the rapids of
the Caloosahatchee River in the early 1880’s, during the first concentrated
effort to drain the Everglades.

    A century
of drainage and development have further altered the environment and carved
up the Ortona earthworks. The vegetation-covered dry indentations that
were the canals, best seen now from the air, lie mostly on private land,
their preservation dependent on the owners.

    The Baton
Pond, built before 700, according to a recent, unpublished analysis, is
also mostly obscured, although the owners of the site are working with
Mr. Carr to preserve it.

    Some
of the 25 Ortona earthworks are protected in Ortona State Park, but others,
including a 60-foot causeway, are unprotected. Sand mining and development
have taken a toll on many, including a 20-foot-high burial mound ˜ the
highest point in Glades County. The burial mound was largely destroyed
by road building in the 1940’s and 50’s, Mr. Carr said.

    Over
the years countless Florida archaeological sites have suffered the same
fate, usually before anyone could investigate them, he added.

    “The
prehistoric settlement pattern across South Florida is still largely unknown,”
Mr. Carr said. “Lake Okeechobee was the hub, and it is one of the least
protected areas in the state. We have to help preserve what’s left, or
it will be gone in the next 20 years.”

24 JULY 2002: DECLINE
AND FALCONRY

From The Independent on Sunday,
30th August, 1998

Film-maker Peter Whitehead
was the coolest dude in Sixties London. Then he dropped out and

went strange. Now Iain
Sinclair and Chris Petit have made a film about him — and Whitehead

hates it. Chris Darke
reports.

 

There’s a scene in The
Falconer in which Peter Whitehead, the man described as the film’s
“fictive core”, is

being interviewed on Swedish
TV. “I copulated with falcons,” he declares. The female interviewer tries
to

keep a straight face while
looking like someone who’s just had her chat-show stolen from under her
nose.

“I did it physically. I
built a special hat…” That’s how Whitehead describes his method for inseminating
the

gyrs; “I was in love with
those falcons,” he sighs. Behind him, the digitally animated figure of
a young

woman strolls into the scene
and bends to kiss him. Black leathery wings unfurl from her back.

    During
the 1960s, Peter Whitehead made a series of films which have since become
documents of the

decade. “I had one foot
in the counterculture and one in Swinging London,” he says of the period
in which

he filmed Wholly Communion,
a cinéma vérité account of the legendary 1965 International
Poetry

Incarnation at the Royal
Albert Hall. Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, a glossy trawl through
the faces

and places of the “swinging”
metropolis, followed in 1967. Over this period, Whitehead was also making

promos for groups as diverse
as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and the Dubliners. The Fall (1969), an

attempt to marry Godard
with footage of the American police crushing the counterculture, was Whitehead’s

last serious piece of film-making.
He now writes self-published novels, and makes his living from selling
off

bits of his archive to television.

    After
he dropped out of film-making, Whitehead made falconry his life. He trapped
the birds and bred them.

By 1982 he was building
a falconry centre for a Saudi prince. The Gulf War put an end to this operation
but,

by then, Whitehead was convinced
that he was living out the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. “Isis

copulates with the live
body of her dismembered husband Osiris and gives birth to Horns the falcon,”

Whitehead explains to the
uninitiated. “I am Horus. I have lived out becoming Horus. It is my myth.”

Whitehead seems happily
to adopt any number of myths – Horns, Oedipus, Salome – as his own.

    “I kept
thinking – there are gaps,” runs a commentary in the Falconer film. “How
do you get from

film-making to falconry?
How do you get from falconry to writing novels?” And it’s in these gaps
that The

Falconer, made by writer
lain Sinclair and writer-director Chris Petit, forges its fictions. The
film works on

layers of unreliable memory,
flashback-blizzards, origami structures of doubles and doubling, hotel
rooms

that metamorphose into a
whalebone box which supposedly possesses occult powers.

    Chris
Petit, the director, is something of an underground polymath. He was film
editor at the London events

magazine Time Out in the
mid-1970s, when it still had some countercultural cred. He then moved directly

into film-making with Radio
On (1979), a beautiful and austere British road movie, an impressive take
on PD

James’s An Unsuitable Job
for a Woman (1981), and two thrillers, Flight to Berlin (1983) and Chinese
Boxes

(1984). He then dropped
out of features to make television films and write two novels, Robinson
(1993)

and The Psalm Killer (1997).
The Falconer has allowed Petit to explore the form of the essay-film, using

video technology. Since
finishing it, he has gone on to produce another video essay, Dead TV.

    And his
working partner, lain Sinclair – as readers of Lights Out for the Territory
will know – is a curio-sifter

at the cultural margins.
So, if you watch The Falconer as you’d read one of Sinclair’s essays, you’ll

understand how it works.

    It’s
a sort of caricature, produced by a couple of avant-garde satirists. Hogarth
worked with pen and ink;

his inheritors take the
language of Sixties experimental film, and throw it in with digital editing
and

multimedia design. And Whitehead
fed himself to the film-makers. As Sinclair has said in an interview, “He’s

someone who always has one
more story to tell … He’s got a kind of mesmerising, Ancient Mariner
quality.

The stories initially were
fascinating, you wanted to know the rest. But when he told you them they
were

never as interesting as
they seemed …”

    Whitehead
now lives in a run-together assembly of cottages in a Northamptonshire
village, which he shares

with his wife Dido, the
daughter of Teddy Goldsmith and niece of the late James. When I visited,
Whitehead’s two

daughters were sitting around
the kitchen table singing “Brown-Eyed Girl” to a guitar accompaniment.
The scene was exactly as I’d

hoped, a high-class Bohemian
enclave in the Shires. We spent the afternoon in Whitehead’s den. He talked
about the 1960s,

and told me about a group
of academics at Leicester De Montford University who had invited him to
a

conference on 1968 and radical
film. “I’m an objet retrouvé” he declared. He then asked Robin,
his

14-yearold daughter, to
show me around the garden. “But Dad,” she protested. “I don’t know anything

about your stuff.”

    Whitehead’s
“stuff” consists of a temple that he built himself in his yard, and where
he intends to be buried.

The temple was constructed
from columns salvaged from a demolished bank, adhering to numerological

principles derived from
Egyptian myth. I wondered whether this structure might partly explain why
Sinclair is

fascinated with Whitehead.
Each in his way is a builder of follies dedicated to his own self-elected

mythology.

    The Whitehead
story, as Petit narrates it, is one of “drug culture, high society, weird
showbiz liaisons,

dealings with the black
economy”. But it was the women in Whitehead’s life that, further down the
line,

would become the sore point
in the story of the film. Whitehead has been linked to a number of famous

beauties, among them Nico,
Bianca Jagger and Nathalie Delon. Liaisons and working partnerships with

sculptors Penny Slinger
and Nikki de St Phalle (he made the film Daddy, an excruciating sexual

psychodrama, with the latter
in 1974) and the actress Mia Martin. Sinclair speaks of Whitehead “vampirising”

his female collaborators
and Whitehead himself plays with the idea of incest as a mystical metaphor,
as his

being haunted by the daughter
as the image of his “soul”. He tells of how, when he photographs women,

he does so “as a woman”.
Incest as a metaphor was to prove a source of controversy, to put it mildly.
In

one scene in The Falconer,
Whitehead relates how he took “a honeymoon” with his daughter, then eight

years old. The father-daughter
relationship was a trope that was worked into the film.

    In April
this year, Whitehead finally watched the finished film, having previously
resisted Sinclair’s offers of a

screening. “It really is
a masterpiece,” he wrote. “I think it will go down in the history of movies
(as did

Eliot’s The Waste Land for
poetry) – establishing a new way of seeing, within film, which really is
visionary. It

is a film about me, a very
generous one – and I am humbled by it … I was expecting more gore, blood
and

Hammer horror stuff. I also
think that I come off quite lightly, considering the truth (But remind
me to say

less, next time!)”.

    Then,
two months later, Whitehead took umbrage. Over the latter part of June,
threats of legal action were

arriving daily on the producer’s
desk. Whitehead claimed that he was the victim of “a deliberate calculated

betrayal, foisted on me
by a close friend for whom I had the greatest respect as an artist and
a person”. It

got worse. Petit was now
“a c***”, Sinclair “emotionally retarded”. More disturbing still, Whitehead
claimed

to “have all Sinclair’s
telephone calls recorded from Christmas. “I have the whole proof of the
deliberate

deception.” He went on to
admit that he was “doing [his] best to screw the thing up”.

    In January,
Whitehead had produced a signed statement that read “I have willingly contributed
to a work

that I understand is not
a documentary but a fabulous version of my life and my varied careers …
a fiction

disguised as a documentary,
a life explained through its underlying mythology and not through a mere

recitation of chronological
facts.” So why the savage volte-face?

    One reason
may have been the response The Falconer received when it was shown at De
Montford

University. Among the panellists
was Caroline Coon, radical feminist, former Sixties activist and founder
of

Release, the drugs advice
organisation. Coon was so incensed by the film that she wrote a vitriolic
open

memo to the organisers.
“How could you collude with this film?” she demanded. “What is your position
on

bestiality and the abuse
of children?” Coon went on to describe Whitehead as a “self-confessed

pseudomythologising narcissist”
and the film as “a snuff movie … that is obdurately reactionary, White

Power and orthodox, a film
only masquerading as radical and avant-garde.” There were rumours that

Whitehead enthusiasts from
the US had been bending their erstwhile hero’s ear. It seemed that they’d

found the film, well, a
little too extreme.

    A friend
rings. “I have a definition that might interest you,” he tells me. “It’s
from James Morton’s book

Lowspeak: A Dictionary of
Criminal and Sexual Slang. Check this out. Under ‘falconer’ it reads, ‘A
conman

posing as an aristocrat’.”

    But Sinclair
knew this all along. Didn’t he?

‘The Falconer’: Renegade
TV Channel 4, 24 September.

COURTESY: JOHN C.!!!!

23 JULY 2002

22 JULY 2002: “THE GODS
ARE ANGRY.”

July
21, 2002  |  ESCRAVOS, Nigeria (AP) — A huge fire broke
out Saturday at ChevronTexaco’s main oil terminal, days after unarmed village
women ended a 10-day siege that crippled the oil giant’s Nigeria operations.

    The
blaze at the multimillion-dollar Escravos terminal in southeastern Nigeria
was ignited by a bolt of lightning during
an early morning storm, the company said in a statement.

    
The lightning set fire to a storage tank containing about 180,000 barrels
of crude oil. Oil workers used remote-controlled chemical cannons to contain
the blaze and pumped about 80,000 barrels out of the burning tank.

    Additional
support was requested from other oil operators, the statement said.

    No one
was hurt, the company said.

    The fire
sent giant flames and a towering pillar of black smoke into the sky.

    “The
gods are angry. Chevron needs to compensate us for this land. The women
leave, and two days later, this thing happens,” said unemployed villager
Lucky Mune, as he watched the blaze from a distance.

    The fire
was the latest blow to a company still facing a series of takeovers at
its Nigerian facilities by unarmed village women.

    Meanwhile
Saturday, unarmed women occupying at least four ChevronTexaco facilities
in southeastern Nigeria said Saturday they had freed their two hostages
in return for a promise from oil executives to meet with them.

    The women,
who live nearby, are demanding jobs for their relatives as well as electricity,
water and other amenities. The protest follows a larger but similar action
at ChevronTexaco’s main oil terminal that involved about 700 workers —
including Americans, Britons, Canadians and Nigerians — being held captive
for 10 days.

    The women,
ranging in age from 30 to 90, used a traditional and powerful shaming gesture
to maintain control over the facility — they threatened to remove their
own clothing.

    The hostages
were freed only after the company pledged to build modern towns out of
poor villages.

    As that
protest was ending, several hundred women from a rival tribe seized at
least four ChevronTexaco flowstations in the same area. On Friday, the
women occupying the Abiteye station took two workers captive, both Nigerians.
They were apparently the only employees who stayed behind after the protest
action began.

    One,
a security supervisor, was released hours later and the other, a community
relations officer, was allowed to leave Saturday. Far from appearing traumatized,
he waved to the women, who cheered as he boarded a ferry.

    Fanty
Wariyai, a protest leader, said ChevronTexaco promised to send a senior
official to meet with the women on Monday. ChevronTexaco officials could
not immediately be reached for comment.

    The protest
turned into a hostage-taking after ChevronTexaco angered the women by asking
them to send representatives to a meeting with company officials and tribal
leaders in the southern city of Warri.

    “They
want us to meet the community leaders who are men, who live in Warri, and
who don’t know our suffering,” Josephine Ogoba, another protest leader,
said Friday. “If Chevron will not come here, we will not allow their staff
to go.”

    The peaceful,
all-woman protests are a departure for the oil-rich Niger Delta, where
armed men frequently use kidnapping and sabotage to pressure oil companies
to give them jobs, protection money or compensation for alleged environmental
damage.

    The Niger
Delta is one of the West African country’s poorest regions, despite its
oil wealth. Nigeria is the world’s sixth-largest exporter of oil and the
fifth-largest supplier to the United States.

21 JULY 2002: “Maybe
I overreacted…”

Man, fearing terrorists, fires at helicopter

July 20, 2002 Posted: 1:22
PM EDT (1722 GMT)

WILLIAMSBURG, Virginia (AP)
— A man armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire on a helicopter
landing in a residential neighborhood, thinking the chopper was carrying
terrorists, police said.

    Helicopter
pilot John S. Sutton landed his helicopter July 13 at the home of businessman
John Peters to pick him up, police said.

    John
Chwaszczewski, a semiretired construction worker, became alarmed when he
saw the chopper swoop down over his garage, about a block from Peters’
home.

    “Maybe
I overreacted, but I did feel this was terrorism at its utmost,” Chwaszczewski
said.

    Chwaszczewski
told police the shooting was “a natural reaction,” after having watched
the events of September 11.

    A woman
who identified herself as Sutton’s wife said he would have no comment.

    Sutton
was charged with recklessly operating an aircraft, a misdemeanor, Deputy
Police Chief Ken Middlebrook said Friday. If convicted, he could face a
month in jail.

    Chwaszczewski
was charged with interfering with an aircraft, discharging a firearm, an
AR-15 rifle, in a public place, reckless handling of a firearm and assaulting
Sutton. He faces up to eight years in prison and $10,000 in fines if convicted.

20 JULY 2002: “WHAT EXACTLY
HAPPENED IN CLEVELAND IN THE EARLY ’70S TO MAKE IT SUCH AN INSANELY CREATIVE
SPOT?”

From: http://www.projex.demon.co.uk/archives/keenan.html

David Thomas interviewed by David Keenan

Looking back on these
tapes now, how do you feel about them?

I’m not sure what you mean.
Am I nostalgic about them? No. Am I embarrassed or shy about them? No.
Do they reveal anything to me? No. I suppose one of the problems has always
been that this phase of our history has never been made public. We started
out dedicated to hard, groove rock. Midwestern garage rock. We remain dedicated
to hard, groove rock. Midwestern garage rock. This is the foundation but
like many foundations maybe it rests unnoticed. You have to remember the
Prime Directive: Never repeat yourself. At all costs, and beyond any reason
or logic, keep moving. So we made this music in 1974-5. It’s hard, groove
rock played with passion and unwavering dedication. Isn’t that what you’re
supposed to do? And once you’ve proved that you HAVE the Right Stuff you
move forward or you slip backwards. Only the dead remain secure.

What exactly happened
in Cleveland during the early-Seventies to make it such an insanely creative
spot? Most people think of these years as a bit of a black hole for outsider
rock ‘n’ roll – how come it was so different in Cleveland? Was the fact
that The Velvet Underground had pulled through there a couple of times
really that significant?

Alot of things came together
in one place and one time. I’m tired of going thru the story but I’ll give
it a shot one last time.

(1.) It was a unique generational
window. Charlotte Pressler described it best in her piece, “Those Were
Different Times.” I quote the first few paragraphs.

“This is a story about life
in Cleveland from 1968 to 1975, when a small group of people were evolving
styles of music that would, much later, come to be called “New Wave.” Misleadingly
so, because that term suggests the current situation, in which an already
evolved, recognized “New Wave” style exists for new bands to aim at. The
task of this group was different: to evolve the style itself, while at
the same time struggling to find in themselves the authority and confidence
to play it. And they had to do this in a total vacuum. The whole system
of New Wave interconnections which made it possible for every second person
on Manhattan’s Lower East Side to become a star did not exist. There were
no stars in Cleveland. Nobody cared what these people were doing. If they
did anything at all, they did it for themselves. They adapted to those
conditions in different ways. Some are famous. Some are still struggling.
One is dead.

“There are questions I would
like to know the answers to. Why, for example, are so many of the people
in this story drawn from the same background? Most of them were from middle
or upper-middle class families. Most were very intelligent. Many of them
could have been anything they chose to be. There was no reason why they
should not have effected an entry into the world of their parents. Yet
all of them turned their backs on this world, and that meant making a number
of very painful choices. First, there was the decision not to go to college
at a time when the draft was still in effect and the Vietnam War was still
going on; and several of these people were drafted. Most of these people
did not marry; those that did generally did not have children; few of them
worked jobs for very long; and the jobs they did hold were low-paying and
dull, a long ways from a “career.” Yet they were not drop-outs in the Sixties
sense; they felt, if anything, a certain affection for consumerist society,
and a total contempt for the so-called counterculture. The Sixties drop-outs
dropped in to a whole world of people just like themselves but these people
were on their own.

“You can ask, also, why they
all turned to rock ‘n’ roll. Most of these people were not natural musicians.
Peter perhaps was, and Albert Dennis, and Scott Krauss; but John Morton
and David Thomas and Allen Ravenstine and Jaime Klimek would probably have
done something else, if there had been anything else for them to do. One
can ask why there wasn’t; why rock ‘n’ roll seemed to be the only choice.

“I would like to know too
the source of the deep rage that runs through this story like a razor-edged
wire. It was a desperate, stubborn refusal of the world, a total rejection;
the kind of thing that once drove men into the desert, but our desert was
the Flats. Remember that the people who did this music had an uncompromising
stance that gave them no way up and no way out. It was the inward-turning,
defiant stance of a beleaguered few who felt themselves to be outside music,
beneath media attention, and without hope of an audience. It seems that
the years from 1974 to 1978 in Cleveland were a flash point, a quick and
brilliant explosion, even epochal, but over with and done. No amount of
nostalgia can bring those years back; they were different times. Still,
I can’t imagine living any other way than the way I learned to live in
Cleveland during those years. We found it hard, in 1975, to imagine that
anyone would live to see the year 2000. It’s not that hard to imagine it
now. What’s become hard to imagine – but then why would we want to recapture
it? – is the timeless, frozen, quality of life as we lived it in 1975,
in the terminal landscape of Cleveland, with our drivenness, our rage,
and our dreams of breaking through.”

(2) Cleveland was, in the
early 70s, a nexus for all music. Record shops competed for the new and
cutting, for the complete and final word. Almost everyone I can think of
who was in a band was working in a record store. Not only the college radio
stations but even local commercial FM stations played radical music. So
the “scene” in Cleveland was compact, informed, tough and protected from
any threat of fame or acceptance.

(3) We were the Ghoulardi
kids.
It’s been suggested by any number of us that the Cleveland/Akron event
of the early 70s was attributable in large part to his influence. I was
ten in 1963 when he went on air and 13 when he left Cleveland in 1966.
After him I believe that I could only have perceived the nature of media
and the possibilities of the narrative voice in particular ways. Describing
how he devastated the authority of the media, and of the Great and the
Good, how he turned the world upside down, would take too long and would
be too hard to translate– a dumb slogan or two, some primitive blue screen
technique, and a couple firecrackers for 90 minutes on the TV every Friday
night, how unsafe could that be? You have no idea. He
was the Flibberty Jib Man.

(4) Don’t dismiss the power
of The Velvets. Yes, it was a big deal. It changed lives. Every band in
Cleveland in the early 70s could do Foggy Notion, for example– all that
unreleased stuff that would later appear on bootlegs– but learned from
cassettes. Doing Sweet Jane was such a rube thing to do it came to be a
litmus test for naffness– like doing Smoke On The Water or something.
Bands from AKRON would do Sweet Jane!

Rocket From The Tombs
almost seem now like some kind of early testing ground for the new punk
rock/avant rock. Their impact seems to be more in the way that they infected
other groups – Pere Ubu, Dead Boys etc – was there something so intense
and charged about that grouping that meant it would always be an unstable
entity? Does the fact that its legacy is so fractured bother you?

RFTT was always doomed. Everything
from Cleveland was doomed. RFTT is totally inconsequential and irrelevant.
Pere Ubu is totally inconsequential and irrelevant. That is the power of
Cleveland. Embrace, my brothers, the utter futility of ambition and desire.
Your only reward is a genuine shot at being the best. The caveat is that
no one but your brothers will ever know it. That’s the deal we agreed to.

Looking back at the
lyrical pre-occupations and the casualties that resulted, that whole scene
seems an intensely nihilistic/apocalyptic one – would you agree with this
perception? What was it that fuelled such nihilism? Or was it just an as-serous-as-your-life
approach to art?

I don’t know what drove it.
Of course we were serious. What kind of question is that? It was a compact
and isolated group of people. The rivalries were intense. The disdain for
anything anodyne was immediate and severe. It was a hothouse environment.
Lots of the people lived on the urban frontier. Allen, Peter and all the
crew at the Plaza were real urban pioneers. It could get weird. And we
were young. We had turned our backs on the hippies and we
had rejected the safe course thru college. (Until just recently
no Ubu member had ever graduated from college– or even lasted more than
a year! And we were smart kids and EVERYBODY went to college in those days.)
So we were drawn to art and in the early 70s rock music was the only valid
art form. Rock music was the cutting edge. If you were good you went into
rock. If you were 2nd string, if you were not quite good enough, then maybe
you wrote or painted or made films. Who cares?

How do Pere Ubu and
Rocket relate? Are the Ubu seeds to be found in Rocket or would you say
Ubu’s project was distinctly different?

I don’t know. They relate
because Peter and I went on to form Pere Ubu and so for us it was a continuum.
For Scott Krauss, for example, or Allen Ravenstine, or Tom Herman, it was
not.

Were you consciously
trying to bring the techniques of the avant-garde to rock music? Was it
as theoretical as that or was it more to do with taking rock ‘n’ roll at
its word and freaking with it?

Rock is the avant garde.
There was no question of taking one to the other. This is a racial problem.
Because you are a foreigner you don’t understand the nature of rock music
as a cultural voice, as the American folk experience, so you are always
looking to interpret it in alien terms. This was the problem with punk.
Punk
was an imperialistic grab at someone else’s culture fueled by chicken-hawkers,
multi-national corporations and a guy who wanted to sell clothes. It provided
a dumbed-down template aimed at the lowest-common denominator that sold
the Big Lie that art was something ANYBODY could do. Well it wasn’t. It
isn’t. It never will be. (I always had this problem at Rough
Trade in any Desert Island Disk debate– no one believed, that given one
record to take, I wouldn’t hesitate a nanosecond to choose John Cougar
Mellenkamp’s out-takes to any Smiths record. John Cougar was playing the
music of his culture with an authentic voice, that Smiths guy, hard as
he tried, as great as he was, as much as I liked what he did, could never
disguise the stone cold fact that he was a foreigner and once removed from
the True Moment.)

The liners to the new
CD make the point that if this grouping had released an LP it would be
seen in the same historical light as Horses, The Velvet Underground &

Nico, Kick Out The Jams and The Stooges 1st – what do you think? Do you
have any regrets about the fact that this group never made it to the LP
stage and were never fully documented? Are there any other RFTT jewels
hidden in the vaults?

Yes, I suppose it would have
been a great record. So? There are many great records. There are many that
haven’t been made. I am always proud to be counted among the Brotherhood
of the Unknown.

How do you feel about
The Dead Boys’ version of “Sonic Reducer”? What was the idea of the sonic
reducer?

I’m not keen on it– the
vocals are overcooked– but maybe also it’s because it’s the source of
the one piece of bitterness I have in my career. When Gene asked if they
could use some of the material I told him he could have it all, take all
the credit, but NOT Sonic Reducer. They could use Sonic Reducer but they
couldn’t pile on the writer credits. But they did. Gene and I remain friends
but he knows how I feel and we avoid the conversation. I think I explained
sonic reduction as well as it can be done in the liner notes.

What do you think of
the subsequent near-deification of Peter Laughner in the rock and fan press?
What are your memories of him now? How important was his input/role in
Rocket? What do you think he would have done had he lived? You ever read
Lester Bangs’s tribute to him? What did you think of that?

I have nothing to say to
outsiders about Peter. Do what you want. Believe what you want. Use him
for any agenda you have in mind. Leave me out of it.

Do you see a direct
line of descent from RFTT through to your current stuff?

Yes.

Do you ever get sad
and nostalgic for those “different times”? Could rock music ever be so
free and full of possibilities again?

I am not nostalgic. Rock
music remains the only music that is free and full of possibilities. All
the endless variants of dance / ambiance are a deadend. Jazz suffers on
without the human voice and rose as far as it could under that restriction
many years ago. World Music is MOR background music for TV shows about
women’s problems. No, I am not nostalgic. I still walk the narrow road.
Say, how’s things in YOUR town?

Do you think of Crocus
Behemoth as being a different person? How do you feel about that particular
incarnation?

No. And there was no “incarnation.”
It was simply an alias to disguise the fact that I was writing inordinate
amounts of the magazine. I happened to use it for certain kinds of writing
that became “popular” among the readers so I kept it as a commercial or
ego consideration. Also because it’s an artifact of the year I spent in
a White Panther commune it had fond personal memories for me but that’s
about it.

19 JULY 2002: “DISASTODROME!”

David Thomas

FROM UCLA
WEBSITE:

Disastodrome! is a 3-day
festival. Sixteen avant-garage heroes, boundary breakers forever outside
the world of music-by-numbers, are led into the Moment by one of rock’s
great prodigies and Pere Ubu founder, David Thomas.

Friday, Feb 21

Caligari’s Diner

Individual voices and unique
visions bellied up to the bar at Caligari’s Diner, featuring the pale boys,
and the electrifying Kidney Brothers, the duo that pinned a Purcell Room
audience to the back of their seats at the London Disastodrome. Plus absolutely
special guests.

Saturday, Feb 22

Mirror Man

The U.S. premiere of the
improvisational opera featuring David Thomas, Linda Thompson, Bob Holman,
Van Dyke Parks, Robert Kidney and always special guests. “A tour de force,”
says Mojo. “Evokes the restless hobo spirit of Harry Partch,” says Time
Out London. “A contemporary update of the Kerouac era,” says The Guardian.

Sunday, Feb 23

Custodians of the Avant-Garage

Pere Ubu, Rocket From The
Tombs and guests. Any appearance by Ubu is special enough but this night
features the one-off reunion of the truly legendary
Rocket From The Tombs.

 

AND:
CHECK THE UBU PROJEX WEBSITE.