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Activist Times Inc. Issue 324
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ATI 324. Week ending June something again. Begun: 0206280813
> From The Executive Editor.
Another meme repeat:
French Onion Coup.
CD concept:
Make each of 4 rekkids a quarter of a painting.
So after you guy the 4th album it completes the
picture.
DID ANCIENT EGYPT HAVE A CNN???
When journalism, polemics and traditional "rule of
law" clearly fail you; it's time to whip out the old
metaphors. Or find some new ones. They may save your
life.
Ready for this one?
I awoke to it today.
7am. 27jun
I awake from a dream some auto-mechanic is fixing
my ex-wife's car tires and breaks for free because
I caught them in an intricate lie that once exposed
would not only take their store down, but the entire
chain.
They don't konw it but I'm humbly accepting their
terms knowing full well that my ex isn't going to
stand by without whistleblowing afterall. I'll hold
to MY word and SHE'LL take the chain down.
OK that was a dream. Are you ready for the profound
metaphoric reality?
Tibetans say we've been here numerous times before.
Some even know the number. Some know exact events to
come.
The George Bush family forced the ancient Egyptian
citizenry to build magic carpets, pyramids, food and
electricity storage on their own labor, from their
own pocket money and with early death of most of their
loved ones.
Why?
So that the George Bush's could survive a geothermal
full-scale nuclear war against the Mayans and the
Anasazi.
So that's the metaphor. There's a good chance it's
all about to re-unfold the next 10-20 years with new
scenery, new "players" but there's the same masonic,
caligulaic, sadistic George Bush family at it again.
I'll end by asking you. You don't believe in magic
carpets??
Then explain away why Christa McAuliffe died in a
space shuttle.
OK it's out of the larval stage, sure. It's almost
fully re-implemented, but there is still time. With
group learning we can dismantle the sucker.
Put it away for good this time.
What do you know?
marco
OK, Enjoy this zine. We got some peculiar emails
this week. Like addressed to us AND from us, and
it's nothing but spam. Stuff like that. But then
a few good gems too.
NUMBERS
http://www.mbeaw.org
http://www.chumba.org
http://www.ctgreens.org
http://www.fringefolk.com
http://www.distantsuns.com
http://thewalkfordemocracy.org
http://www.democracyrising.org
http://www.anada.net/links.html
http://www.rivalquest.com/garofalo
http://hometown.aol.com/rosaharris76
http://www.narconews.com/pageten.html
http://kumo.swcp.com/synth/janeane.html
http://www.cherrybleeds.com/index2.html
http://scene.textfiles.com/jasontwo.html
http://www.notowar.com/blastfurnace.html
http://www.neo-comintern.com/friends.html
http://stlimc.org/freeconomy/freeconomy.cgi
http://www.aircrash.org/burnelli/med101.htm
http://www.etext.org/Zines/ASCII/ATI/ati323.txt
http://www.sacred-texts.com/the/sd/sd1-1-12.htm
http://twa800.com/news/timesoflondon-8-25-96.htm
http://www.ververtasty.com/soe/files/soe-0088.txt
http://www.wardom.org/html/ezinearsivi/index.shtml
http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=25005
http://www.geocities.com/outlawmanjp/prisonstock.html
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=189139
http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=188316
http://www.indiemonkey.com/columns/stripwaxjello.html
LETTUCE
to ati@etext.org
the goverment censors all signs, books, protests, etc. about
knowlege and life to pacify the world. they are trying to make
it a conservative planet where the only reason of living is
to be successful.
-anon
<<< You have to read this out loud using
your best Don Adams ("Get Smart") voice. >>>
Man Tells Passer-By Cop About Dope
CANTON, Ohio -- A man boasting to a "passer-by" while carrying
a marijuana plant down the street ended up getting arrested by
a plainclothes police officer.
"Would you believe I'm walking down the street in the middle
of the day with this pot plant," Daniel Fornash of Canton said
as he walked down the street Thursday, according to police.
The passer-by responded, "Would you believe I'm a cop?"
Canton Detective Joe Mongold, who was returning from court,
cited Fornash with misdemeanor charges of cultivation and
possession of marijuana. Authorities said Fornash told
police the marijuana had been growing in the front yard
of a vacant house, where he had been nurturing it, and
that he decided to dig it up and take it home.
Hi,
Each day I post a freebie link or cool site link to the list...
well today it's called the "MYSTERY LINK"... what can it be?
Click To Find Out!
http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=239318
<a href="http://www.linkcounter.com/go.php?linkid=239318"> click here
</a>
P.S - It's a good one!
[ed note: this is a little too commerce-oriented for my liking,
but you really did get my attention on this one.]
Hey folks,
Well, the conference and festival in Missoula last weekend
was a wonderful thing, but attempting to cross the damn border
wasn't. I got turned away at the crossing northeast of Glacier
National Park yesterday evening. The immigration guy who turned
me away was very friendly, and we bonded around our appreciation
of acoustic guitars and Martin Sexton and other things, but then
someone produced a paper specifically warning the Canadian
authorities that I was planning on going to Calgary, and I was
turned away on the basis of having literature in my truck which
advocated "direct action." Those were the words he focused on
as grounds that I was up to no good. They also cited the themes
of the titles on my CDs and my website as additional grounds,
apparently figuring that since I'm obviously a leftist, I must
be planning on committing illegal acts in Calgary.
They said they'd be putting out an all-points notice not to let
me into Canada until the G8 protests are over, and that if I were
to try to cross the border elsewhere before the protests are over
I'd be risking arrest and detention until the 28th.
It seemed like they were willing to accept people who they deemed
to be planning on "peaceful" (read "legal") protest, and they all
kept insisting that Canada wasn't a police state, either that or
apologizing for it being one, depending on how one read them.
It seemed that many of the folks at this particular border-crossing
(unlike others I've been to recently) were genuinely annoyed with
the situation and felt stupid searching every car and interrogating
every person who crossed the border, as they're required to do at
the moment. But for whatever reason or combination of reasons, they
turned me away. If they were going to let me in, the next round of
questioning was to be carried out by a "regional intelligence agent,"
who was on her way to the place when they decided it wasn't necessary
for her to bother and I should just go away.
Needless to say, I'm really bummed out not to be in Calgary. It
occurred to me after I got turned away, though, that it could be a
theatrical piece of propaganda for my set at the Uptown to be broadcast
through the theater's sound system via some kind of internet connection,
and I could play the concert live from Minneapolis (with headphones on
so I can hear the audience in Calgary). The message, of course, that
we shall not be silenced, even if we're denied entry into each other's
countries. Seems like a neat idea to me, maybe it'll happen if the
organizers in Calgary like the idea and if it can work technically.
(Maybe while they're at it they could broadcast the whole concert on
the web...so others who got turned away could listen...)
Since we're talking about two days from now, I thought I'd send this
email out to folks now rather than waiting until I know more about this
idea happening, 'cause Rob Waite with Maine Indymedia is heading up an
effort to get the technical aspects up and running, and last I heard
he's still trying to find suitable contacts in the Minneapolis/St. Paul
area.
Tear down the wall!
Yours for the OBU,
David
FACING THE MUSIC
An Essay Sent In By Lazzaro
Rock stars and music-industry execs once ruled the earth, but now --
in terms of size and profit margins -- the music industry is becoming
the book business (minus the literacy).
BY MICHAEL WOLFF
From the June 10, 2002 issue of New York Magazine.
Hemingway had rock-star status (and even impersonators).
Steinbeck was Springsteen. Salinger was Kurt Cobain. Dorothy Parker
was Courtney Love. James Jones was David Crosby. Mailer was Eminem.
This is to say -- and I understand how hard this is to appreciate --
that novelists were iconic for much of the first half of the last
century. They set the cultural agenda. They made lots of money. They
lived large (and self-medicated). They were the generational voice.
For a long time, anybody with any creative ambition wanted to write
the Great American Novel.
But starting in the fifties, and then gaining incredible force in
the sixties, rock-and-roll performers eclipsed authors as cultural
stars. Rock and roll took over fiction's job as the chronicler and
romanticizer of American life (that rock and roll became much bigger
than fiction relates, I'd argue, more to scalability and distribution
than to relative influence), and the music business replaced the book
business as the engine of popular culture.
Now, though, another reversal, of similar commercial and metaphysical
magnitude, is taking place. Not, of course, that the book business is
becoming rock and roll, but that the music industry is becoming, in
size and profit margins and stature, the book business.
In other words, there'll still be big hits (Celine Dion is Stephen
King), but even if you're fairly high up on the music-business
ladder, most of your time, which you'd previously spent with
megastars, will be spent with mid-list stuff. Where before you'd be
happy only at gold and platinum levels, soon you'll be grateful if
you have a release that sells 30,000 or 40,000 units -- that will be
your bread and butter. You'll sweat every sale and dollar. Other
aspects of the business will also contract -- most of the perks and
largesse and extravagance will dry up completely. The glamor, the
influence, the youth, the hipness, the hookers, the drugs -- gone.
Instead, it will be a low-margin, consolidated, quaintly
anachronistic business, catering to an aging clientele, without much
impact on an otherwise thriving culture awash in music that only
incidentally will come from the music industry.
This glum (if also quite funny) fate is surely the result of
compounded management errors -- the know-nothingness and foolishness
and acting-out that, for instance, just recently resulted in what
seems to be the final death of Napster.
But it's way larger, too. Management solutions in the music business
have, rightly, given way to a pure, no-exit kind of fatalism.
It's all pain. It's all breakdown. Music-business people, heretofore
among the most self-satisfied and self-absorbed people of the age,
are suddenly interesting, informed, even ennobled, as they become
fully engaged in the subject of their own demise. Producers,
musicians, marketing people, agents . . . they'll talk you through
what's happened to their business -- it's part B-school case study
and part Pilgrim's Progress.Start with radio.
Radio and rock and roll have had the most remarkable symbiotic
relationship in media -- the synergy that everybody has tried to
re-create in media conglomerates. Radio got free content; music
labels got free promotion.
Radio's almost effortless cash flow, and mom-and-pop organization
(there were once 5,133 owners of U.S. radio stations), made it ripe
for consolidation, which began in the mid-eighties and was mostly
completed as soon as Congress removed virtually all ownership limits
in 1996. A handful of companies now control nearly the entirety of
U.S. radio, with Clear Channel and its more than 1,200 stations being
the undisputed Death Star. (Clear Channel is also one of the nation's
major live promoters, and uses its airtime leverage to force
performers to use its concert services, as Britney Spears and others
have charged.)Radio, heretofore ad hoc and eccentric and local, underwent
a transformation in which it became formatted, rational, and centralized.
Its single imperative was to keep people from moving the dial --
seamlessness became the science of radio.
The music business suddenly had to start producing music according to
very stringent (if unwritten) commercial guidelines (it could have
objected or rebelled -- but it rolled over instead; what's more, in a
complicated middleman strategy of music brokers and independent
promoters, labels have, in effect, been forced to pay to have their
boring music aired). Format became law. Everything had to sound the
way it was supposed to sound. Fungibility was king. Familiarity was
the greatest virtue.
Once Sheryl Crow was an established hit, the music business was
compelled to offer up an endless number of Sheryl Crow imitators.
Then when the Sheryl Crow imitators became a reliable radio genre,
Sheryl Crow was compelled to imitate them. (Entertainment Weekly,
without irony, recently praised the new Moby album for sounding like
his last.)But then, just as radio playlists become closely regulated,
the Internet appears.
"Suddenly there was another distribution avenue offering far greater
product range," notes my friend Bob Thiele, who's been producing,
writing, performing, and doing A&R work in L.A. for twenty years (and
whose father was Buddy Holly's producer), and who, in my memory,
never before talked about avenues of distribution. "And then, before
anyone was quite aware of what was happening, file-sharing replaced
radio as the engine of music culture."
It wasn't just that it was free music -- radio offered free music.
But whatever you wanted was free (whenever you wanted it). The
Internet is music consumerism run amok, resulting not only in
billions of dollars of lost sales but in an endless bifurcation of
taste. The universe fragmented into sub-universes, and then
sub-sub-universes. The music industry, which depends on large numbers
of people with similar interests for its profit margins, now had to
deal with an ever-growing numbers of fans with increasingly diverse
and eccentric interests.
It is hard to think of a more profound business crisis. You've lost
control of the means of distribution, promotion, and manufacturing.
You've lost quality control -- in some sense, there's been a
quality-control coup. You've lost your basic business model -- what
you sell has become as free as oxygen.
It's a philosophical as well as a business crisis -- which compounds
the problem, because the people who run the music business are not
exactly philosophers.
"They're thugs," says a former high-ranking music exec of my
acquaintance, who is no shrinking violet himself.
Such thuggishness, when the business was about courting difficult
acts, enforcing contracts, procuring drugs, paying off everyone who
needed to be paid off, may once have been a key management advantage.
But it probably isn't the main virtue you're looking for when you're
in a state of existential crisis. Being street-smart is not being
smart.In a situation of such vast uncertainty, with the breakdown of all
prior business and cultural assumptions, you don't necessarily want
to have to depend upon, say, Tommy Mottola to create a new paradigm.
For a long while, the management response at the major labels had a
weird combination of denial and foot stamping: putting Napster out of
business-then sort-of/sort-of-not buying Napster -- all the while
being told by everybody who knows anything about technology that, no
matter what the music industry does, or who it sues, music will be,
inevitably, free. Duh. There is, too, a management critique --
perhaps most succinctly put by Don Henley in his now-famous
post-Grammy letter wherein he quoted Mel Brooks in Blazing Saddles:
"Gentlemen, gentlemen! We've got to protect our phony baloney jobs!"
-- that sees record labels as generally engaged in the usual practice
of ripping off anyone who can be ripped off while remaining oblivious
to the fact that Rome is burning.
But for the most part, denial, and even the reflex to just keep
squeezing the last dollar until there is nothing left to squeeze, is
passing (labels have even recently awoken to the problems of dealing
with the radio behemoths and are frantically, and way too late,
trying to find reasons to sue the radio guys and gain back a little
leverage).I had a very nice sushi lunch in the Sony dining room the
other day where I heard about the generally gallows mood at Sony Music.
The recent past was very bad; the future was likely to be worse. All
money earned from here on in would be harder to earn. This felt like
acceptance to me: We simply don't know what to do.
The truth is, there might not be anything much to do.
Here are the choices:
If you're providing free entertainment, which is obviously what the
music business is doing, then you have to figure out some way to sell
advertising to the people who are paying attention to your free
music. But nobody seems to have any idea how that might be done. Or
you can provide stuff that's free, and use the free stuff to promote
something else of more value that people, you hope, will buy -- now
called the "legitimate alternative." (Putting video on the CD is one
of those ideas -- though, of course, you can file-share video too.)
Or sell the CD at a level that makes it cheap enough to compete with
free (free, after all, has its own costs for the consumer).
It's a spreadsheet solution. There will continue to be a market for
selling music, however diminished -- but it will have to be cheaper
music. Margins will shrink even more. Accordingly, costs will have to
shrink. Spending a few million to launch an act will shortly be a
thing of the past. (The formal catalyst of the beginning of the end
of big development costs may be the Wall Street Journal's story a few
months ago that precisely accounted for the $2.2 million launch costs
of a singer named Carly Hennessy, who went on to sell 378 CDs.) A&R
guys making half a million are also history (in the future, they'll
start at $40,000 and max out at $150,000). And no more parties.
And then there is the CD theory. This theory is widely accepted --
with great pride, in fact -- in the music industry. It represents the
ultimate music-biz hustle. But its implications are seldom played out.
The CD theory holds that the music business actually died about
twenty years ago. It was revived without anyone knowing it had
actually died because compact-disc technology came along and
everybody had to replace what they'd bought for the twenty years
prior to the advent of the CD.
The music business, this theory acknowledges, is about selling
technology as much as music. From mono to stereo to Walkman. It just
happens that the next stage of technological development in the music
business has largely excluded the music business itself.
The further implication, though, might be the more interesting and
painful one: You can't depend on just the music.
Rock and roll is just an anomaly. While for a generation or two it
created a go-go industry -- the youthquake -- it is unreasonable to
expect that anything so transforming can remain a permanent
condition. To a large degree, the music industry is, then, a fluke. A
bubble. Finally the bubble burst.
But not with a pop. It's an almost imperceptible, but highly
meaningful, alteration in context. Alanis Morissette becomes Grace
Paley. Bono becomes John Hersey. Fiona Apple is Joyce Carol Oates.
Moby is Martin Amis.
This is not so bad.
And best of all, our children -- all right, our grandchildren --
won't want to become rock stars.
--------------------------------
ATI - Not Your Father's Mustache
--------------------------------
REPEAT AFTER ME
john gotti's dead
john gotti's dead
john gotti's dead
john gotti's dead
the world is a little bit
safer to live in now
john gotti's dead
Mother's Day Proclamation, 1870
by Julia Ward Howe
Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or tears!
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies.
Our husbands shall not come to us,
Reeking with carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us
To unlearn all that we have taught them
Of charity, mercy, and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of the devastated earth,
A voice goes up with our own. It says,
"Disarm! Disarm!"
KNOCKITOFF!
Another list of virus' that tried getting in my ports:
12:50:54 AM 21 FTP Trojan
12:43:39 AM 2023 Ripper Pro
12:35:47 AM 1981 Shockrave
6:09:02 PM 1338 Millenium Worm
5:39:09 PM 1170 Psyber Stream Server
5:27:41 PM 1081 WinHole
4:14:42 PM 1042 Blah 1.1
4:14:45 PM 1045 Rasmin
4:15:35 PM 1090 Xtreme
4:16:23 PM 1097 RAT
4:16:34 PM 1099 BFevolution
4:35:54 PM 1269 Mavericks Matrix
6:28:43 PM 1207 Softwar
6:30:30 PM 1212 Kaos
6:35:23 PM 1243 SubSeven
7:15:46 PM 113 Invisible Identd daemon
10:21:43 PM 2001 Der Spaeher 3
4:54:22 PM 1090 Xtreme
5:08:56 PM 1225 Scarab
5:11:15 PM 1234 Ultors Trojan
5:23:56 PM 1256 Project nEXT
7:44:05 PM 2140 Deep Throat
8:16:51 PM 2300 Xplorer
9:25:05 PM 2583 WinCrash 2
10:00:22 PM 2716 The Prayer 2
6:42:59 PM 1080 WinHole
6:56:29 AM 1033 NetSpy
7:08:04 AM 1098 RAT
11:50:46 PM 1969 OpC BO
12:05:40 AM 2003 TransScout
9:43:28 AM 1492 FTP99CMP
9:46:03 AM 1524 Trinoo
7:23:08 AM 1050 Mini Command 1.2 Access
9:53:05 AM 1245 VooDoo Doll
8:37:04 PM 2600 Digital Root Beer
9:59:06 PM 2801 Phineas Phucker
[PAWN] (Prime Anarchist World Newz)
The Paisley Accord
India and Pakistan have announced a new peace agreement
after a 47 hour summit held in Houston, TX.
"It will be a lasting peace," said Ali Sikh Partition
at 430 this morning tanked up on coffee and french fries
at a press conference at the local International House of
Potatoes.
The accord calls for Pakistan to remove the letter 'K'
from their country name, which they did not agree to until
3am, according to Partition.
In exchange Paistan will receive all of Kashmir.
India must agree to never cook with, grow, purchase or sell
cardamom any more. Agreeing to that, India now owns and
operates a small chain of cider mills in Dallas and Fort Worth.
I end this zine with a poem I wrote a long time ago
when I lived in Colorado Springs in the foothills
of NORAD mountain.
Myth Of Freedom
by Marc Frucht
Coke or Pepsi?
McD's or BK?
Republican or Democrat
Yuppy or hippy.
IRA or Keogh?
A summer home or a Winnebago
Cowboys or NDN's?
Gay or straight.
Cops? Robbers? Rich? Poor?
Black or white?
Right or wrong?
US or them.
Are you with us or against??
Big choices, big deal!
Do you follow? Without!
Thus!
Wong, wong, wong. All night long.
Bright red right and rue!
Lower middle, upper middle - all of us poor.
What of a cop who's gone south?
how about gay and monogamous?
Straight but strange? Bi with attitude?
Whaddya wanna be when you grow up
Can't have it all, can't take it with.
How about neither???
Yippie schmippy
Demipublican.
Burger McBeef-
Pokesy cokesy, pepsi schmepsy
HOW LONG MUST WE TOLERATE A MYTH OF FREEDOM?
*&^%*&^%*&^%&^%&$%#$@$#%$$&*&)(*^&$^&
Well, that's about it for the E-ZINE
send any complaints or submissions to:
ati@etext.org
Go to all or none of our unofficial websites:
http://www.angelfire.com/wi/kokopeli/ATI.html
http://www.freespeech.org/kokopeli/grudge.html
http://flag.blackened.net/ati/zine/infomaniack.html
http://cosmos.lod.com/~ati
Our http://www.thepentagon.com/primeanarchist
seems to have died out. (good while it lasted I guess...)
