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Activist Times Inc. Issue 300
YIPPIE!!! Our 100101100th issue! Can you read binary?
12C for those Hex folks;
454 for octals.
*****
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***** activist
times
** incorporated!
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** ** ...
** ** . .
.300.
...
Loud? Film at 11.
Shoutz, greetz, & props to:
The Summer Twins, Emily and Fran (ready for the CNA?)
Thanatos796
Tammy P.
Gary and Cindy L.
Ceriddwyn54
Dr. Woods
Darron "No apology/No permission" M.
And especially Mr. N., whom we miss.
As you know, this is our 300th issue. However, dont look for
self-promotion or anything like that. Theres still work to be done.
The SOA/WHISC is still running, the WTO/GATT/World Bank is still taking
advantage of poor countries.
So when you finish reading, get off your duff and get to work to make a
better world.
And now:
the
Prime Anarchist Family Column
Here's to the left handed whopper!
I begin this by telling you that PMoore did 99%
of this zine, in both writing/editing, and
publishing while I was away speaking truth directly
to power. And how fun it was. Wow!
I'll add a numbers run and a short column and
it's on its way out to youall.
S/
prime
http://incal.net
http://66.56.40.6:7777
http://tazebao.dyne.org
http://www.whitehouse.org
http://www.emperors-clothes.com
http://www.newbreedlibrarian.org
http://www.portal.telegraph.co.uk
http://www.dxing.com/dxld1026.htm
http://www.reginafolkfestival.com
http://www.stompintom.com/Intro.html
http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj
http://www.imonthe.net/66wnbc/loud.ram
http://www.neo-comintern.com/friends.html
http://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/0109.htm
http://www.terravista.pt/enseada/3182/mp3.htm
http://www.heureka.clara.net/music/seizeday.htm
http://www.supersnail.com/webzine2000/2index.html
http://artists2.iuma.com/IUMA/Bands/Michael_Borkson
http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress01/freeh051001.htm
http://atlanta.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=2857
http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/index20011118.htm
http://www.burgerking.com/company/press_releases/04_31_98a.htm
http://www.burstnet.com/cgi-bin/ads/ad2624a.cgi/764/RETURN-CODE
My Dear Honorable Judge Haywood Turner:
I am writing you because a couple of the 29 SOA protestors fasting
in the Muscogee County Jail are friends of mine.
Thank you for your respect of not just rule of law, but also God
and history during this unique dialogue. It seems to me you notice
as do I, how historic your actions are this very second.
I pray that your wisdom to creatively resolve this impasse will
shine like some of the other beacons before us that leave Americans
looking proud. You know, like when the Amistad accidentally hit a
rock up near my mom's house in Connecticut and from that day on,
slaves had to be treated like human beings in the north, or when
Colonel Weidner announced to the Journal-Ledger a couple years ago,
"We have lost the information war," and not only Associated Press
picked it up, but Pravda, Le Monde and Al Jazeera blabbed it all
over the world. Or even when the Berlin wall came down and those
of us in the army signal corps those years following didn't have
to see lines drawn down the middles of houses anymore with russian
soldiers on one side and american ones on the other.
OK, I'm worried that this fast could endanger the health of these
men and women of conscience. But I also recognize that it's Gospel.
I don't think it's wacky to say my friends there are following in
the footsteps of Martin Luther King, Jr., Gandhi and Christ.
Do you think you could do the following two things?
1) Get them home for the holidays?
2) Say something about wishing we could have closed the SOA
years ago but are still looking for a way to save face?
Thank you for giving me some of your precious time,
Marco
[ref]=[http://www.soaw.org/Articles/current%2520info/new/soa31.html]
A song slamming the GE/Seinfeld/Kramer network? Yeppers!
Once upon a time, NBC was last place. ABC, which wasn't a Mickey Mouse
outfit then, was mopping the floor with its former sibling. How bad was
it? Stations that started with NBC Radio in the 1920's and 1930's began
switching networks. KSTP-TV, Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, the first NBC-TV
affiliate west of the Mississippi (joining in 1948) switched to ABC in
1978. On January 1, 1980, WBRZ in Baton Rouge, LA and WSB-TV (its radio
division one of the first NBC-Red stations, joining in 1926) in Atlanta
dropped the peacock and went to the Alphabet Network.
Fred Silverman, who was brought in from ABC after he put them on top
with shows like "Laverne and Shirley", laid an egg of gigantic
proportions. A Peacock egg.
At the start of the 1979/80 television season, NBC began its "Proud as a
Peacock" theme. Of course, Silverman hired an ad agency to produce an
uptempo theme song for the promotion. What Silverman didn't know was the
same ad agency that produced the jingle ALSO produced a stinging parody.
When Freddy did find out about it, he ordered all the parody tapes
confiscated and destroyed. However, a few copies still exist.
So, if you have a real audio player, you can download it. Heres the
lyrics... enjoy!
"WERE LOUD!"
We're loud! Uh-huh!
Say it again!
NBC....
We're loud! We're in last place
Loud! We're gonna fall flat on our face
Loud! Since Freddy came,
Our ratings always stay the same,
An 18 rating, a 14 share
Bet you wonder if we care...No!
We're just proud to be...NBC
We're loud! We're living in the past
Loud! The bottom's dropping out real fast
Loud! Of our boring shows,
Just watch us cram 'em up your nose
We don't care; it's all fair,
NBC is always there
We're not just proud, weeeee're also loud,
We're loud! We're louder than the rest
So loud! It doesn't matter we're not the best
Loud! We're gonna screw around
And run this network in the ground,
The peacock's dead, so thank you, Fred,
Yeah, thanks a whole looooot...
NBC, Proud as a Peacock!
[ref]=[http://www.imonthe.net/66wnbc/loud.ram]
(A classic t-phile__ sadly, things havent changed much.)
>From the Harvard Law Record
April 17, 1987 Vol.84, No.8
Transcribed 8/90 by Diabolical Ed
Reformatted 11/01 by deadly_admin
Holiday Inn, Cambodia BBS - 209/456-8584
The Far Right and the Censorship of Music:
An Attack on the Freedom of Expression
By Jello Biafra
Jello Biafra was until recently lead singer, lyricist, and chief
songwriter of the San Francisco-based punk rock group Dead Kennedys, one
of the leading underground bands in the country. He also operates
Alternative Tentacles Records, their own recording label. He came
fourth place in the 1979 San Francisco mayoral election, won by Diane
Feinstein. On June 2, 1986 Biafra was charged by the Los Angeles City
Attorney's office with distributing harmful matter to minors. The
charge stemmed from Dead Kennedy's inclusion in their third album,
Frankenchrist, of a poster by Oscar award-winning Swedish artist H.R.
Giger entitled Landscape No. XX: Where Are We Going? Biafra and four
other defendants intend to plead not guilty; the American Civil
Liberties Union is assisting in Biafra's defense, challenging the
constitutionality of the charge. Since that time, the Dead Kennedys'
have broken up, an event the associate editor of Rolling Stone magazine
termed "a real loss to the American scene". To raise the necessary
funds to fight this case, Biafra helped to form the San Francisco-based
No More Censorship Defense Fund. He now tours various parts of the
country giving talks on the issue of censorship, and performing "spoken
word" readings of his poetry and lyrics. His musical activities will
probably remain on ice for some time to come.
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
I was half-asleep in the attic of my rented flat on April 15th of last
year when I was startled by nine police officers tearing my place apart.
They had broken a window by the front door in order to get in. They
claimed they had knocked but I had not heard them. The police were
hoping, I think, to find the original Giger painting, or better yet,
Giger himself, and were disappointed to learn that the painting was
hanging in a private collection in France and that Giger lived in
Switzerland. With their vaguely worded search warrant, they looked
through so many places that it was quite obvious they were hoping to
find drugs or weapons as well as anything pertaining to the set-up of a
harmful matter bust. (The search warrant said nothing about drugs or
weapons.) They were again disappointed. They found nothing of this
type since we don't touch that sort of thing in the first place.
All this apparently started just the day before Christmas of 1985, when
a teenage girl bought the Frankenchrist album as a present for her
younger brother. Upon seeing the poster, their mother wrote a letter of
complaint to the California Attorney General's office, the Los Angeles
City Attorney's office. On April 15th both my flat and the offices of
the record company I own, Alternative Tentacles Records, were raided by
the police - three officers from Los Angeles and six from San Francisco.
Criminal charges were leveled against me, the by then ex-general manager
of our record company, the distributor, the wholesaler in Los Angeles,
and a 67-year-old man who owns the record pressing plant that actually
manufactured the posters and inserted the poster in the albums. The
charges were announced to the press on June 2nd, the day before primary
elections in California.
I see this prosecution as a direct result of a nation-wide climate of
hysteria created by an orchestrated power play by forces on the far
right to set in motion a pattern of censorship that will allow them to
censor anything they find 'objectionable'. There are already movements
to purge 'The Wizard of Oz, 'The Catcher in the Rye', and many other
books out of the public schools, and remove or qualify the mention of
Darwin's theory of evolution in school science text-books. The recent
U.S. District Court ruling in Alabama striking down the use of any
textbook that mention what the judge classified as "secular humanism"
resulted from a lawsuit partly orchestrated by the judge himself and
funded by TV evangelist Pat Robertson.
Yet rock music, and particularly underground and independent rock music,
has become one of the far-rights' most convenient targets. Ideally, what
such groups are hoping to do is set in motion a domino effect, similar
to what happened with 7-11 and other convenience stores pulling Playboy
and Penthouse off their shelves after that under-the-table threat letter
from the Ed Meese Inquisition saying that these stores would be labeled
'peddlers of pornography' unless such magazines were removed. Lo and
behold, less than a month later, the Wal-Mart drug store chain, with
stores throughout the Midwest, South, and Southeastern seaboard pulled
Rolling Stone, Creem, Tiger Beat and 30 other publications pertaining to
rock music off their shelves on the grounds that they too were
'pornographic'. Who was it that threatened Wal-Mart by branding these
magazines pornographic? Not Ed Meese, but TV evangelist JIMMY
SWAGGART! Since when has a religion-for-profit exhorter been allowed
wield this much power?
We have truly reached a low point in our history when self-appointed
guardians such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson are presented as valid
spokesmen for the American mainstream. Thinking people are aware they
represent nothing of the kind, yet at times it seems otherwise because
the far-right is better organized and more widely exposed than at any
time in the recent past. Their success so far in advancing their
adgenda is at least partly due to the fact that people are
characteristically silent in this country until something reaches their
own raw nerve and threatens their personal comfort and cocoon. When a
few loudmouths on the far right begin harping at grocery stores or at
local school boards, and the majority fail to take notice and respond,
the school board or retailer feels it has no choice but to give in to
the high-pressure tactics, exaggerations, and outright lies employed by
the far right.
Enter the PMRC (Parents Music Resource Center), a pressure group formed
by the wives of several Congressmen and a member of President Reagan's
cabinet. Like so many far right groups, they masquerade their real
goals behind the ruse of the 'concerned parent'. That time-honored cry
of 'what about our children?' has always been an effective tool for
getting attention.
The PMRC operates as a secret society, complete with tax-exempt status.
They claim they have no membership (only founders) and refuse to divulge
their sources of financing. Their start-up money apparently came from a
rock musician, Mike Love of the Beach Boys. Now their backers
reportedly include noted arch-conservative fundraiser and Reagan
kitchen-cabinet member Joseph Coors of the Coors brewing family.
The co-founders of the PMRC are Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary
James A. Baker III, and Tipper Gore, wife of presidential aspirant
Senator Albert Gore, Jr. (D-Tenn.) Their avowed purpose is to force
record companies to bypass the law and censor their own releases by
slapping movie-style 'R' or 'X', or at the very least Parental Advisory
warning labels on the album covers of artists they deem 'morally
objectionable.' What is 'morally objectionable'? According to the
PMRC's 'Rock Music Report', it is any song dealing with rebellion,
substance abuse, sexual promiscuity, perversion, 'violence-nihilism', or
their definition of the occult. Ironically, they voice next to no
objection to violent TV shows or opera and country-western music lyrics.
Besides a rating system, they call for lyrics to be printed on album
covers whether the artist deems it appropriate or not, and covers deemed
'explicit' to be kept under the counter. More dangerously, they call
for the 're-assessment of contracts of performers' they claim 'engage in
violent or explicit sexual behavior' on stage. Their so-called
'media-watch' asks citizens and record companies to pressure
broadcasters not to air 'questionable' artists. Many chain shopping
malls have already threatened to evict any record store that stocks any
item carrying any kind of warning sticker whatsoever, including the
'Explicit Material Warning Advisory' warning label the PMRC proposes.
This not only amounts to censorship, but a partial and all-too-ominous
black-balling of the artist himself.
The joke stopped being funny in the fall of 1985 when the PMRC wives
arranged for the U.S. Senate Commerce Technology and Transportation
Committee to hold public hearings on obscenity in rock, even though no
legislation was actually being considered. Five of the wives' husbands
were on that committee.
The mainstream record industry has been all too silent about this power
play towards censorship. Very few major artists, with the exception of
Frank Zappa, have spoken out against this subject in interviews. Zappa
has even wound up spending over $70,000 of his own money, and at least
one year of his time, trying to raise the awareness of music enthusiasts
to the growing threat of censorship and blackballing. Why isn't the
industry backing him up?
It appears members of the Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA) have agreed to censor their own artists by playing ball with the
wives in hopes their husbands will ram a tax on blank recording tapes
and/or cassette tape recorders through Congress. They claim this tax
($0.01 per minute of tape, $.90 on a 90-minute tape at the WHOLESALE
price) will reimburse musicians who lose royalties when listeners tape
their albums at home. This is complete fraud. In reality, 90% of this
tax would go DIRECTLY TO THE RECORD COMPANIES, with only %10 to the
artist, a $250 million windfall. Even the artists' 10% would be divided
according to whoever sold the most units, thus ensuring the smaller
artists would get nothing. This also means that if I were to buy a
cassette tape and a recorder to tape, say, a classroom lecture or
correspondence memos, I would wind up paying a royalty to Michael
Jackson. I hardly think that's fair, yet this is why major record
companies continue to cooperate with the censors.
Ours is a test case. I have no doubt that if someone as popular as
Madonna, Prince, or Ozzy Osbourne were charged as we are, the record
companies would give them the best legal help money could buy. But
Alternative Tentacles and I are a self-supported, self-managed
independent artist and record company, and are therefore the easiest to
destroy through bankruptcy. Los Angeles District attorney Michael
Guarino said on network television news that they picked us to prosecute
because "We feel this is a COST-EFFECTIVE (our emphasis) way of sending
a message that.... we are going to prosecute." (ATI Ed. Note: Guarino
has since openly apologized for bringing the case to trial.)
It is also curious that the record store responsible for the actual
sale, an outlet of the giant Wherehouse chain, was not charged in this
case, on the grounds that "they were cooperative and took the record off
the shelves." This same prosecuting official also told the National Law
Journal in the July 28, 1986 issue: "We don't feel that the City
Attorney's office is in charge of protecting [the daughter of the mother
who complained] from this: We are responsible for seeing that the Dead
Kennedys don't profit from the sale of this sort of merchandise [.]"
The major reason we are fighting this charge instead of taking a slap on
the wrist, paying a fine, and negotiating away the jail sentence is that
a conviction would have ramifications far beyond this case. A legal
precedent set by such a conviction could only open the floodgates
nationwide for further charges and harassment against other artists, big
and small. Not just underground artists, but also folk artists, as well
as some of the journalists who are being kept out of the country by the
INS would be affected. We hope that fighting this charge will help stop
this lurch towards blackballing dead in its tracks.
The rippling effect of a McCarthy-style chill factor has already taken
its toll. Contrary to media predictions, there has been no dramatic rise
in our record sales as a result of the publicity surrounding this case.
In fact, many retailers have already removed our records from their
shelves in fear of being dragged down to the nearest kangaroo court by
the local gendarmes. They know too well how easy it is to go broke
defending themselves, even if they win in court. People have written in
from all over the country, saying they can no longer find Dead Kennedy
records in their local stores, especially chain stores.
Another alarming example of possible blackballing is the banishment of
John Denver from RCA records. Until recently, General Electric, one of
the worlds largest arms manufacturers, owned RCA Records. John Denver,
a veteran and very successful RCA recording artist, included a song
attacking the arms race on his last LP. After his album was released
Denver testified against the censorship warning sticker proposal at the
Senate hearings. Soon afterwards, RCA dropped John Denver - someone who
has sold tens, if not hundreds of millions of records for them. Sure,
Denver's sales have been declining, but would RCA have dropped Frank
Sinatra or Elvis Presley? (ATI Ed. Note: RCA Records was purchased from
General Electric in 1985 by the Bertelsmann Marketing Group, a
multinational media company out of Munich, Germany.)
Turning now to the poster itself, when I first saw H.R. Giger's work, I
was very impressed, emotionally affected, and even uplifted by it. The
art that truly inspires me is the kind that jolts the dormant sediment
in my brain and gets thoughts spinning and whirling so ideas pop into my
head, and I am then inspired to create on my own. I had not seen any
visual art that had affected me this deeply since viewing the work of
Hieronymus Bosch. 'Landscape No. XX', in particular made me think, "My
god, here it is, this is how we treat each other every day in a
consumer-orientated society, intentionally or as a self-defense
mechanism. This is consumer culture on parade!" This painting portrayed
to me a vortex of exploitation, that vicious circle of greed where one
of us will exploit another for gain and wind up looking over our
shoulder lest someone do the same thing to us in return. I realized
that many of these same themes ran like a thread through the songs
slated to be on the 'Frankenchrist' album, which we were in the
process of recording at the time. I felt that we should include this
piece of artwork as a kind of crowning statement of what the record was
trying to say, musically, lyrically and visually. The Constitution
implies that it is up to the individual to make that decision, not the
state or self-appointed surrogate parents in Washington, DC to make it
for them.
We do not feel the mother who complained about the poster had a valid
complaint. Nothing we have ever included on one of our records or in an
album cover was intended to be harmful to anyone. But even if she
thought it was harmful it is the height of irresponsibility by a parent
to be so lazy as to expect the police to do one's parenting for them.
If my kid brought home something that I thought was harmful, the last
thing I would do would be to call the police and try to have the artist
arrested.
But let me mention first what I would consider harmful. If my kid
brought home something like 'Top Gun' on videotape, or one of those
blatantly nationalistic, racist, or sexist heavy metal albums that
promote beating or sexual assault of women, or some whisky-drenched
country-western song where the guy brags about beating or shooting his
wife, or a Rambo-type toy - yes, that would rub my fur the wrong way.
What, after all, encourages kids more kids to go out and get killed,
Ozzy Osbourne records or armed forces' recruiting ads? I do not feel,
however, that any of the above should be censored. That's not what the
Constitution says. I would rather reply to and expose stupidity in
media through my own artwork, and make it an issue that way.
Nor would I abdicate my parental responsibility and chicken out and call
the cops. I wouldn't even confiscate the offending article, because
that would not teach the kid that the article could be harmful or
misconstrued. Such an action on my part would only serve to reinforce
the notion that daddy is a fascist, or that daddy is mean, or worse yet
an uptight jerk who just doesn't understand.
What I WOULD do is sit down with the kid and say "Look, you went out and
brought home this item. Why? Why did you buy this? Why do you like
it? What do you see in this? How does it affect you? How do you think
it might affect someone else? And now let me tell you what I think of it
and how it affects me." A meaningful discussion is a far healthier way
to help nurture a loving family than is discipline with no rational
explanation to back it up. Such a breakdown in communication might also
encourage the kid to simply sneak the offending article home and hide
it.
More generally, Dead Kennedys have always used their art as political
speech. One element of the band has always been journalism. Through our
songs we have exposed issues around us that our audience might not ever
even have heard of otherwise, since many people their age who listen to
records were brought up on television and hardly ever read books and
newspapers.
If we are successful in defending ourselves on this charge, we hope a
dismissal will help slam the door on prosecutions of rock musicians for
what they say with their records, and artists and journalists for what
they say with their work. And perhaps, ultimately, we would be able to
send a message to public officials who think they need to hop on the
censorship bandwagon in order to avoid attacks from wealthy far right
wing fringe groups or attract funding from the same right wing political
action committees, by saying that perhaps this is not such a lucrative
issue after all since it makes the person doing the harassing out to be
the pompous jerk he or she really is.
Censorship is like that certain brand of potato chips. Nobody can stop
with just one. Well-organized and financed pressure from the far right
has already dealt a serious blow to what we see, read, hear - and
ultimately think. People once viewed as dangerous right-wing extremists
have succeeded in casting themselves as spokespeople of the American
mainstream. In their world music and literature can be judged harmful,
yet Star Wars is considered perfectly safe. And genocide squads like the
Nicaraguan contras are "the moral equivalent of our founding fathers."
Libraries and textbooks are under new attacks in schools. Many gifted
artists now face possible blackballing. The Reagan Administration, under
the continuing guise of a drug scare, is actively promoting urinalysis
and lie detector tests at work. Attorney General Edwin Meese has used a
wildly-contrived "study" of "pornography" as the first step in a crusade
to widen the crackdown on free speech. His commission threatens
magazine retailers through extra-legal maneuvers such as threat letters,
while he strives to pack the federal court system with avowed enemies of
Constitutional liberties.
A fresh PMRC media blitz again has them in the news, with new censorship
via warning label proposals. Their tone is more conciliatory now, with
their more volatile edges temporarily masked. They compare the rock
music they deem "objectionable" to the violence on television many of
the rest of us have problems with, yet they still concentrate their
attack on one form of music - rock - and barely address the issue of
television at all. What about all the families bombarded every night by
the violence seen on the six o'clock news?
History has shown us that any compromise with cultural vigilantes just
encourages more of them to go further. The hysteria sparked by the PMRC
husbands' Senate hearings is what gave Jimmy Swaggart's views front-page
respectability in the first place.
The rationale behind freedom of speech has always been that truth
emerges out of open debate. Democracy assumes a variety of voices, each
trying to persuade the other. Dissent is healthy, even when presented in
a manner that may seem abhorrent or obscene to those who fear direct
confrontation with the reality that surrounds us. Only an informed
population can make responsible choices.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Postscript: After this was originally written, Biafra was acquitted of
the "harmful matter" charges. Biafras second spoken word album, "High
Priest Of Harmful Matter: Tales From The Trial" (Alternative Tentacles
Virus 66) gives a first-hand account of the arrest, jury selection,
trial, and subsequent acquittal.
However, another controversy erupted in 2001 when the other members of
Dead Kennedys sued Alternative Tentacles and Jello Biafra. Three years
earlier, Biafra refused to allow "Holiday In Cambodia" to be used in a
TV commercial for Levis Jeans.
Unfortunately, AT and Biafra lost the case and are appealing. As of now,
Alternative Tentacles does not sell any DK music (save for "Fresh Fruit
for Rotting Vegetables"). The rest of the DK catalog is on another
label.
For more information on this case, please address all correspondence or
contributions to:
No More Censorship Defense Fund
P.O. Box 11458
San Francisco, CA. 94101
Well that's about it this week. This'll end with
a short encantation.
Prime Anarchist Productions wishes to thank one of our own,
PMoore for putting this issue out while the publisher was off
protesting himself.
Thanks for keeping us a weekly, bro!
Send all submissions, letters of intent and non-anthrax hoaxes to:
ati@etext.org
or click on the homepage at:
http://www.thepentagon.com/primeanarchist
http://www.angelfire.com/wi/kokopeli/cygnus.html
for back issues and to order t-shirts,
hats and FruktWitch Cookies.
Hurry there's only _00_ left.
Call 860-887-2600 ext. 5293 to say something positive;
or 860-887-2600 ext. 5293 to say something negative.
And remember, 2morrow is international day of attwoment,
so when you're done with your atonement make sure you "at two"
for all your sinful bellyaching about everyone else around you.
Dm
We are rising up
And our spirits are on fire
A7
Brothers and sisters
Dm
Spread your wings and fly higher.
(Repeat 'til the SOA is closed...)
