Seed Newsvine
Saturday, June 25, 2005
Some ammo for your "friendly" recruiter....
"A teacher for 30 years, Truthout reader Kirk Stapp now faces a new problem: how to advise his students on the offers made to them by over-eager military recruiters."--TO.
He sent sent them the account below, which moved me to tears, so I sent him an email (mine follows the piece, FYI), and he has kindly allowed me to copy the whole thing here. --Julie
The Class of '05
By Kirk Stapp
t r u t h o u t | perspective
Friday 24 June 2005
After a marine or army recruiter visits Mammoth High School, students frequently ask me questions about my military experience in Vietnam. Eventually, these conversations lead to a single question: Should I enlist?
Advice can carry a heavy burden in shaping a seventeen-year-old's future: employment, culinary school, a community college, a UC, a tour in Iraq, an amputated leg, a lifetime full of nightmares, cancer from the hundreds of tons of depleted uranium used in US and British munitions, a flag-draped coffin.
Ryan (not the student's real name): "The recruiter said that my ASVAB (Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery) scores were so high that I could become a helicopter mechanic or even go to officer's candidate school."
"You know, if you enlist, you're going to end up serving a tour or two in Iraq or Afghanistan." There is an awkward moment of silence. "If you're smart enough to have options in the military, why don't you go to college?"
Ryan hesitates: "My folks said they could help me pay for books, but that's about it. They can't afford to ..." There is a pause - then a glimmer of hope: "The recruiter said that if I enlisted I would receive ten thousand dollars, an enlistment bonus, and thousands more in college tuition assistance when I get out." If you get out. He's looking for an opening. It's not "Should I enlist?" He wants to know why he shouldn't enlist.
"What do you think?" Ryan asks, while looking at the floor.
I think recruiters target poor kids. The chance of Ryan's being killed in Iraq or Afghanistan are minuscule. The chance of his losing a leg or arm or eye are probably less than two percent. Sadly, the chances of his suffering from exposure to radiation are probably astronomically high given the fact that hundreds of tons of depleted uranium munitions have been expended in Iraq during the first gulf war and Bush's crusade.
The idea of advising Ryan to not serve his country is repulsive to me. Americans have always served ideas bigger than themselves: "freedom," "opportunity," "liberty," "justice," "truth," "equality." Most of these ideas are enshrined in our Constitution: they are called the Bill of Rights.
Ryan hands me an Army National Guard brochure: "BE ONE OF AMERICA'S MOST POWERFUL WEAPONS." "Citizen. Soldier. Defender of Freedom." "Your country needs you."
"Ryan, you're not American's most powerful weapon and you're not an army of one. You also need to know that there were no weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq, there was no link between Saddam Hussein, al-Qaeda and 9/11, and the people in Iraq, at least the Shia, didn't vote because of Mr. Bush's Iraqi Freedom; they voted because the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani issued a fatwa - a religious order - vote or go to purgatory or wherever Muslims go. They also voted because they wanted American troops our of their country." There is another prolonged pause.
"What the recruiter won't tell you, Ryan - or for that matter, what most American newspapers won't print - is that not only have we killed over a hundred thousand Iraqis, demolished many of their cities, allowed their museums to be ransacked, crippled their water and electrical system, desecrated their Qur'an; but we also sold over 200 state-owned Iraqi enterprises to foreigners, multinationals like Halliburton - and Iraqis aren't even entitled to any of the contracts to rebuild their own country. We've decimated their country and economy. And then there are the US prison camps - Abu Ghraib, Bagram Air Force Base, and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba - it's much worse than a "few bad apples," we're torturing people to death. Amnesty International has branded the US prison camps a human rights failure. Muslims around the world fear us and hate us. We've lost the moral high ground."
Ryan is intensely staring at his hands; his fingers are claws. He wants to know why he shouldn't enlist.
"Mr. Stapp, didn't you enlist during the Vietnam War?"
"Yes!"
"Why did you enlist?"
"For the GI Bill, so I could go to college - my family was poor; because I thought it was the right thing to do; I didn't know any better; I just signed up."
Ryan unlocked his fingers, placed his hands palm down on the desk, extended his fingers, slumped in is chair.
"Ryan, let me ask you this: why wouldn't the recruiter let you bring your enlistment papers to school for me to read?"
There is an tense silence. He still wants to know why he shouldn't join.
"Okay - if you are going to enlist, make sure you get everything the recruiter promises you - in writing. Your enlistment papers are a contract with Uncle Sam. If they promise you enlistment bonus money, or free tuition money, or officer's candidate school, make sure you get it in writing. And before you sign any enlistment papers, please bring a copy to school so I can read them and talk to you about what's in them, what they mean. And one other thing, promise me - promise me - if you do end up in Iraq and you encounter a destroyed Iraqi tank or armored vehicle, stay the hell away from it. It was probably destroyed with depleted uranium munitions, which means if you breathe any of the contaminated dust, you could get cancer. Of course, the army will deny that DU can cripple you, but over 200,000 troops who returned from the 1991 Gulf War are now dead or debilitated with ailments ranging from leukemia to kidney failure to brain damage: all attributed to service in Iraq - that's 1 in 3!"
"The recruiter said I would be stopping terrorism - stopping another 9/11."
I am almost shouting through clenched teeth. "Afghanistan was about stopping al-Qaeda and terrorism. The war in Iraq isn't about stopping terrorism. It's about oil or egos. According to a recently released secret British memo, the intelligence and the facts for going to war in Iraq were 'fixed' by the Bush administration eight months before the war was started. Today, ninety-five percent of the fighters in Iraq - fighting against American soldiers - are Iraqi nationals, not foreign fighters or bloodthirsty fanatics or insurgents. The Iraqis view the US-led forces as 'occupiers' not 'liberators.' We're increasing terrorism. Last year, terrorist incidents were at a 20-year high, and they have increased five times since then. We're making America and the world less safe." Ryan is looking at his hands again. I lower my voice: "Iraq is drifting into chaos and taking the US and the Muslim world with it."
Ryan stops listening. After a brief silence, he changes the subject: a few comments about teachers, friends, the end of the school year. There is a clumsy parting. "Take care, Ryan."
Ryan is a pragmatist and an unwitting patriot. A long time ago I taught a unit about war poetry. Talking to Ryan, I am reminded of the ending of Kipling's poem, "Epitaphs of the War" - "If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Kirk Stapp can be reached by email.
Dear Kirk,
Thank you so much for this! Would you mind if I copied it on my blog? See below for link.
I have a 12 year old son about to enter a public junior high in California. He's been privy to my frequent anti-Iraq war rantings, and tho he plays the usual airsoft battles and gaming with friends, he is aware of all the things you told Ryan about this war. All 5 of his best buds, whom I love dearly, are mostly aware, too, and even tho I get that deep sigh from Jackson when I holler at the radio one more time with them in the car, I thank Pacifica Radio for being there when I can get it, and truthout every day for being my homepage. I'm a subscriber.)I am thankful that my son has been raised in a home where there is no incoming TV since 1996. He sees it at a couple friends, and when we're in hotels, but his buddies are usually here at our place...and we watch a lot of DVDs. I'm afraid he IS a movieholic.
My point is, I'm with you trying to spread the knowledge of WHY it is a bad decision to be recruited during THIS war, and as a point of fact, kids should read WR Pitt's piece today about the unspoken fact of our nation's economy being based on the Military Industrial Complex's need to perpetuate itself through CREATING endless war (see also Gore Vidal, but you already know this.)
Thank you also for your service in Viet Nam. We have a paraplegic friend having trouble getting benefits for his MS which was probably caused by Agent Orange. He's in litigation. I'm from Iowa, land of the veteran, and to breathe of these things in any social situation brings inflammation, but I really like the way you handled it by saying, and I quote you here, "The idea of advising Ryan to not serve his country is repulsive to me. Americans have always served ideas bigger than themselves: "freedom," "opportunity," "liberty," "justice," "truth," "equality." Most of these ideas are enshrined in our Constitution: they are called the Bill of Rights." And then, Ryan showed you the brochure and you refuted the Army National Guard's claims. You are so right. This has to be, above all, A CONVERSATION. But it has to be the conversation on everyone's lips. We can't be discussing Michael Jackson, ( thank god that's over, but I bet Bush is nervous...See Dick and Karl run to find something else to talk about-like Iran...), or American Idol, or Desperate Housewives or LOST. Why is it always TV? "Kill your TV." They don't talk about the Downing Street Memo or any of the things you told Ryan on it, anyway.
China is buying Maytag. I come from the town in Iowa where they used to make every Maytag washer you ever saw. There is a Wal Mart there, and a state prison, too, so my home town is DYING. But the supreme court, even the "Clinton nominees" voted to keep letting that happen and to kick homeowners out to do that yesterday... I'm rambling, and my son and his friend want to go for a swim. Next year, someone from JROTC will be visiting THEM.
01:04 Posted in Blog, Games, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Politics
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
COURAGE TO RESIST
May 2, 2005
We urge you to join us in a "National Day of Action for GI Resisters" on Tuesday May 10, 2005. This is the day before the US military is planning to bring sailor Pablo Paredes and soldier Kevin Benderman before military court martial tribunals for their opposition to the Iraq War. They face forfeiture of pay and benefits, and military jail time.
On December 6, 2004, Navy Petty Officer Pablo Paredes refused to board his ship as it left the San Diego Naval Station in support of the Iraq War and occupation. At the time of his refusal, Pablo said he hoped his protest might inspire other GI's to refuse to take part in the war.
On January 5, 2005, Army Sgt Kevin Benderman refused to deploy for a second tour of duty in Iraq with the Army's Third Infantry Division. At the same time seventeen other soldiers from his unit went AWOL, two tried to kill themselves and one had a relative shoot him in the leg to avoid deploying.
Both men applied for discharge from the US military as conscientious objectors. The military has wrongly rejected both claims.
It's time for us to escalate public pressure and action in support of Pablo, Kevin and the thousands of other courageous men and women who have followed their conscience to uphold international law and to take a principled stand against the unjust, illegal war and occupation of Iraq. It's time we had their backs.
Objection and resistance by military servicepersons is a healthy and important assertion of Democracy in a country where the decisions to invade Iraq, to maintain an occupation, and engage in widespread human right violations and torture were made undemocratically in violation of international law and based on continuing lies and disinformation.
Please join us by organizing a public demonstration, vigil or rally of support on May 10. Every action, no matter how large or small is important.
Also,
-
Send letters of support and donations to cover legal fees to Pablo and Kevin via their websites listed below.
-
Come to San Diego, California (Pablo) or Fort Stewart, Georgia (Kevin) to show your support during their trials.
-
Write letters to the editor, and help educate your organization, church, union, school, co-workers and community.
Resisting illegal occupation and war is not a crime! The right to conscientious objection is being systematically violated by the military. Those objectors who are publicly asserting their rights are being singled out for punishment. We demand that military personnel retain their right to follow their conscience, publicly dissent and that their basic democratic rights be respected.
A better world is possible.
More info about Pablo Paredes:
www.SwiftSmartVeterans.com
More info about Kevin Benderman:
www.BendermanDefense.org
Left: Pablo Paredes refuses to ship out in support of the Iraq War at the San Deigo Naval Station pier. Right: Monica and Kevin Benderman outside of Fort Stewart, Georgia.
(organizations listed for identification purposes only)
Organizational endorsers include
National Leaflet (PDF)
San Diego, California
BETTER LINKS FOR ALL THESE EVENTS WILL BE ON THE COURAGE TO RESIST.COM SITE. CLICK THE BIG BLUE LINK AT THE BOTTOM OF TODAY'S ENTRY! or download the pdf and write in the info for your hood and post.
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 7 PM
"Vocies of Resistance" featuring Pablo Paredes, Adian Delgado,
and Camilo Mejia at the Bayview Babtist Church, 6134 Benson
Ave (at 61st St, between Imperial Ave and Skyline Dr)
Contact:
solidaritywithpablo@yahoo.com
Event info: graphic
New York City, New York
Tuesday, May 10 ~ Evening
Details coming soon.
Orlando, Florida
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 11 AM-1 PM
Military Recruiting Center, Herndon Shopping Plaza at Colonial and Maguire Streets
Contact: orlando@notinourname.net
San Francisco, California
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 12 Noon
War Memorial Veterans Building
401 Van Ness (across from City Hall, near Civic Center BART)
Contact: courage@riseup.net
Event info: leaflet (PDF)
Also, a car caravan is being organized to leave from the protest to travel directly
to San Diego for Pablo's court martial May 11-13. Contact the email above for
more info.
Ventura, California
Tuesday, May 10 ~ 12 Noon
Ventura Government Center, corner of Victoria and Telephone
Contact: nionvtc@riseup.net
Please send us a note letting us know of what you have planned: courage@riseup.net
COURAGE TO RESIST is a new group of concerned community members, veterans and military families organizing support for military objectors to illegal war and occupation and the underlying policies of empire. We have adopted a people power strategy to weaken the pillars that support the Iraq war and occupation by supporting GI resistance, which together with counter-recruitment and draft resistance work can remove the supply of obedient troops.
12:55 Posted in Blog, Leisure, Rapture Index = 0, Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Politics
Monday, February 21, 2005
Save the Arctic Wildlife Refuge!
16:00 Posted in Leisure, Rapture Index = 0, Science, Travel, Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this
Tuesday, February 08, 2005
Came So Far For Leonard Cohen
Review of the Show From the Sydney Morning Herald.....
with my boldface in your face! It was such an honor working with everyone again on this great music, and an Australian woman named Lian is making a documentary film on Leonard for which some of the concert, rehearsals and interviews with artists was filmed. Scotty has beamed most of me back, but some is still on Cloud Nine....
Came So Far For Beauty
By Bernard Zuel
January 31, 2005
Page Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, January 28
In Leonard Cohen's 1973 song A Singer Must Die, presenting himself
before a panel of stern judges he declares: "I'm sorry for smudging the
air with my song." Some smudge. Some song.
That smudge's lasting imprint on several generations of singers and
fellow songwriters is the subtext of what simplistically would be
called a tribute show but in effect was a celebration of song. Spread
across nearly four hours it was as strong on interpretation as it was
light on unnecessary reverence; as steeped in Jacques Brel and country
music as German cabaret and folk; as joyous as it was moving.
You could see that with a cocked-hip Jarvis Cocker wholly inhabiting
Death of a Ladies Man (in duet with Beth Orton) and bringing a
self-mocking playboy touch to I Can't Forget. And certainly it was
there in Nick Cave, who made us re-evaluate one of Cohen's more
contentious songs, Diamonds In The Mine - "a nasty Leonard Cohen song"
he cheerfully declared - by playing up some Vegas sleaze while the
always impressive and flexible backing group briefly turned into Elvis
Presley's TCB band.
Not that the evening's stars were only the best-known faces. The
Handsome Family took and gave great delight by relocating A Heart With
No Companion to the Kentucky hills, while Teddy Thompson (whose mother
Linda Thompson earlier had hushed the room with The Story of Isaac)
found a bruised centre to lines such as "I choose the rooms that I live
in with care/the windows are small and the walls almost bare".
And in the category of "where the hell has he been hiding?" was the
hulking, shambling figure of New York singer Antony, who left open
mouths on and off the stage with his heart-piercing explorations of The
Guests and the prayer-like If It Be Your Will. (He's playing tonight at
the Vanguard and must be seen.)
What was staggering was how each time you thought the night had just had its peak someone else would stroll on stage and give you another one. And then another. For example, Rufus Wainwright's version of Hallelujah, which escaped from the shadow of Jeff Buckley's seemingly definitive interpretation with an elegant but effortlessly transporting take, is the kind of song that would climax any regular show, but here was presented early in the first set. Three songs later a former Cohen backing vocalist, Julie Christiansen, beautifully balanced The Singer Must Die between pathos and humour and upped the ante again.
Martha Wainwright's bared-to-the-bone Tower of Song was matched by her
appearance with her mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, on a
spare but riveting You Know Who I Am. But soon after that came Perla
Batalla, the other of Cohen's long-term backing vocalists, delivering a
rich, passionate exploration of Bird On a Wire.
It was a wondrous night. A long, winding, rich and constantly rewarding
evening brought to us by the musical equivalent of a fantasy football
team whose dedication was to the work and not the ego.
Somewhere in California you imagine the droll Mr Cohen hearing this and
saying to them, "I thank you, I thank you for doing your duty/you
keepers of truth, you guardians of beauty".
19:40 Posted in Blog, Film, Music to listen to..., Travel | Permalink | Comments (1) | Email this | Tags: Music and Culture
Saturday, January 15, 2005
More on the Cohen thing....
He's their man
January 2, 2005
Leonard Cohen, who for the past decade has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism.
Photo: Supplied
Leonard Cohen inspires an uncommon kind of devotion among his fans, as the all-star line-up at a tribute concert in Sydney proves. Guy Blackman reports.
"I don’t think he plans on performing any more, and now he doesn’t have to because we’re doing it,” American music industry veteran Hal Willner says of Leonard Cohen. “He is really happy, he has been totally supportive in every way.”
Willner — who has worked with everyone from Sting to Sun Ra and whose credits as a movie soundtrack director include Gangs of New York and Robert Altman’s Short Cuts — is the man behind Came So Far For Beauty, an all-star concert tribute to the music of Leonard Cohen.The concert will be performed for three nights only at the Sydney Opera House later this month, as part of the Sydney Festival.
Already in his 30s when he had his first musical success, the Canadian-born Cohen is now 70. For the past decade he has been a reclusive devotee of Zen Buddhism. It seems unlikely he will ever return to live performance.
Cohen was a respected but relatively obscure poet and novelist in 1968 when his first (and still his most famous) song, Suzanne, introduced a literate, decadent and world-weary romantic vision to the world of pop music. His subsequent body of work, consisting of just 11 studio albums recorded over five decades, has become the subject of more serious analysis and feverish discussion than virtually anyone bar Bob Dylan.
“I just adore Leonard Cohen’s music,” says Willner. “I know it backwards and forwards. So the opportunity to do what I call an exploration or a dissection of his music is fantastic. Hey — I get to choose the set list!”
And the line-up. The hand-picked cast is impeccable, comprising Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Rufus and Martha Wainwright, Linda and Teddy Thompson, the Handsome Family and Cohen back-up singers Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen.
Each night these 13 performers will present 31 songs from Cohen’s total canon of 101, with the backing of a nine-piece band.
The show has already been staged in New York and Brighton, England, to uniformly rave reviews — no small feat for a night dedicated to a man whose music inspires such fierce devotion. Late last year Nick Cave told The Age’s Patrick Donovan how Came So Far For Beauty managed to come as far as Australia.
“Hal’s events are notoriously ramshackle, with lots of different people singing,” he said. “In Brighton, it somehow clicked together, and after that we got offers from all over to do more stuff. But we didn’t want to spend the next year doing tributes to Leonard Cohen — we all have other things to do. But the Sydney Opera House is too interesting to pass up.”
Cave is a Cohen fanatic and his version of Cohen’s Tower of Song was included on I’m Your Fan, a tribute album compiled by French rock magazine Les Inrockuptibles in the early 1990s. At that time, Cave was asked how he first fell under Cohen’s spell. “I discovered Leonard Cohen with (his third album) Songs of Love And Hate,” he said. “I listened to this record for hours at a friend’s house. I was very young and I believe this was the first record that really had an effect on me. “In the past, I only listened to my brother’s records. Leonard Cohen was the first one I discovered by myself. He is the symbol of my musical independence.
“I remember these other guys that came to my friend’s house who thought Songs of Love And Hate was too depressing. I’ve realised that this depression theory was ridiculous. The sadness of Cohen was inspirational, it gave me a lot of energy. I always remember this when someone says that my records are morbid or depressing.”
Cave first worked with Willner on a 1999 tribute to filmmaker and American folk music anthologist Harry Smith. Since the early ’80s, Willner has made an unusual career for himself by honouring the work of the world’s most intriguing artists, paying homage to such diverse figures as jazz pianist Thelonious Monk, existentialist German composer Kurt Weill, even Edgar Allan Poe and the Marquis de Sade.
Willner believes the grand theatre of American childhood in the 1960s was the inspiration for his career path. He grew up listening to the Beatles, watching the Rolling Stones and the Moscow Circus on the same TV variety show, hearing Ornette Coleman, Jack Benny and Orson Welles side by side on the radio. “It was an era when the Fireside Theatre and Bill Cosby were on the pop charts. You also had movies like Fellini’s Satyricon. That was the era I grew up in, it was my kind of vaudeville.”
This, however, is the first time Willner has paid tribute to an artist still very much alive. To him, the distinction is just an added bonus. “If he’s still alive, that’s great!” he says. “It’s important to me to have the approval of the artist, especially now when we’re seeing something that we’ve never really seen before in the history of music, which is artists making records 30 or 40 years into their career, doing music as good as it ever was. Some of those songs on Ten New Songs, or Tom Waits’ records, Bob Dylan’s records ... These people have been making records for 40 years. It has never happened before. Look at Sinatra — he had, what, five great years?”
Indeed, Cohen has been comparatively prolific in recent times, releasing two albums in the space of three years. Ten New Songs came in 2001, and was his first album since 1992. In November last year he released Dear Heather. Both continue in the style first adopted on 1988’s I’m Your Man. Their sound is so unfashionably slick, so full of dated synthesisers and soulless saxophone solos, as to be almost timeless. Cohen’s words drop deadpan over a bed of tasteful musical mush, more like a catalyst for the listener’s own emotional response than a direct portrayal of emotion itself. It’s a selfeffacing, almost humble style that accords with Cohen’s embrace of Buddhism.
It’s also an approach that strikes a chord with Rennie Sparks, of American country-noir duo the Handsome Family. “Unfortunately, pop music has become a lot about the personality of the singer, or the singer’s nice ass,” she says. “That’s not really what songwriting is about. A good song should be able to be sung by anybody, it shouldn’t only be the property of one person. That’s what I love about Leonard Cohen — his songs are like that. They’re very personal, but anybody can really sing them and feel them. It’s a magical thing.”
Strangely enough, not all of the performers assembled for Came So Far For Beauty are so fervent about Cohen’s music. Montreal-based Kate McGarrigle, who has been releasing folky, odd and always enchanting albums with sister Anna since 1976, grew up in the same city as Cohen, even attended the same university, but didn’t come to appreciate his music until she and Anna were invited to participate in the concert.
“Suzanne kind of showed up at a time when I wasn’t doing any music,” she says. “At that point I was probably much more into Motown. I never really listened a lot to singer-songwriters, other than Bob Dylan. So Suzanne kind of came and went in my life, and didn’t make any impression on me at all.
“When it really came to mean something was when Hal Willner asked us to do this. He gave us all these records to listen to, and we had to choose songs. We ended up choosing the very early ones, the very simple ones on nylon string guitar, because they reminded us of our youth in coffee houses in the early ’60s, of little simple songs with only three chords. So when we started singing songs like Winter Lady, we suddenly realised how good they were.”
McGarrigle’s children are much less off-hand, however. Rufus and Martha Wainwright, whose father is eccentric ’70s songwriter Loudon Wainwright III, are both huge fans. The flamboyant Rufus has described Cohen as the greatest living poet on Earth, while Martha has been performing Cohen’s Tower of Song in concert for many years.
Rennie Sparks, though, loves Cohen so much he has become more myth than man in her mind. She is one of the few cast members who has never met him, and would prefer to keep it that way.
“I don’t want to know about him as a human being,” she says. “Perla Batalla told me once about going to a dollar store with Leonard Cohen. I don’t know if I want to do that! I just want to imagine him alone in a cave with a little lamp, writing in blood.”
*Came So Far For Beauty is at the Sydney Opera House, Jan 28-30.
15:31 Posted in Blog, Leisure, Music to listen to..., Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Music and Culture
I'm coming to Sydney Opera House!
The third installment of the ROLLING THUNDER of Leonard's considerable oevre, Hal Willner's Came So Far for Beauty, an evening of Leonard Cohen Songs in which I have been honored to take part, will be heading to Sydney, Australia to three sold-out concerts later this month. Click above for more about it....
What's Cohen on
The 2005 Sydney Festival is about collaboration - that is why a brooding Australian rock poet, among others, is performing the songs of a brooding Canadian rock poet. By Clare Morgan.
There can't be too many occasions when Nick Cave fans would snuggle happily beside devotees of the McGarrigle Sisters. Brooding rock poet Cave sharing the same bill as trilling French-Canadian folk singers Kate and Anna? Hardly. And how comfortable would ultra-hip connoisseurs of Rufus Wainwright be cuddling up to followers of the oddball country duo the Handsome Family?
Pretty comfortable, as it turns out, thanks to Leonard Cohen. In a blueprint for the art of crossover, Came So Far For Beauty - An Evening of Leonard Cohen Songs brought together a line-up that showed no respect for musical borders, with folk-pop songbird Beth Orton, Martha Wainwright, Linda and Teddy Thompson, and former Cohen bandmates Perla Batalla and Julie Christensen joining the abovementioned artists for a one-off performance in New York in 2003.
The show was repeated last May in Brighton, England, and in the audience was Brett Sheehy, the hyperactive director of the Sydney Festival, who knew immediately he wanted the show for Sydney. "It was just musical heaven," he said.
Sheehy isn't one to think small, but with only eight months until the festival he was pessimistic about his chances as he dashed backstage.
He even admits to being a bit starstruck: "I was in this room with all this awesome talent, looking at my shoes and a bit nervous, and said 'Gosh, if anyone wants to come to Sydney next January then, you know, it'd be great'. And to a woman and man they said 'Yeah, let's do it' ... I'd like to be able to say it was all down to us, but it was delivered on a platter to us by those artists."
Sheehy was amazed by the mix in the audience. "There were the Cohen dinosaurs like me, the Pulp fans for Jarvis Cocker and the Nick Cave fans, then all the underground and avant-garde types who were there for Rufus Wainwright and all the folk fans for the McGarrigle Sisters. The floor was jumping. To feel in the audience the different patches when people were responding to their favourite artists was amazing."
Crossover is a big theme of this year's festival, with the Cohen event just one of several that feature what might seem unlikely collaborations. Take the festival centrepiece, The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets. The musical fable is based on a book by beat poet William S. Burroughs; Tom Waits wrote the music and lyrics; and it is being staged by ground-breaking director Robert Wilson. John Rockwell, culture critic for The New York Times, described it as a kind of hybrid of Cabaret, The Threepenny Opera and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
15:03 Posted in Blog, Leisure, Music to listen to..., Travel | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: Music and Culture
Wednesday, December 29, 2004
Help the victims
Following are some of the agencies accepting contributions
for aid to people affected by the earthquake and tsunami in
Asia.
OXFAM AMERICA
Donor Services Department
26 West Street
Boston, MA
12111-1206
800-77-OXFAM
DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS
P.O. Box 1856
Merrifield, Va.
22116-8056
888-392-0392
INTERNATIONAL FEDERATION OF RED CROSS/RED CRESCENT
INTERNATIONAL MEDICAL CORPS
Earthquake/Tsunami Relief
1919 Santa Monica Boulevard,
Suite 300
Santa Monica, Calif. 90404
800-481-4462
ACTION AGAINST HUNGER
247 West 37th Street, Suite 1201
New York, N.Y. 10018
212-967-7800 x108
AMERICAN FRIENDS SERVICE COMMITTEE
AFSC Crisis Fund
1501 Cherry Street
Philadelphia, Pa. 19102
215-241-7000
ISLAMIC RELIEF USA
Southeast Asia Earthquake Emergency
P.O. Box 6098
Burbank, Calif. 91510
888-479-4968
AMERICAN JEWISH WORLD SERVICE
45 West 36th Street, 10th Floor
New York, N.Y. 10018
800-889-7146
DIRECT RELIEF INTERNATIONAL
27 South La Patera Lane
Santa Barbara, Calif. 93117
805-964-4767
MERCY CORPS
Southeast Asia Earthquake Response
Dept. W
P.O. Box 2669
Portland, Ore. 97208
800-852-2100
INTERNATIONAL ORTHODOX CHRISTIAN
CHARITIES
Asia Disaster Response
P.O. Box 630225
Baltimore, MD 21263-0225
877-803-4622
OPERATION USA
8320 Melrose Avenue, Suite 200
Los Angles,
Calif. 90069
800-678-7255
SAVE THE CHILDREN
Asia Earthquake/Tidal Wave Relief Fund
54 Wilton Road
Westport, Conn. 06880
800-728-3843
( I checked the gushy corporate donor page against "choosetheblue.org"
and it looks to be as much blue as red. Let's hope the corporate
partners give a lot, too...)
I actually went to the web pages of all the charities listed in the New
York Times and left off some that looked too partisan, and American Red
Cross and a couple others that have been in the news as being shady.
If you'd care to see that full list, you can go here:
NEW YORK TIMES
Have a safe and strong new year.
09:40 Posted in Blog, Books, Film, Leisure, Music to listen to..., Travel, Web | Permalink | Comments (0) | Email this | Tags: The Wanderground