***** ******* ** ** ** ** ******* ***** activist times ** indicative! ** 13may02 ******** ******** ** ** ** ** ** ** ******** ******** ** ** ... ** ** . . .318. ... Channel surfing some yesterday, I ended up on VH-1. I probably watched the last 2/3 of a show about Milli Vanilli getting caught lip-sinc'ing. "Girl, you know it's (not) true." I won't even go NEAR Hitler's "big lie" and any current parallels. But I should bring up something else about the music industry. When Milli Vanilli got caught there was outrage. Why? Because there was a belief that no one does that. There was a certain purity perceived. What happened when Britney got caught? She argued, she stood up and fought for herself. If she wants to do that, she can. No one's going to stop her, and no one's going to call her less of a rock star for it. She stayed ontop. There is no longer any outrage is there? Everyone seems to do it at some or all of their shows now, huh? There's no easy way to tell if someone you see on a television screen is lip-sinc'ing is there? [ http://www.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=179567 ] But there's something much worse. Memorize the lyrics to your favorite song. Sing them into your computer in something -- anything that resembles the right rhythm and meter. Just get it close. Anunciate every word right. Don't worry about pitch, don't worry about much really, just get it onto a .wav or an .mp3 and get it to me. Using just cool edit and sound forge I WILL GIVE YOU A MUSIC MAKEOVER THAT WILL MAKE YOUR HEAD SPIN. "Who is that. Is that me???" You betcha. Pitch, tone, volume, there's almost nothing that cannot be fixed now. In fact, we can build all that in a petry dish. You don't have to bring a single thing with you musically anymore. If you have perfect breasts, or washboard abs, no one is going to care. In fact, it'll serve the industry much better (how come whenever I see the word "industry" next to the word "music" I think Hormel??) if you don't bring any music with you. None at all. Your voice won't need to be perfect. It needs to be PERFECTIBLE. That is all. They can do the rest, and they'd prefer to. First look at Shakira. If you've ever heard her spanish music before any US corporations got ahold of her you'd know she can sing. She sings really well. She has a voice like no other. LIKE NO OTHER. No one sounds like her, and she sounds like no one else. And she used to bring that to her songs when she interpreted moods, and put music to melodies and rhythms in a way that made all your neck hair stand on end. Now, what. "Underneath Your Cloths." Who wrote it? Does it matter anymore? I don't even want to find out, really. The last time I went hunting for who wrote a song it was either a Britney song or a Christina song, and it was co-written with 9 middle aged white men. How do ten people set about co-writing a song anyhow??? Do they each push down one note on a piano, while the others build a chord? But I digress. Is there a sub-reason Shakira's "crossover album" is titled "Laundry Service?" Are there Mafiosos in Putumayo, Colombia and Houston, Texas laughing at all the rest of us? Especially when we pay $14 for it new? And last up, I'd better pick on Grammy-Nominated Craig David. Maybe he's talented maybe not. He's been "Grammy-Nominated" since before I'd ever heard of him. It seems he was born Grammy-Nominated. I doubt we'll ever know. At least with Shakira I knew how much talent she came up with, despite all that. What can I say? He's certainly not the first to do it, but he's letting them do it to his voice more than I've heard from anyone else so far. And you're going to laugh but truth be told, I've taken apart about a dozen hit songs this last year, and analyzed them. The ONLY (you heard right, the only) song that didn't have any pitch shifting was a Britney Spears song. She sings her own music??? How novel. The pitch fixer. Are you even aware it exists anymore? When Cher did it, did it bug you? At all??? It certainly bothered me. Not because of Cher, but what it indicated to me for the future of the music world. I asked myself right then, what if people get used to this? If we all put up with it? Craig David. Need I say more? It seems they've fixed more than half his notes. Will we ever know? Will it matter? It's a small lie compared to the bigger ones all around him, huh? All around us really. Will we spend our entire life in denial? #s http://newyorker.com/talk/content/?020513ta_talk_mcnamer http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=21559 http://www.leftcurve.com/LC24WebPages/artrat.html http://members.ams.chello.nl/jsteenis http://www.wave.coop/info/links.html http://www.notowar.com/media.html http://www.holt.org/images/koko http://www.globalresearch.ca http://www.newworldpeace.com http://nymphs.org/~bobcat http://www.dyne.org http://www.snowshoefilms.com http://www.holt.org/kokopelli http://www.thewoodstockspirit.org http://www.turner.com/planet/static http://www.hardtimes.com/recipes.htm http://www.webmaster.crevier.org/beatles http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=6375 http://artists2.iuma.com/IUMA/Bands/Shiitake_Mushrooms http://madison.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=4584 ASK A ROUGH QUESTION? How come when a friend of mine sent me notice about Patch Adams coming to lecture, I quickly received a spam at my ISP's email address from Patches, a colorful clown who's going to tell me all about quitting smoking if I'll only send them some nominal amount of cash? And how come when I wrote something unfavorable about Pfizer corporation including how they lobbied so hard for "fast-trac" which excludes product testing so now they can put narcotics like viagra, norvasc, zoloft, and zithromax right onto the market, whether they're safe or not. Woops - run-on sentence again - how come minutes later I get no less than five (count them 5) spams in my ISP's email inbox about how I can buy all the viagra I want online without even having a prescription? NEWSWATCH More Newspaper Consolidation a local update by Kristian Knutsen. (reprinted from Insurgent newspaper) I'm typing this in from a newspaper I just read because I find it very important to the grand scheme of things. I'll include this as a newswire article while I prepare it as a feature story too I think. -30-#marco#-30- In February, Lee Enterprises Inc., an Iowa-based newspaper chain with a 50% interest in MNI (Madison Newspapers, Inc.) announced a $694M deal to acquire Howard Publishing, Inc., a newspaper chain with 16 dailies nationwide, from New York to California. MNI is publisher of The Capital Times and The Wisconsin State Journal. When the two Madions dailies formed MNI, Lee, the owner of State Journal, became half owner of MNI, sharing control with the Capital Times Company. Currently, MNI contracts with Lee for State Journal editorial content, while The Capitol Times Co. is contracted for Times editorial content. With this addition, Lee will have a 1.1 million and 1.2 mil daily and Sunday circulation, respectively, and will be the twelfth largest newspaper chain in the US. While the issue of media consolidation is usually associated with global behemoths like AOL Time Warner, Vivendi Universal or News Corp., the newspaper industry has also experienced an ongoing wave of acquisition, consolidation and "downsizing." Ranging from giants such as Gannett (owner of USA Today and numerous papers across Wisconsin), Knight-Ridder, Times Mirror, and Tribune, to smaller players like Lee, the newspaper industry is dominated by growing chains. Many dailies have disappeared because of this consolidation. Often when company gains ownership of more than one paper in a city, it wil close one. In the last decade, the Lincoln Journal (one of Lee's cuts), Anchorage Times, Shreveport Journal, Tulsa Tribune, Pittsburgh Press, El Paso Herald-Post, and Nashville Banner have all disappeared. http://www.webactive.com/webactive/cspin/cspin980703.html [A realaudio interview with Richard McCord, discussing his book, The Chain Gang: One Newspaper Vs. The Gannett Empire.] http://www.shepherd-express.com/shepherd/19/12/news_and_views/media_musings.html [Dave Berkman column about "anti-trust violations, breach of contract, extermination campaigns, deceit, bribes, lies, threats, under-the-table deals, circulation scams, broken promises--anything that would make a buck..."] http://www.sfaol.com/mccord/mccord.html [other McCord articles in Santa Fe Always Online] http://www.greenbaynewschron.com/history [historical account of a small paper refusing to become Gannett-victimized with the "Chain Gang" story centered in its context.] ATI - No longer abusing puts and calls since 1991 .-. / \ .-. .-. / \ / \ .-. _ .-. / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / `-' `-' \ / \ \ / `-' `-' \ `-' ` ALIA'S STORY: DETAINED IN MILWAUKEE AND LATE TO A-20 Most of what follows is transcript of an interview Alia Kate gave to my friend Brian Long and his co-producer Stokely Baksh near a Taco Bell in Dupont Circle, Washington, DC., after she and her travelling companions were detained at Milwaukee's Mitchell International Airport on their way to joining us for a weekend of protests, rallies and demonstrations. It was disturbing to hear that night that most of the group hadn't made it, wasn't allowed to leave the ground, that they had been put on a "no fly" list, and that there was only a possibility they could try again the next day. That morning they made it on, but that caused them to miss all the morning marches, and instead they would meet up with us at a rally at the National Mall later that day. I could recount the rest of this story, but Alia's video interview tells all this much better than I could. As soon as we got to the airport we all went to check in. As soon as they got our names they said the computer was locked. The sheriff came and the first thing she said was grab your bags and follow me, we have to do some further questioning. I found out I was the second person that happened to. There was a database of names that the FBI or Air Marshalls had compiled and that my name or another name had been linked to a terrorist. So I went to an office for about 20 minutes. Three or four Sherrifs asked me questions. If I was from Milwaukee, if I lived here my whole life, what my nationality was. It turned out that I was part Iranian. They asked if it was my mother or father who was Iranian, when he came here, if he was a citizen, if I travelled anywhere outside the United States before. I've been to a lot of places, then they just told me that there was this guy who had been arrested and he was Indonesian and linked with Al Qaeda, and he was a bomb maker or something like that, so they were on extra alert. They also told me that only about four people a day are usually procedurally stopped. So after they made phone calls and checked with immigration to make sure I wasn't who they suspected. I had to have my bag screened extra, I had to go through a hand check of all my bags, then a special metal detector. I guess that was only the start of it because when the rest of our group came in about 20 more were flagged, and those were people varying from college students, high school students, nuns and priests were stopped. It appeared to have no order. The first thing that went through my mind was maybe it was because of my nationality. Because my name sounds a little Arabic; I don't know. As soon as people started getting grouped together then there were 20 of us, we started to wonder exactly what was going on. We didn't find out until later, they said they were holding us indefinitely until they could process us all through immigration. Meanwhile our plane left. Midwest did all they could but it was someone higher up than Midwest that gave the order. HOW LONG WERE YOU AT THE AIRPORT? We were at the airport from around 4:45 pm til about 9:30. One of us called every single major network in the city. By the time our plane was about to leave all of us had been processed but they still said no, we couldn't get on. DO YOU HAVE ANY SORT OF A CRIMINAL RECORD THAT WOULD LEAD ANYONE TO BELIEVE THAT YOU WERE A DANGEROUS TERRORIST? [laughs] No criminal record. Only thing I'm guilty of is being a peace activist. WHAT GROUP ARE YOU WITH? Peace Action Wisconsin. One of the sherrifs said early on that the reason we were flagged was probably because we were going to Washington to rally and lobby. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO WHEN YOU GET BACK? We're going in on Monday to lobby our senators here about Plan Colombia and we're also going to consequently mention what happened at the airport. We'll go back and do followups with all the news stations, letters to the editors, get the word out as much as possible. WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS ABOUT THE CRIMINALISATION OF DISSENT AND THE INCREASING EQUATING OF ACTIVISM WITH TERRORISM IN THE WAKE OF SEPTEMBER 11? I think it's absolutely rediculous. They have us flagged out for being some kind of dissident terrorist organization, and in fact we're coming out here to protest those things. And we're coming out here to participate in the democratic process of lobbying our congress and there they are stopping our democratic rights, they're violating our rights. IS THIS THE FIRST TIME YOU'VE FLOWN SINCE SEPTEMBER 11TH? Yes. I was no where near expecting any of this to happen. SO YOU'RE THINKING OF CHANGING ANY PLANS? Actually I'm coming back here again soon. HAVE FUN It'll be interesting. [ref]=[http://www.progressive.org/webex/wxmc042702.html] [ref]=[http://dc.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=21891] [ref]=[http://mke.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=278] Well, that's about it for 318, huh? Send good stuff to ati@etext.org Bad stuff to primeanarchist@thepentagon.com The Zine's semi-official website is at: http://www.thepentagon.com/primeanarchist http://www.thepentagon.com/schoolofamericas or http://www.thepentagon.com/soa for all things reconsidered. Oh, and if you've got sense, you'll dial 1-860-887-2600 extention 5293