Helen Mirren is phenomenal. I have been a fan for many, many years, but just this evening for the first time watched The Passion of Ayn Rand. In it, Helen Mirren ascends to another plane.

Follow the link to hear to KMEC interview with Terena and me about Medusa’s Muse and the Punk Anthology, due for release Spring 2009.

Midnite Society

(3-21-2008. the interview is split into two parts)

About an hour into it Emilyn gave a shout-out to Boston punk, then I spent 10 minutes talking more specifically about Chestnut, Squallie, Faulty Conscience and the Swaggering Growler. (See previous post(s) for more about them.)

A big thank you to Emilyn, who is a fabulous DJ and host. We all had a blast!

ps. Emilyn hopes to be Boston-bound before too long; I told her she could expect a warm welcome from the B-town punk community.

Terena, the publisher of Medusa’s Muse Press, and I will be interviewed on KMEC radio (105.1 FM) in Ukiah, California, on Midnight Society with Emilyn, tonight (Friday, 3/21) at 8:00. That’s 11 p.m for you folks on the right-hand coast.

We’ll be chatting about Small Press Month, starting Medusa’s Muse, and our current project, a Punk Rock Anthology. If you live too far away from Ukiah to get KMEC on your radio, you can listen to it streaming from the KMEC website, or check out the mp3 archive of Emilyn’s show.

http://www.kmecradio.org/p/midnitesociety/

Terena will talk about the press and the origins of Punk Rock Saved My Ass (due out next spring!), and I’ll be giving Faulty Conscience and the Swaggering Growlers a good plug as I talk about my interviews with Chestnut Roadkill and Squallie Greenthumb.

For those of you who are in the Boston area, Faulty Conscience is playing the new warehouse in Everett tonight! Here’s the skinny… Everett Warehouse, 69 Norman St. Doors at 6:30 pm, first band at 7:00. ALL AGES!!! $5 – Cheap! The bands are: Superpower, Faulty Conscience, Colin & the Cancer, Lethal Erection, The Sex Offenders. The Warehouse is about a ten minute walk from the Wellington stop on the Orange line, and about a block past the Teddy Peanut Butter Factory. Go if you can! It’ll be a great show!

In other punk news, we are still taking art submissions for Punk Rock Saved My Ass. If you have a sketch, a painting, a photo, a reproducable tattoo that expresses how punk rock was a positive transformative influence in your life, send it to medusasubmits@medusasmuse.com and we’ll consider it for inclusion in the book.

Now tune your radios to KMEC, 105.1 FM, www.kmecradio.org …

Living in the dark like that.

Actually, mushrooms have an advantage — at least they’re outside, inhaling fresh air and absorbing nutrients straight from the soil (or dung, or compost, or stable bedding — it’s all a matter of taste). And even if they’re outside in unpleasant weather, they’re equipped therefor.

According to the American Mushroom Institute, which I linked through to (ooh! a daringly split infinitive!) from the Mushroom Council (mushrooms have a council?!), “Mushrooms are one of the most difficult commodities to grow.” This is because they would prefer to be living free, in a location of their choice, not trapped in some highly technical, computerised “growing house.”

Midway through my second Boston winter I can empathise. You have my sympathy and my support sister mushrooms! Don’t despair — I will come and rescue you!

If I make it down this hill without sliding into a power pole or a parked car. Perhaps one of those cars that’s parked just before the Stop sign, so that I have to swerve out into the path of vehicles swinging needlessly wide around the corner and accelerating up the hill, then swivel the steering wheel sharply right and hit the brakes hard so I can stop at the Stop sign without being in the middle of the road (or the intersection).

Don’t blame me for my bitterness! I grew up on a subtropical island. I was born for temperate climes!

Over at Medusa’s Muse we’re (the almost indefatigable publisher, Terena, & I) simultaneously giving ourselves a crash course in promoting our first book, Traveling Blind (buy it!), and figuring out how to infiltrate the world of (mostly underground) punk rock as we solicit stories for an anthology to be released next fall (which, if all goes according to plan, will be our third title).

The book will be called Punk Rock Saved My Ass, and the title describes in language as straight and to the point as punk itself what the common thread of all the stories — and artwork, comics, photos and anything else we can collect and reproduce in ink on paper — will be. Here it is in words less bald: transformative stories about the ways the the punk rock scene can empower people. Stories of a person’s journey through punk and what effect that has had on the way he or she lives and sees the world.

Finding people willing to tell stories that are worth telling has been an adventure. I started with a couple of former classmates in a graduate sociology course at Northeastern University who declared a little shyly but nonetheless proudly at some point during class discussions (the topic: sociology of deviant behaviour) that they were or had been involved in the punk scene. One of them suggested I try posting my request for tales on Boston Punk, a forum for — state the obvious — punk rockers in and around Boston.

Bingo.

Within days of my post I netted two bandmates (Faulty Conscience – check them out!) who didn’t know they’d both agreed to be interviewed by me until they discovered the coincidence in a conversation one night during band practice.

One had but a short tale to tell; the other has a story that encompasses most of his approximately three decades alive. This story he is telling and I am recording over the course of a series of interviews. This process started out fun and fairly light (it’s all relative), but a couple of weeks ago we reached his tale’s painful core, which we had intended to cover in one session. In our last meeting his flow of words, which had up to that point gushed so that my wrist ached and my hand felt by the end of each two or three hour interview as though it were seized in a rigor mortis of pen clench, sputtered and jerked for an hour and a half and then stopped.

“Let’s try and finish this part next time,” I said, mentally revising our sketched out schedule of sessions. He agreed, uncharacteristic relief in his voice, so we packed up and left the pub. We parted at the T station, and as I strolled along the streets of Cambridge’s Central Square back to my car I felt myself being hit by the reality of what he’d been through. Up until that night this process — he telling his story, me recording it — had been for both of us a kind of lark, fun and exciting because of the nature of the subject and because nobody else was doing this or had ever thought of doing this (as far as we know).

But that night the reality of an unrecoverable six years of his young life hit home in both of us. I realised that what I was recording was not just a tale of adventure and anarchy (albeit with a lot of suffering of all kinds) that ends in a happily ever after kind of way, but the story of an injustice and prejudice that cost a man six years of his life that should have been spent partying, flirting and setting out upon his path as an adult.

But, while he was taking his first steps along it, that path was warped and plunged into a dungeon.

…

More about how I’m finding garrulous — and literary! — punk rockers in the next post.
Stay tuned …

" ‘The best thing going for the Republicans in this election,’ he wrote, ‘is the weakness of the Democrats. There has never been such a motley collection,’ he said, ‘of what former Ambassador William Bullitt used to call "first-rate second-rate men." ‘

"But it does not matter. George Herbert Walker Bush [okay, the name gives this one away] will not be with us much longer. By next Halloween, he will be living somewhere in New Jersey not far from the Nixon homestead."

(Hunter S. Thompson, October 5, 1987. From Generation of Swine – Gonzo Papers Vol.2: Tales of Shame and Degradation in the ’80’s)

A friend just sent me a link to a Talk of the Town piece by Jeffrey Toobin in the latest New Yorker about Pablo Fenjves. (Dec. 4 issue; article posted on the New Yorker Web site Nov. 22)

What’s Fenjves’ most immediate and glaring claim to fame?

He’s the ghostwriter for "If I did it" — O.J. Simpson’s un-confession. A book that Rupert Murdoch, in a rare fit of apparent social sensitivity, put the kybosh on before it hit the shelves.

The article is interesting, informative and enjoyable to read, in standard Talk of the Town style, but the ending is priceless. Fenjves’ response to Murdoch’s cancellation of the book:

Still, Fenjves is undaunted. “It’s going to be bigger than ever,” he said. “It’s like ‘Ulysses,’ except without the talent.”

Will the most egalitarian of all modern inventions — the Internet (and, by extension, the World Wide Web) — become just another "them who has it, gets it" medium?

That’s the possiblity posited by New Yorker financial page writer James Surowiecki.

Surowiecki’s piece ran in the March 20, 2006, issue of the magazine, which makes it hardly a topic of burning immediacy, but I’m a little behind in my New Yorker reading and the possibility that Internet providers might — and would like to — charge companies who use their services more for better quality bandwidth, caught my attention.

As Surowiecki describes it, a bandwidth provider, e.g. AT&T or Comcast, establishes a system of tiered access. Pay more, get better bandwidth, your customers (viewers of your Web site, purchasers of products sold via your Web site) don’t have to wait as long for a page to download/don’t get cut off in the middle of browsing/buying/etc.

In effect, the bandwidth providers would become, as Surowiecki puts it, self-appointed gatekeepers. "Decisions that once were made collectively by hundreds of millions of Internet users would now be shaped in large part by a handful of telecom executives."

If this had been the system from the beginning, he says, the Internet would almost definitely not be the humming hive of seemingly infinite variety and egalitarianism that it is today:

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it’s been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them — blogs, say, or Wikipedia — can become influential. If the Internet turns into a zone of tiered access, it will be harder for noncommercial sites or startup companies to compete with bigger firms.

Curious to see if the subject of "net neutrality" was still in the news, I did a little searching, coming first across this Google groups discussion sparked by Surowiecki’s piece.

I shouldn’t have been surprised to find a Wikipedia entry, although I was surprised by its length, the number of links (including several referencing political activity around the subject, and a whole collection linking to academic papers), and by the fact that it was last updated yesterday, Nov. 23 — Thanksgiving Day here in the U.S.

According to Wikipedia’s multitude of authors, the subject has attracted the attention and support of such disparate entities as MoveOn.org, the Christian Coalition of America, and Google.

There’s also a link to a Web site called Save the Internet, which informs me (not literally) that I must have had my head buried in the Sahara somewhere, because this topic is a hot political button right now, with all the hallmarks of great political stories of old: corruption, big money players, little folks losing out.

Here’s what a Nov. 20 post on Savetheinternet.com has to say:

The revolving door of congressional staffers-cum-industry lobbyists is a part the same corruption of our democracy that has become loathsome to voters.

The phone and cable lobby is a major player in this scheme. In the past 10 years, telecommunications, broadcasting and cable companies have spent more than half a billion dollars on campaign contributions, political action committees, PR firms and high-spending lobbyists to push through self interested policies.

These regulations – offering massive tax breaks, relaxed ownership rules, and unfettered control of the public airwaves and broadband markets — all came at the public’s expense.

On the issue of Net Neutrality, companies like AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and Comcast outspent public interest advocates on a scale of 500 to 1 – pushing Congress to remove the longstanding nondiscrimination rules that enabled the Internet to become the greatest vehicle for free speech and economic innovation.

Stay tuned, I’ll be posting more about this.

Ready for Web 3.0?

According to a "Business Filter" blurb (quoted below) in this morning’s Boston Globe, The New York Times is.

Last week’s Web 2.0 conference ended with tepid reviews, and so did the term Web 2.0.   John Markoff of the New York Times, put the "nail in the coffin" by writing about Web 3.0 – otherwise known as the semantic web. Web 3.0 will be about mining "meaning," rather than just data, from the web by using software to discover associations among far-flung bits of information. Imagine a world where search is smart enough to know the syntax of what you really want to know. Then imagine the creepy part – where people, marketers, etc. can easily mine meaning about you, potentially manipulating you without your knowledge or awareness.

But the NYT is eleven months behind A List Apart (a Web site "for people who make websites"), which ran this article about Web 3.0 by Jeffrey Zeldman, publisher of A List Apart, on January 16, 2006.

And citizen media guru Dan Gillmor weighed in on April 22, 2006, with this post on his (now discontinued) grassroots journalism blog.

A friend just asked me in a Gmail chat if I’d heard about the UCLA student being Tasered by police late Tuesday night. Apparently he was asked to leave the UCLA library but from there it gets murky. The report in the Daily Bruin, the UCLA student newspaper, identified the student as being Iranian-American, and eyewitness accounts implied there was an element of racial profiling in the vigorousness of the police officers’ actions.

The incident was captured on cell phone video — when my friend mentioned that in his "chat", the first thing I thought, and the first thing I asked him, was, "Is it on YouTube?" He didn’t know, but twenty seconds later I had my own answer: it was — several different ways.

Here’s the video, on YouTube, in a post that concentrates on the alleged racial aspect of the incident.

"Citizen journalism" strikes again.