CULTURE

Fans say Jamaica reggae star Peter Tosh ignored

By Howard Campbell

Kingston, Jamaica, Sept. 21 (IPS)— On Sept. 11, 1987, gunmen murdered reggae singer Peter Tosh at his home in Jamaica’s capital. But even as the controversial Rastafarian singer-songwriter’s work is enjoying a rebirth internationally, organizers of the annual Peter Tosh Symposium at the University of the West Indies (UWI) and the Tribute To Peter Tosh concert in Negril town, say that his legacy is still being ignored in his homeland.

Both events were launched Sept. 11 in Kingston, and promoters used the occasion to direct a scathing attack at radio stations and journalists who they say have done little to promote Tosh’s legacy.

“I cannot go to the Gleaner [Jamaica’s leading daily newspaper] or the successor to the Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation [a defunct television station] and get archival material on Bob Marley or Tosh,” said Clinton Hutton, head of the department of government at the UWI’s Mona campus.

“These people are central figures in Jamaica after independence,” he added.

Hutton’s charge is supported by Worrel King, a music industry veteran who launched the tribute concert in 1992. King criticized local radio stations for not playing Tosh’s music, even though they were presented with copies of his 12 solo albums at last year’s event.

“They said they could not play his music because they didn’t have the albums, so we gave them,” said King. “But we’re still not hearing Tosh,” he added. “[We’re] still hearing garbage.”

The singer recorded for three major record labels (Columbia, EMI and Capitol) during his solo career. Yet, his songs have never been as accessible as those of Marley, his former colleague in The Wailers.

Last year, through Tosh’s revived company, Intel Diplo, the albums were made available to local stores and radio stations but King says there has been little change on the airwaves since.

The music of Peter Tosh has never been radio-friendly. In the late 1960s, he co-wrote the powerful black power anthem, “Get Up, Stand Up” with Marley, and throughout the 1970s, his hard-hitting songs like “Legalize It”, “Equal Rights” and “Burial” were unofficially banned from the airwaves.

While Marley at times changed gear and appealed to the mainstream with ballads like “Waiting In Vain” and “Turn Your Lights Down Low”, Tosh was consistently critical of Jamaica’s colored middle class, which he accused of holding down the country’s black majority.

At the April 1978 One Love Peace Concert in Kingston, Tosh stole the show by blasting Jamaica’s political and civic leaders, who were in the audience, blaming them for the civil war that had claimed hundreds of lives since the 1972 general elections.

He also called on the government to legalize marijuana, regarded as a religious sacrament in the Rastafarian religion, whose members practice a holistic naturalness known as I-tal and wear their hair in dreadlocks.

Five months after the concert, he was arrested for possession of marijuana and reportedly beaten for 90 minutes.

But even as Tosh continues to get the cold shoulder from his countrymen, overseas his flame continues to burn. In 1999, Legacy Records, the reissue arm of Columbia Records, released the three CD “Honorary Citizen”, which covered the musician’s 25-year career. The following year, the label reissued “Legalize It” and “Equal Rights”, two of Tosh’s most acclaimed albums.

This year’s Peter Tosh Symposium will be held Oct. 11 at the UWI’s Mona campus while the tribute show takes place Oct. 19 in Negril in Westmoreland parish, where Tosh was born.

Avant garde legacy celebrated in Asheville

Fifty years ago at Black Mountain College, composer John Cage organized Theatre Piece No. 1, commonly regarded as the first multimedia “happening.” To commemorate this event, artists, performers and educators from around the country will be in Asheville this weekend to attend the Under the Influence festival.

Under the Influence is a celebration of the spirit, legacy, and ongoing influence of Black Mountain College (BMC), which operated between 1933 and 1953. The college had among its faculty innovators such as Cage, Buckminster Fuller, Robert Rauschenberg and Paul Goodman. Through its dedication to an approach to learning that went beyond classes and lectures, Black Mountain College helped nurture the flowering of radical culture that emerged in the 1960s.

Under the Influence will feature lectures, performances, collaborations, installations, exhibitions, and film screenings. The festival is being organized by the Black Mountain College Museum and Arts Center in cooperation with numerous co-sponsors, including educational institutions, arts councils, music venues, and performance spaces.

This event is not about simply recalling history, but creating history inspired by the arts practiced and theories developed at (BMC). In other words, the best way to celebrate the achievements and ongoing influence of BMC is to actively present opportunities for participation in the unique processes of education that were encouraged there.

The goal of this event is to raise awareness among all generations of the historical significance of Black Mountain College and its ongoing influence within numerous disciplines of art and science. The events will be specifically focused on educating the participants about BMC and the contemporary relevance of the ideas generated there through demonstrations by and collaborations between contemporary artists, teachers, and technologists. The festival organizers will also work closely with educational institutions to ensure that students are provided with appropriate materials to understand the context of the events.

The coordinators of the festival hope to create a deeper understanding of Black Mountain College -- not as an historic institution, but as a collection of people and ideas that forever changed the landscape of American and international culture.

For a complete schedule of events, go to www.blackmountaincollege.org/festival, or consult schedules in this week’s Mountain Xpress.

Source: www.blackmountaincollege.org/festival

It’s all Farsi to me

By Joe Knowles

Secret Ballot, a new comedy now playing in better multiplexes, is a breezily entertaining road movie about the most abused word in the dictionary. The term in question is “democracy.” Or, in Farsi,

Wait, you don’t read Farsi? Those characters might as well be from the console of some alien spaceship? Or a Florida ballot line? If you are like most US citizens, you are as uncomprehending as I am of those little black markings, the preferred written medium of some 50 million literate Iranians. Perhaps more linguistically versatile readers can assure me that the above translation, provided by “the first online Farsi dictionary,” www.farsidic.com, doesn’t actually mean “I am a jelly donut.”

But if it does, it would only serve to underscore my point, which is that the US fundamentally does not get Iran. It may surprise the average moviegoer that one third of the “Axis of Evil” is also a limited democracy, with a popular reformist president and legislature bravely determined to peacefully sideline the clique of mullahs who still hold the real power. (This pseudo-democratic arrangement, incidentally, is rather like any number of US allies in the “developing world,” such as Turkey, which has generals behind the scenes instead of religious leaders. Except that Turkey has been much nastier to its Kurdish minority.) Iran’s 2000 election—and, without a doubt, Florida’s—is the context for Secret Ballot, which unfolds on a remote island in the Persian Gulf far removed from the drama of mainland politics.

In the opening shot—the first of many surreal touches—a large wooden box parachutes from a military plane. We later learn that it’s Election Day in Iran, and the box contains another box, this one for holding ballots. A female polling agent, a wide-eyed idealist sent to collect the locals’ votes, washes up on shore next to the military barracks—not much more than a bunk bed on the beach—and announces to the soldier on duty that he has orders to escort her around the island. Areas as rural as this have no polling places, the chador-clad agent explains, so here the government must send election officials door-to-door.

And so begins the journey of a truly strange cinematic odd couple, tooling around in an open jeep trying to cajole the natives to exercise their rights. The skeptical soldier, rifle at the ready, chafes at the assignment and unthinkingly scares people away—“I want to vote, but not at gunpoint,” says one frightened citizen—but the earnest woman, vainly trying to explain the virtues of democracy to fishermen, herdsmen and their standoffish wives, can’t seem to get anyone’s attention without him. It’s tempting to call both of these characters personifications of the divided Iranian government—he of the grim old guard, she of the younger, modernizing reformers.

That’s not exactly the case—thankfully, Secret Ballot avoids schematic allegory in favor of a more ambiguous humanism—but in any event, the locals have no use for either of these people. Entreaties to fill out ballots are met with perplexed stares—who ever heard of a woman polling officer?—or polite offers of food. One busy fisherman shrugs, “Voting doesn’t catch fish.” A flock of veiled wives complain that they can get married at 12 but must wait until 16 to vote. After getting the brush-off at a populous and rambling estate headed by an ancient matriarch, the agent concedes that “Granny Baghoo has her own government here. She doesn’t need representatives.”

Indeed, the deep well of absurdity that makes Secret Ballot so good is the fundamental disconnect between the election and reality; it provides the engine for the laughs and the occasion for one surrealist gag after another. We reach a nearly Buñuelian climax when the jeep stops at a red light, in the middle of nowhere, that obviously has no reason for existing at all. On the darker side of the same surreal coin, the polling agent, at wits’ end, tries to crash a funeral in hopes of collecting the mourners’ votes. When she’s coldly ignored at the cemetery, which is off-limits to women, her heartbroken expression—the emotional nadir of the journey—practically carries the film by itself.

Moments like these reveal that Secret Ballot cares deeply about the human beings democracy is supposed to serve—not the other way around, the all too common pitfall of “political” movies. On this island, where the law is pointedly irrelevant and communication next to impossible, the ballots might as well be in Greek—or English. (Even Farsi isn’t good enough for some of the islanders who happen to speak Arabic.) Director Babak Payami, with his long takes, deadpan wit and knack for capturing cultural collision, finds a kindred spirit in filmmakers like Jim Jarmusch and Jacques Tati, whose deceptively low-key comedies also understand that our biggest problem is that we talk too much. Secret Ballot is a reminder that political debates, as surely in Iran as in America, are often much more one-sided than we think.

Source: In These Times
Movie logo courtesy of www.Secret-Ballot.com

Negativland uses ‘mosquito fleet’ to bite Clear Channel and the NAB

Sept. 13— Clear Channel’s KJR FM is a station promoting itself as the best of the 60s and 70s, but it also plays a heaping helping of tired old songs from the 1980s, as if nobody in their audience would know or care. Surrounded with canned voice-tracked DJs from who-knows-where and inane chatter, the station is a stark indicator of the low regard with which Clear Channel holds its audience and the people of Seattle.

Negativland, a performance art and culture jamming group, took hold of this absurd hypocrisy and exploded it over the course of a 24 minute simulated broadcast of KJR. The program started innocently enough with the sounds of KJR’s canned liners and jingles, followed by a DJ who introduced himself, but then started to expose the lie, as he cued up a song from Michael Jackson’s 1980s hit album Thriller. The rhetoric only escalated from there as the mythical DJ dug in to KJR’s lies and naming KJR’s program director personally as responsible for the misrepresentation.

This program was simulcast on over 6 different unlicensed low-power stations, a “mosquito fleet” throughout the city. The pirate stations had gathered here for the Reclaim the Media conference and to demonstrate the power of low-power FM to the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Radio Conference meeting in downtown Seattle.

Seattle radio listeners could hardly avoid the broadcast as they tuned across the dial. Negativland’s KJR program played repeatedly on many of these stations for six hours, through the evening drive-time commute. The Seattle Independent Media Center (IMC) placed a radio playing the broadcast outside it’s downtown storefront space, and many confused and amused pedestrians stopped to listen as the faux KJR DJ ranted on about the station’s lies and how refusing to acknowledge its lies makes it no better than an ax murderer.

One Reclaim the Media participant even brought a radio playing the broadcast into the NAB Radio Conference lobby, challenging the mainstream radio industry to recognize that people are on to them.

Thursday evening Mark Hosler, a founding member of Negativland, gave a talk and video showing where he explained some of the motivation behind the KJR parody. He explained that while Clear Channel’s destructive impact on the radio dial in city after city is something meriting protest, the strange absurdity of a 60s and 70s format station not even staying true to its own identity was too hard to pass up, and indicative of the company’s attitude.

Much of Hosler’s presentation, and many of the Reclaim the Media panel sessions held on Friday have been broadcast on the “mosquito fleet” stations via streaming Internet feeds set up by the Seattle IMC.

Source: Seattle Indymedia