america – Page 8 – stevelawson.net

August 24, 2005

Back to political blogging….

So, with all that Edinburgh festival stuff, I seriously curtailed my newsfeed reading, and thus blogged v. little about stuff that’s going on in the world. So to get us back in the swing of things, dear bloglings, here’s one that made me rethink my position on one of the upcoming pressing decisions of British politics – the next Conservative party leader.

George Monbiot points out in this article that most lefties would be hoping that, if the worst were to happen and we were to end up with a Tory leader at the next election, at least it could be someone who seems a bit more moderate, like Ken Clarke.

But he points out that as deputy chairman of British American Tobacco, Ken has presided over all kinds of hideously inethical decisions, pressing for tobacco importing and advertising regulations to be softened in order to make the shareholders of BAT richer, and the people of some of the world’s poorer countries more likely to get addicted to ciggies. All this while he’s in charge of their frankly risible ‘corporate social responsibility group'(here’s a tip, BAT, how about not making cigarettes at all, if you care about social responsibility? oh sorry, you don’t, it’s a whitewash. Well done.)

The tobacco industry is one of the great evils on the planet. The crop itself destroys the ground it grows on, the workers end up with all kinds of illnesses thanks to the pesticides that are put on it, and the end product, according to the World Heath Organisation, is responsible for the deaths of half the people who smoke – currently, that’s 650,000,000 people.

Here’s a quote from the WHO website –

“Tobacco use is the leading cause of preventable death in the world today. With 4.9 million tobacco-related deaths per year, no other consumer product is as dangerous, or kills as many people, as tobacco.”

In contrast, have a look at the Social Report page on the BAT website – the most ridiculous load of psuedo-concerned horseshit I’ve read for quite a while. What a great industry to invest in!

Any of you green-lefties who smoke but want to make the world a better place, the single biggest step that you can make to start that process is to give up smoking, and start encouraging your friends to do the same. There’s no such thing as a fair trade cigarette, and as the ban is hopefully going to come into effect soon, it’ll become even more of a social blight to be the smoker in the group. So go on, give up now, tell everyone it’s for ethical reasons, store up some social capital and feel smug about yourself!

In the meanwhile, read the Monbiot article, and rethink your possible good feelings towards Ken Clarke. He’s sadly as much of a scumbag as the rest of his tory counterparts…

August 19, 2005

Gig last night…

Despite being exhausted, the promise of a chance to play a set with Orphy and a couple of friends from the States last night at the Red Rose was too tempting, so I headed off out again.

I took a much scaled down rig with me, as I knew I was only going to be playing for about 10 minutes, and really couldn’t be arsed to take the whole lot out again after setting it up and packing it down 12 days in a row at Edinburgh!

the Americans in question are Jeff Kaiser and Andrew Pask playing trumpet (jeff), sax and clarinet (andrew) through lots of delicious electronic processing (Andrew works for Cycling 74, so has written some glorious loop algorythms for Max/MSP).

They did about 25 minutes, and then Orphy and I joined them for a 10 minute improv thingie, which sounded lovely from where I was sat.

The rest of the evening was fun too – a solo trombone set from Alan Tomlinson was a mindblowing mixture of virtuosic free improv and clowning. Very funny indeed.

Then Evan Parker and John Coxon did a lovely guitar/sax duet, which ran the gamut from outnoisemadness to a bluesy mellow jazz bit in the middle and back to freakoutland. Very fine stuff.

And finally a quintet of Tony Bevan (bass sax), Mark Saunders (drums), John Edwards (bass), Ashley Wales (electronics) and Orphy (percussion etc.) finished off the night with more craziness.

And what’s more there was a huge crowd in – by far the biggest I’ve ever seen at the Red Rose, which was great especially for Jeff and Andrew, coming all this way. It was lovely to catch up with Jeff – he came to one of my gigs a couple of years ago in Ventura County, California, and loved it and we’ve been in touch ever since, so it was great to finally get to see him play live.

The London Improv scene is fascinating – it’s got a pretty unique sound to it, and a fairly broad spread of contributors. There are elements to it that come across as over-zealous in their rejection of all things tonal, and other players who seem to embrace just about anything and everything. It’s not a scene I could inhabit all year round – I’d start to feel guilty about playing so much inside music, and that’s insane – but it’s one that I feel enriched and inspired by whenever I get a chance to see those guys play. The time and energy and focus that players like John Edwards and Tony Bevan have put into exploring the outer reaches of what’s possible with their instruments is awe inspiring.

And now I’m exhausted. Today I’m going to have to tidy up the mess from Edinburgh – my office looks like the stock room at a badly organised high-end bass shop, so I need to whip it into shape before teaching tonight.

Soundtrack – Avishai Cohen, ‘Lyla’ (a pressie to educate me from JazzShark – and a fabulous album it is too!)

July 20, 2005

'democracy' brings a shift to the right in Iraq.

Well, lots of people said it would happen. Apparently, the new Iraqi constitution “could sharply curb women’s rights, particularly in personal matters like divorce and family inheritance.”

So what happened to this new found freedom that The US promised following blowing up Iraqi cities? We’ve already got a situation where ‘immodestly dressed’ iraqi women are having acid thrown at them.

All it shows is that the invaders have really not thought through the ramifications of attempts to democratise in the middle east. Obviously bombing for democracy is a shitty idea anyway, but what happens if the democratically elected government don’t meet with your approval? Are we going to be heading for a situation in the middle east like we had in Central America in the 70s and 80s where the CIA were training and funding right wing militia groups to try and oust democratically elected left wing governements? Only this time it’ll be islamic governments that get elected, and bringing elements of sharia law. At the moment, there are very few countries that use sharia law, but it may become more popular as ‘open’ elections allow militants to run alongside moderates, and challenge people to vote for a ‘proper’ islamic party.

It will, ironically, probably mirror the insane scare tactics used by Bush in the last election in the US, where the religious vote is galvanised around a couple of issues that are deemed to be the most important for people of faith, thus allowing a hideous government to get elected despite them having the worst interests of most of the people at heart. In the US, it was abortion, gay marriage and stem cell research. I’m not even going to speculate how things would go in the middle east.

Either way, this new Iraqi constitution could lead to yet more suffering and bloodshed in the quest for ‘democracy’.

Soundtrack – Jughead, ‘Jughead’.

July 19, 2005

Ooh, look, America's own terrorists…

Eric Rudolph was given two life sentences yesterday in the US for Blowing up an abortion clinic in Birmingham, Alabama. Totally unrepentant, he carried on saying in court that the Abortionists were murderers and ‘needed to be fought with deadly force’.

Great, the American religious right has their own terrorists! They’ve been around for a while – attacks on Abortion clinics have been happening for decades – and the American people are generally fairly good at discerning between the beliefs of those on the right wing of the church who are anti-abortion but would never condone bombing a clinic, and those psychos with murderous intent. \

So, here’s the easy bit people, why not apply some of that logic to the situation with terrorists inspired by a violent murderous misinterpretation of their faith? Maybe what needs to happen is we need to get a couple of right-wing-but-not-bomb-expert American whackos – say, Pat Robertson and Oral Roberts, or Tim LaHaye – and get them to discuss the abortion clinic bombings, and then go through it and replace all the references to christianity with references to Islam, the justification of not agreeing with abortion with information about the bombings in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then publish it as a statement to America’s religious right on how the actions of a murderer can be understood as separate from a) the actions of a wider faith community and b) the veracity of the politcal case they espouse.

It’d still make pretty horrible reading for the rest of us – I can’t imagine, Robertson, LaHaye or Roberts ever saying anything that I remotely agreed with, foul blight that they are – but might help those American Christian Jihadists in the PNAC-lovin’ south understand the less-than black ‘n’ white way that we need to engage with these kinds of event.

As it is, blowing up an abortion clinic to end murder is just about on par with sending hundreds of thousands of troops armed with depleted uranium shells into a country to bring about democracy…

July 8, 2005

One Day On…

So, it started with up to about 9 bombs going off in London, which thankfully (though inexplicably) became four bombs. Lots of people tragically killed, but could have been lots more – times like this we all get thankful for lil’ things.

Anyway, a few stream of conciousness thoughts that have been circulating my head over the last 24 hours…

Predictably, the cliched rhetoric has started to pile up like media manure pile all that ‘it’s not an attack on London, it’s an attack on Freedom and Democracy … they want to destroy our freedoms … they won’t beat us …’

OK, #1, we don’t know who ‘they’ are, for certain. It has all the hallmarks of an Islamist extremist group, and some previously unheard-of group linked to Al Quaeda have claimed it, thus far unsubstantiated.

#2, it’s not an attack on democracy – while the killing was indiscriminate, if it was Al Quaeda, or any other islamist extremist group (which we’ll assume for the sake of argument, though wait for clarification in the long run), the targeting and motivation weren’t indiscriminate at all. This was in direct response to the bombing of Afghanistan and Iraq. A situation where the people of Afghanistan and Iraq had no democratic say in what went on, and thousands upon thousands of innocent people were killed. More than were killed in London yesterday were killed in single attacks.

Falluja was flattened, large parts of Baghdad was flattened, 10 thousand years of history obliterated. From where they were sat, that didn’t look like democracy in action. I’m not defending the bombing of London – it’s hideous and evil. But I’m equally not defending the bombing of Iraq or Afghanistan. If yesterday was an attack on Freedom, it’s the assumed freedom to bomb nations into the stone age to get rid of their leaders (albeit, seriously fucked up leaders). That’s not democratic, especially when the nearest to a democratic body voting on the legality of the war said ‘no’.

It’s also about the ongoing Iraeli military action in the middle east. From house clearances to kids with sticks being shot with helicopter gunships. The support given to the Israeli armed forces from the British and American governments is perceived as an attack on Islam. Talk of ‘attacks on freedom and democracy’ sound pretty hollow if you fail to deal with the senseless killing happening on both sides in Palestine.

#3, there’s nothing to ‘beat’ – this isn’t a war, it’s a terrorist attack. The form is, they blow shit up, we tidy up and try to stop it happening again. Each time, everyone changes their tactics and carries on. They aren’t going to ‘beat’ us, no-one’s going to ‘win’ – they’ve made the point that they are unhappy with something, by murdering lots of people. That’s a pretty screwed up way of proving a point.

the US and the UK both have a pretty poor record in protecting democracy – we’ve done precious little about the regime in Burma, about the Chinese occupation and genocide in Tibet, and we prop up dictators around the world, particularly the Reagan-era interventions in Cental and South America, aimed at keeping back the communist onslaught, by funding and arming right wing militia groups to oust democratically elected left-wing governments. So much for freedom and democracy.

World politics is far more messy than talk about ‘them’ attacking ‘us’ and ‘our freedoms and democracy’. These were seriously fucked up people, but also seriously desperate people with a point to make. They made it in a hideous murderous way and I hope they are caught and locked up for a long time. But I don’t want to hear anymore jingoistic shite about Dunkirk spirit or attacks on liberty.

These things HAVE to inspire introspection. There’s a reason, whether the motives are screwed up or not. If you want to prevent it from happening again, you have to try and understand the motivation. Hitting a wasps’ nest with a stick won’t make it go away. There is no ‘war on terror’ any more than there’s a war on poverty or a war on bad stuff. Terrorism is a method not an ideology. It’s what happens when very desperate people are dispairing enough to see their cause as worth both killing and dying for. Ironically, it’s almost always through a lack of any possible democratic international discourse.

The tragedy of all this is that the way to stop terrorism is dialogue. It’s happened with the IRA, it needs to happen here. A war on terror just shows their supporters how ‘right’ they were in the first place, and that those who were previously sympathisers become militants. It’s like Jason and The Argonauts – you chop one in half, two jump up to fight. The invasion of iraq has turned it into a military play ground. Apparently, militant organisations are practicing terror attacks there. The rhetoric is still confusing. Insurgents, Militant Islamists, Jihadis, Terrorists, Freedom Fighters? Who knows. Someone somewhere needs to do more talking and less shooting. And it doesn’t look like they are in a position to start the talks. Who’s got the balls to look at ways of making sure it doesn’t happen again, rather than ‘getting even’?

July 4, 2005

Edinburgh MPH March/Live8

So, despite it being Wimbledon finals weekend, I didn’t see a stroke of tennis played… But for good reason.

On Friday I drove up to Berwick–On-Tweed (the Lawson ancestral home), in order to go up to Edinburgh on Saturday for the Make Poverty History March and rally, arranged to coincide with the G8 summit meeting in Gleneagles this week.

Estimates on the attendance at Edinburgh vary working upwards from about 200,000, but that’s the figure for Fringe Sunday in August, and this was WAYYYY more crowded than Fringe Sunday.

The march itself was just huge – for a lot of people, they were waiting for almost three hours just to get out of The Meadows (that is, a secret location, known only as ‘the meadows’). The atmosphere was fabulous, though the food was a bit crap for veggies (I’ve got too used to ‘london food’). The first people to set off on the march were back at the start by one o’clock so the continuous white band lasted for a good few hours.

The talk from the stage was largely good – Billy Bragg was on form as always – talking not playing (at least not that I heard, sadly), Jonathan Dimbleby was marvellous. Some twat from the Church Of Scotland was congratulating Gordon Brown on all he’s done so far… hello? Done what exactly? Announced a supposed debt relief package so tied to IMF trade and services liberalisations that it’s virtually worthless? FFS, stop pandering to these goons – they’ve done just about nothing as yet, the situation is still brutally inequitous, and so far Gordon Brown has done pretty much sweet FA.

Anyway, the rest of the talk was good.

We got back into Berwick, and in front of a TV at the time The Killers were on at Live8, who made no impression whatsoever. The evening was definitely all about the old guys showing the youngsters how it was done – Floyd, Robbie, The Who and Macca all rocked the party that rocks the party, while the Scissor Sisters were dull, Velvet Revolver were shit-on-a-stick, Joss Stone and Mariah both did well and Peter Kay was the only Accapella singer of the day and lost the americans royally.

I was struck by how little comment was being made about the cause, both between bands, and by the bands. Now that I’m watching the AOL online feed of the show, I see just how much the BBC had edited out in the name of impartiality. Good God, I hope I never rely on the BBC’s impartiality to save my life from rapacious world trade laws. How can you be impartial on this? Grrrrrrrr.

So all in all, a monumental event – the biggest ever public protest in Scotland, the biggest ever worldwide TV audience for a show, millions and millions of people signing up th the MPH campaign. Surely this will send a message to the tossers in the G8 that things need to change?….

…apparently not, that arch-enemy of freedom, democracy and all things decent, George Bush, has announced that there’ll be no climate change deal in the G8 – you know, right now, I’m wishing someone would blow up Gleneagles. I know something of how Bruce Cockburn felt when he wrote ‘If I Had A Rocket Launcher’, with it’s censor-baiting line, ‘if I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die’ – why does the G8 even exist? The idea that there is a coalition of the wealthy deciding the mortal future of over half the planet is disgusting. That fuckers like George Bush would come into the meeting saying he’ll be doing what’s best for the US only…

From the bbc news site –
‘But he rejected the idea he should support the British prime minister’s G8 plan in return for his support during the war in Iraq.

“Tony Blair made decisions on what he thought was best for keeping the peace and winning the war on terror, as I did,” he told the programme.

“So I go to the G8 not really trying to make him look bad or good, but I go to the G8 with an agenda that I think is best for our country.” ‘

He’s an evil, pernicious, twisted blight on the planet, and anyone who voted for him should be seriously ashamed of themselves. There is a political will within sections of the G8 to improve on these issues but while Bush, under the influence of his PNAC cronies, undermines anything that makes the rich accountable, that makes the rich empire-building countries of Europe and North America feel any sense of responsibility for the fuck-up that is modern day African economics. The most resource-rich continent on earth is its poorest. It makes me cry.

If the G8 don’t listen, who’s in for a revolution?

Soundtrack – The AOL Live8 stream.

June 24, 2005

The smokescreen of Debt Cancellation

This is all getting very murky.

the G8 have pledged $50 million dollars in debt relief for Africa.

Sounds good? Yes, of course. Until you start to break it down. Firstly, it only goes to 18 countries – lots more needed. Secondly, it’s condition on ‘economic reforms’ in the country, under the IMF’s HIPC scheme, which require increasing privatisation and opening up of nationalised industries and services to outside tender (guaranteeing that american and european companies get to start syphoning money out of those countries again, in return for provide water, energy, transport infrastructure as a profit making venture – now call me naive, but surely in a situation where poverty is as rife as it is in those 18 countries, the last thing they need to be worrying about is their water supply breaking down or being held to ransom because the share-holders of the parent company aren’t making enough?? That’s as bad as being in the debts they are already in.

It’s so galling that the twin evils of the IMF and World Bank go around telling countries how to run their economic affairs to the advantage of the rich. This is why trade law reform is THE big issue for the Make Poverty History campaign. Debt relief is all well and good, but if the cancellations are off-set against falling aid packages and industrial contracts to outside investors, they’re still utterly screwed.

The bottom line is, a share-holder based economic model is never going to favour the poor. It can’t, it is institutionally programmed to reward those with more money for their investments, to protect their investments from doo-gooders who seek to put the wellbeing of the stake-holders ahead of the balance sheet of the share-holders. It’s evil, pernicious and it needs to be challenged before anything is going to change substantially for the world’s poor.

If you are a share holder, use your power and vote at the company AGM to push for reforms. That’s the only way things can change on a company level – the directors and managers of a company are legally bound to maximise investors profits above all else. So they can’t even start to use recycled office paper unless it saves money or it’s cleared by a vote. So vote.

And if you don’t own any shares (I don’t, and never will) support co-operatives instead – organisations that operate on a stake-holder basis, where decisions are made considering the effects those decisions will have on all affected, not just those with a financial interest.

Debt cancellation is a wonderful thing, I’m glad it’s been announced, but I hope it becomes part of a MUCH bigger package of reforms, cos right now, it’s not making anyone’s poverty history.

and while we’re on the subject, consider this t-shirt, from Philosophy Football –

June 9, 2005

Listening and Viewing…

Finally got hold of my copy of the As One Tsunami charity CD, which I’m on. It was posted a month ago, and for some weird reason the postal service decided that a box the size of a CD was too big for my letter box, which is clearly bollocks. So I finally collected it from the sorting office, and had a listen. There’s some great stuff on it, not least of all a Dean Brown track with Marcus Miller on fretless – very nice indeed. Also featured are some other amazing bassists – Laurence Cottle, Mo Foster, Jimmy Haslip etc. Top players.

Last night, TSP, Kathryn (current house-guest visiting from the states) and I watched Team America – it’s the South Park guys doing a satire on the War on Terrorism using Thunderbirds style puppets. I have to admit to being a big Trey Parker fan – I think the South Park stuff, when he’s doing satire, is brilliant. He does descend into mindless smut at times, but there’s usually a point to it. And when there isn’t, for me it still almost always stays on the right side of the ‘funny vs overly grubby’ scales.

And on that note, I also got a CD through yesterday from Toupe, a two basses + drums band from Southampton – I’d really enjoyed their last album, Alopecia, but when the first track I heard from the new album was called ‘f***ing’, my suspicions about the content of the new album were raised… As it is, bits of it are fab. Some fine satire on the music industry, and some other general frivolous nonsense. But, like their musical forebear, Frank Zappa, much of the album slips into crass comedy-porn. I’m sure there’s a point to it somewhere, it was just lost on me. If you’re into that kind of thing, definitely check them out. If you’re not, steer clear. I like the Toupe guys, and they are capable of making me laugh a lot with some of the stuff they do, but about a third of the album really misses the mark for me. Musically it’s somewhere in the Primus/SadHappy/Zappa territory – lots of funky ‘n’ furious slap lines, and some great distorted bass sounds, with that show-tune element that all three of the above mentioned bands have corrupted to similar effect in the past.

Soundtrack – Various Artists, ‘As One’; Prefab Sprout, ‘From Langley Park To Memphis’.

May 23, 2005

Some thoughts on live music in the UK…

Recently, The Mean Fiddler, one of the largest groups of music venues in the UK, were
bought out by Clear Channel – the american media giant, who have begun to take over the US airwaves and gig scene. There’s been a pretty vocal backlash to their activities in the US, but the complicity of a lot of big name bands and labels has lead to them getting a serious stranglehold on the american live music scene.

The ramifications in the US are pretty scary – Clear Channel sign exclusive deals with acts to handle all their live work, so only book them into their venues. They promote them on their own radio stations, and no doubt work with other ‘media partners’ for greater exposure. It’s the live equivalent of a major record label deal. They also only book support acts signed to them, and so become the only apparent option for a lot of bands trying to ‘make it’ (a misnomer if ever I heard one, but still…)

In the UK, The Mean Fiddler already have a pretty dreadful reputation for not treating bands too well. They are a big player in the London live music scene, owning The Mean Fiddler, The Astoria, The Jazz Cafe, The Forum, The Borderline and a handful of other venues. They also have a fairly large stake in the Glastonbury Festival, as well as the Reading and Leeds festivals. All that is now in the hands of Clear Channel.

The situation here doesn’t look quite as grim as the US in that there’s some competition. The biggest competitor to the Mean Fiddler Group is probably Carling – the brewery that now have a series of ‘Carling Academy’ venues around the country. However, the problem for musicians is that Carling are, not surprisingly, primarily interested in selling beer. So, they’ll book music based on its beer sales potential, and set venues out to maximise traffic to the bar, not to make the listening situation ideal. I saw Nick Harper at the Bar Academy in Islington. Now, Nick’s a pretty high energy performer for one bloke and an acoustic guitar, but he’s still just a bloke and an acoustic guitar. The venue was standing only. No seats, except stools at the bar. It didn’t look like seating was an option. Why? Cos people sat in rows in seats don’t get up to go to the bar mid-gig. They wait til the break. That’s no good when you’re not concerned with the music, just selling beer.

This is not good news for people who play quieter music. Particularly those that are signed to labels who do deals with certain venue chains. You turn up to the gig, thinking it’s a gig, and realise you’re playing in a bar, with a low stage, the room isn’t really set out to focus on you, rather to filter people towards the bar. You play louder to try and keep people’s attention (a standing, drinking audience is never going to be as quiet or attentive as a seated one), and all of a sudden you’re thinking ‘maybe next album I need to put some more uptempo songs in there for situations like this.

It doesn’t affect me all that much, given that there are loads of really cool little venues in the UK, most of them provincial theatres and dedicated music clubs that lap up interesting original music, and still manage to make money over the bar. But I fear for my musician friends who end up getting sucked into the circuit of these venues – it’s pretty demoralising when your audience are getting steadily more hammered, and corespondingly loud…

Have a look at clearchannelsucks.org for more on what Clear Channel have done in the US.

Soundtrack – The Bears, ‘Live’; Maxwell, ‘Maxwell’s Urban Hang Suite’; A Mighty Wind, ‘OST’; Roseanne Cash, ‘ Rules Of Travel’.

May 18, 2005

Gotta hand it to George…

“I told the world that Iraq, contrary to your claims, did not have weapons of mass destruction. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to al Qaeda. I told the world, contrary to your claims, that Iraq had no connection to the atrocity on 9/11, 2001,

“Senator, in everything I said about Iraq, I turned out to be right and you turned out to be wrong. And 100,000 people have paid with their lives — 1,600 of them American soldiers sent to their deaths on a pack of lies, 15,000 of them wounded, many of them disabled forever, on a pack of lies.”

“Senator, this is the mother of all smokescreens. You are trying to divert attention from the crimes that you supported.”

Now, I’m not really a member of the George Galloway fan club – I was all in favour of his militant anti-war stance, am still very confused by his ‘I salute your indefatiguability’ speech to Saddam, and don’t trust his new Respect part at all. That said, his speech to the US Senate committee investigating claims that Saddam gave him shedloads of oil to sell was fantastic – the quote above is just a small part of it, quoted from this article on CNN.com. I’d love to see the video footage…

Soundtrack – a minidisc of a gig I did at the Barbican back in 2003, with Orphy Robinson, Mano Ventura and Filomena Campus, that I’ve never listened to before – the disc was lost under a pile of stuff, so today’s bit of tidying unearthed it. Bits of it are fantastic. There’s easily 20 minutes of editable top notch stuff. I might have to have a go some time!