Phawker

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) — Hunkered down in their war rooms hundreds of miles from mass protests, the aging, hard-line generals in Myanmar are known as a suspicious lot who view the West with disdain and depend on browbeaten advisers and astrologers to guide them.

The demonstrations are the stiffest challenge to the ruling junta in two decades, a crisis that began Aug. 19 with protests over a fuel price hike then expanded dramatically about two weeks ago when Buddhist monks joined the protests.Since Wednesday, soldiers and riot police have clubbed, shot and detained demonstrators in Yangon, formerly known as Rangoon, the largest city in what used to be called Burma. At least 10 people were killed, dozens injured and hundreds detained, including Buddhist monks whose monasteries were shot up and destroyed in overnight raids by security forces.

The heavy-handed response, analysts said, was not surprising given the junta’s long history of snuffing out all dissent since the country’s independence in 1948. For decades, they have also waged a brutal war against ethnic groups in which soldiers have razed villages, raped women and killed innocent civilians — atrocities that continue to this day.

Since the 1980s, they have detained and tortured thousands of political prisoners including Aung San Suu Kyi, the pro-democracy leader who has been under house arrest for almost 12 of the past 18 years. When hundreds of thousands of citizens took to the streets peacefully in 1988, the military opened fire, killing as many as 3,000. MORE

TIMES OF LONDON: Live Blogging The Crackdown

***

All tremble at the rod. All fear death. Comparing others with oneself, one should neither strike nor cause to strike.

All tremble at the rod. Life is dear to all. Comparing others with oneself, one should neither strike nor cause to strike.

Whoever, seeking his own happiness, harms with the rod other pleasure-loving beings, experiences no happiness hereafter.

Whoever, seeking his own happiness, harms not with the rod other pleasure-loving beings, experiences happiness hereafter.

–Buddhism. Dhammapada 129-32 ***

WITH APOLOGIES TO ALLEN GINSBERG

I’m with you in Rangoon
where you’re madder than I am
I’m with you in Rangoon
where you must feel very strange
I’m with you in Rangoon
where you laugh at this invisible humor
I’m with you in Rangoon
where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter
I’m with you in Rangoon
where your condition has become serious and
is reported on the radio
I’m with you in Rangoon
where the faculties of the skull no longer admit
the worms of the senses
I’m with you in Rangoon
where you scream in a straightjacket that you’re
losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss
I’m with you in Rangoon
where you bang on the catatonic piano
the soul is innocent and immortal it should never die
ungodly in an armed madhouse
I’m with you in Rangoon
where fifty more shocks will never return your
soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a
cross in the void
I’m with you in Rangoon
where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-
rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale
I’m with you in Rangoon
where we wake up electrified out of the coma
by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof
they’ve come to drop angelic bombs
O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here
O victory forget your underwear we’re free
I’m with you in Rangoon
in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea- journey
on the highway across America in tears
to the door of my cottage in the Western night

Adam Andy Samberg, with Adam Levine, on SNL.

PHILADELPHIA – Believe it, Philly. The Fightin’ Phils are going to the playoffs. Considered all-but-out of contention just 2 1/2 weeks ago, the Philadelphia Phillies overcame a huge deficit in the standings, caught the Mets and won their first NL East title since 1993 on the final day. [via ASSOCIATED PRESS]

BY ADAM LIPTAK OF THE NEW YORK TIMES: Saying it had the right to block “controversial or unsavory” text messages, Verizon Wireless has rejected a request from Naral Pro-Choice America, the abortion rights group, to make Verizon’s mobile network available for a text-message program. The other leading wireless carriers have accepted the program, which allows people to sign up for text messages from Naral by sending a message to a five-digit number known as a short code.

Text messaging is a growing political tool in the United States and a dominant one abroad, and such sign-up programs are used by many political candidates and advocacy groups to send updates to supporters. But legal experts said private companies like Verizon probably have the legal right to decide which messages to carry. The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.

The dispute over the Naral messages is a skirmish in the larger battle over the question of “net neutrality” — whether carriers or Internet service providers should have a voice in the content they provide to customers. “This is right at the heart of the problem,” said Susan Crawford, a visiting professor at the University of Michigan law school, referring to the treatment of text messages. “The fact that wireless companies can choose to discriminate is very troubling.”

In turning down the program, Verizon, one of the nation’s two largest wireless carriers, told Naral that it does not accept programs from any group “that seeks to promote an agenda or distribute content that, in its discretion, may be seen as controversial or unsavory to any of our users.” Naral provided copies of its communications with Verizon to The New York Times. MORE
UPDATE: Reversing course, Verizon Wireless announced today that it would allow an abortion rights group to send text messages to its supporters on Verizon’s mobile network. “The decision to not allow text messaging on an important, though sensitive, public policy issue was incorrect,” Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon, said in a statement, adding that the earlier decision was an “isolated incident.” MORE

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Keith Richards and Andrew Loog Oldham at the Blue Boar Motorway Cafe, along the M1 between London and Birmingham, 1963. By Philip Townsend; never before published.

BY JONATHAN VALANIA

SOUTH AMERICA CORRESPONDENT

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA — Today I saw Andrew Loog Oldham standing in his kitchen making me a lovely cup of tea, high above the streets of Bogota’s ritzy financial district in his tastefully upscale bi-level condominium, where he has lived on and off since 1975. If you have to ask who Andrew Loog Oldham is, you’ll never know — unless you click here, go on, we’ll wait. Psych! OK, now that we lost the dorks, let’s back up: A couple days before leaving for Colombia, it was brought to my attention that ALO currently resides in Bogota and broadcasts his daily Sirius show from there. Calling in a favor from friends in high places, I secured his email address and wrote him that I was a music journalist and I would be in “Bogata” in a couple of days and would love to do an interview. He wrote back “Fine, but you better learn how to spell Bogota before you get down here.” So much for first impressions.

From there I dashed over to Borders to get a copy of his Stoned, a 1998 total recall of his early days in pre-Swinging London grooming the stylized thug mythos of the motherfucking Rolling Stones. Turns out the book is out of print and the only copy I knew I could get my hands on before my flight belonged to none other than Philebrity Jones himself, Joey Sweeney. Back before our partnership/friendship went south, Sweeney lent me Stoned with the proviso that I must ABSOLUTELY return it because not only was it one of his favorite books but Andrew Loog Oldham was the coolest thing on two legs to ever walk the Earth, or something along those lines. So I rang him up and, knowing it was me, he answered with a tentative ‘Hello’ delivered in that wary Is This A Trap? tone you might expect, given the circumstances. I told him I had a modest proposal for him:

ME: Loan me your copy of Stoned and I will get it signed by Andrew Loog Oldham.
SWEENEY: What?!?
ME: I know this sounds like I am putting you on, but I am serious as cancer, Jack. I’m leaving for Bogota, Colombia in the morning and have made arrangements to interview him.
SWEENEY: What? Colombia? Are you serious?

I was going to counter with “Obviously you are not keeping up with your daily Phawker,” but decided getting the goddamn book was more important than winning the latest round of our ongoing snark war.

So fast forward to this morning and I am standing outside ALO’s apartment building trying to figure out how to tell my cab driver to wait for me and that I will be back down in an hour. He speaks no English, and my rudimentary Spanish does not encompass such a relatively complicated exchange. The two door men are laughing at our communication breakdown and I ask them ‘tu habla ingles?’ to which they nod their heads no and go back to laughing. I feel like a fool with a paper ass, coming to somebody else’s country and expecting them to speak my language. How arrogant and intellectually-lazy, such imperial hubris. Thankfully ALO knows enough Spanish to get my point across, and five minutes later I am standing in his kitchen while he boils water for tea. Since the interview will, god willing, be published elsewhere, I can only give you a teaser of our conversation. Topics covered: heroin, Scientology, cocaine, shock treatment, Her Satanic Majesty’s Request, Sirius, Monterey Pop, Catholicism, mod sex, clinical depression, Martin Scorsese and whether or not his friend Phil Spector is innocent. An exchange:

ME: So is it true that you and Jagger don’t speak to each other?
ALO: We speak. When I last saw him [in 1994] he said ‘Hello, Andrew’ and I said ‘Hello, Mick’ and then he walked away. See, we talk.
ME: When did you last speak to him prior to that?
ALO: 1968.
ME: What do you make of Keith Richards snorting his dad’s ashes?
ALO: Hey, back in the 60′s I used to say I wanted my friends to smoke me when I’m dead.
ME: Phil Spector, innocent or guilty.
ALO: I have no earthly idea, but I must say upfront that Phil wrote me a lovely postcard when my mother died a few years ago. However, 67-year-old men in high heels and wigs should not be out drinking after midnight, especially when they are heavily armed.

Suffice it to say, we got on thick as thieves, in no small part because of the truth in the old maxim that you cannot bullshit a bullshitter — and today that cut both ways.

About the author: Our own Boss Phawker, man of the world and leader of the local ruling junta, is vacationing down South America way. He never told us if he got the goddamn book signed.

BY DAN BUSKIRK
FILM CRITIC

YOU’RE GONNA MISS ME (2005, directed by Kevin McAlester, 91 minutes, U.S.)
A MILLION YEARS OF KENN KWEDER (2007, directed by John Henderson, 119 minutes, U.S.)

Its title, taken from the sole hit of the Texas psych-rock outfit The Thirteenth Floor Elevators, is sadly untrue — the world had forgotten the brightly-blazing talent of their lead singer, Roky Erickson. A glaring injustice, that, because Erickson was the Real Deal, a man with hell hounds on his trail who had a naturally blood-curdling howl to rival Van Morrison’s raw vocals with his early band Them. Mental illness and rumors of too many hallucinogens have only allowed Erickson to create music sporadically over the last few decades, and after a flurry of activity in the mid-80s, Roky sightings became fewer and fewer. By century’s turn, it was like he had disappeared into the same mist as cult stars like Syd Barrett and Fred Neil.
After recent successful music docs on Texas eccentrics Townes Van Zandt, Jandek, and especially the marvelous Devil and Daniel Johnston, it seems inevitable that someone would go knocking on Roky’s door with a video camera. Sure enough, here comes Harvard magna cum laude director Kevin McAlester on the hunt for a story about where Roky’s been. No surprise, it wasn’t pretty.

After a brief flurry of early clips, we first see Roky in a cluttered apartment, rambling optimistically about a junk mail sweepstakes offer. Living under the loose care of his aging mother Evelyn,Roky seems to exist in some sad limbo, trying to drown out the voices by running all the household appliances at once while he collapses in his La-Z-Boy. Evelyn obviously loves her son but it isn’t until her youngest son Sumner returns to wrestRoky’s care from her that the Texas songwriter makes an unforeseeable step up of his cloud and into recovery.

That transformation is the film’s final pay-off and director McAlester should count his lucky stars, because otherwise there would be no feature film here. There’s very little footage of Roky’s heyday and even after recovery, Roky is not the most forthcoming subject for an interview. McAlester must have seen little option but to go the route of Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, where the camera was turned away from its main subject in order to capture his nutty family.

So while Roky’s mind spins its wheels, we follow his lonely mother Evelyn, who has made some truly odd autobiographical art pieces including a fairy tale-like video that anoints a disturbed-looking Roky as “The King of All Beasts.” When Roky’s brother Sumner arrives from Pittsburgh (he’s a musician in the Pittsburgh Symphony) he seems like a fresh breath of sanity, yet the more time we spend with him the odder he seems. Perhaps the psychiatric therapy that reduces him to weepy fetal state is legit, but inviting a camera crew to capture it seems like needy exhibitionism.

It’s hard to defend such cynical thoughts once you see Roky in his current state, looking no more weathered than your average Rolling Stone as he confidently hits the stage in 2005 for a withering version of his classic “Cold Night For Alligators.” You’re Gonna Miss Me doesn’t do enough to illuminate Roky’s journey from psychosis to apparent health, but it does witness his most convincing recovery yet and one can’t help but to hope it is also his last.

You’re Gonna Miss Me is now available on home video through Palm Pictures

***

No local musician has had his sanity questioned more frequently than Kenn Kweder. His unpredictable antics and alcohol-fueled reputation have had him on the local list of imminent rock tragedies for decades now, and yet he improbably remains, still here and vital after 30-odd years of headlining local clubs. There’s a thousand and one stories of things that have happened during his live shows (most unrepeatable at the request of Phawker’s legal team) yet a new DVD, A Million Light Years of Kenn Kweder, captures a bountiful collection of clips shot during many drunken nights once thought lost to time. A few of the clips are professionally produced (including a beautifully melancholy 1998 take of early Secret Kids-era tune “Suzy Says So”) but the majority of the disc is culled from fans who have trailed Kweder with their camcorders for decades.

Much has been made of his near-signing to major labels in the early 80s, yet national recognition or not, Kenn Kweder has always been an authentic “Rock Star,” a fact which these home movie-style videos render clearly. The sensation that you’re seeing a musician too big for the room bubbles up again and again as Kweder’s over-sized charisma brings a charge to each and every grainy clip.

The Bigger-Than-Life persona shouldn’t overshadow the strength of his catalog, a colorful collection of poetic Dylan-inspired songs which has been tackled by some of the city’s best musicians in town over the years. Among those visible here are Philly mainstays like Kevin Karg of the Sloane Rangers, Mike “Slo-Mo” Brenner, Beru Revue’s Greg Davis and Ben Vaughn’s late bassist, the irrepressible Aldo Jones, all spotted supporting Kenn’s still-flexible voice, the raspy yet still razor-sharp instrument that cuts these songs to the bone.

That fact that Kweder has stayed committed to playing a punishing schedule of gigs when so many of his comrades have escaped for the safer pastures of regular jobs and health insurance only underlines the rock and roll true believer conviction that he brings to his music. He plays tonight at the Tin Angel for his DVD release party, and his shows at the venue are usually some of his tightest and most focused. However if you miss him, you can count on the fact that Kweder will be playing somewhere nearby soon, and as always he’ll be playing like it is his last gig ever.

Info on A Million Light Years of Kenn Kweder @ www.kennkweder.com

Kenn Kweder appears at 7 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. tonight at The Tin Angel, 20 S. Second St., Philadelphia PA 7pm and 10:30pm. $12.

Yes, you were supposed to get this yesterday, but believe me, it’s worth the wait. Not exactly SFW, unless your workplace is cool with the word “faggoty.” If you aren’t currently gay you very well may be by the end of this.

Also, does anyone else think it’s time for an openly gay boy band? Maybe with Perez Hilton as the impresario, like Lou Pearlman but without the Ponzi scheme.

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BY AMY Z. QUINN

Like time, news waits for no man. Keeping up with the funny papers has always been an all-day job, even in the pre-Internets era. These days, however, it’s a two-man job. That’s right — these days you need someone to do your reading for you, or risk falling hopelessly behind and, as a result, increasing your chances of dying lonely and somewhat bitter. Hey, we know how it is — so many words to read, so little time to surf for free porn. That’s why every week, PAPERBOY does your alt-weekly reading for you, freeing up valuable nanoseconds that can now be better spent ‘roughing up the suspect’ over at Suicide Girls or what have you. Every week we pore over those time-consuming cover stories and give you the takeaway, suss out the cover art, warn you off the ink-wasters and steer you towards the gooey caramel center of each edition. Why? Because we like you.

ON THE COVER

CITY PAPER: I’m not sure I buy the logic that says the upcoming Beijing Olympics are a good vehicle through which to expose that country’s ongoing tyranny against its own people, but it certainly is a handy one. Personally I’m more a fan of a complete boycott, especially of Olympics-related consumer goods; nothing connected to this event is free of the stink of Chinese oppression — even the building of the athletic stadiums themselves are to blame for the uprooting of thousands of Chinese and we highly doubt they received fair market value for their homes. But the all the righteous indignation in the world won’t stop the Olympic entertainsport machine, so groups like Falun Gong are hoping they can at least bring some truth to the proceedings by going public against the harvesting of organs from executed Chinese “criminals” such as political dissidents.

Today, due to extensive anti-Falun Gong propaganda in China, many Chinese are suspicious of the group and its purported political agenda. Allegations of torture and organ harvesting from imprisoned Falun Gong practitioners, however, have overshadowed concerns about the group’s politics.In April 2003, Canadian human-rights lawyer David Matas and ex-member of parliament David Kilgour released a report on organ-harvesting allegations titled “Bloody Harvest.” It concluded that China engages in “large-scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners.”
Last November, China admitted that it had been using organs from executed prisoners for transplants since 1984. (While the Chinese government does not release the number of prisoners executed annually, Amnesty International calculated that at least 1,010 people were executed during 2006, a number that does not fulfill the increasing demand for organs.) Governed by a 1984 document titled “Rules Concerning the Utilization of Corpses or Organs from the Corpses of Executed Prisoners,” these organs fuel a lucrative transplant economy that supports underfunded hospitals.

Suffice to say, some of these unethically harvested organs are finding their way into the bodies of unsuspecting Americans who are shocked, shocked to find out the organs they purchased from the most oppressed country in the world may not have been freely shared.

“Some people ask me, ‘How could you go?’” Kline says. “The doctors assured me that the prisoners gave consent; they produced a consent form in Chinese. Maybe the prisoners give consent because they give money to their families. … If I knew that prisoners were being executed for their organs, I would never have done it.”

PHILADELPHIA WEEKLY: Let’s be honest here. Between the Fringe Festival and the Fall Guides, is anyone not sick of theme issues yet? To put it another way, when I’m agreeing with Steven Wells (who called it “a touchy-feely-preachy green issue”) you know there’s something wrong. Still, annoying but useful gets PW off the hook this week, since the cover package, by Jeffrey Barg and Sara Kelly, isn’t exactly calling for folks to toss out all their synthetic clothing, grow their own food and install windmills on the roof to power the teevee. And issue-wide, there’s a there’s a nice mix of practical vs. high-concept approaches to everyday conservation, Cassidy Hartmann’s look at area businesses trying to bring “green” into new home construction and a look at how PhillyCareShare is trying to sell itself to the “young and fly.”
INSIDE THE BOOK:
CP: Happy Birthday Fork ! Will there be cake? A nurse from Collegeville goes from “demonstrator to activist” by getting arrested at the Capitol (you go girl); ballet is bustin’ out all over Philly.

PW: Zombie Prom ! Zombie Prom! Zombie Prom! Kia Gregory stays on message; a nekkid look at Feast Of Love

WINNER: Me Slacking = Everybody Gets A Pass This Week

Fault lies squarely with Dirty On Purpose, who rocked a crack-a-lackin’ version of this at JBs the other night. Umm, thanks?

Call it a lesson learned from Katrina or dirty-bomb fearmongering, but officials in Huntsville, Alabama are re-examining and implementing emergency disaster shelter plans in which bomb shelters, university housing and an abandoned mine play starring roles.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (Sept. 27) – In an age of al-Qaida, sleeper cells and the threat of nuclear terrorism, Huntsville is dusting off its Cold War manual to create the nation’s most ambitious fallout-shelter plan, featuring an abandoned mine big enough for 20,000 people to take cover underground.

Others would hunker down in college dorms, churches, libraries and research halls that planners hope will bring the community’s shelter capacity to 300,000, or space for every man, woman and child in Huntsville and the surrounding county. . . .

Many cities advise residents to stay at home and seal up a room with plastic and duct tape during a biological, chemical or nuclear attack. Huntsville does too, in certain cases.

Local officials agree the ”shelter-in-place” method would be best for a ”dirty bomb” that scattered nuclear contamination through conventional explosives. But they say full-fledged shelters would be needed to protect from the fallout of a nuclear bomb. . . .

In all, the Huntsville-Madison County Emergency Management Agency has identified 105 places that can be used as fallout shelters for about 210,000 people. They are still looking for about 50 more shelters that would hold an additional 100,000 people. . . .

Plans call for staying inside for as long as two weeks after a bomb blast, though shelters might be needed for only a few hours in a less dire emergency.

Unlike the fallout shelters set up during the Cold War, the new ones will not be stocked with water, food or other supplies. For survivors of a nuclear attack, it would be strictly ”BYOE” – bring your own everything. Just throw down a sleeping bag on the courthouse floor – or move some of the rocks on the mine floor – and make yourself at home.
[AP via AOLNews]

BY AMY Z. QUINN

I’m not sure what time this occurred to me, but it’s worth pointing out: Accepting the Liberty Medal with Bono was Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, formerly both finance and foreign minister for Nigeria and a member of DATA’s policy advisory board.
She’s the third woman in the Liberty Medal’s 19 years to have it placed around her neck. Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor (who had to dodge falling set pieces) and in 1995, Sadako Ogata was the first.
4:45 p.m.Will Bunch just emailed a link to his brush with Bono, which happened earlier today when the rawkstah met with the editorial boards of the Inquirer and Daily News. To borrow a phrase from Jezebel, I am sofa king jealous.

***

4:33 p.m.

Back online. Don’t ask.
Jamie Drummond, DATA’s executive director, and Joe Torsella, the Constitution Center’s president, are doing a little press conference — and I do mean little. Few reporters are here yet, and those who are (myself included) are too busy poring through the press kits to really ask substantive questions.

***

4:23 p.m. I’ve managed to find myself a shady patch of lawn outside the Constitution Center, where the press cowpen seems to sit a full five miles closer to the sun than the rest of the city. The bagged dinners have just arrived (turkey, roast beef or tomato-mozz?) and I’m settling in to do some liveblogging before the rest of the hordes arrive.

Dude, where’s my wireless?

I pick up a signal and get a one-off chance to check email, but can’t actually file anything until after the event in the designated pressroom that will be set up in the Center’s cafe. In the meantime, I’m in the dark unless I pony up for a temporary Earthlink pass, and that ain’t happening. Fortunately, there are any number of helpful press babelets (male and female) on hand and one of them, obviously the hippest of the bunch, has promised to see if he can get me a connection somewhere in the meantime. Above and behind me, on the camera platform, I hear the TV camera guys having the same conversations they were having 10 years ago, when I did this kind of thing all the time.

***