ON THE LINE
Kupfer, David & Laskin, Tom & Shard, Randel & Fantle, Will & NICHOLS, JOHN
ON THE LINE Stereolab: Doing More With Less Tim Gane can't quite believe that his London-based band. Stereo-lab, has been dubbed a Marxist act in the United States. Sure, Gane's partner, Laetitia...
...I simply asked him to remember Mark in a compassionate way...
...Several hours later, their cutting complete, they pushed hard on one of the poles...
...The Environmental Protection Agency has found that the numberone source of dioxin is the burning of medical waste...
...Helms has never been accused of sensitivity to gays and lesbians...
...We're all terribly grandmotherly looking...
...Will Fantle Recovering Republicans Against Helms Raleigh, North Carolina AIDS killed Patsy Clarke's son Mark, but Jesse Helms killed her political apathy...
...Dan Savage is the author of the sex-advice column "Savage Love," which runs in sixteen papers, including the Village Voice, Chicago Reader, and The Stranger, and reaches a million and a half readers...
...In response, the Union has established a second tent city...
...David Kuper HOMELESS SQUATTERS Since July 1995, the Kensington Welfare Rights Union in Philadelphia has occupied several sites, including an empty lot (the former site of a lace factory), Independence Mall, an abandoned church, and vacant Housing and Urban Development (HUD) homes...
...W Savage says he hopes to goUti to the state convention—and beyond...
...At first, GOP officials claimed that he had registered in the wrong district, but Savage kept his papers and they eventually backed down...
...Not really...
...I have sympathy for him—and for you—but there is no escaping the reality of what happened...
...So I don't know," he chuckles conspiratorially...
...Our wish: a land without bigotry, judgmental-ism, hatred...
...John Nichols DIGITAL DISOBEDIENCE ^ A new web site called InterActivIsm is launching an electronic civil-disobedience campaign...
...And Savage knows how to play dirty...
...And her musical koans are suggestive, not didactic...
...Savage is debating whether to attend the convention in drag...
...We have invested eight months of our lives in this," says Donna Howard-Hastings, who has given up her job to fight ELF "The truth for me is so much more immediate...
...I've wanted to do this for so long...
...Volunteers have contributed medical care, food, and clothing...
...abortion clinics (the new ComrrwnieMionz OkMH explicitly prohibits posting abortion information on the intemMH to an amendment by Congressman Henry Hyde...
...With her friend Eloise Vaughn, who had nursed her own son Mark for more than a year before he, too, died of AIDS, Clarke decided to bring together a group of mothers and grandmothers of AIDS victims...
...Savage was the only person who registered Republican in his mostly Democratic precinct, which automatically made him a Republican precinct committee officer and a delegate to the county convention...
...On Emperor Tomato Ketchup, Kraftwerk's hit, "Autobahn," supplies a springboard for both rhythmic and melodic elaboration in the bouncy pop tune "OLV 26...
...For more information, contact Greenpeace, 1436 U St...
...They posted an Earth flag and drove several stakes topped with photos of children into the ground...
...Burning this waste in a cement kiln to create energy is—paradoxically—classified ai recycling, not incineration, according to federal regulations...
...Instead of exploiting familiar sounds for their commercial potential, they bend and stretch them, often exploring the nature of pop hook itself...
...If progressives join the GOP, perhaps we could temper its social Neanderthalism," he wrote in an opinion piece in The Stranger...
...The Trident fleet, to which the Pentagon is still adding subs, carries 100,000 times the firepower that vaporized Hiroshima in 1945...
...I like those simple riffs...
...Tom Laskin Drag Queen Goes to the Big Tent Seattle Is there room in the big tent for a drag queen...
...Being called communistic, Marxist . . . it's just completely wrong...
...They established a work site away from the road and next to the antenna system's right-of-way...
...They then turned themselves in to authorities...
...At first glance, her repetitions resemble nothing so much as the jottings of a graduate student who's just been dosed with a few hundred pages of critical theory...
...Gane isn't above borrowing...
...HUD has recently threatened the group with eviction...
...Jesse has come to epitomize the bigotry that divides families, that makes it impossible for some families even to go to their own sons' funerals...
...You cantrae power by being entertaining* making people laugh...
...But we had to do something...
...I'm not going to walk in there with dynamite strapped to my body or anything," Savage says...
...Take, for example, the first few lines of "Moteroller Scaletron," from Emperor Tomato Ketchup: "What's society built on, what's society built on, what's society built on, what's society built on...
...Raleigh, NC 27613...
...The groups fighting the hospital are attempting to place a proposition on Seattle's ballot banning this practice...
...The group is demanding that the city provide the homeless with housing...
...Instead of aping the familiar verse-chorus-verse narratives of mainstream rock, she casts her deceptively dry ruminations on society and its institutions in curt, clipped lines that retain just a hint of poetry...
...It's a high and a scare...
...Many of them—including Clarke, who now calls herself a "recovering Republican"—had voted for the Senator in past elections...
...And no one recycles riffs quite like Stereolab...
...Activists Disarm Nuclear War Trigger Chequamegon National Forest, Wisconsin Saws in hand...
...Since forming the band with Sadier in London in 1991, Gane has drawn on an enormous variety of musical sources, mixing and matching the regularized rhythms of kraut-rock and the early minimalist compositions of Steve Reich and Philip Glass with the melodic invention of French chanson, cocktail exotica, cheesy disco, breezy mood music and whatever other forms he finds "interesting...
...Clarke and her friends did not decide to join the anti-Helms movement casually...
...They're just explorations, really, of whatever Laetitia's thinking at the time...
...In the past, Gane has taken Canned Heat's blues-boogie and made it new...
...My knees are shaking and I'm happy...
...The email address is pmcral® aol.com...
...That's not stealing so much as efficient recycling, a time-honored practice in Western pop...
...To make trouble, he voted for Pat Buchanan...
...Tom and Donna Howard-Hastings went to the woods and cut down three forty-foot antenna poles at tne Navy's Project Extremely Low Fre-queney (ELF) trans-itter jn northern Wisconsin...
...And when Clarke began to tell her story, she found that a lot of other North Carolina mothers agreed...
...It's aimed and ready...
...With several loud cracks, three poles—antenna cables twanging and vibrating—struck the ground and shorted out the ELF transmitter...
...The Seattle Citizens for Quality Living, Women's Health Action Network, Washington Citizens for Resource Conservation, and Greenpeace have banded together to support an end to PVC burning...
...On Emperor Tomato Ketchup he updates Kraftwerk, light electric jazz, and the bedrock industrial experiments of Cabaret Voltaire...
...It may be going too far to say that those simple riffs have helped put Stereolab on the cusp of stardom in this country...
...government with violating international law, and lugged the wood a mile to the transmitter compound...
...Even at extremely low doses, dioxin has toxic effects—including cancer, male and female reproductive-system disorders, birth defects, impaired neurological development, impaired immune-system function, endocrine disruption, and liver, spleen, thymus, and skin-organ toxicity...
...tour with Sadier and band members Mary Hansen (vocals and guitar), Morgane Lhote (keyboards), and Andy Ramsey (percussion), to promote their new CD, Emperor Tomato Ketchup...
...Is this pop larceny...
...A private firm, Stericycle, has proposed a trial "cleanup" project to heat the medical waste using electrothermal deactivation and then ship it off to the Hol-man Cement kiln south of Seattle for burning...
...Donna Howard-Hastings said at the site...
...The crowd donated several thousand dollars to MAJIC, which plans to continue raising money in hopes of buying anti-Helms ads this fall...
...However, Emperor Tomato Ketchup did spend some time at the top of the college charts...
...they had to slog through snow...
...It's built on bluff, built on bluff, built on trust...
...But after a while, the connections between the lines seem vague, Sadier's take on the social order less sure...
...I can either come as a boy, and they can play nice, or if they're going to be jerks about it, I'll come as a girl and play dirty...
...The antenna directs a signal upward, 250 miles into the atmosphere, where it encircles the globe before it plunges into the oceans...
...Randel Shard Hospital Creates Health Risk Seattle A medical institution in Seattle is threatening its neighbors' health, activists say...
...I didn't ask him to stop condemning homosexuals...
...He is also a delegate to the Republican convention in King County, Washington...
...People will just hear what they hear...
...Once medical waste has been heat sterilized, it can be officially disposed of as hazardous waste...
...I didn't ask Jesse Helms for more money for AIDS research, although it is needed...
...But when the Republican Senator from North Carolina told the Republican grandmother from Raleigh that Mark had died because of his irresponsible actions, she decided that the best way to honor her son was to retire Helms...
...But there is a constituency for their message...
...Compassion was not what Clarke got from Helms, however...
...Already Vaughn and Clarke have been attacked for defending "fags and queers...
...You hit a mother's heart and she is going to fight back," says Clarke...
...Because those simple, raw, primitive riffs really are quite powerful...
...Project ELF has been a target of activists for nearly thirty years...
...We look like a church circle," says Clarke, a bubbly sixty-seven-year-old...
...Both have refused to post a $500 bond for release that stipulates they not go near the ELF site...
...The political arena is totally new to most of us...
...Northwest Hospital is burning medical waste containing deadly polyvinyl chloride plastic (PVC), and spewing dioxin...
...We have half the people saying [Ketchup] is more commercial, and half the people saying it's less commercial and 'Why have you done this?' The initial reaction for us when we did it was that it was uncommercial...
...I can't make him do that...
...I wrote him a letter and I told him about Mark, and I told him Mark was a fine young man...
...20009, (202) 462-1177...
...The subjects of our songs are more abstract than what you find in most pop songs," Gane says over the phone from Los Angeles, an hour before embarking on a U.S...
...Together, they formed MAJIC—Mothers Against Jesse in Congress—one of the most novel grassroots political groups to appear in years...
...It's got to come down...
...Special radio receivers aboard the Navy's Trident nuclear submarines link them to ELF...
...That has led to complaints that the band has abandoned its lo-fi roots, but the down-pulling doesn't bother Gane...
...The couple next cut a chunk from one of the poles, attached an indictment charging the U.S...
...I just flipped...
...For more information, contact MAJIC at Box 277, 7474 Creed-moor Rd...
...JM After "throwing peanut biSr and jelly sandwiches at ToinE Thompson," Savage movejnb Washington and started his pnE lar sex column...
...They can decode the signals, while remaining deep under water...
...If you deal with ideas, why must they be generalized and simplified...
...p|9| InterActivIsm is a central site for political and social change...
...JiS For more information, contact InterActiyism on ths,¥g^H Web at...
...A land with compassion, understanding, love...
...It seemed to us that the best thing we could do is to try to unseat Jesse...
...In a rambling letter that complained about "militant homosexuals" and claimed there was "no justification for [increased] AIDS funding," Helms informed Clarke that "the Bible judges" homosexuality to be a sin and he has no choice but to follow its supposed teachings...
...So after Clarke's son died in 1994 of AIDS, she felt she had to write a letter to the man she still refers to as "Jesse...
...The message read: "Mother's Day greetings, Senator Helms, from the families of North Carolina...
...This exempts the kiln from the more stringent pollution-prevention requirements an incinerator is normally subject to...
...The couple has been charged in an Ashland County court with felony sabotage and criminal damage to property...
...The web site invites visitors to "break the new internet law with us" by sending three potentially illegal electronic files to Bob Dole's election headquarters...
...Located deep inside the Chequamegon National Forest, the system beams a secret, encoded radio message into the Earth...
...on April 22...
...www.interaicllvijm.com...
...They face a maximum punishment of fifteen years in prison...
...More than 300 folks showed up at a rally to sign a giant Mother's Day card that Clarke and Vaughn had decorated with a border featuring the words "joy," "peace," and "love...
...Radio waves bounce off the underlying granite bedrock and back to the twenty-eight miles of antenna cables strung above ground...
...One of ACT-UP's issues at the time was the treatment of prisoners with AIDS within the Wfc-consin prison system...
...When Tom and Donna Howard-Hastings entered the woods at 5 a.m...
...At the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, where he got his degree in theater, he became involved in queer activism...
...But come November, I'll vote for Bill Clinton, because I may be a Republican now, but I'm not a moron...
...Rather, in a "Dear Patsy" letter, the Senator wrote, "As for Mark, I wish he had not played Russian roulette with his sexual activity...
...And when she sings: "built on words, built on work . .. responsible for what I say, responsible for what I hush," at the end of the song, it's unclear whether she's offering a critique of the social order, or giving herself a high-minded pep talk...
...It's this sly ambiguity that gives her lyrics added power...
...I thinkjK much more effective now sifng at the computer and answcJK people's letters...
...I walked the floor and cried and cried when I received that letter," recalls Clarke...
...Then he spent a year in Madison, Wisconsin, where he ran ACT-UP...
...Research indicates that children, infants, and fetuses are especially vulnerable to the effects of dioxin exposure...
...In fact, it's difficult to imagine why anyone would want to reduce Sadier's abstract lyrics to clunky political cant...
...Their Earth Day action temporarily shut down the facility, which military experts have described as a "bell-ringer" for launching a military attack...
...I like to mess around with them and extend them way beyond their normal capacity to see what happens," says Gane...
...Stereolab's musical ideas also defy easy categorization...
...Sure, Gane's partner, Laetitia Sadier— who writes all the group's lyrics—sings sweetly in both French and English about the social consequences of a market economy, but that doesn't make Stereolab a rigidly political pop group...
...A little moderation, a few cooler heads, and we could save the Republicans from themselves, and in the process save ourselves from the Republicans...
...NW, Washington, D.C...
...The local paper had an article that quoted Jesse as saying people who died of AIDS deserved what they got," recalls Clarke...
...The more serious charge of sabotage carries a maximum penalty of ten years in prison...
...In full drag, with spike heels, wig, and hat, he stands seven feet five inches...
...He's also made good use of classic electronic gear like the Moog synthesizer and the Farfisa organ, both of which add an appealing futuristic gloss to the band's ethereal repetitions...
...Living with ELF, she says, "is like seeing someone aim a gun at a child...
...He's just pleased to be in a position to experiment with more electronic tools...
...iH to the site can deluge policymakers with e-mail petitions- aiw||S support of a variety of progressive causes...
...The "indecent" files include a graphic illustration of proper <Mfl| use to prevent AIDS, sex scenes from Newt Gingrich's new a list of U.S...
...Maybe I'll get to be a delegate to the national convention," he says...
...In one case, Savage says, a doctor ordered nutritional supplements for a pjis-oner but "he got just an ejjfja peanut butter and jelly sajffij"So we delivered a PBjjBb [Governor Tommy] ThompsjK office for a year...
...When Clarke's husband died some years ago, Helms called to offer his condolences, and even inserted a tribute in the Congressional Record...
...It was just so ignorant and insensitive...
Vol. 60 • July 1996 • No. 7
