ABOVE: Shoppers at a Bakersfield Wal-Mart grab televisions after the store opened at 6 a.m

The Washington-based National Retail Federation predicts total holiday retail sales, which exclude restaurant and auto sales, will increase by 4 percent to roughly $209.25 billion.

from The New York Times for April 24, 2001:

Labor Standards Clash With Global Reality
by LESLIE KAUFMAN and DAVID GONZALEZ

SAN SALVADOR — Six years ago, Abigail Martínez earned 55 cents an
hour sewing cotton tops and khaki pants. Back then, she says, workers were made
to spend 18-hour days in an unventilated factory with undrinkable water.
Employees who displeased the bosses were denied bathroom breaks or occasionally made
to sweep outside all morning in the broiling sun.
    Today, she and other workers have coffee breaks and lunch on an outdoor
terrace cafeteria. Bathrooms are unlocked, the factory is breezy and clean, and
employees can complain to a board of independent monitors if they feel abused.
    The changes are the result of efforts by Gap, the big clothing chain, to
improve working conditions at this independent factory, one of many that supply
its clothes.
    Yet Ms. Martínez today earns 60 cents an hour, only 5 cents more an hour
than six years ago.
    In some ways, the factory, called Charter, shows what Western companies
can do to discourage abuse by suppliers. But Gap's experience also demonstrates
the limits to good intentions when first-world appetites collide with third-world
realities.
    Ms. Martínez's hours are still long, production quotas are high, and her
earnings are still not enough to live on. She shares a two- room concrete home with a
sister, two brothers, her parents and a grandmother.
    Yet the real alternative in this impoverished nation is no work. And
government officials won't raise the minimum wage or even enforce labor laws too rigorously
for fear that employers would simply move many jobs to another poor country.
    The lesson from Gap's experience in El Salvador is that competing
interests among factory owners, government officials, American managers and middle-class
consumers — all with their eyes on the lowest possible cost — make it difficult to
achieve even basic standards, and even harder to maintain them.
    "Some have suggested that there are simple or magic solutions to ensure
that labor standards are applied globally," said Aron Cramer, director of human
rights at Business for Social Responsibility, a nonprofit advocacy group that receives
support from business. "In fact, it takes a great deal of work."
    Fed up with abusive conditions, Ms. Martínez and a small group of other
workers organized and began to hold strikes at the factory, then called Mandarin
International, in 1995. As tension rose, workers took over the factory and shut down
power to the plant. Security guards forcibly ejected strikers; union members said the
guards dragged women out by their hair and clubbed them with guns. The
factory's owners fired hundreds, including Ms. Martínez.
    It might have ended that way, except that it occurred just as concern
about sweatshops was rising in the United States. Groups like the National
Labor Committee, a union-backed, workers advocacy group based in New York, had formed to
oppose sweatshops. Mandarin offered a media- ready case of abuse, and the
revolt was widely publicized.
    Still, two of the four retailers using Mandarin left after the protests
— J. C. Penney and Dayton Hudson (now Target). Eddie Bauer, a unit of Spiegel Inc.,
suspended its contract. Gap Inc., which is based in San Francisco, intended to quit,
too, but a group of Mandarin workers pleaded with the company to save their jobs. Some
blamed union organizers for the trouble. "Problems were made to look worse by the
union," said one employee, Lucía Alvarado, who has worked at the factory for eight years.
    Gap executives chose to stay after deciding that all the groups involved
— workers, labor activists and factory owners — were willing to make changes. The
workers were expected to stop disrupting the plant, and managers had to agree to more
humane practices and to accept outside monitors.
    To make sure the changes stuck and to arbitrate disputes, Gap decided to
try the then innovative idea of hiring local union, religious and academic leaders as
independent monitors who would meet regularly with workers to hear complaints,
investigate problems and look over the books.
    "It's not a paradise," said Carolina Quinteros, co-director of the
Independent Monitoring Group of El Salvador, as the monitors call themselves. "But
at least it works better than others down here. They don't have labor or human rights
violations."
    The push for change ranges far beyond the Charter factory, or El
Salvador. Today, activists on college campuses are calling for an end to sweatshops
everywhere. [As recently as this past weekend in Quebec, world trade officials debated
how to clean up those operations, and the United States has pushed developing countries
to raise pay and working conditions in thousands of plants from Bangladesh to
Brazil.]
    Results, however, have been negligible. The basic problem is that jobs
and capital can move fast these days, as the president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores,
is keenly aware. "The difficulty in this region is that there is labor that is
more competitively priced than El Salvador," he said.
    Here, as in many other countries, labor advocates say the problem is
made worse by the government's cozy ties with factory owners. When a Labor Ministry
committee issued a report critical of forced overtime, poor safety and threats
against labor organizers, factory owners complained. The government swiftly withdrew
and disowned it.
    Salvadoran officials and business leaders have also objected to monitors
Gap has hired to police working conditions. They contend that the group is a tool of
unions that want to keep jobs from leaving the United States — or a leftist
anti-government front, a suspicion left over from El Salvador's long civil war, which ended in
1992.
    Then there is practicality. Gap spends $10,000 a year for the
independent monitors at Charter, which is owned by Taiwanese investors, and thousands more for
management time to arbitrate disputes and for its own company monitors to recheck
the facts on the ground. For the company to duplicate these intensive efforts at each
of the 4,000 independent factories it contracts with would have taken about 4.5
percent of its annual profit of $877 million last year.
    In a world where costs are measured in pennies, that percentage would be
a significant burden. Wal-Mart and Kmart are praised by investors for relentlessly
driving down costs, but they have much less comprehensive monitoring programs.
    Gap says that expense and staff time are not even its main concerns. The
experiment in El Salvador has only reinforced the company's conviction that
companies cannot substitute for governments indifferent to enforcing laws. Also, it said,
retailers have limited power over their independent contractors. Either they pull out,
which would punish innocent workers, or they must accede to a slow process where
they must cajole and bully for every bit of progress.
    "We are not the all-powerful Oz that rules over what happens in every
factory," said Elliot Schrage, Gap's senior vice president for global affairs. "Do we
have leverage? Yes. Is it as great as our critics believe? Not by a long shot."

Sitting Down: Monitoring Effort Enlists Outsiders
Still, monitoring is the sweatshop opponents' great hope. Watchdog
groups say that only people outside of the company can win the trust of workers and
evaluate complaints. "That is where you get problems that won't show up in paper
records and interviews with management," said Sam Brown, executive director of the
Fair Labor Association, a labor advocacy group in Washington.
    At the time, however, no one had ever done it, said Mr. Brown, who is a
former Ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe
and past director of Action, federal domestic volunteer agency.
    Gap's efforts are still in many ways a blueprint for the international
labor advocacy movement — since 1995 other companies like Liz Claiborne and Reebok have
attempted to start similar programs. But what has actually happened in
El Salvador is a process that lasted longer, cost more and achieved less than what many
people had hoped for. "We knew it would be hard," Mr. Schrage said. "But it's been
harder than we ever imagined."
    The company has found that no aspect of its efforts escapes local
politics. On the recommendation of Charles Kernaghan, the director of the National Labor
Council, Gap turned to the legal aid office of the Archdiocese of San Salvador and to
the Jesuit University here. Earlier, both institutions had helped uncover abuses in
the plant, which to Gap demonstrated their experience and independence from management.
But both also had a history of sympathy for the Farabundo Martí National
Liberation Front, a coalition of rebel groups and political parties during the civil war.
The coalition is known as the F.M.L.N., its initials in Spanish.
    "When companies see me, they see someone to the left of the F.M.L.N.,"
said Benjamín Cuéllar, the director of the Institute for Human Rights at the
University of Central America here who is also on the board of independent monitors. That view
manifests itself in mistrust and resistance by managers, he said.
    Beyond politics, Gap says it is not easy to impose its will on
contractors simply because it is a major customer. Pedro Mancía, the factory's manager,
indicated that he looks on the monitors as an annoyance, not a threat. In his view, the
only meaningful role they played was in easing tensions among the workers themselves
after the 1995 strike.
    That event "was not between management and workers," Mr. Mancía argued.
"We had two warring factions of unions and they could not sit down together."
    Factory managers agreed to accept monitors mostly to avoid losing Gap
and going out of business. Still, trust is tenuous and the managers have found ways —
subtle and not so subtle — to resist, monitors say.
    It took about a year to rehire all of the workers fired during the 1995
strike, for example. And 30 of those rehired in 1997 were fired again recently, not
because they were strikers but because the company said they were not productive
enough. "They are playing by the rules of the game," said one member of the monitoring
group. "But I'm not much in agreement with the rules of the game."
    Gap says that this project has taught it the limit of its own influence.
"We can't be the whole solution," Mr. Schrage said. "The solution has to be labor laws
that are adequate, respected and enforced. One of the problems in El Salvador is
that that was not happening and is not happening."

Moving On: Economic Obstacles Impede Reforms
Before dawn each day, Flor de María Hernández leaves her three children
in the tent where they have lived since an earthquake leveled her home earlier this
year and begins her two-hour commute to the Charter clothing factory.
    She and the others, like Ms. Martínez, must be at work before 7 a.m.
Managers close the gate precisely on the hour and dock the pay of anyone who is late.
    Inside, rows of sewing machines face blackboards on which supervisors
have written the daily quotas for shirts and trousers, roughly 2,000 a day for each
line of 36 machines. The pace is relentless, but by local standards it is a
pleasant place to work. There are lockers, tiled bathrooms, a medical clinic and an outdoor
cafeteria. Large fans and high ceilings keep temperatures down.
    But Ms. Martínez remembers just what it took to get this far. She was
among the workers who protested the abusive conditions in 1995. "Workers would
bring in permission slips from their doctors to go to the hospital," she
recalled, "and supervisors would rip it up in their faces."
    Of the 70,000 garment workers in El Salvador, 80 percent are women. Few
earn enough to take care of their families. Ms. Hernández, for example, earns
about $30 a week inspecting clothes. It is not enough to feed her children; to make
ends meet, she relies on help from her ex-husband.
    She keeps her job because the most common alternative is to work as a
live-in maid or a street vendor. Jobs cutting sugar cane in the searing sun, once
plentiful, are difficult to find now, and wages have fallen in recent years along with commodity
prices.
    El Salvador, never a wealthy country, is struggling every bit as hard as
its people. Roughly 75,000 people were killed and thousands wounded in the civil
war. The war also drove away foreign investment, shuttered relatively high-paying
electronics factories and left roads, power lines and other basic services in
tatters.
    Earlier this year, two powerful earthquakes compounded the difficulties
by wrecking hundreds of thousands of buildings. Economists estimate that 180,000
Salvadorans are jobless. Almost half of the population lives in poverty.
    The government has gone out of its way to attract investment and jobs.
Government leaders pin the country's future on the optimistic hope of doubling the
number of factories making clothes for the United States, to more than 400, in
three years.
    "Maquilas have been a source of significant economic growth in recent
years," President Flores said using the Spanish term for the plants that enjoy tax and
trade benefits. "They are the most dynamic economic sector in the country."
    That growth, however, has not been matched by the budget of the Labor
Ministry, which is among the worst-financed agencies. It employs only 37 labor
inspectors to enforce regulations — 1 for every 10 factories, not including coffee
plantations, construction sites or other places of business in this country, which
has 6.1 million people.
    The limits of the government's willingness to be an advocate for labor
was illustrated last summer when it suppressed the report critical of factory working
conditions. The labor minister, Jorge Nieto, said that the report was technically
flawed, and insists that the government intends to modernize his agency and improve inspector
training. "We want investment, but only with respect and fairness," he said. "Only
when workers' rights are respected can we generate more contracts with American
companies."
    But to get those contracts, El Salvador must compete with neighbors like
Honduras and Nicaragua, where wages are lower and the population even poorer and
more eager for work. Government officials and factory managers concede that El
Salvador's current minimum wage is not enough to live on — by some estimates it covers less
than half of the basic needs of a family of four — but they are wary of increasing it.
    "We cannot be satisfied with the wage, but we have to acknowledge the
economic realities," Mr. Nieto said.
    Since Gap pioneered the independent monitoring effort, few other
American companies have followed. They cite costs, politics and questionable effectiveness.
Gap executives echo those worries when they assess the experience at Charter.
    "We are in a very competitive marketplace," said Mr. Schrage of Gap.
"Consumers make decisions on lots of factors, including price. There is no clear benefit
in having invested in independent monitoring to a consumer and it is not clear if we were
to make it more broad policy that consumers would get a benefit or care at all."
    As she shopped at the Gap flagship store at Herald Square in Manhattan,
Claire Cosslett fingered an aqua cotton T-shirt made in El Salvador to check
for quality. Ms. Cosslett, a legal recruiter, said she reads labels and sometimes worries
that her garments are "made by some child chained to a sewing machine."
    American companies dread comments like that. Yet for all their fears,
they ultimately have to balance their concern over image, and any feelings they have
about third-world workers, with customers' attitudes. Then there are the competitive
pressures to keep costs low. Would the cost of raising working standards in El Salvador
raise the price of a T-shirt enough to drive off customers?
    Among several shoppers who were interviewed at the Manhattan store, Ms.
Cosslett was the only one to say that reports of sweatshop conditions had stopped
her from buying a particular brand. She said she would be willing to pay more for
a garment made under better working conditions.
    But then she paused and hedged. "It would depend how much," she said.

Why eating less may extend your life
Thursday, November 28, 2002 Posted: 2:09 PM EST (1909 GMT)

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- As Americans feasted on plates of Thanksgiving turkey Thursday, U.S. scientists reported they have made progress in understanding how eating less leads to longer life.
    Studies in yeast, rodents and other organisms have found that drastically cutting calories extends life span, and researchers are striving to find out how that happens. The hope is that human drugs may be developed to mimic that effect, without having to eat less.
    In a report in Friday's edition of the journal Science, researchers said studies with fruit flies, which have many genes similar to mammals, showed that an enzyme called Rpd3 histone deacetylase likely is a key to longevity.
    "If you decrease the level of enzyme without eating less, you still get life span extension," said Stewart Frankel, a Yale research scientist and the study's senior author.
    In the study, flies with genetic mutations that resulted in lower levels of the enzyme lived about 33 percent or 50 percent longer than normal. With a low-calorie diet, life span was extended by about 41 percent.
    The enzyme may be an attractive drug target, said Frankel.
    Frankel cautioned that much more research, which probably will take several years, is needed before scientists find a drug that can safely provide the same effect in people. The drug would have to be convenient and safe to take for many years, he said.
    One drug, called phenylbutyrate, is thought to target the Rpd3 enzyme, Frankel said. A study published earlier this year showed that feeding that drug to fruit flies extended their lives.
    Low-calorie diets produce other benefits aside from longer lives, according to past studies in rodents that evaluated the effect of decreasing caloric intake by 20 to 40 percent.
    "Their memory is better, their muscle tone is better, they get fewer cancers, fewer heart problems," Frankel said. Even gray hair is delayed.
    The study was co-authored by Blanka Rogina and Stephen Helfand of the University of Connecticut Health Center.

Missing Pieces [IMPORT]
Talk Talk
(February 16, 2001)
Number of Discs: 1
Label: Blueprint

1. After the Flood (Outtake) [Alternate Take]
2. Myrrhman
3. New Grass [Edit]
4. Stump
 5. Ascension Day
6. 5:09
7. Piano - Mark Hollis

'Missing Pieces' picks up where EMI's 'A's & B Sides' left off. After leaving EMI the band signed to Polydor to produce their final album 'Laughing Stock'. This CD is a collection of the A and B-sides of the singles issued during the Polydor era. Also includes the very rare piece called 'Piano', recorded in 1998. 1999 release. Standard jewel case.

http://www.fortune.com/indexw.jhtml?channel=artcol.jhtml&doc_id=210409
 

Crisis in a Coffee Cup
The price of beans has crashed. Growers around the world are starving. And the quality of your morning cup is getting worse. So why is everyone blaming Vietnam?

Fortune: Monday, December 9, 2002
By Nicholas Stein

Nestled among the rugged hills of Vietnam's Central Highlands, 200 miles north of Ho Chi Minh City, Buon Ma Thuot is a remote and isolated village in a remote and isolated land. The only road in and out of town is a narrow, winding, muddy track interrupted by gaping potholes and meandering yaks. Until the mid-1990s the region was notable only for a key battle in the final days of what Vietnam calls its American war. A replica of the first North Vietnamese tank to roll into Buon Ma Thuot sits in the center of town as a monument to South Vietnam's "liberation." But in the past decade almost everything else here has changed. The rain forest that once blanketed the region is gone--pulled up and burned down to get at the fertile soil beneath. The population has exploded. And the streets now reverberate with the buzz of motorcycle traffic and the hum of commerce. The development is exemplified by Phuc Ban Me, a gaudy resort complete with a hotel, a sprawling water park, and a karaoke bar built in the shape of a cave.
    The catalyst for Buon Ma Thuot's growth was a plant associated more often with the lush climes of Latin America than the jungles of Southeast Asia: coffee. Between 1990 and 2000, Vietnamese farmers planted more than a million acres of the crop. Annual production swelled from 84,000 tons to 950,000, enabling Vietnam to surpass Colombia as the world's second-largest producer (Brazil is the first). Vietnam may not have Juan Valdez, but its coffee is probably in the can in your kitchen pantry.
    In 1997, after a frost in Brazil sent the price of green (unroasted) coffee on New York's Commodities Exchange soaring above $3 a pound, Buon Ma Thuot's coffee sector suddenly had more money than it could spend. But the coffee renaissance in Vietnam proved short-lived. In 1999 prices began to fall, sinking last December to 42 cents a pound, their lowest level in a century. For three consecutive years prices have not even covered the cost of production. Many of the region's farmers are heavily in debt. Some have replaced their coffee plants with corn or pineapples. Others have simply abandoned their farms. Phuc Ban Me gets few visitors these days, and its water park stands vacant, a reminder of the excesses of the boom.
    Vietnam's coffee industry is not the only one suffering. The prolonged price slump has ravaged many of the world's 25 million coffee growers. In Central America, where the costs of production are triple those of Vietnam, the repercussions have been particularly severe. The U.S. Agency for International Development estimates that at least 600,000 coffee workers have lost their jobs. Conditions are equally dire in Africa, where impoverished nations such as Uganda, Burundi, and Ethiopia rely on coffee for the majority of their export revenues. Nestor Osorio, executive director of the International Coffee Organization, calls this "the worst crisis ever" for coffee, the second-largest globally traded commodity, after oil.
    Vietnam is not just a victim of the crisis. For many, it is also the chief culprit, responsible for flooding the market over the past five years with millions of bags of unwanted coffee, upsetting the fine balance between global supply and demand for its own short-term gain.
    But the depressed prices plaguing coffee growers are not simply the result of a cyclical glut. They are also caused by two systemic changes within the global coffee world: the collapse of the cartel that kept prices at sustainable levels for nearly three decades, and the development of new coffee-processing technology, which prompted a shift away from high-quality arabica beans to cheaper, lower-quality robusta. The former was brought on by complex geopolitical developments. The latter can be traced to the coffee divisions of four multinational conglomerates--Nestle, Kraft, Procter & Gamble, and Sara Lee--which buy nearly half of the world's coffee and own some of the best-known brands, including Nescafe, Maxwell House, Folgers, and Chock Full o' Nuts. In the past, these Big Four coffee roasters blended small amounts of robusta with arabica to pare their purchasing costs. But technological advances have allowed roasters to neutralize robusta's harsh, unpleasant taste. To reduce costs further, the Big Four have significantly upped the percentage of robusta in their blends, substituting it for arabica they once purchased from small farmers in Latin America and Africa.
    Most of the robusta comes from Brazil and Vietnam, which together have seized a greater share of global exports, up from 29% in 1997 to 41% last year. "Brazil and Vietnam offer excellent coffee at very reasonable prices," says Frank Meysman, head of Sara Lee's worldwide coffee business. "It will be difficult for other countries, particularly in Central America, to compete."
    The switch to cheaper beans in the past five years has provided a windfall for the Big Four. Though none of the companies releases financial results for its coffee divisions, all acknowledge they have enjoyed record coffee profits.

Hold tight the massive
Ever since Simon Dee's first broadcast from the MV Caroline in 1964, pirate radio has played a crucial role in forming Britain's musical taste. Now the phenomenon is bigger than ever, the airwaves in the cities so crowded that the pirates are being pushed into the suburbs and the countryside. Alexis Petridis picks up the story in an Essex garage with a young man named Stealth . . .

Friday November 22, 2002
The Guardian
 

It has been described as a new studio, a nerve centre, and the headquarters of Essex's top pirate radio station, and admittance has been granted only after a rigorous vetting procedure. I have been quizzed at length. ID has been demanded. The Guardian's photographer has been accused of spying for the government: "I'm sorry about that, mate," says our guide, a 19-year-old who bears the fitting pseudonym of Stealth. "But he looks exactly like an inspector from the DTI - he's even driving a Ford Mondeo." Finally, though, Stealth has agreed to drive us to the secret location. On the way, the car stereo blares out Soundz FM. It plays chirpy UK garage topped not with patois-heavy rhymes about guns, "haters" and inner-city violence, but rap of a distinctly Essex strain. "Big shaaht aaht to the XR3i crew," says the MC. "Buzzing abaaht in the rain on a Sunday afternoon."
    The screening procedures are so exacting, it's difficult not to be slightly disappointed when you arrive. You can call this place a studio until you are blue in the face, but there is no getting around the fact that we are standing in the middle of someone's garage. The turntables nestle on a workbench amid cans of de-icer and Hammerite. The DJs and their friends sit on piles of stacked-up garden chairs, their baseball-capped heads nodding in time to the beats.
    A DJ called Mr Y2K is hunched over the turntables, while his fellow DJ Softmix chatters into a microphone, taking requests and demands for "shout outs", and reading text messages. The mobile phone rings. He hands it to Mr Y2K, and a brief, animated conversation takes place, just audible over the beats. A listener is criticising Y2K's choice of records. "Yeah, I know, mum," he mutters. "I didn't really want to play it myself." He pauses and looks momentarily pained. "Will you stop interfering?" he asks, plaintively. "Big up Mr Y2K's mummy!" cries Softmix. Stealth rolls his eyes. "Sometimes his nan rings up as well," he says.
    Soundz FM is far removed from the popular image of a pirate radio station. For a start, we are not in a crumbling Hackney tower block, nor is the atmosphere fugged with marijuana smoke. Judging by the litter on the floor, Soundz runs on nothing stronger than junk food and cigarettes. The atmosphere is cheery with the added frisson of illicit behaviour. It is somewhere between a youth club and a house party being held while parents are away. Everyone is friendly, if startled by the arrival of a national newspaper in their midst. "Shout going out to the Guardian posse," cries Softmix, by way of introduction. "Checking out the studio, writing an article on Soundz FM!" He then decides to conduct an interview of his own. "What do you make of it?" he asks, thrusting the microphone into my hands. But I have neither the voice nor the vocabulary for pirate radio. "So far it seems very impressive," I say, sounding like the winner of a competition to find Britain's most middle-class person. Aware that Soundz FM's street credibility is threatened, Softmix takes the microphone back. "Wicked," he says.
    From Radio London in the 60s to So Solid Crew's Battersea-based Delight FM, pirate radio has traditionally been a London phenomenon. Two years old, Soundz is one of a new breed of suburban pirates, uncomfortable with the gangster posturing and occasional bursts of violence that have become associated with illegal radio in the capital. Although Soundz reaches London, the majority of its audience comes from the suburbs: Essex, Surrey, Kent and Hertfordshire. The "staff" of Soundz FM are curiously prudish. Swearing is banned on air. "Some stations use filthy language, you know," bridles one DJ indignantly. "They're asking to be taken off the air, no question."
    "In London they want that rude boy attitude," says Stealth. "In certain parts of north-west London... well, there's a pirate station there that's actually based in a crack den, so that gives you an idea of some of them. But we're not all like that. We're referred to as polite people from Bexley. We're a friendly, community station. We're from the suburbs, we don't bother trying to get non-suburb listeners."
    There's a musical distinction as well, albeit one of those infinitesimal sub-generic shifts that anyone not completely immersed in the dance music world has no hope of understanding. DJ L-Dubs attempts to explain it to me. "Shady garage", he says, is to be avoided at all costs, whereas "happy garage" attracts "uplifting people who want to be uplifted". The latter, he informs me, is what Soundz FM is all about. I nod knowledgeably, but have no idea what he is talking about.
    Equally bewildering is the station's co-founder, Master Control. Portly and middle-aged, he cuts an incongruous figure amid the sportswear-clad teens. He was a teenager himself when he first got involved with pirate radio. Now it has completely taken over his life. During the week he makes "rigs" - radio transmitters - that he sells to other stations. At the weekends he careers around the Essex countryside, checking Soundz's aerial, ensuring that the signal is not causing interference to television or the emergency services. Ask him what the appeal of pirate radio is and he looks completely mystified. "I don't know. I find it... I don't know. I can't really do anything else. It's the only thing in my life that I can do. I make rigs that work, I do it properly. You get a sense of achievement, I suppose."
    He's not alone in his inability to explain the compulsion to break the law on a weekly basis, endure the endless hassle and expense of having your transmitter impounded by the Radiocommunications Agency (or stolen by a rival station) and risk unlimited fines and two years in prison. There's certainly no financial reward - the DJs pay a £10 weekly subscription to play on the station, which goes towards running costs - and little chance of celebrity. While some of the Soundz staff clearly see the station as a means of breaking through, circumventing the politburo of ageing celebrity DJs who control the dance scene, it is statistically unlikely that they will. For every So Solid Crew, who have converted their pirate notoriety into a more tangible form of celebrity, there are scores of DJs beavering away in semi-obscurity: Dom Da Bom, Miss Giggles, Lukozade, DJ Bangers, the hopefully named Aylesbury Allstars.
    It's peculiar, but then pirate radio has always been a bit peculiar. By definition it exists outside the mainstream, attracting strange characters who don't really fit in anywhere else. As befits a criminal enterprise, it regularly changes its identity. It began in 1964, the brainchild of Irish businessman Ronan O'Rahilly, who noted that, in the heyday of Beatlemania, the BBC Light Programme was broadcasting only two hours of pop music a week. Rahilly's Radio Caroline and its competitor Radio London invented pop radio as we know it today. By 1967, however, the Marine Broadcasting Offences Act had made the seafaring stations illegal, and Radio 1 had swiped both the pirates' all-pop     format and their biggest DJs: Tony Blackburn, Dave Lee Travis, Kenny Everett and John Peel.
    Deprived of both legality and raison d'etre, pirate radio went into decline. By the 70s, it was the domain of crackpots: Radio Nordsee featured a DJ called Spangles Muldoon and broadcast virulent Tory propaganda during the 1970 general election. Radio Enoch, meanwhile, offered military music and plummy voices denouncing immigration.
    It took the rise of dance music to revive the pirates' fortunes. Britain's underground soul and reggae scenes grew throughout the 70s, but were largely ignored by Radio 1 or the new commercial stations. Pirates stepped in to fill the void. Invicta, Radio Free London, Solar, Horizon and LWR eschewed fishing trawlers and set up in the centre of London, broadcasting urban music in an urban setting. When acid house was effectively banned from Radio 1 after 1988's tabloid drug exposés, a host of new pirates sprung up: Centreforce, Sunrise and Fantasy among them. It set a pattern that has repeated ever since, in which the pirate stations are the scourge of the authorities and a vital source of new music for the record industry.
    When a new dance genre emerges - hardcore, drum'n'bass, and most recently UK garage - a new wave of pirates appear, devoted to the new sound. Virtually every garage or drum'n'bass tune that makes the national chart will have been played on a pirate station first. Occasionally, a pirate DJ finds himself at the helm of a hit. Flex FM's DJ Dee Kline went to number 11 in 2000 with I Don't Smoke, a garage record that sampled Jim Davidson doing his comedy West Indian voice.
    Radio 1 repeated the trick it pulled off in 1967, luring DJs Pete Tong and Tim Westwood from LWR, Gilles Peterson from Horizon and the Dreem Teem from Blackbeard Radio. But this time the pirates, attracted by the relatively low cost of setting up a station (estimated by Stealth at around £2,500), won't die away. In 1991, the RA carried out 475 operations against pirate stations. Last year, it carried out 1,438. London's airwaves are currently jammed with a startling array of illicit stations. At the weekend, you can hear anything from the pre-pubescent children of So Solid's Dan Da Man spinning garage on Delight to Ghanian gospel music courtesy of WBLS's improbably named DJ Rabbi.
    Stations rise and fall with dizzying frequency - the victims of internal feuding, a lack of suitable studio locations and raids by the DTI's Radiocommunications Agency - but there is always someone to replace them. So far this year, the RA has raided 179 pirate stations in London. Most went straight back on the air. As the RA dolefully admits: "There's no easy victory or cure for pirate radio. You take them down, they put them up again. You can't be sure people won't re-offend. You're just dealing with a specific complaint at a specific time."
    According to Stealth, central London's airwaves are so overcrowded that the suburbs are the best option for a new station. "We're doing it as a hobby. There are too many stations in London and they're all doing it for money. When it turns into a money market, you get people using dodgy rigs, employing thick cement mixers to install the equipment." Meanwhile, he says, pirate stations are springing up in locations that make Bexley look like a teeming metropolis: Weymouth, Newquay, Telford, Ludlow, Swindon.
    To prove the point, Stealth suggests a visit to his friend's station, Y2K Kent, which broadcasts from Margate. The next weekend, we rendezvous in a lay-by near the Blackwall Tunnel. Stealth arrives in a small hatchback, with a large skull and crossbones flag sticking out of the sunroof.
    In Margate I am introduced to Y2K's founder, a stocky 20-year-old who works for a drainage company by day and who calls himself Fraudster. Fraudster has been involved in pirate radio since he was 13. He originally DJed around London before realising the pirate scene was simply too crowded there. "We realised we needed to go somewhere else," he says, "so we packed everything into the car and just started to drive out of London, through the Blackwall tunnel. This was the first place we got to."
    Fraudster says that in its year of existence, Y2K Kent has been successful enough to attract complaints from the local commercial radio station. "They said we nicked 1,000 of their listeners, but they play music for over-30s, so I don't see how that works." Nevertheless, it is a modest set-up, located in the box room of a student house. The room is so tiny that three people constitute a life-threatening crush. DJs and associates crowd outside, peering in. It is extremely hot, and the unmistakable stench of bloke wafts down the stairs. The windows must be kept shut, lest anyone notices the noise and contacts the RA. "You have to be careful in Margate," says Fraudster, "because there's no crime, the police have got nothing to do. The front page of the local paper is 'man steals pork pie from Tesco's'."
    On the floor, an electric fan cools a tangle of wires and electronic boxes, apparently assembled to plans by Heath Robinson. On our arrival, it breaks down. "Hold tight the massive," says the MC, "as we sort it out inside the place."
    Stealth immediately springs into action. "You need a graphic on the mixer," he suggests. "I need another studio," groans Fraudster, looking harassed. In fact, Fraudster spends most of my visit looking harassed. His mobile phone rings constantly, not with shout outs or requests, but irate calls from his girlfriend, for whom the novelty of pirate radio has clearly long worn off. "I sometimes wonder why I do this," Fraudster admits. "I spend my whole week cleaning out shitty drains, then spend all weekend doing this. I'm not in it to earn anything. I suppose it's for the joy of the music."
    The RA's spokesman argues that "people suffer as a result of pirate radio. They tune into a station they want to listen to, and find something else blocking it. I take their calls, and they're absolutely furious. If you live nearby they create a noise nuisance. They're anti-social."
    You take his point - you wouldn't want to live next door to an illegal radio station, pumping out UK garage or drum'n'bass from Friday evening to Monday morning. However, it's hard not to be impressed by the determined attitude of the pirates. There is little fame and less cash in their world of box bedrooms and converted garages.
    Yet still they doggedly carry on, buying new rigs, finding new studios, skulking about in search of suitable transmitter sites. Although most of them are far too young to remember the Sex Pistols, there's something resolutely punk about theirattitude: confronted with a dance scene that has slid into mundane irrelevance, they have decided to do something for themselves. Their ambitions are not commercially driven, yet they extend far beyond anti-authoritarian posturing. At Soundz, there's a lot of talk about digital radio. When legal stations switch to digital transmission, they live in hope that the RA will leave the obsolete FM band to them. Soundz even has aspirations beyond playing music. "We run a show between 8pm and 12am where we do comedy," says Stealth, proudly. "It's absolute chaos. We had a bloke out with a microphone doing wind ups on people in McDonald's in Lakeside shopping centre, and on drivers at the Dartford tunnel. You'd crease up if you heard it." A little corner of pirate radio, it seems, will be forever DLT.
    A few weeks after my visit, Stealth telephones. Both Soundz FM and Y2K Kent have gone off the air. Soundz has collapsed due to internal disagreements: Stealth and Master Control have fallen out over music policy. Y2K Kent, meanwhile, was raided by the RA, who found not only their rig, but two station staff standing next to it. For the first time, Stealth sounds bleak about the future of pirate radio: "Fines are going up, more stations are getting raided, things are getting tighter all the time. They're really turning up the heat."
    But it's still not hot enough to discourage Stealth and Fraudster. Within weeks, both are back in business with new stations, Fraudster with a station called Essence 105.1 FM, Stealth with Impact 99.7 FM. He has moved out of the garage and set up a studio in an industrial estate. And he has finally nailed pirate radio's unique appeal. "The buzz is when you're driving down your local high street and you hear it playing out of someone else's radio, or you hear people talking about it on the bus," he says. "You realise you're having an effect. If it was going nowhere, you'd soon lose interest."

Fashion's High Priestess of Gnosticism
By HERBERT MUSCHAMP

Why don't you . . . give all your ideas away to other people, so that you'll fill up again with new ones? Diana Vreeland, the great fashion editor, understood that this is how creative minds work. It's fatal to be a hoarder. When you have an idea, get it out there. Pretend you're Josephine Baker, tossing fruit into the audience. Hit someone on the head with a pineapple. Circulate the energy. Distribute the wealth. Rinse your child's hair with dead Champagne.
    This is a gnostic way of thinking. Now relax. It's Sunday. You won't mind a bit of Gnosticism with your Styles. Glamour and knowledge both share the same root in gnosis (secret learning), so why shouldn't Gnosticism be fashion's true faith?
    The gnostics were a religious order, circa the year 0, but in modern times it makes better sense to view them as a personality type. Vreeland was one of them.
    "If you do not bring bring forth what is within you," the gnostics believed, "what you do not bring forth will destroy you." And I suspect Vreeland truly believed that if she had an idea and didn't get it out there, it would kill her. Killer-diller. If she couldn't come out with observations like "pink is the navy blue of India," she would die.
    Thanks in part to those observations, she hasn't. Or, rather, the point of view defined by Vreeland's insights remains indispensable. It is the viewpoint of fearlessness, the stance of "Why not?" And if Vreeland's legend looms larger today than it did during her lifetime, that may be because this particular stance has become harder to sustain.
    Vreeland is the subject of a new biography by Eleanor Dwight, and it is the first to explore the personality behind the histrionic public persona. The book rides a wave of printed material by and about Vreeland that did not begin until years after her retirement from Vogue. "Allure," a coffee-table book, written with Christopher Hemphill, of black and white photographs punctuated with Vreeland's taped recollections of them, was published in 1980 and has been reissued this year.
    The first book was followed in 1984 by the editor's memoir, "DV." Two additional volumes of Vreeland's musings have appeared in the last year: "Why Don't You?" a collection of her columns for Harper's Bazaar, and "Vreeland Memos," an issue of the fashion periodical Visionaire.
        Why don't you . . . buy Dwight's biography and read it, so that I don't have to try your patience with one of those super-compressed summaries that nobody reads anyhow? "Elegance is refusal," Vreeland once pronounced. I don't know whether this is a gnostic idea precisely. But it appears to be an essential antidote to excessive gnostic fecundity. If what you have to bring forth is tedious, just leave it alone.
    Vogue in the 1960's was as much the creature of its time as it was the creation of an editor. At the beginning of the decade, fashion magazines reflected a relatively rarefied realm of elegance, style and social poise. Ten years later, they had become a mass medium. Vreeland's Vogue occupied the pivotal place in this transformation. Herself a latter-day Edwardian Woman of Style, she hit her manic professional stride in the postwar years, when people were just beginning to grasp the full extent of changes brought about by mass communications.
    These circumstances are unrepeatable. That's why it is pointless to complain that no magazine quite like Vreeland's exists today. No world like hers exists today. When she started out, celebrity was tantamount to notoriety. Now, the news media are glamorous in their own right. Today, everybody knows who Diana Vreeland was. In her own time, she communicated to audiences who never gave much thought to who an editor was.
    I know, because I was part of it. When I started reading Vogue in my early teenage years, I had little interest in fashion and knew even less about it. Rather, like The New Yorker, and Ada Louise Huxtable's architecture columns, Vogue represented what I recognized as an urban point of view. I found my suburban life confining. It was a relief to project myself into the escapist fantasies offered by those texts. I wouldn't know of the existence of Diana Vreeland or William Shawn, the editor of The New Yorker, until many years later. Now the situation has changed. We're all regaled by the antics of editors without magazines.
    Vreeland, I later read in a biography of Alexander Lieberman by Calvin Tomkins and Dodie Kazanjian, once described Vogue as "the myth of the next reality." The myth was accurate in my case. The next reality was relatively exempt from the pleasures of cold war normalcy.
    People were onto something when they called Vreeland the high priestess of fashion. She was a gnostic priestess. In the gnostic system, there was an outer mystery for the many and an inner mystery for the few. So it was with Vreeland's Vogue. Many readers may have regarded it as the leading fashion magazine. Others, too few to constitute a mass readership, understood that glamour has only incidentally to do with clothes. It has mainly to do with personality structure, with the places we choose to dwell or avoid within the architecture of our subconscious fantasies.
    Now, the point of Gnosticism is to be reborn to the divine within oneself. If "the divine" is not acceptable, you can substitute the truth within oneself. Or, as the psychotherapist D. W. Winnicott called it, the authentic self. But Vreeland probably would be comfortable with the divine.
    Why don't you bring out that divine thing that is within you? If you don't, that divine thing will slay you.
    In any case, you have to kill off the inauthentic, or at least not let it take over the executive committee of the self. Vreeland was vigilant in this regard. Of course, she was also a fabulist. She made up or grossly exaggerated her accounts of her past and the world around her. But if she had stuck to the facts, she would have falsified her self. She had "the wound" of the creative artist: an unshakeable disbelief in her potential to be loved, coupled with an iron determination to conceal this disbelief from herself. From this stemmed her power as an architect of other people's desires.
    Ms. Dwight's biography is, among many other marvels, a brilliant study in the relationship between love and work. The book is a treatise of changing mores, too, of course, but at heart it is a report from the front lines in the struggle to craft new identities for men and women in the modern world of work. The evidence suggests that Vreeland was not a feminist. She was, however, a strong woman and a breadwinner who reformed the decorous world of fashion magazines within her muscular grip.
    Vreeland's is the flip side of the "Lady in the Dark" story. This extraordinary woman blossomed when circumstances forced her to create a world outside her marriage to a man of limited emotional and financial resources. Reed Vreeland looked the part of leisured money. The leisure part was real. He was a Ralph Lauren ad campaign before a Ralph Lauren was even dreamed of, but evidently possessed neither the earning power nor the work ethic of an average male model. A woman who considered herself unattractive might see him as a catch.
    But what a lot of hard work it must have taken for Vreeland to believe that he was worthy of her devotion! The fantasies it must have taken to fill up the vacuum between herself and a human version of the spotted-elk-hide trunks she advised her readers at Harper's Bazaar to strap on the backs of their touring cars! She was herself the driver. And although it is pleasing in life to travel with attractive luggage, greater rewards await those who travel light. A higher quality of attention will be paid to the active partner in the wider world.
    "I know what they're going to wear before they wear it, eat before they eat it, say before they say it, think before they think it, and go before they go there!" This astonishing outburst, once overheard by Richard Avedon, could be taken as evidence of a fashion dictator's disrespect for her readers. But perhaps the woman was simply reassuring herself that she could trust her instincts.
    What else did she have to go on? It's not as if she was dealing with anything rational. In "DV," Vreeland recounts the possibly apocryphal story of assigning a photographer to shoot a picture against a green background. The photographer strikes out after three attempts. " `I asked for billiard table green!' I am supposed to have said. `But this is a billiard table, Mrs. Vreeland,' the photographer said. `My dear,' I apparently said, `I meant the idea of billiard table green, not a billiard table.' "
    In other words it did not pay to follow this dictator literally. Far better to respond with instincts of one's own. This, I think, was the core clause in Vreeland's contract with her readers. We expected her to know where we were going before we went there. We were traveling to places deeper within ourselves.

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