FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES:
 

Connect, They Say, Only Connect
By EMILY EAKIN

The whiteboard in Duncan J. Watts's office at Columbia University was a thicket of squiggly blue lines, circles and calculus equations. Mr. Watts, an associate professor of sociology, had just begun a passionate disquisition on the virtues and liabilities of scale-free networks when the telephone rang. It was Alfred Berkeley, the vice chairman of Nasdaq, hoping to chat about the exchange's design.
    Mr. Watts, 31, is a network theorist. And these days that means fielding frequent calls from powerful admirers like Mr. Berkeley — Wall Street moguls and government officials eager to tap into a nascent academic science that few understand but that many think may hold the key to everything from predicting fashion trends to preventing terrorism, stock market meltdowns and the spread of HIV.
    Never mind that Mr. Watts's new book on the subject, "Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age," which will be published by W. W. Norton next month, is littered with the arcana of theoretical physics as well as charts and graphs that appear to require an advanced degree in math in order to decipher. Network theory is hot. Two other recent books on networks, "Linked: The New Science of Networks" (Perseus, 2002) by Albert-Laszlo Barabasi and "Nexus: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks" (W. W. Norton) by Mark Buchanan, have already sold tens of thousands of copies.
    And that's not counting sales in the burgeoning genre of consumer studies, where network science terms and concepts are invoked with near religious fervor. From Malcolm Gladwell's three-year-old best seller, "The Tipping Point," to just-published analyses like "The Influentials" and "Branded: The Buying and Selling of Teenagers," the shelves at Barnes & Noble are laden with books alternately applauding and deploring the importance of things like hubs, connectors, mavens and influencer teens for creating fads, cementing brand loyalty and swelling profits.
    "Network theory has become a bit of a fad," Mr. Watts conceded after hanging up the phone. "I spend half my time telling people I think it's relevant to a lot of problems people care about and half my time trying to tone down the hype."
    Network scientists study networks: collections of people or objects connected to each other in some way. Think of the 1.5 million Manhattan residents or the 30,000 genes inside a human cell. Such networks, scientists argue, behave in ways that can't be understood solely in terms of their component parts. Without knowing what every single person or object within the network is doing, they say, it's nevertheless possible to know something about how the network as a whole behaves.
    Stated that way it sounds simple. But as an intellectual approach, network theory is the latest symptom of a fundamental shift in scientific thinking, away from a focus on individual components — particles and subparticles — and toward a novel conception of the group. As Mr. Barabasi, a professor of physics at the University of Notre Dame, put it: "In biology, we've had great success stories — the human genome, the mouse genome. But what is not talked about is that we have the pieces but don't have a clue as to how the system works. Increasingly, we think the answer is in networks."
    Not that network theory is an entirely contemporary creation. Its roots stretch back nearly 300 years, to Leonhard Euler, a brilliant 18th-century Swiss mathematician who dabbled in nearly every branch of modern science, from algebra to astrophysics. In 1736, Euler took up a brain teaser that had preoccupied the residents of Königsberg, a Prussian town on the Pregel River not far from where he lived: how to cross all seven bridges in town without crossing the same bridge twice. No one had been able to pull off the feat, but Euler provided the mathematical proof that it could not be done. To do so, he turned the problem into a network, depicting the bridges as lines and the landmasses they connected as nodes.
    After Euler, mathematicians continued to analyze networks, then called graphs, enumerating the properties of orderly and static structures like ice crystals and beehives. No one thought to tackle networks of people or objects that were, as Mr. Watts puts it in his book, "actually doing something — generating power, sending data or even making decisions." Such complex real-world networks were assumed to be random: nodes and links connected in an arbitrary, disorderly fashion.
    But clearly this is not always the case. "Imagine that you really did pick your friends at random from the global population of over six billion," Mr. Watts writes. "You would be much more likely to be friends with someone on another continent than someone from your hometown, workplace or school. Even in a world of global travel and electronic communications, this is an absurd notion."
    Of course, studying a network of six billion people is an unfathomable proposition. It wasn't until the mid-1990's and the advent of powerful computers that network scientists were able to analyze real-life networks of significant size and complexity. And in doing so, Mr. Watts and his colleagues made some tantalizing discoveries. By 1998, they had found that networks as diverse as actors, power grids, the World Wide Web, the proteins in a human cell and the neurons of a wormlike organism called C. elegans aren't random at all but obey the same simple, powerful rules.
    For example, whether the network has nearly a billion nodes (the estimated number of Web pages) or just half a million (roughly the number of actors in the Internet Movie Database), the paths between any two nodes tend to be extremely short — such that, for example, any two movie actors can be connected by an average of less than four links.
    That may not seem like news to anyone who has played the Kevin Bacon Game — in which film actors invariably turn out to have starred in a movie with Mr. Bacon or else with another actor who has — or seen John Guare's play "Six Degrees of Separation." (The play was inspired by the famous 1967 experiment in which the Harvard social psychologist Stanley Milgram tried to prove that anyone in America could reach anyone else through a chain of fewer than six people.) But it was not entirely clear why these should all be "small-world" networks. As Mr. Watts points out, "There is nothing similar at all about the detailed way in which movie actors choose projects and engineers build transmission lines."
    Eerier still, in 1999, Mr. Barabasi and a student at Notre Dame found that many of these small-world networks are also what scientists call scale-free. Many natural phenomena, including traits like height and I.Q., tend to cluster around an average (producing the familiar bell curve distribution). By contrast, scale-free networks go in for extremes: a few hubs — nodes with lots of links — and many more nodes with hardly any links at all. (Think of Google, the search engine, as a hub, and your personal homepage — which probably has just a few links — as an ordinary node.)
    Mr. Barabasi's discovery startled scientists. "People always knew there were networks but thought they were random," he said. "To know they were nodes linked by hubs was very unexpected."
    It also provoked a frenzy of research. For as Mr. Barabasi and his collaborator were able to show, the structure of scale-free networks has important practical implications. If you remove a few nodes at random, the network can still function normally. But if you remove one of the hubs, the results can be catastrophic.
    Inspired by this insight, cancer researchers are now homing in on the cell's hub proteins in order to learn how to defend them from devastating attacks. Epidemiologists studying sexually transmitted diseases are arguing that it makes more sense to identify and treat the hubs in the transmission network than to give drugs to everyone. "The Bush administration's policy to give drugs to mothers with children is completely irrelevant to stopping AIDS in Africa," Mr. Barabasi said. "It's much better to go and target the hubs."
    Even the United States military has begun recruiting network theorists to conduct counterterrorism research, with the goal of learning how to protect information and economic networks at home and destabilize terrorist networks abroad.
    Yet just which network model describes human society remains a subject of fierce debate. Mr. Barabasi believes the human social network is scale-free with the expected smattering of richly connected hubs. Mr. Watts disagrees. "If you asked people to list the number of people they recognize, that could be scale-free, everyone recognizes Michael Jordan," he said. "But if you said, `Who would you trust to look after your kids?' That's not scale-free. As you start to ratchet up the requirements for what it means to know someone, connections diminish."
    Is society a small-world network of the sort Milgram was interested in? Mr. Watts spent the past year trying to test that idea, using the Internet as a proxy for the world population. Whatever the results, he says, it's clear that human psychology has not yet adapted to the implications of a connected world.
    "We like to think of our world as full of atomized individuals," he said. "But decisions people make and the actions they take are so hopelessly entwined with the behaviors of everyone else that it's difficult to draw the boundaries around the individual." When it comes to choosing a CD or explaining the success of Harry Potter, your preference may matter less than the network's.
    But some scholars dismiss the network hypothesis altogether. Judith S. Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, prompted a flurry of media attention last year when she published an article questioning the validity of Milgram's small-world findings. Given the prevalence of networks — from power grids to airports to the Internet — it's tempting to assume that human society is a network as well, she says. But ultimately, that is impossible to prove.
    "Duncan assumes the world is a matrix," Ms. Kleinfeld said in a telephone interview. "He wants to know how you get from one point on it to another. But what if the world isn't a matrix? What if people aren't all connected? What if they're islands in space?"
    Mr. Watts admits that he faces daunting empirical challenges — and that overzealous scientists are a concern. "You can turn almost anything into a network," he said, holding up two papers he had received on the "small world of human language" and shaking his head. "So what?"
    "When I'm brutally honest with myself, I think that if we can figure this out, we can answer some important questions. Other times, I think it's just too hard."

"If you recognize any of the person(s) below, please contact:
by phone: (604)717-3349 #5600,
or email craig_bentley@city.vancouver.bc.ca or randy_regush@city.vancouver.bc.ca,
or if you want to remain anonymous, contact Crimestoppers at 604-669-TIPS or 1-800-222-TIPS. "

95-Year-Old Plans Considered at WTC Site
Wed Jan 22, 3:18 AM ET
By SARA KUGLER, Associated Press Writer

NEW YORK - Decades before the World Trade Center was conceived, a revolutionary architect drew plans for a rocket-like skyscraper to be built on that very site. Now, a movement is growing to include his ideas in the redevelopment.
    Antoni Gaudi, whose architecture changed the face of Barcelona, Spain, in the early 1900s, sketched a design in 1908 for a New York hotel that was never built. It is not known why Gaudi's plans were never realized.
    The drawing called for a cluster of steel and concrete parabolic towers at varying heights surrounding a central tower that would stand 1,048 feet tall, according to Paul Laffoley, the Boston architect leading the effort to give the concept a second chance.
    "It's like resurrecting something that should have existed in the past," Laffoley said.
    He intends to enter the design in the international memorial competition that begins this spring. The agency in charge of rebuilding the site says a plan for the memorial will be chosen by Sept. 11 of this year, the second anniversary of the attacks that killed nearly 2,800 people.
    Inside the tip of the main tower would be a sphere of empty space and then a 412-foot cavern where each victim would be commemorated. Gaudi had wanted to fill that space with slots for each U.S. president, leaving enough room to last until the year 3000.
    Art historians, architects and Gaudi enthusiasts are behind the effort to push the plans for inclusion in the master redevelopment scheme. Barcelona artist Marc Mascort i Boix will discuss the idea of reviving the sketches during a panel Thursday in New York.
    Laffoley insists that Gaudi's design would cut through the political and territorial wrangling involved in rebuilding the site by drawing on its storied past.
    "It's 77 years since Gaudi died — a lot of the other proposals are literal ego trips, but here is a way that everyone can be involved in a historical project from around the world," Laffoley said.
    Gaudi does not fit neatly into any architectural category, but he is often associated with the modernist movement that dominated Barcelona at the beginning of the 20th century.
    He was so influential there that the city dedicated 2002 as the Year of Gaudi to commemorate the 150th anniversary of his birth in 1852. Gaudi died in 1926 when he was hit by a streetcar.
    He is known for creating unusual shapes, curved lines and vivid color, and is considered an architectural genius for his ability to combine artistic flair with technical structure. Many of his trademark buildings in Barcelona incorporated tiles made from broken dishes and other found objects.
    Laffoley suggested pieces of debris saved from the trade center rubble piles might be used in such a way with the Gaudi plans for the New York building.

FROM THE VILLAGE VOICE:

New Science Raises the Specter of a World Without Regret
The Guilt-Free Soldier
by Erik Baard
January 22 - 28, 2003

A soldier faces a drab cluster of buildings off a broken highway, where the enemy is encamped among civilians. Local farmers and their families are routinely forced to fill the basements and shacks, acting as human shields for weapons that threaten the lives of other civilians, the soldier's comrades, and his cause in this messy 21st-century war.
    There will be no surgical strikes tonight. The artillery this soldier can unleash with a single command to his mobile computer will bring flames and screaming, deafening blasts and unforgettably acrid air. The ground around him will be littered with the broken bodies of women and children, and he'll have to walk right through. Every value he learned as a boy tells him to back down, to return to base and find another way of routing the enemy. Or, he reasons, he could complete the task and rush back to start popping pills that can, over the course of two weeks, immunize him against a lifetime of crushing remorse. He draws one last clean breath and fires.
    Pills like those won't be available to the troops heading off for possible war with Iraq, but the prospect of a soul absolved by meds remains very real. Feelings of guilt and regret travel neural pathways in a manner that mimics the tracings of ingrained fear, so a prophylactic against one could guard against the other. Several current lines of research, some federally funded, show strong promise for this.
    At the University of California at Irvine, experiments in rats indicate that the brain's hormonal reactions to fear can be inhibited, softening the formation of memories and the emotions they evoke. At New York University, researchers are mastering the means of short-circuiting the very wiring of primal fear. At Columbia University one Nobel laureate's lab has discovered the gene behind a fear-inhibiting protein, uncovering a vision of "fight or flight" at the molecular level. In Puerto Rico, at the Ponce School of Medicine, scientists are discovering ways to help the brain unlearn fear and inhibitions by stimulating it with magnets. And at Harvard University, survivors of car accidents are already swallowing propranolol pills, in the first human trials of that common cardiac drug as a means to nip the effects of trauma in the bud.
    The web of your worst nightmares, your hauntings and panics and shame, radiates from a dense knot of neurons called the amygdala. With each new frightening or humiliating experience, or even the reliving of an old one, this fear center triggers a release of hormones that sear horrifying impressions into your brain. That which is unbearable becomes unforgettable too. Unless, it seems, you act quickly enough to block traumatic memories from taking a stranglehold.
    Some observers say that in the name of human decency there are some things people should have to live with. They object to the idea of medicating away one's conscience.
    "It's the morning-after pill for just about anything that produces regret, remorse, pain, or guilt," says Dr. Leon Kass, chairman of the President's Council on Bioethics, who emphasizes that he's speaking as an individual and not on behalf of the council. Barry Romo, a national coordinator for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, is even more blunt. "That's the devil pill," he says. "That's the monster pill, the anti-morality pill. That's the pill that can make men and women do anything and think they can get away with it. Even if it doesn't work, what's scary is that a young soldier could believe it will."
    Are we ready for the infamous Nuremberg plea—"I was just following orders"—to be made easier with pharmaceuticals? Though the research so far has been limited to animals and the most preliminary of human trials, the question is worth debating now.
    "If you have the pill, it certainly increases the temptation for the soldier to lower the standard for taking lethal action, if he thinks he'll be numbed to the personal risk of consequences. We don't want soldiers saying willy-nilly, 'Screw it. I can take my pill and even if doing this is not really warranted, I'll be OK,' " says psychiatrist Edmund G. Howe, director of the Program on Medical Ethics at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences. "If soldiers are going to have that lower threshold, we might have to build in even stronger safeguards than we have right now against, say, blowing away human shields. We'll need a higher standard of proof [that an action is justified]."
    The scientists behind this advance into the shadows of memory and fear don't dream of creating morally anesthetized grunts. They're trying to fend off post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, so that women who've been raped can leave their houses without feeling like targets. So that survivors of terrorist attacks can function, raise families, and move forward. And yes, so that those young soldiers aren't left shattered for decades by what they've seen and done in service.
    Combat and psychoactive chemicals have always been inseparable, whether the agent was alcohol or a space-age pill. A half-century after Japan hopped its soldiers up on methylamphetamines during World War II, the U.S. has pilots currently in the dock for mistakenly bombing Canadian troops while using speed to stay awake. When Eric Kandel, the Nobel laureate in medicine who works out of Columbia, was asked if his genetic exploration of fear was funded by the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, he quipped, "No, but you're welcome to call them and tell them about me."
    Imagine a world where the same pill soothed victims and perpetrators alike. Henry David Thoreau advised, "Make the most of your regrets; never smother your sorrow. . . . To regret deeply is to live afresh." Without remorse, there would have been no John Newton, a slave trader who found religion during a harrowing storm at sea and later became an abolitionist; he's best known for penning "Amazing Grace."
    For doctors, the drugs would present a tricky dilemma. Most people exposed to traumatic situations don't end up with PTSD, but there are few means of knowing on the spot who might need treatment much further down the line. Researchers say that for the medicines to be effective, patients would need to take them soon after the upsetting event. The temptation for physicians might be to err on the side of caution, at the cost of curbing normal emotional responses. Victims might be eager to avoid lasting pain, wrongdoers the full sting of self-examination.
    "The impulse is to help people to not fall apart. You don't want to condemn that," says Kass. "But that you would treat these things with equanimity, the horrible things of the world, so that they don't disturb you . . . you'd cease to be a human being."
    The very idea of PTSD has been attacked as a social construction, a vague catchall that provides exculpation for the misdeeds of war. But researchers are trying to prevent the onset of a disease, not change the social circumstances that bring it about. James L. McGaugh, a neurobiologist at U.C. Irvine whose study of stress hormones and memory consolidation in rats is one of the cornerstones of the effort, acknowledges the ambiguities but comes out swinging in defense of his work. "Is it immoral to weaken the memory of horrendous acts a person has committed? Well, I suppose one might make that case. Some of your strongest memories are of embarrassments and of the guilty things you did. It doesn't surprise me at all that people would wake up screaming, thinking of the young children they killed in Vietnam," McGaugh says. "But is treating that worse than saying, 'Don't worry if your leg is shot off, we've got penicillin and surgery to prevent you from dying of infection'? Why is it any worse to give them a drug that prevents them from having PSTD for the rest of their lives? The moral dilemma is sending people to war in the first place."
    Nevertheless, fellow fear researcher Dr. Gregory Quirk of the Ponce School of Medicine, in Puerto Rico, is troubled by how his work might be used if it progressed from studies of rats to therapies for humans. He argues that fear isn't created and degraded in the amygdala alone, but is also unlearned in the prefrontal cortex, which in PTSD patients is only weakly active. Quirk thinks a physician could stimulate those areas with magnets while patients view the images they fear, and could thus restore balance to the mind. With that same method, he says, firemen could stave off episodes of life-threatening panic. "Certainly the military might be interested in something like that," he says. "If this would be used to go against fear that's important for survival or morality, I would have a problem with that."
    There are reasons to believe our military would covet mastery of Quirk's technique in humans. People at war dehumanize their enemies to make killing more palatable. Now, in the war on terror, our modern cultural taboos against torture are fraying. Put yourself in the room then. The commission of heinous acts, even deliberate torture, can also visit lifelong torment on perpetrators who aren't hardwired very well to be sadistic. The sounds of screaming—a primordial alert that mortal danger is near—trigger those damning hormones even in the torturer.
    And couple Quirk's magnetic manipulation of the brain with this: "One of the horrible things I discovered after the Gulf War was that, because of the coeducation of wars, as it were, male soldiers were given extensive desensitization training to make them able to hear women being raped and tortured in the next room without breaking," Kass says. "It's a deformation of the soul of the first order. I cannot speak about it without outrage."
    But a trauma-born irrational aversion to necessary war—pacifism in the face of an expanding evil—isn't healthy either. "Such emotions can blind us as well as make us wiser," says Howe. "It's possible that these kinds of drugs would help patients see in a clearer way." On the flip side, could anyone possibly maintain that Ahab was a better captain for not having been chemically mollified after the white whale bit off his leg?
    An uncomfortable reality is that war isn't an aberration; it has a very codified place in our culture. We agree through treaties to normalize it. We demand punishment for soldiers who violate those treaties, though more often those from the losing side. But we don't deny them medical treatment. And one needn't have committed a war crime to feel wracked by sorrow. "In my dreams I meet six Vietnamese people I murdered. Whether they had a gun on them is irrelevant," says Romo, who, as a 19-year-old lieutenant, served as a platoon leader in the 196th Light Infantry Brigade in 1967 and 1968. His ticket home was as a body escort for his similarly aged nephew, who served in the same unit. "I returned to the United States on my nephew's dead body," he says.
    Romo and veterans like him have taken it upon themselves to use their experiences to teach peace. But veterans torn apart by PTSD don't have a choice about being Exhibit A in the case against war. "When you see what can happen to a young person, it passes on in a very real way, not in a history-class sense, that reality of what war and blood really is," he says. Who are we to impose this emotionalalbatross on soldiers? As a nation, we elect our leaders. It seems unjust to make veterans a special class to suffer for our sins in wrongheaded wars, or pay a continuing price for victory in the "good" ones.
    "That's a heavy burden to put on people to preserve the morality you're talking about," says Dr. Roger K. Pitman of Harvard University, who's leading the propranolol study in people fresh from car accidents. "By that same logic, if you could make a lightweight bulletproof garment for soldiers we still shouldn't do it. For moral reasons we ought to make them able to be shot, to preserve the cost of war, the deterrent to war. But we work to prevent our soldiers from being shot, and I say there are mental bullets flying around there, too."
    There's another context to be considered as well, McGaugh notes, one that was made clear by the recent demand from representatives Charles B. Rangel of New York and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan that we reinstate the draft to address racial and economic inequities. "Who are our soldiers?" McGaugh asks. "They are in the wrong place at the wrong time. Very few of their daddies go to Harvard, Yale, or Princeton."
    But PTSD doesn't result solely from war. When Kass first heard of McGaugh's research, at a presentation in October, he had a far more intimate horror in mind: rape. "At fraternity parties they'll be popping Ecstasy at night and forgetfulness in the morning," he growls.
    The victim would be an obvious candidate for an anti-trauma drug. Would dulling her emotional memories of the event help her to endure the lengthy, perhaps humiliating, pursuit of justice through the courts, or would it rob her of the righteous anger she'll need to persevere and perhaps the empathy to later help other victims? The rapist is part of the equation too. If his victim stabbed him in her own defense, no doubt he would be bodily healed. No physician could refuse to treat him. "If such a person had PTSD stemming from the circumstances of the act, he could be a candidate [for therapy]," Pitman says.
    How much of our remorse do we have a right to dispense with, and how much exists in service to others, a check on our worst impulses? "Each experience we have changes our brain and in some sense alters who we are," says Dr. Joseph E. LeDoux of NYU, who studies emotional memory. "The more significant the experience, the more the alteration. We have to decide as a society how far we want to go in changing the self. Science will surely give us new and powerful ways of doing this. Individuals may want more change than society wants to
permit."

COURTESY: COMMANDER RAYDEEN AGAIN!

FROM USA TODAY:

Posted 1/21/2003 9:22 AM     Updated 1/21/2003 9:22 AM

Bush plan gives huge tax break to buyers of big SUVs
By David Kiley, USA TODAY

DETROIT — Buying big, luxurious sport-utility vehicles could cost a lot less under the Bush administration's economic stimulus proposal, even though a Bush appointee blasted SUVs last week as dangerous fuel hogs.
    Small businesses and the self-employed could deduct the entire cost, up to $75,000, from business income the year of the purchase. Normally it would be written off over several years, using a depreciation schedule. Deducting the entire cost in one year considerably reduces that year's taxable income, and income taxes. In some cases, it could result in paying no federal income tax.
    A similar deduction in the current tax code is limited to $25,000. Tripling that creates a much more alluring incentive at a time when SUVs are under fire for fuel consumption and safety concerns.
    Bush appointee Jeffrey Runge, head of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, scolded automakers at an industry conference one week ago for not making SUVs safer and more fuel efficient. He told reporters that he considers some SUVs so dangerous he wouldn't allow his family in them "if they were the last vehicles on Earth."
    A stung auto industry shot back with statistics showing SUVs are very safe in the most common types of crashes.
    White House spokesman Taylor Gross said Monday that the provision "is not designed to favor one vehicle over another, but rather to allow small businesses to buy more equipment and to create more jobs."
    Computers and other equipment do also get favorable treatment in the provision to help small businesses and the self-employed upgrade their hardware. But the language regarding vehicles limits the tax benefit to those with a gross vehicle weight rating of 6,000 pounds or more. That means full-size SUVs and pickups.
    As a result, an accountant who'd do fine with a 30-mile-per-gallon compact sedan as a company car could be enticed into a big, 15-mpg SUV instead because of the deduction. Or a real estate agent about to buy a 20-mpg midsize SUV that doesn't qualify for the deduction might opt for a full-size SUV instead, because it does qualify.
    Taxpayers for Common Sense (TCS) estimates that the current deduction cuts tax revenue $1 billion for every 100,000 SUVs, and vows to lobby against tripling the amount. "The market for personal-use SUVs has outgrown the original intent of this tax break," says Aileen Roder of TCS.
    "When a loophole gives an accountant an incentive to deduct the cost of his luxury SUV, it makes the argument of how ridiculous" it is, says Jonathan Collegio of Americans for Tax Reform.
    During furious SUV sales last month, "We did have some people coming in saying, 'My accountant told me I better buy something,' " says Chevrolet dealer Jerry Haggerty in Glen Ellyn, Ill.

COURTESY: COMMANDER RAYDEEN

From today's New York Times:

Doing Their Own Thing, Making Art Together
By HOLLAND COTTER

To many Americans, the world feels more threatened and threatening today than at any time since the 1960's. Terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the prospect of war on Iraq and ever tightening security measures at home have sent a hum of tension through daily life.
    In the 1960's, comparable tension, excruciatingly amplified, produced a big response: the spread of a counterculture, one that began with political protest movements and became an alternative way of life. Among other things, it delivered a sustained, collective "no" to certain values (imperialism, moralism, technological destruction), and a collective "yes" to others: peace, liberation, a return-to-childhood innocence.
    The collective itself, as a social unit, was an important element in the 60's utopian equation. Whatever form the concept took — the commune, the band, the cult — its implications of shared resources, dynamic interchange and egos put on hold made it a model for change.
    Even the art world, built on a foundation of hierarchies and exclusions, produced its own versions. Activist groups like the Artworkers Coalition and the Black Emergency Cultural Coalition made concerted attempts to pry open institutional doors and let in a multicultural world. Simultaneously, nonmilitant movements like the Dada-inspired Fluxus produced an ephemeral, give-away, anyone-can-do-it art that amounted to a kind of passive resistance to the existing market economy. Both approaches — one forceful, one gentle — changed the way art was thought about, and the way it looked.
    The collective impulse has never died out in American art; and now it is surfacing again, for the most part outside New York. In cities like Milwaukee, Providence, R. I., St. Louis and Philadelphia, as well as several in Canada, an old countercultural model, often much changed, is being revived, in some cases by artists barely out of their teens.
    Many of the new art collectives are virtual: they reside on the Internet, that intrinsically collective medium. They are fluid in size, and members may not even know the identity of other members. The kinds of art they produce vary widely, but when it is political it tends to be actively so. To much of the art world, these collectives barely exist. Their work is difficult to market; it's available to everyone free; traditional criteria of judgment, the kind that make critics so comfortable with, say, painting, don't apply.
    Other, even newer collectives, while computer-savvy, are studio-based and are starting to gain attention. They are housed in apartments, storefronts, art schools and minivans. Their members — who often support themselves with day jobs as designers, programmers, teachers or temps — are identified by a group name, like rock bands. And their art is often a multitasking mix of painting, sculpture, printmaking, design, digital art, video, zine production and musical performances.
    In general, the collaborative arrangements are superrelaxed. A few groups, like Temporary Services in Chicago, have a Fluxus-like conceptual agenda: an aesthetic of sharing sites, ideas and objects with outsiders that extends the collaboration beyond the group itself. Others, like Slanguage in Los Angeles, have established self-sustaining, artist-run workshops and exhibition spaces. Still other groups are formed, at least initially, as more or less closed social circles of friends getting together with friends and brothers and sisters, to make art, a description that fits, for example, the Royal Art Lodge from Winnipeg, Manitoba, whose work is on view at the Drawing Center in SoHo.
    Most of these young artists (many in their 20's) would probably not identify themselves as political, never mind use the word counterculture, with its uncool, mind-settish, even institutional ring. They just do what they do. But what they do, or rather the way they do it, outside the centralized, market-determining power structures of the mainstream art world, could turn out to have political consequences for the way art develops.
    Forcefield, a collective founded in 1997 in Providence, where it is part of the art-school and music scene, has already made a splash in New York with a fantastic appearance in last year's Whitney Biennial. For the occasion, the group assembled dozens of Op Art-patterned knit costumes — form-fitting, face-concealing, topped by bright vinyl wigs — of the kind they wear in their maniacally edited films, which are like tribal rites crossed with fashion shows. They supplemented the installation with a deafening noise-band soundtrack and a pulsating abstract video piece, both of which they produced.
    The results, hilarious and slightly scary, brought all kinds of associations to mind: Rudi Gernreich, Sesame Street, Jack Smith, cheesy sci-fi, 60's psychedelia and church rummage sales. This was a zany art made out of seriously worked things and materials, as became evident when a selection of Forcefield material was exhibited at Daniel Reich, a gallery that operates out of a Chelsea studio apartment and has been instrumental in introducing collectives to New York.
    Forcefield's vividly low-tech approach to art-making has inspired other, newer East Coast collectives. The members of one, called Paper Rad, individually make photocopied cartoon zines, combining a grade-school doodle style with wise-cracking New Age quest narratives. They also combine their styles in animated Web-based Gumby music videos that are like tripped-out children's television.
    Another group, Dearraindrop, has four artists, the youngest of whom is 18. Erudite about history, they acknowledge the influence of past collectives like Chicago's Hairy Who from the 1960's and Destroy All Monsters from the 1970's. At the same time, they prefer a casual just-friends designation for themselves. Their collaborations — which include exquisite collages of cartoons, product labels and texts — are often executed long distance: one member is in high school in Virginia; others live in Providence. Their group name is as recycled as their materials. Two of the artists discovered it written on a scrap of paper as they were foraging through neighborhood trash while on LSD.
    Dearraindrop's idiot-savant-type aesthetic becomes even more complex in the work of Milhaus, a Milwaukee collective that claims the modernist Bauhaus merging of function and art as one of its ideals. The group is largely the creation of Scott and Tyson Reeder, painters, designers and brothers who, like the artist Jim Drain of Forcefield, also have solo careers. Both brothers lived for a while in Los Angeles, but found the formalized, competitive atmosphere of the art scene dispiriting and returned to Milwaukee.
    There, with a filmmaker, they produced a smart, slacker Web television show (www.zerotv.com) and turned their attention in nondigital directions. For a show in Chicago, they built bunk beds and lived in the gallery, turning it into a video theater one night, a dance club the next. For the opening, they held an all-night drawing party and invited gallerygoers. For the closing, they turned the bunk beds into a raft and floated down the Chicago River, like Generation-whatever Huck Finns.
    The self-scheduled workshop, as raucous as a band rehearsal or as sedate as a quilting bee, is the basic form of several collectives. The members of the Royal Art Lodge meet in weekly, collaborative drawing sessions. Slanguage, begun last summer by Mario Ybarra Jr. and Juan Capistran, M.F.A. graduates from the University of California at Irvine, uses half of its space in Wilmington, a working-class city near Los Angeles, for experimenting with media and ideas, the other half for public performances and exhibitions, which may also be works in progress.
    Such exhibition spaces, which have neither academic nor commercial support, are becoming ever more important. Not only do they offer places for types of work uncongenial to an increasingly conservative art establishment; they also provide a forum for the work of students being churned out of art schools every year in numbers the commercial gallery system cannot begin to absorb.
    Slanguage is by no means alone in its thinking. In Philadelphia, an older, larger and by now semiprofessionalized collective called Space 1026 has renovated an old downtown jewelry store to include not only studios, a computer lab and a skate ramp, but also a street-level gallery and an artist-run shop. Similarly, a Manhattan group called Alife runs a store at 178 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side, to promote and sell work by young artists, using a corporate paradigm of exchange and distribution. (An installation of Alife products is on view at Deitch Projects in SoHo through Feb. 15.)
    Some collectives blend art and lifestyle in more personal ways. The 13 members of Flux Factory, which recently showed at the Queens Museum, live together in a loft in Long Island City, in Queens. The members of Instant Coffee in Toronto use much of their collective energy to organize large-scale artistic and social events that bring artists, writers and musicians together in combinations rarely encountered elsewhere.
    Instant Coffee functions on a principle of service-work — generosity as an art medium — an ethic that is also an aesthetic. So, in a more focused way, does Temporary Services. Members of both groups collaborate with other artists, organize projects that insert ephemeral work into public spaces or bring otherwise invisible art into public view.
    For one project, Temporary Services helped place artists' books surreptitiously in public library collections. For another, they used existing curbside newspaper vending machines to distribute art objects. As part of a group show this spring at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams, Mass., they will present drawings by a federal prisoner named Angelo of ingenious mechanical devices created by his fellow inmates.
    The group's play with conventional ideas of aesthetic value is shared, to some degree, by Beige, a young collective that takes obsolete computer technology as its medium. It is probably best known for its hacked versions of dumpster-salvaged Nintendo games, which they broke open and manipulated to create new images. As Beige Records, they have released a 12-inch vinyl disk of sound samples of video games from the 1980's.
    In its geek-positive way, the Beige artists deliver subversive messages. They undercut the notion of technological progress and demonstrate ways in which popular forms and aesthetics can be taken out of the control of the corporate game industry. And they hint at the power inherent even in cheap technology and low-level expertise, which are by now ubiquitous and are sufficient to infiltrate a database or make a bomb.
    As if to confirm a crypto-activist agenda, Beige recently collaborated on a DVD with the Radical Software Group, an Internet-based collective that is stretching the definitions of art, politics and collectivity itself. Consisting of an ever-changing group of international programmers and artists, the group claims that its main goal is not to make art but to provide software for artists. But one of their programs, titled Carnivore, which turns individual computers into F.B.I-style data surveillance tools, is conceptually sharp, visually compelling and completely attuned to the political moment.
    As innovative as it is, Radical Software Group belongs to a whole alternative universe of activist artists' collectives that exists partly or entirely in the public realm called cyberspace. Other groups include RTMark, Critical Art Ensemble, Ultra-Red, Reclaim the Streets, Electronic Disturbance Theater (also called Electronic Civil Disobedience), Institute for Applied Autonomy and the Center for Land Use Interpretation. The list is long and varied and will surely continue grow in direct proportion to increased government monitoring of the Internet.
    Such Net-centric collectives are electronic descendants of earlier American groups that cohered and dissolved from the 1960's through the 1990's: PAD/D (Political Art Documentation and Distribution), Colab, Group Material, Guerrilla Girls, REPOhistory, Act Up and General Idea, which originated in Canada, to name but a few. The full history of this phenomenon has yet to be written, though a few art historians — Alan Moore, Gregory Sholette and Blake Stimson — have books in the works.
    And what about American art now? It exists in a world where much indeed has changed, not just since Sept. 11, 2001, but since the end of the cold war. It is a dangerous place, in need of radical change. Not that a return to the 60's is the answer. Forget retro. Yes, it's reassuring and it sells, but contemporary culture — including a lot of New York art at the moment — is about what's reassuring and what sells, and it feels parochial, small, out of touch.
    Thus a counterculture. I have no idea what it will, or does, or should look like. An eye-popping hacktivist Web site that carries transformative information across the globe? A collective of young artists having fun making books that only they and their friends will see? Or something totally other. But if contemporary art, marginal and minute as its influence is, doesn't get it together to offer new models for a future some of us still hope to have, chances are at this point nobody will, and that's more than a shame.

FROM THE WIRE -- 157/MARCH 1997

IN ALL LANGUAGES
Formed in 1962 by an Esperanto-speaking New York City lawyer, The ESP-Disk label
created a parallel universe where underground counterculture icons mixed with the
revolutionary cosmic jazz of Frank Lowe, Milford Graves, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders,
Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra. Story by Howard Mandel

It was a time before psychedelics. Following the seismic ructions of the mid-'50s, rock 'n' roll had hit a
period of stasis, enlivened only by the occasional novelty number. College kids in the US listened to folk
singers, and pop music meant Pat Boone serenading Doris Day over a white-picket fence. There were faint
rumblings of a new soul music, but the edge belonged to beatniks, a handful of renegade 'classical'
composers and some brave men and women of jazz. Then came a promise: "You never heard such sounds
in your life." It was made by ESP-Disk.
    "I think I can give you a perspective that embraces both the beginning and current status of the label," says
ESP founder Bernard Stollman from his home in New York's Catskill Mountains, up near Woodstock, about
two hours north of Manhattan. "Imagine in 1962 a record label is founded by a somewhat erratic young
music lawyer, just starting in the business and also involved in the Esperanto movement. Actually our first
production was Ni Kantu En Esperanto, which we described as 'a sing-along record in the international
language,' and I called the label Esperanto-Disk, but it got shortened.
    "Then this lawyer got set up. He was living on New York's upper west side in bachelor digs and had some
work representing both Cecil Taylor and Ornette Coleman, and they set him up by holding a three-day
festival of music at the Cellar Cafe right under his - my - nose. Someone had already told me, 'You should
do something with Albert Ayler, my old school pal from Cleveland who happens to be playing at the Baby
Grand club,' and I'd decided to record him. But at the Cellar Cafe I met everybody: Paul Bley, Sun Ra, Steve
Lacy; everybody who was anybody on this curious scene. Sun Ra invited me to some loft in Newark, and for
some reason I went, wandering around New Jersey late at night in order to hear this big band Sun Ra called
his Arkestra. The upshot was in 18 months I recorded 45 productions, totally exhausting my small
inheritance which my parents offered to give me if I wanted it before they died."
    And so the bold manifestations of a vital American musical underground were born. There were other
so-called independent jazz record labels active in the same extended, wild decade (roughly 1962-74) as
ESP: Prestige, Blue Note, and Bob Thiele's Impulse! which would package some of the most progressive
visions of New York new jazz, notably those of Charles Mingus and the incomparable John Coltrane. But
those labels' avant garde productions were offshoots to their main activities in what could already be called
the jazz mainstream, while every ESP release felt like it was out on an unfathomable limb. Artists on ESP
didn't necessarily intend to be iconoclastic or confrontational - they just were. For instance, Albert Ayler,
whose first US release, the legendary Spiritual Unity, became the second ESP-Disk.
    "I remember the first place I heard Albert Ayler," recalls Marzette Watts, the multi-reed player, painter,
teacher and affable gadabout, currently living in California, whose own ESP disk Marzette Watts, recorded
19 December 1966, featured a company comprising trombonist Clifford Thornton, guitarist Sonny Sharrock,
vibeist Karl Berger, bassists Junie Booth and Henry Grimes, drummer JC Moses, and fellow saxophonist
Byard Lancaster (shortly to be heard on Bill Laswell's second Arcana project). "Eric Dolphy walked into the
Half Note to sit in for Coltrane, who'd taken ill, with this little man in a green leather suit, half-white and
half-black goatee. I thought: who is this little leprechaun? But when he started to play - that sound! To me
it was overpowering, but familiar, too. It was familiar from the Holiness church. Albert was simply a
sanctified tenor player."
    Spiritual Unity looked as distinctive as it sounded, setting a precedent for ESP's approach to the packaging
of this emergent, wild, free music. Most of the early releases came in rough-textured, primitively drawn
monochrome covers, with not much more information than the players' strange names - besides Ayler,
Pharoah Sanders, Ornette Coleman, Giuseppi Logan, Milford Graves - and the Esperanto legend: "Mendu
tiun diskon ce via loka diskvendejo au rekte de ESP. Prezo: $4.98. Pagu per internacia postmandato." They
were mysterious packages, as irresistibly intriguing as messages in bottles, whether you found them in a
dusty bin in a corner in the back of a conventional record store, or unaccountably mixed in among tacky,
low-priced pop overruns in giant discount stores in suburban shopping malls. Oddly for those years when
homespun independent labels generally released efforts by local artists only within their geographic regions,
ESPs seemed likely to wash up anywhere.
    Inside were raw, sprawling, squalling improvisations ostensibly 'led' by such little-knowns as Frank Wright,
Charles Tyler, Byron Alien, Gunter Hampel, Noah Howard; so-called 'free jazz' star Ornette Coleman's
brilliant hybrid of probing saxophonics, kinetic rhythms and atonal string arrangements recorded in concert
at NYC's Town Hall; The Giuseppi Logan Quartet's murky, hypnotic emanations, reeking of incense, which
introduced the pianist Don Pullen; and the recitation of an angry manifesto, "Black Dada Nihilismus", by a
poet named Leroi Jones, accompanied by Rosweli Rudd and John Tchicai in The New York Art Quartet.
Pianists Ran Blake, Burton Greene and Bob James (yes, that Bob James) recorded their debuts; Paul Bley
cut Barrage with Sun Ra's alto saxophonist Marshall Alien; soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy brought back
The Forest And The Zoo (one LP side for each) with Italian trumpeter Enrico Rava and South African exiles
Johnny Dyani and Louis Moholo from a concert in Argentina. There was Ayler's Bells, 19 minutes long and
originally released as a one-sided disk of clear red vinyl, as well as his free-for-all New York Eye And Ear
Control purporting to be a soundtrack for a film by Canadian Michael Snow; Milford Graves's percussion
ensemble with Sunny Morgan (four tracks, all titled "Nothing"); bassist Henry Grimes's trio with clarinettist
Perry Robinson tootling over throbbing darkness; and Diamanda Galas precursor Patty Waters raving for 13
minutes about black being the colour of her true love's hair.
    During the course of ESP's 12 year run, altoist Sonny Simmons blew gritty, gutsy improvisations, Marion
Brown brought a delicate lyricism to similarly open, melodic songs, tenorist Gato Barbieri traded lead lines
with cellist Calo Scott, bassist Alan Silva introduced a quasi-Asian timbral orientation on Skillfullness, The
Revolutionary Ensemble (violinist Leroy Jenkins, bassist Sirone, drummer Jerome Cooper) waxed on about
Vietnam, Karel Velebney sent rare missives from the Prague Spring, and young tenor hopeful Frank Lowe,
fresh from San Francisco and Alice Coltrane's group, bowed in with Block Beings, taped at Ornette's Artists
House loft space and featuring The Art Ensemble Of Chicago's Joseph Jarman. Not to mention the flatout
East Village folk-poetry of The Fugs ("Monday, nothing/Tuesday, nothing/Wednesday, Thursday, nothing"),
the less abrasive Pearls Before Swine, records featuring counterculture icons Charles Manson and Dr
Timothy Leary.

"Yeah, I was kind of central to that ESP activity at the start, I guess you could say that," Milford Graves
agrees, a little reluctantly at first, from his home in Brooklyn. "There was a whole lot of stuff going on then;
it didn't seem like such a big thing."
    Despite his apparent lack of enthusiasm, Graves's thrilling polyrhythms enriched nearly half of the first 15
or so ESP releases. "I'd always had these special ideas about drumming," he continues. "Even when I was a
kid playing around the neighbourhood people said I had a different approach. I was playing in a Latin jazz
band, I was hanging out with Cal Tjader and playing with a Mexican sax player named Dick Mesa and
[percussionist] Don Alias. We went up to Boston where I met Giuseppi Logan at a jam session: he stood
up to play and the other musicians said, 'Oh, here's that crazy alto player', and they sat down. But I liked
this guy! I thought: I'll try it. I said to him, 'What do I do?' He told me to do what I wanted to. And he liked
it.
    "Giuseppi Logan was a paranoid schizophrenic, you'd never know what he was going to do. He'd stop in the
middle of the street and start screaming about God, and not in a religious way, either. But he was always
singing those melodies, they were always coming to him, and then he'd look up and say to us, 'Listen to
this! Let's go find someplace to play!' I got him his first ESP date, because Bernard wanted to give me a
date and I said, 'No, you ought to record this other musician I know.' I met Don Pullen through Giuseppi,
too: he said to me, 'You gotta hear this bad piano player.' Giuseppi also took me to the jam session where
I met Roswell Rudd and John Tchicai. I met [Amiri] Baraka [né, Leroi Jones] at that same session, and of
course he recorded with Ros and Tchicai and me and Lewis Worrell: The New York Art Quartet. We played a
gig at the Museum of Modern Art, at the New School for Social Research, at some lofts, but no clubs. And
no, we didn't get any money in ESP, either, but that was just the way things were then. Some of the guys
kicked about it; Giuseppi Logan was the most vociferous, almost to the point of violent confrontations.
Bernard, he was going to do what he was going to do, though, and he put the music out. He had the
courage and insight to hear that music. A few of us got some pennies off him, not much, but it was the
idea of it. I don't really think he was selling so many records, anyway."

"My album was one of the last to be released by ESP, I think," says Frank Lowe sitting in his Manhattan
apartment, where he takes life "a day at a time" (12-step recovery programme speak). "The label was
closing when I came to New York, on its last legs as a record company. But I wanted to be associated with
it, just because of Albert and Pharoah and all the musicians who'd been on it.
    "I think maybe my friend Rafael Donald Garrett hooked me up with Stollman. Rafael put out one with his
wife, Zusann Kali Fasteau, called The Sea Ensemble around that time, too. He was one of my teachers back
in San Francisco. He'd taught me to ji kwan, kind of a martial art based on a breathing technique of focused
attention and energy. Or maybe it was Marzette Watts. I think he had an affiliation with Bernard, like served
as a sort of go-between for some of the musicians. You should give him a call. I've got his number in
California."
    "Frank Lowe says I worked for ESP as an A&R man or something?" says Watts when I speak to him later.
"0h, no, no, no, no, no. The first time I ever met Bernard - is he still alive? - had to do with Giuseppi Logan.
Is he still alive?
    "I remember so well: Giuseppi had just arrived in town with his wife and all his kids, and there was going to
be a big concert for him at Judson Hall, just up the street from Carnegie Hall, though it was a little smaller.
Giuseppi was going to play 13 instruments, and he came crying to me that Bernard Stollman told him if he
didn't sign a contract he wouldn't record him, and how often was he going to get a chance to record playing
13 instruments in front of an audience?
    "So I told him, 'Don't worry, we're going to record you.' I went and got two Neumann mics - I had a friend
who worked for ABC Camera Supply, he'd let us borrow mics and recorders and whatever we needed on
Friday nights as long as we brought them back undamaged early Monday, for free, no charge. I recorded
that concert. But afterwards Bernard came and said I had to give him Giuseppi's tapes because he'd signed
a contract with him: he was his artist and if I didn't give him the tapes he'd kick me in the face!
    "That was the first time I met Stollman. I never worked for ESP, other than putting out my own record on
the label and having a lot of tapes I recorded ending up on the label.
    "I guess you know the address 27 Cooper Square?" he continues. "That's where I was living, in the building
with Amiri Baraka and that's where we put on our affairs, starting sometime in 62 and ending the day
Malcolm X was shot. By then times had changed, the scene wasn't that pleasant any more, there were
some things going down that I wasn't happy about, didn't want to have around my loft. When the black
audience sat on one side of the room and the white audience sat on the other side, segregated, I didn't like
that, I didn't want to be associated with it. But that was the loft jazz era, and we were the first of them all.
    "We started having concerts in my big open space before Ornette opened Artists House in SoHo - there
was no SoHo then, it wasn't called that, it wasn't called anything - and before Sam Rivers's Studio Rivbea
or [Rashied Ali's] Ladies' Fort. Everybody played in my loft: Albert and Donald Ayler, of course, Cecil Taylor
with Andrew Cyrille and Alan Silva, Bill Dixon, Giuseppi Logan who lived right around the corner near Steve
Lacy, Reggie Workman... I think that's where Stollman discovered a lot of people who recorded for ESP. He
was a fan, I guess, and what he heard at our loft whetted his appetite."
    Stollman recalls differently. "I did not come to it as a music enthusiast," he says. I was just pissed off that I
could not turn on the radio and hear anything I could relate to. I hated blandness and commercialisation,
and I loved the idea of providing recognition for people who had something to say. I had delusions of
grandeur - I thought I could do something about what was on the radio.
    "I was a curator, or kind of like an ethnomusicologist, realising there was something happening in music and
someone should capture it. So I did. But I was also, basically, a producer who'd run amok. I mean, I was
not exactly out of Harvard Business School. If I'd had ambitions to make it in the music business I would
have taken a different tack. If you care about music as a form of sacrament and mystery, the music
business is nothing but degrading. Its as Lillian - or maybe it was Dorothy - Gish said: 'Art and business do
not mix.' So we came up with the slogan, 'The artists alone decide what you will hear on their ESP disks.'
    "We did some things right: I figured out if you didn't put out ten or 12 albums at a shot, you got lost. I
learned that from the Sidney Janis gallery, which had an art show of unknowns named Warhol and Segal
and Rauschenberg and put out a big sign saying 'POP ART', and soon everybody was talking and writing
about pop art, whatever that was. So I released ten or 12 discs initially, and it worked like a charm: guys
who did then what you do now sat up and took notice. Within a couple of months someone from JVC in
Japan came over and licensed the label for distribution there; for next to no money, but still, something.
Then Phonogram came over from Europe, also to license for distribution, and they did a somewhat better
job.
    "I did nothing as a producer. I might have called a studio once or twice and said, 'Save some time
tomorrow, X-and-So is coming in.' I paid the bills. I didn't do anything else. The musicians played as long as
they wanted, and typically, 45 minutes later the engineer would cut up the tracks and there'd be a
production. No second takes."
    None were necessary, as the ESP crowd valued spontaneity over virtually everything else. Many of the best
albums were recorded live, like Ayler's Prophecy (with poet Paul Haines acting as the tape-op) and Sun Ra's
Nothing Is.. (with a cover photo depicting Ra's head engulfed by fire) which contained tapes of his 'band
from Outer Space' from a 1966 tour of New York State colleges. The studio sessions were similarly
conceived; once asked by a Danish journalist how he maintained his cosmic energies in a studio, Ra replied
that in the case of his ESP discs he'd been lucky enough to have an audience in engineer Richard Alderson,
"who happened to like and truly understand the music".

The circumstances surrounding the recording of perhaps ESP's most famous live release, Ornette Coleman's
1962 Town Hall Concert, give a hint of the harsh climate in which many of the musicians associated with the
label were forced to operate.
    "My intention always was to be recognised for my work as a composer as much as a saxophonist, a
performer," Colernan tells me 35 years on. The year before he recorded Town Hall Concert Coleman had
ended his extraordinary two-year association with Atlantic Records. His music had become increasingly
experimental, even considering where he'd started, with his final Atlantic sessions comprising unique
chamber ensemble pieces with the conservatory-sanctioned 'Third Stream' composer Gunther Schuller. "But
I was getting a bad relationship with critics and the musicians," he continues, "because I wasn't playing the
standard jazz, and they didn't want to support me. Club owners didn't want to pay me and stuff like that,
and I didn't want to get paranoid and evil or something so I said, 'Well, maybe everybody just don't
understand what I'm trying to do as a player, so I'll retreat and just start writing music.'
    "I started writing Skies Of America at that time, and my first string quartet - I performed it in 62 so I must
have been writing it in 61. This is a true story: I took all my life savings and I hired a string quartet, and I
got the guys together from my group - David Izenson and Charlie Moffett and myself - and I went and
rented Town Hall.
    "I'll never forget. It was 21 December. That night there was a subway strike, a newspaper strike, a taxi
strike, everything was on strike, even a match strike. Not only that, I hired a guy named Jerry Newman to
record it for me and he committed suicide. Oh, I could tell you lots of tragedies that happened. But that
recording was Town Hall."
    It was the sixth ESP release, and clearly sounded the call of independence: from rigid musical classifications
and segregations, from traditional assumptions and pretentions, from a jazz past that hewed to the
imperatives of the entertainment industry towards an artist-controlled (if, arguably, artist-self-financed)
future.
    "I think Bernard had ears for what we were doing, I think he just liked it, is all," Milford Graves says. "He
never told us to do anything that he wanted. I think he had some soul, he had that style, that he liked it. I
remember he'd be there in the back of a session where we were playing, smiling and grooving. He was not
cold! I'd never say that about him. Though I remember going to sessions, too, where he didn't say
nothing."
    Stollman says he followed no recognised models for building a label. "I'd say to somebody, 'I think you
should have an album.' I wouldn't know the size of the group, often. But the musicians were all part of a
network, they knew each other and worked with each other, so I wasn't too concerned. If they liked what
they did, it was fine by me.
    "Bob James, for instance, was a recent graduate of University of Indiana, I think. He handed me a tape and
I said, 'OK'. He gave me a cover he'd shot in Australia, part of a poster or something. We didn't have much
conversation about it. I couldn't even tell you why I said yes. It was intuitive. It was serendipitous. It
shouldn't have worked, but it did."
    The tape James handed Stollman would become one of ESP's most notorious and baffling releases:
Explosions, a unique fusion of free jazz, cocktail lounge piano and musique concrète, a part-collaboration
with composer Robert Ashley, that is so far removed from James's subsequent fusion output (including the
rap/breakbeat staple "Take Me To The Mardi Gras") as to occupy another universe entirely.
    "The label had a life of its own, still does today," continues Stollman. It was and is an organic creature. And
I didn't know what I was getting. I certainly didn't know that little kid I was recording was someone like
Amiri Baraka.
    "But then I wasn't satisfied documenting what was happening in jazz, I had to take on the US government,
too. I felt Vietnam was an atrocity. I was horrified, as a whole generation was, and felt that something
should be done. It was a media age, so something should be done in the media. The Fugs and Pearls Before
Swine felt the same way, and they were able to express it pretty bluntly, and I was able to put their music
out.
    "That led to ESP having some very subtle government problems. They planted someone in our office. They
audited our taxes, punitively. They bugged our phones, intimidated our distributors. At that time there
were no federal anti-bootlegging statutes on the books, and our pressing plants went to work on The Fugs
and Pearls Before Swine albums, pressing them on their own and selling directly to our distributors. That's
why Ed Sanders was convinced we'd robbed The Fugs blind. Our distribution may have been marvellous but
we never saw any money from those sales."
    Ed Sanders's charges weren't the first time Stollman had been accused by artists (or more likely, their
suspicious, protective fans) of malfeasance, nor would it be the last.
    "I understood the record business," Marzette Watts says, "and I knew I'd never get a dime for my ESP
record. That was OK, because I worked for five years off of that record. I knew Bernard had great
distribution - he had a flair for that merchandising thing. I recorded in December and by June 1 was working
in Moscow, and I saw those ESP records there and in London and all over Germany, Scandinavia,
Switzerland and Northern Europe.
    "Now, Patty Waters lives out here, and I ran into her recently, after not having seen her for 20 years, and
the first thing she said to me was, 'I still haven't gotten my ESP session pay. Did you get yours?' She
always thought we all got rich except for her off those records. Well, she should have! If you listen, she's
really into some stuff there. I hear her doing things Betty Carter does now, free associative things. Patty
was doing that in the 60s.
    "You know, one of the things that kept someone like Symphony Sid from putting us on the radio was that
they couldn't deal with the music we were playing, but part of it also was that we were the first generation
of black jazz musicians to have degrees, to be educated, to have the ability to write our own liner notes, if
we wanted them. Bernard was not afraid of innovation. You could say he was a modern Medici, but he was
really performing a great service, and taking a big chance, lots of chances.
    "If you're an artist, you're promised the talent, not the money. I get a little bit of a sour taste in my mouth
thinking about certain aspects of the history of jazz, when someone who's a copy cat takes credit for the
innovation. But America does that to everybody. Its a distortion of the truth. But I didn't expect it to be
any other way. I came from an art background. I knew art history. I knew painters died, innovation was
overlooked, that there is never any money for the artists. Money isn't why you do art - you do it because
you have to.
    "Bernard never send me a royalty cheque, but I don't think I ever asked him for a royalty cheque, either. I
don't put horns on him. Do some of the other guys?"
    "Yeah, there was some talk about him at that time, in the 60s, 70s," Frank Lowe reports. "'Motherfucker is
ripping off Bud Powell, and Billie Holiday's estate.' That was under the surface, that talk. But I said to
myself, 'Who am I? I just got here, I'm a newcomer, I can't lose anything. If I have to pay some dues, so
be it."'
    "In the 60s I worked briefly with the attorney who was handling the estates of Charlie Parker and Billie
Holiday," Stollman explains. "I did some work on those estates, for Louis McKay, who was Billie's executor,
and Leon Parker, for Bird, and then I was cleared by the estates to release the material by them. I was also
Bud Powell's attorney for the last two years of his life, but releasing those albums was a huge mistake.
Despite our assertions, we were said to be putting out bootlegs. And we were not a classic jazz label in any
case.
    "I know there was speculation I was a rip-off, enriching myself at the musicians' expense,' he admits, "which
was probably also my own fault, because I ran the company in such a slipshod way. I was irresponsible. The
musicians were entitled to royalty statements, even if they didn't earn any royalties, as a matter of respect.
So I deserved the static I got. But there's no one living today who will say I interfered with the creation of
their music. From that standpoint, I can be proud of what I did."

Stollman's pride is further vindicated by the interest being shown in ESP by the Smithsonian Institution, the
official US archives which he says has negotiated to release ESP catalogue titles in the States under a
Smithsonian-ESP imprint, and initiate 45 new productions this coming summer. Stollman himself is no
longer involved in the label; after closing shop in 1974 he concentrated on his legal career, serving as
assistant attorney general for the state of New York from 1978 until his retirement in 1991. Responsibility
for new ESP music rests with his wife, Flavia Stollman, and her associate producer, Woodstock-based Jayna
Nelson.
    As for the stars of the old ESP, "Some of the senior musicians want to join in the Smithsonian project just
for the prestige of it," Stollman claims.
    Most of them are not readily available. Ayler, of course, was found floating in New York City's East River,
stabbed to death, in 1970. Sun Ra is no longer on this plane, nor are Charles Tyler, Don Cherry, Frank
Wright, Rafael Garrett, Don Pullen. Marion Brown is in a nursing home in Brooklyn suffering from some
degree of Alzheimer's disease. Henry Grimes, according to Marzette Watts, had a family history of mental
problems and has been way off the scene for more than a decade. His former friends presume he's dead.
And Giuseppi Logan? "I last saw him more than ten years ago, he was on 57th Street looking very down,
grey and derelict," Milford Graves says sadly. "I don't know what's become of him, I couldn't say."
    Others of the old ESP crowd have moved on to better things. Sunny Murray, who played on Ayler's Spiritual
Unity, is somewhere in Europe, as are Burton Greene and Alan Silva. Sonny Simmons is in Paris and
releasing new music on the New York label CIMP, and Steve Lacy has apparently quit that city, having
established himself securely as an improvising master. Ornette's Harmolodic label is an active subsidiary of
Verve/Polygram, and Coleman hosted a fabulous Christmas 96 party, complete with a raucous jam session
and Frank Lowe blowing in the frontline.
    Paul Bley records voluminously, and Pharoah Sanders is enjoying a resurgence of interest thanks in part to
his association with Bill Laswell and the Axiom label. Gato Barbieri has returned to performing, John Tchicai
is playing from his base in California, Roswell Rudd lives in upstate New York; Amiri Baraka holds a
university post in New Jersey. Professor Milford Graves teaches holistic arts from his studio in Brooklyn; his
performances are all too infrequent, considering the spiritual power of his drums.
    "You know, the history of this music is told in terms of all the great musicians," says Graves, "but you got
to remember there were the guys who didn't go out, for one reason or another, who sat at home with their
instruments, and could have still been great. Me, I looked ahead back then and I didn't think anything too
much would be happening for me until the year 2000; now there's only three years left."
    "Those ESP records had a huge impact," Frank Lowe maintains. I was flattered to be part of that caste.
After all, the first record I was influenced by, growing up, was Pharoah's First [the third ESP-Disk], then
some of Ayler's. I'd had my ear to the speakers listening to Coltrane, and ESP had this record by Marion
Brown, who'd been on Trane's Ascension, called Why Not? where he's wearing a light beige trenchcoat on
the cover. It was almost as good as Three For Shepp on Impulse!. And The New York Art Quartet, I was
influenced by them. That's where I first saw Milford Graves. I played in his band for a couple of years, too.
    "Black Beings was a hardcore record. ESP was a hardcore label, too. And it's a good thing it existed,
because it's almost like the music didn't exist, if not for that documentation. You could damn near rewrite
history and just purge it of all that music, as some critics have tried, if it wasn't for those ESP albums."
 

******

Most of the releases in the ESP-Disk catalogue have been reissued in Europe by the German distributor
ZYX. Alongside the Smithsonian initiative, there are further plans for the label's catalogue, including
previously unreleased material from the 60s and 70s, to be relaunched in the UK in the autumn.

Besides free jazz, the ESP-Disk catalogue contained some of the most bizarre, unfathomable records to
emerge from the 1960s. Edwin Pouncey picks ten of the strangest...

VARIOUS Ni Kantu En Esperantu (ESP 1001) Rather than being connected with extra-sensory perception,
ESP-Disk was an abbreviation of Esperanto Disko. Founder Bernard Stollman was so obsessed by what he
thought would be the future "international language" that he privately pressed this instructional oddity.
Performed as a set of children's songs in a tongue that was a cross between Indo-European and Venusian,
Stollman's vision of universal understanding faded with bad press and poor sales. Refusing to be beaten,
he insisted that the message "Order this disk at your local record store or directly from ESP" appeared on
each subsequent ESP release - in Esperanto.

BOB JAMES TRIO Explosions (ESP 1009) Pianist Bob James is best known as the composer of the theme
for US TV sitcom Taxi, along with a wagon-load of less memorable pop-jazz productions. Explosions
reveals another side of James and suggests he had a hidden desire to be an avant garde musician. The
record hooks him up with experimental composers Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, who were
experimenting with the kind of tape manipulation that Frank Zappa was actively processing into works such
as Lumpy Gravy and We're Only In It For The Money. The resulting interplay between James's adventurous,
nervous sounding modern jazz combo (with aspiring free bass player Barre Phillips in the ranks) and
Ashley/Mumma's eccentric electronic music squealings make Explosions a record that still sounds
remarkable today. It also marked the end of James's brief but significant flirtation with weirdness.

ALBERT AYLER Bells (Esp 1010) A fabulous example of the Albert Ayler group's lung power captured live at
Town Hall, New York City on May Day, 1965, Bells also demonstrates Stollman's love of gimmicky ideas to
promote ESP, some of which are only just beginning to surface (specially-printed inner sleeves and a white
label promo box set being two recent discoveries). Bells was originally issued as a one-sided transparent
disk that was silk-screened with the cover design on the non~playing side. (Inevitably, the CD reissue looks
feeble in comparison.) Later issues were printed on coloured vinyl without the silkscreen, and the record
was finally issued as a plain black LP, a shadow of its former glory.

THE FUGS First Album (ESP 1018) The Fugs were once described as "The Fathers Of Invention", the New
York obverse of Frank Zappa and his California based Mothers. They were crude (verbally and musically) and
grubby, but blessed with a beatnik poet's surreal sensibility that mixed Allen Ginsberg with William Blake.
Their debut album (subtitled ". . . Sing Ballads Of Contemporary Protest") was originally released on the
Folkways offshoot Broadside. Their move to ESP produced the official Second Album plus the semi-official
Virgin Fugs and 4, Rounders Score, neither of which were Fugs-approved. Pissed off with Stollman, they
signed to Reprise and got reamed for real.

PATTY WATERS Sings (ESP 1025) With a voice that hovered between torch song sensuality and Yoko
Onoesque art howl, Patty Waters was ESP's offbeat version of Billie Holiday (whose radio recordings
Stollman would later release). Waters's finest vocal performance is captured here on the still astonishing
"Black Is The Colour Of My True Love's Hair". The group includes bass player Steve Tintweiss, percussionist
Tom Price and Burton Greene on "piano harp" (which is in fact a description of how Greene plays his piano).
It is Patty's 11 minute, gloom-ridden, repeated incantation of the word "black", however, that remains
unforgettable and makes this a landmark ESP release. Her follow up College Tour (ESP 1055) was a live
recording that featured a cover shot where she resembled a member of Charlie Manson's Family.

THE EAST VILLAGE OTHER Electric Newspaper (ESP 1034) This was a brave attempt to unite the free
thinking 60s US underground press with the freeform playing of the underground music scene, some of
whom had already appeared on ESP. The East Village Other was a originally a newspaper for 'heads' whose
contributors included Tuli Kupferbeg and Ed Sanders from The Fugs, along with beat poets Allen Ginsberg
and Peter Orlovsky, all of whom appear on this special vinyl edition. Other participants include saxophonist
Marion Brown (in a trio with Scott Holt and Ron Jackson), Warhol Factory cohorts Gerard Malanga and
Ingrid Superstar, plus a guest appearance by The Velvet Underground who make a "Noise" just before
Brown opens up and blows them away. A Velvets artifact that has been consistently bootlegged.

THE GODZ Contact High With The Godz (ESP 1037) ESP's house punk band, if only for the fact that all four
members (Jay Dillon, Larry Kessler, Paul Thornton and Jim McCarthy) were employed by the label. The Godz
couldn't play, sing or write hit songs, but what they lacked in basic talent they more than made up for with
sheer audacity and invention. It's a toss up whether Contact High or Godz 2 (ESP 1047) is the stranger
album. The former wins, however, due to the opening "White Cat Heat", in which The Godz metamorphose
into alley cats, first subdued but then breaking into a claw-slashing, fur-flying fight that sounds as though
they really were at each other's throats. The group's main claim to fame was having the late Lester Bangs
write a rave article about them in Creem magazine which was reproduced in the posthumous anthology
Psychotic Reactions And Carburretor Dung.

SEVENTH SONS 4AM At Frank's (ESP 1078) A late night raga session that captures the three Sons and
their flute playing pal Frank (Eventoff) in bong heaven. A stoned, mad instrumental rant that cuts out
abruptly at the end of side one and continues on side two without stopping. The CD reissue stays true to
the original vinyl version by cutting out halfway through and then restarting.

CROMAGNON Orgasm (ESP 2001) Cromagnon are the most mysterious act on ESP, mainly because half of
the group members preferred to remain anonymous. It was this behaviour (together with their strange
subterranean sound) which led to rumours that Cromagnon were in fact a pre-Cryptic Corporation version
of The Residents. Believe that or not, Orgasm was way ahead of its time and remains an enigma.

CHARLES MANSON Lie (ESP 2003) This is the only Charles Manson album you ever need to own. Released
by Awareness Records in California and ESP in New York, Lie contains the results of a single recording
session by everybody's favourite 'Hippy Killer Cult Leader' singing, playing guitar and sounding uncannily like
a psychotic Tim Buckley. Songs such as "Mechanical Man", "Sick City" and "Cease To Exist" (which was
recorded by The Beach Boys under the title "Never Learn Not To Love") are warped, eco-rock noir classics
and have made Lie ESP's most bootlegged title over the years. To murder freaks, Charlie is still bigger than
The Beatles.

this article totally COURTESY J. COULTHART!