David Banner

Just out:Certified-from all music guide
Review
by Andy Kellman


The money rolls in, the inspiration drains out. It happens to a lot of artists. David Banner, however, does not fall into that camp. Now that he knows he has a lot of people paying attention, built on the popularity of Mississippi: The Album and MTA2: Baptized in Dirty Water, he's more fired up and outspoken than ever, fearlessly and descriptively expressing the rage he feels for the way his people have been treated throughout history, whether the events went down centuries or weeks ago. (Needless to say, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, going down as he was promoting this album, must be giving him loads of thoughts and feelings to work through for his next release.) As on his past albums, Banner has all the bases covered, so there's also plenty of material to soundtrack an orgy of any variety, and even those moments are intense and sound like very pointed protest songs. Every other chorus seems to be have been written for a mob of some kind, while the production work — handled mostly by Banner, along with contributions from Jazze Pha, Lil Jon, Maestro, Get Cool, and a couple others — takes on a number of dimensions without making for a disjointed listen. more

David Banner downloads at mp3.com -- David Banner:rap news

The Ecstasy of Saint Theresa

The Czech band: http://sweb.cz/eost/info/english.html
flame tipped we hope just like St Teresa of Avila .

Camp Sheila Wellstone

Domestic Violence Prevention in the US was greatly helped by the late Sheila Wellstone. Wellstone Action, named after her and her late husband, Senator Paul Wellstone, has just announced a series of training programs--Camp Sheila Wellstone is a unique training program that provides domestic violence service providers and advocates with skills in the areas of planning, organizing, communications, and political advocacy.

Training Schedule
Training News

TRAINING PROGRAMS:
Advanced Campaign Management School
Camp Sheila Wellstone
Camp Wellstone
Campus Camp Wellstone

Camp Sheila Wellstone is a unique training program that provides domestic violence service providers and advocates with skills in the areas of planning, organizing, communications, and political advocacy.
Learn more about Camp Sheila Wellstone
Camp Sheila Wellstone addresses the specific needs of those working in the movement to end domestic violence.
Read a letter from a Camp Sheila Wellstone participant
The following letter was written by a participant at the first Camp Sheila Wellstone. The letter writer works for the Tubman Family Alliance in Minnesota.
Check out the basic Camp Sheila Wellstone curriculum
Here's an outline of what you will learn at Camp Sheila Wellstone.
First Camp Sheila Wellstone a Huge Success
Training program attracts overflow crowd.


Wellstone Action Phone (651) 645-3939 Fax (651) 645-5858
821 Raymond Ave. Suite 260 St. Paul, MN 55114

2005 WebAward Winner: National Geographic: Inside The Mafia

the Web Marketing Association is pleased to announce the winners of its ninth annual WebAward Competition for Web site development.
A complete list of the winning sites can be found at the WebAward Web site at www.WebAward.org.
The 2005 Best of Show WebAward is presented to Atlanta -based IQ interactive, for their outstanding work on National Geographic - Inside The Mafia.
The site was also awarded Best Entertainment WebAward.
To generate interest and viewers for the show, IQ Interactive was challenged to create a web site as engaging and compelling as the show itself. With a click, mysterious and intriguing rich media banner ads drive viewers straight to the full screen immersive interactive experience. Targeting a lifestyle demographic called New Enthusiasts, this dark and stylistic micro site engages in an almost game-like way. This discovery based site allows viewers to explore the world of the mafia through a variety of avenues, from full original animation, to a variety of video compositions and much more. The goal being to use video in a way that hasn't been used before.
more

BOOK REVIEW: Bayou Farewell

Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast
by Mike Tidwell (Pantheon Books, 2003)
Review by Stephanie Showalter, J.D., M.S.E.L.

Louisiana is sinking? Sounds crazy, right? But it is true, as revealed in poignant detail by Mike Tidwell in his book Bayou Farewell: The Rich Life and Tragic Death of Louisiana’s Cajun Coast. The massive levees built to prevent flooding along the Mississippi River in the early part of the 20th Century have robbed the Louisiana coast of sediments that used to compensate for the settling of the land underneath the state’s bayous. While on assignment for the Washington Post, Tidwell, an award-winning travel journalist, hitchhiked through the bayous of Louisiana on Cajun fishing boats and discovered that Louisiana was sinking. Approximately fifty acres of wetlands are lost every day. Tidwell returned in April 2000, “to carefully document as much of this world as I could before it departs.”
more

More On The Road

The Book Standard Books-to-Film Deals Report, with Billy Crudup, Scarlett Johannson, Angelina Jolie, Alison Lohman and Elijah Wood September 06, 2005As summer fades away, Hollywood dealmakers are busier than ever fighting over film rights to hot literary properties, a growing trend led by Scott Rudin, Brad Pitt and Benderspink and tossed so often to script-master Akiva Goldsman for his preternaturally prolific adaptation prowess.
Below, see the old (On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, at left), the very old (Beowulf, by Unknown) and the yet-to-be published (A Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs). Whether all these adaptations will make it to the big screen remains to be seen, but the authors, at least, have made a happy trip to the bank.
Jack Kerouac’s On the Road
Even for those who haven’t read Kerouac’s druggy-boozy, era-defining memoir of his roadtrip across America with fellow Beat icon Neal Cassady, it’s even more familiar than “Howel,” by another of Kerouac’s compadres. . . .more

all u niggas suk go to rotten.com and see who dies.
we all do and if you can get through all those links then you are sicc as me.
It's sooo reeaaal. u don't wanna go there. or do u?
F.T. lova North niggas stay up So. niggas stay down.

Poets Against The War -- September 25th

POETS AGAINST THE WAR PROTEST READING SUNDAY, SEPT. 25

The Phoenix Theatre in Petaluma, Calif. will host a benefit poetry reading from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Funds donated will be used to help publish Ruggles’ last collection of poems, "Enough."

Among poets scheduled to read are Sam Hamill, Geri Digiorno, Clive Matson, Andrena Zawinski, Martin Hickel, Prartho Sereno and Gerald Nicosia and Joyce Jenkins and Lucy Lang Day.

Sunday's reading in Petaluma will feature the work of Eugene Ruggles, who put together several mass reading against the Vietnam in San Francisco. His collection, Lifeguard in the Snow, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, won the Great Lakes College Association Award in Poetry.

His poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, The American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Hudson Review, Field, Kayak, Manoa, Poetry Flash, Floating Island, The New Yorker, Copperfield's Literary Magazine and Passages North. He was given grants by the National Endowment for the Arts, P.E.N., The American Academy of Arts and Letters, and The Academy of American Poets.

Recreating Gallery Six Reading

2 OCTOBER---Sunday
The Six Gallery Goes Golden: 50 Years of Poetry Renaissance, Howl, and Literary Activism
A memorial tribute to the San Francisco poetry reading that changed American letters, mores, and society and gave birth to the Beat Generation.
Memories of the original 1955 event will mix with live poetry old and new, as well as tributes to the original six participants--
Allen Ginsberg; Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, Philip Whalen, and event emcee, poet Kenneth Rexroth
Actor/author Peter Coyote reads from Howl,
Other readers include David Meltzer, Ron Loewinsohn, Ntozake Shange, Herb Gold, A.D. Winans, Nicole Henares, Michael Rothenberg, David Gitin, Lee Swenson, and Neeli Cherkovski, Jami Cassady, and surprise guests--hosted by Gerald Nicosia and Jonah Raskin

Koret Auditorium
San Francisco Public Library
100 Larkin at Grove
SF
1:00-4:00
This even is free.
(415/924-2270, or 415/557-4595)
Co-sponsored by Friends of the San Francisco Public Library, New College of California, and Poetry Flash

About Katrina

email from Softskull Press

Tim Wise, who is a brilliant anti-racism activist, and lived in New Orleans 1986-1996, just sent us this...We will continue to forward his commentaries on the unpreventable hurricane, and its preventable aftermath, over the coming days...

I have been paralyzed this last few days, unable to write anything.That changed today.This is the first of several things I'm going to be getting off my chest. Hope you all find them useful, or confirming, or cathartic, or whatever. If not, just delete them and move on, I guess.

A God With Whom I am Not Familiar
By Tim Wise

This is an open letter to the man sitting behind me at La Paz today, in
Nashville, at lunchtime, with the Brooks Brothers shirt:You don't know me.
But I know you. I watched you as you held hands with your tablemates at the restaurant where we both ate this afternoon. I listened as you prayed, and thanked God for the food you were about to eat, and for your own safety, several hundred miles away from the unfolding catastrophe in New Orleans.
You blessed your chimichanga in the name of Jesus Christ, and then proceeded to spend the better part of your meal--and mine, since I was too near your
table to avoid hearing every word--morally scolding the people of that
devastated city, heaping scorn on them for not heeding the warnings to leave before disaster struck.
Then you attacked them--all of them, without distinction it seemed--for the behavior of a relative handful: those who have looted items like guns, or big screen TVs.
I heard you ask, amid the din of your colleagues "Amens," why it was that instead of pitching in to help their fellow Americans, the people of New Orleans instead--again, all of them in your mind--chose to steal and shoot at relief helicopters. I watched you wipe salsa from the corners of your mouth, as you nodded agreement to the statement of one of your friends, sitting to your right,
her hair neatly coiffed, her makeup flawless, her jewelry sparkling.
When you asked, rhetorically, why it was that people were so much more decent amid the tragedy of 9-11, as compared to the aftermath of Katrina, she had
offered her response, but only after apologizing for what she admitted was going to sound harsh.
"Well," Buffy explained. "It's probably because in New Orleans, it seems to be mostly poor people, and you know, they just don't have the same regard."
She then added that police should shoot the looters, and should have done so from the beginning, so as to send a message to the rest that theft would not
be tolerated. You, who had just thanked Jesus for your chips and guacamole, said you agreed. They should be shot.
Praise the Lord.Your God is one with whom I am not familiar.
Two thoughts.
First, it is a very fortunate thing for you, and likely for me, that my two young children were with me as I sat there, choking back fish tacos and my
own seething rage, listening to you pontificate about shit you know nothing about.Have you ever even been to New Orleans?
And no, by that I don't mean the New Orleans of your company's sales conference. I don't mean Emeril's New Orleans, or the New Orleans of Uptown Mardi Gras parties.I mean the New Orleans that is buried as if it were Atlantis, in places like the lower 9th ward: 98 percent black, 40 percent poor, where bodies are floating down the street, flowing with the water as it seeks its own level.
Have you met the people from that New Orleans? The New Orleans that is dying as I write this, and as you order another sweet tea?
I didn't think so.Your God--the one to whom you prayed today, and likely do before every meal, because this gesture proves what a good Christian you are--is one with whom I am not familiar.Your God is one who you sincerely believe gives a flying fuck about your lunch. Your God is one who you seem to believe watches over you and blesses you, and brings good tidings your way, while simultaneously letting thousands of people watch their homes be destroyed, and perhaps ten thousand or more die, many of them in the streets for lack of water or food.
Did you ever stop to think just what a rancid asshole such a God would have to be, such that he would take care of the likes of you, while letting
babies die in their mother's arms, and old people in wheelchairs, at the foot of Canal Street? Your God is one with whom I am not familiar. But no, it isn't God who's the asshole here, Skip (or Brad, or Braxton, orwhatever your name is). God doesn't feed you, and it isn't God that kept me from turning around and
beating your lily white privileged ass today either. God has nothing to do with it. God doesn't care who wins the Super Bowl. God doesn't help anyone win an Academy Award. God didn't get you your last raise, or your SUV.
And if God is even half as tired as I am of having to listen to self-righteous bastards like you blame the victims of this nightmare fortheir fate, then you had best eat slowly from this point forward. Why didn't they evacuate like they were told?A re you serious? There are 100,000 people in that city without cars. Folks who are too poor to own their own vehicle, and who rely on public transportation every day. I know this might shock you. They don't have a Hummer2, or whatever gas-guzzling piece of crap you either already own or probably are saving up for.And no, they didn't just choose not to own a car because the buses are so gosh-darned efficient and great, as Rush Limbaugh implied yesterday, and as you likely heard, since you're the kind of person who hangs on the every word of such bloviating hacks as these. Why did they loot? Are you serious?
People are dying, in the streets, on live television. Fathers and mothers are watching their baby's eyes bulge in their skulls from dehydration, and you are begrudging them some Goddamned candy bars, diapers and water?
If anything the poor of New Orleans have exercised restraint.
Maybe you didn't know it, but the people of that city with whom you likely identify--the wealthy white folks of Uptown--were barely touched by this storm. Yeah, I guess God was watching over them: protecting them, and rewarding them for their faith and superior morality. If the folks downtown who are waiting desperately for their government to send help--a government whose resources have been stretched thin by a war that I'm sure you support, because you love freedom and democracy--were half as crazed as you think, they'd march down St. Charles Avenue right now and burn every mansion insight. That they aren't doing so suggests a decency and compassion for their fellow man and woman that sadly people like you lack.
Can you even imagine what you would do in their place? Can you imagine what would happen if it were well-off white folks stranded like this without buses to get them out, without nourishment, without hope? Putting aside the absurdity of the imagery--after all, such folks always have the means to seek safety, or the money to rebuild, or the political significance to ensure a much speedier response for their concerns--can you just imagine? Can you imagine what would happen if the pampered, overfed corporate class,which complains about taxes taking a third of their bloated incomes, had tosit in the hot sun for four, going on five days? Without a Margarita or hotel swimming pool to comfort them I mean? Oh, and please, I know. I'm stereotyping you. Imagine that.
I've assumed,based only on your words, what kind of person you are, even though I suppose I could be wrong. How does that feel Biff? Hurt your feelings? So sorry. But hey, at least my stereotypes of you aren't deadly. They won't effect your life one bit, unlike the ones you carry around with you and display within earshot of people like me, supposing that no one could possibly disagree. But I'm not wrong am I, Chip? I know you. I see people like you all the time,in airports, in business suits, on their lunch breaks. People who will take advantage of any opportunity to ratify and reify their pre-existing prejudices towards the poor, towards black folks.
You see the same three video loops of the same dozen or so looters on Fox News and you conclude that poor black people are crazy, immoral, criminal. You, or others quite a bit like you, are the ones posting messages on chatroom boards, calling looters sub-human "vermin," "scum," or "cockroaches."
I heard you use the word "animals" three times today: you and that woman
across from you--what was her name? Skyler?
What was it you said as you scooped the last bite of black beans and riceinto your eager mouth? Like zoo animals? Yes, I think that was it.
Well, Chuck, it's a free country, and so you certainly have the right I suppose to continue lecturing the poor, in between checking your Blackberry and dropping the kids off at soccer practice.
If you want to believe that the poor of New Orleans are immoral and greedy, and unworthy of support at a time like this--or somehow more in need of your scolding than whatever donation you might make to a relief fund--so be it.
But let's leave God out of it, shall we? All of it.
Your God is one with whom I am not familiar, and I'd prefer to keep it that way.

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me: Reflections on Race from a
Privileged Son
(http://www.softskull.com/detailedbook.php?isbn=1-932360-68-9).
He lived in New Orleans from 1986-1996. He can be reached at timjwise@msn.com

The NewYorker Festival