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zzzzz//YOU
UPGRADEmag// april 10 2001
The UPGRADEmag is a global edutainment round-up ‘broadcast’ weekly to =[9398]= Trance// New Age// Alternative// Activist folks who have been recommended to the Parallel YOUniversity/ Megatripolis Dance Dept as "showing signs of life". Since many choose to forward it to their own lists, we estimate 18,800+ recipients. And, because of its less 'specialist' content, it's increasingly being posted on a variety of sites worldwide, making a total ‘readership’ of, conservatively, 175,000+
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this week's UPGRADE is shorter than usual while we take a well-
earned rest from our labours with the new club. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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Hi,
in the beginning, when I recieved your mag I was surprised and I also didn´t really know what to do with it, but now, now I love it!
Thanks a lot!
Daniela, Austria
YOU 2289
DEN OF ENLIGHTENMENT FEEDBACK
Went there!
You hit the spiritual nail on the head once again Fraser!
Thank you
www.zak.net
____________________________________________________
NEXT DEN IS SATURDAY MAY 5TH. COME EARLY!
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YOU 2290
London
FRI APRIL 13 LIQUID SPIRAL
Good Friday 13th - mischievous, miraculous, memorable and meant to happen ---the Liquid Spiral Collective - fused, evolved & continuing a conscious journey through the London underground - rejuvenating, mind inducing, pattern-stripping and soul-blowing flow of arts, psychedelia, creation and co-operation. The process continues within the community to rise beyond all doubts and limitations and passing through the Transinitiation Gateway to;
* Liquid Connective's psychedelic journey - multi-sensory hyper-spatial navigations through throbbing meta-rhythms and transcendental grooves.
* Nagual Sound Experiment -"Dedicated to an Advanced Understanding of Paraphysical Manifestations of everyday Chaos"
* ID Spiral 12V Magichill - visuals, performers, deco by Green Lizard, poets and ambient live music.
* "Indigenous People" acoustic stage, also showing "Undercurrents 1-12"
* Liquid Lounge - groovy, fluid soundwaves, smart drinks, organics, interactive art and awareness. NGO stalls and information exchange.
* Spacegirls' cyberactive poetry salon and cosmic costume co-op.
* Soul Sanctuary - sacred healing therapies, inner sanctum of the universal altar and deep comfort garden of peace and regeneration. Smoke free
* Little Stars kids space - Safe space for our little treasures. Painting, games, toys and stories, kiddie-yoga, a fairy workshop - smokefree zone. Parents will be required to offer some assistance.
* Sacred Elder Didge and Drum Space - Didges, Drums + "Suck My Rocket" iced confectionery for your delight.
* Herbal Highs natural, legal, mood-enhancing potions and pills.
* The Bee Art Gallery - presenting the "Headfuk" Family.
* jam room - self expression, bring instruments/soundmakers, amplification
* Faerieology by the Good Will Rumour Faerie
* The Spiral - Chai cafe, organic haute cuisine and chai en masse.
PLUS welcoming pixies, transformative 13 moon rituals, the fluffiest security and loads of awareness.
10pm till Easter... £5 on door. No guestlist. 07939 367710 or 0207 644 5156
liquidspiral2001@hotmail.com
YOU 2291
DEN OF ENLIGHTENMENT FEEDBACK
I liked the night tho' the noise made me work hard….
People are asking when the next one is!
Guru Dave (who 'performed' in the Playshop)
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADVERTISINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
London
SAT APRIL 14 PAGAN GODDESS OF SPRING PARTY
Return To The Source announce 4 seasonal parties throughout 2001. Many modern day festivals actually have roots in ancient pagan celebrations of the seasons, and the Source will be hosting massive parties to recognize these: Summer July 7, Autumn October 6, Winter December 31.
The April 14 party celebrates the Spring Equinox.
TRANCE TERMINAL - Oberon, Chrisbo, Ludvig (Dogma 3000), Baraka, Pablo Gargano, Hallucinogen (live), Dogma 3000 (live), The Secret (live)
CATCH 23 HARD HOUSE FOYER - Skol & Roosta (Mind Over Matter), Ed Real (Frantic), Lisa Pin Up, Si Fevah & Riksta, Jess Jones
Beats n’ Breaks in the Circle with Trigger - Freq Nasty, Tipper, Kosmic Neil Digital Pimp
DUB CLUB CHILL OUT IN THE AMBIENT MEDITATIONS LOUNGE - a vital reggae dub selection featuring Adrian Sherwood Dub Showcase (On-U Sound) alongside MC Ghetto Priest, Steve Barker and special guests.
Stalls, performance, pyrotechnic show, freebies, funky people!!!
@ Brixton Academy, 9pm 6am. £15. £12 in advance from RTTS (0207 735 5522), Brixton Academy (0207 771 2000) and all usual outlets.
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADVERTISINGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG
DEN OF ENLIGHTENMENT FEEDBACK
a quiet, contented wow!
what a club, what a lovely night the Preview was, filled with promise for what is obviously going to be the best fookin club EVER!
:-)
not too big. intimate. most intelligent, sensitive, politically aware and cultured group of people in london.
guru dave "psychic surgeoning" people out back, mark sinclair being begged for more on the dancefloor, the glastonbury rooms with wandering minstrels, and the theatre, wow, the Crows Nest was like travelling back to the middle ages and watching shakespeare perform his own plays on acid!
i really don't see how a club could have more - oh yes, and even a resident dog!
shhh. don't tell too many people.
:-)
sparkle
YOU 2292
US RAVE CRACKDOWN CONTINUES
Time magazine, April 7, 2001:
ECSTASY CRACKDOWN
WILL THE FEDS USE A 1980S ANTI-CRACK LAW TO DESTROY THE RAVE MOVEMENT?
Nearly three years after her daughter's death, Phyllis Kirkland still visits her grave every day. She drives over from the Monroeville, Ala., dentist's office where she works. She weeps. Jillian was only 17 - "a beautiful 17," her mom chokes - when she died from a drug overdose after a sweaty night of dancing at the State Palace Theatre, a nightclub about a four-hour drive away, in New Orleans.
Jillian's August 1998 death crushed her mom, but it may also change how the U.S. government fights its war on drugs like ecstasy. Jillian's overdose - the coroner can't say precisely from what -
- and there's where the emperor has no clothes. last I heard from Alexander Shulgin, the scientist who legally invented most of today's designer drugs - there has never been a single case of ecstasy death. that's not to say there aren't dangers, but death is not one of them.
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and the sad 16 days she clung to life at Charity Hospital enraged doctors there. Federal agents began investigating, and in January a grand jury indicted three of the men who ran the club under a novel application of a 1986 law called the Crack House Statute. It prohibits maintaining a property "for the purpose of...distributing or using a controlled substance." Congress wrote the law to go after sleazebag landlords who let dealers and addicts hide the crack trade in slums. This is the first time prosecutors have used it against a nightclub, and drug enforcers and club owners across the U.S. are watching the case.
'sfunny, i've just finished reading this rather amazing book called Underworld Of The East by James Lee who describes how this business of 'renting' empty houses for prostitution or whatever the current authorities were getting hysterical about is as ancient as, well, private property?
What's new about this drug-war strategy is that it does not require the government to show that the defendants - brothers Robert and Brian Brunet, who managed the State Palace, and Donnie Estopinal, who promoted its raves - were actually selling drugs. And so far, the government has offered no evidence that they were, though investigators have been digging for well over a year.
Rather, U.S. Attorney Eddie Jordan plans to argue that the defendants looked the other way as druggies turned the State Palace into a kind of crack house for club drugs. Cops say it was a place where partiers could easily score hits of ecstasy and acid without getting hassled by club staff, and where the staff encouraged the pharmacological festivities by selling rave-culture gear such as glow sticks and pacifiers. These are silly fashion accessories for many ravers, but they can be drug-related too: glow sticks stimulate dilated pupils; pacifiers relieve the teeth grinding associated with ecstasy.
The Brunets and Estopinal say they did everything they could to keep their parties sober. They and their A.C.L.U. lawyers also argue that those who provide music should not be blamed for its devotees' crimes. But the case raises an important question: Given that the use of ecstasy continues to soar, is there any way to stop club drugs without stopping the raves? Could music be to blame for what happened to Jillian Kirkland?
It's an attack on music! now i've heard everything! It's the same old puritan attack on the shamanic lifestyle and we've had enuff, brothers.
Before he ever heard of Kirkland, before he became a nationally known promoter and way before an attorney showed him photos of the prison he might call home if he loses his case, Estopinal was a frat boy at Louisiana State University. In the early '90s, according to friends - the defendants wouldn't talk on the record - Estopinal, now 31, was waiting tables, trying to decide whether he really wanted to be an accountant. Co-workers started taking him dancing. Dance music was enjoying a revival, having shaken off disco excesses and borrowed harder beats from underground. Estopinal fell in love with the dance renaissance and began having parties at a stinky fish-processing warehouse. By 1995, cops were closing him down for illicit booze sales and noise, but he knew he could draw thousands of fans of the new music. He turned to the State Palace to help legitimize his work.
The State Palace is a musty old gem on Canal Street, a crowded esplanade bordering the French Quarter. The Palace started life in 1950 as a cinema, but after the Brunets leased the space in 1992, it was turned into a concert venue. Robert and Brian Brunet managed it day to day; their dad Rene helped run the family's 88-year-old New Orleans entertainment company. Robert, 36, and Brian, 33, booked mostly mainstream acts such as the Dave Matthews Band and the Beastie Boys. When Estopinal told them in 1995 that he could pack their club with dancers, the family was skeptical.
"One day the Capitalists will compete to sell the revolutionaries the rope with which to hang them" Karl Marx. That's another reason why this totally corrupt and bankrupt system cannot stop the shamanic rave wave, especially in America!
The first dance drew just 900, but by 1999, up to 4,300 were paying as much as $35 each to attend raves lasting from 10 p.m. till dawn and beyond. Even so, Rene says, the parties never generated a majority of club revenues, in part because Estopinal spent so much on artsy flyers and DJs like Britain's Paul Oakenfold (who can charge $25,000). On most nights conventional rock, not electronic music, blasted from the club's stage. Regis and Kathie Lee taped their show there each January. In 1998 their taping came days before Estopinal's "Attack of the 50-Ft. Raver Zombies" party. If the State Palace was a crack house, it was an awfully nimble and elaborate one.
hell, the homes of haff the people reading this are such houses!
As a manager, Rob saw little downside. The dancers didn't fight or break limbs like alt-rock's moshers.
britain, five years ahead in this cultural shift, is now on the verge of realising that the only alternative to shamanic rave culture is what's increasingly being called "yob culture." take your choice!
Instead, they created a warm atmosphere, welcoming overweight teens, 30-year-olds toting Powerpuff Girls backpacks, nerds who hated their college Geek scene. Some would drive for hours from Alabama or Arkansas. They would tell Rob that the events had changed their lives. No Dave Matthews fan said that.
which is why nobody tried to stop them.
But wasn't some of the love and unity at the raves chemically generated? Sure. Raves sprang from underground, and drugs were always part of them. For a decade now, electronic-music fans have been protesting that they are creating a culture as valid and vital as the scenes that appeared around jazz in the 1930s or folk rock in the 1960s. And drugs were surely an integral part of those worlds. "It is no secret," TIME noted in a 1943 article, "The Weed," "that some of the finest flights of American syncopation owe much of their expressiveness to the use of a drug."
State Palace staff members suspected that some of the ravers were taking ecstasy, but they had seen drugs at other events too: giant clouds of pot smoke would rise from reggae crowds, for instance. Still, employees say they fought to prevent drugs from being consumed on any night. How hard did they really fight? Depends on whom you believe. Employees say for big nights - rave or otherwise--the State Palace hired three off-duty but uniformed cops to assist house security guards. But after Kirkland's death, the New Orleans police department was slammed in the media for allowing officers to work off-duty at the place where she had passed out. The N.O.P.D. pulled its cops. Club workers say they then had no easy way to get dealers arrested. They say that maybe 10 times, they caught dealers and then called the N.O.P.D. or a local agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration to arrest them. "But no one would ever come get these people," laments a club employee. George Cazenavette III, who runs the DEA's New Orleans office, says he can't comment on that charge. N.O.P.D. commanders deny they ever ignored calls from the State Palace.
let's be fair to the police, maybe they had something really serious to attend to? like homicides? wife beatings?
The government is basing its allegations against the Brunets and Estopinal mostly on the work of DEA agent Michael Templeton. Cazenavette says Templeton's baby face made him a good investigator among young ravers. But the rave world that Estopinal was creating must have seemed monstrously weird to Templeton, who had come to New Orleans after being a cop in rural Johnson City, Tenn., for four years. In addition to being dances, Estopinal's parties were often wacky performance-art spectacles featuring fire eaters, trapeze artists, cross-dressers on roller skates and other assorted characters.
Mounting an undercover operation in this world without rules is horrid work for your average cop. "It's loud and dark in there. There are the strobe lights in your eyes. Ugh," says N.O.P.D. captain Steve Nicholas. "It's just not an easy thing to find these people." But Templeton found them. For six months beginning in February 2000, he went undercover to at least eight State Palace raves. He and a fellow agent were able to buy 45 hits of ecstasy and five other illegal pills.
They also learned from local ambulance companies that from December 1997 to August 2000, more than 70 overdose victims were hauled from the State Palace to the emergency room - an average of about two per rave.
ahem. 25 per year. 2 per month. how many raves per month? also: 4000 young people dancing all night. that might be one in 5000 then? and besides, how exackly are we defining "overdose victim"?
The agents didn't arrest any of the dealers for two reasons. First, such arrests usually result in trivial convictions. Second, by last year the DEA was so frustrated by its inability to reduce the ecstasy supply that it wanted to try new strategies. In August the agency held an international conference on ecstasy, at which officials noted that for every major seizure of pills at an airport, perhaps millions more were slipping into the country. The DEA resolved to redouble its efforts to combat the ecstasy that was already circulating in U.S. cities.
The New Orleans case was apparently part of the DEA's new campaign. By going after promoters, the agency wouldn't have to waste its time on low-level dealers. And evidence that managers were running something akin to a crack house seemed to be everywhere. There were all those pacifiers and glow sticks.
The bottled water on sale was also suspect, since drugs that rev the system often cause dehydration. In an affidavit, Templeton even cited dancers' moves as evidence of drug use. It's common, he wrote, "for persons involved in rave management to allow patrons to touch and massage one another to enhance the heightened sensory perception to palpation created by the use of ecstasy." O.K., but it's also common for people who are dancing to get funky, whether they are high or not.
and it's body armoured puritans who have made most of the population afraid of touching each other.
To be sure, the DEA is on to something. Plenty of drug users showed up for the raves. Templeton says in his affidavit that when he went undercover to talk to Brian Brunet about working at the club, Brunet told him he didn't expect security guards to look actively for drug activity. If they found it, Brunet allegedly said, the guards usually didn't contact authorities. When Templeton commented to Brunet that getting dealers arrested would kill the party, Brunet allegedly responded, "Exactly." Templeton says that during his rave nights, numerous dealers were offering him drugs, messed-up kids were constantly vomiting, people were smoking pot openly - but "neither the security guards [nor] the management...did anything to curtail the illegal activity going on around them."
If all that is true, did the defendants break the Crack House Statute? Maybe. The law has never been stretched so far.
i gotta better idea, commissioner. why not charge the city authorities with creating a city where tons of dope are consumed each week?
Perhaps a jury could be convinced, but the prosecutors had hoped the case wouldn't get to that stage.
aha! they underestimated the depth of the cultural shift that's been taking place for a decade in europe now. THE FIGHTBACK HAS WELL AND TRULY BEGUN!
They offered plea deals of a year in prison (the law carries a maximum of 20 years). But the A.C.L.U (American Civil Liberties Union) helped persuade the defendants to fight. "Go after the people who deal the drugs," says Graham Boyd, head of the A.C.L.U. Drug Policy Litigation Project. "But you can't go after the people who provide the music - and you especially can't go after only the ones who provide a certain kind." The DEA didn't investigate other State Palace events. In addition to the A.C.L.U., a local lawyer is helping. Buddy Lemann is the kind of charming defense attorney who wears three-piece suits, drinks martinis at lunch, writes a book about himself called Hail to the Dragon Slayer - and the kind who wins constantly and charges a lot. But the Brunets and Estopinal hope the music industry will help pay. An organization called the Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund has formed in Los Angeles to raise money for them; the fund may also look into efforts by authorities to shut down raves in Chicago and other cities using local ordinances similar to the Crack House Statute. The International Association of Assembly Managers, a trade group for 1,500 entertainment venues, has filed a brief in support of the defendants. "No amount of training, security, or preparation can ... constrain any and all illegal behavior at any mass gathering," it says.
Meanwhile, the New Orleans prosecutors are digging in. They plan to file new charges against the Brunets and Estopinal after a second exhaustive investigation. The DEA's Cazenavette hints that his agents are finding serious dirt on the men. But for now, the music continues. These days the Brunets book mostly non-DJ acts such as the hip-hop duo OutKast. Estopinal still brings big-name DJs to town, though they now spin at a smaller venue. Some patrons there are surely on ecstasy, just as some of the city's many other shows attract other drugs. Charity Hospital, however, is seeing far fewer club-drug admissions, maybe one a month now.
Instead of two, right?
Will that improvement be permanent? Or will the raves simply return to the hidden warehouses where they got started?
and from there to a whole generation around the world, uniting in the only movement in town that stands against the corrupt dinosaur culture all around them.
The outcome of the State Palace case may point the way.
or it may point the wrong way, it doesn't make any difference. it might be better to lose this one and thereby encourage the power-possessors into even deeper corruption of the law.
YOU 2293
US RAVE CRACKDOWN FIGHTBACK CONTINUES
This e-mail is an update on the New Orleans case, and an urgent request for donations to EM:DEF of $15 or more.
Newsweek has covered the New Orleans case, pointing out three critical issues:
1) "DEA agents and federal prosecutors decided on the (crackhouse) strategy in a meeting at the beginning of last year in New Orleans."
that would be around the time of frontman Bush's election victory, would it?
2) "DEA agents have been disseminating information about how to use the crackhouse statute to shut down raves across the country in forums such as a November gathering of the nation’s police chiefs."
3) "Now (the DEA is) gearing for a reindictment (of Robert, Brian and Donnie) with even harsher charges (multiple counts of the crackhouse law) that could put the defendants away for 20 years to life."
This e-mail is a request for donations!!!!
The Newsweek article was printed following a panel at The Winter Music Conference with Donnie Estopinal, Robert Brunet and Graham Boyd of the ACLU - hosted by The Electronic Music Defense and Education Fund (EM:DEF)
As the article mentions, EM:DEF has raised $33,000. The cost of the case has exceeded $100,000 and will likely grow to $200,000 by May 1st. If a second motion to dismiss is not granted, the trial will likely cost $500,000 or more.
Please make a donation of $15 or more. Please ask friends to do the same.
www.emdef.org/donate.html
To keep this affordable to everyone, we are counting on 10,000 people to make a donation. By joining together, we can stop this intimidation
tactic being used by the DEA to stomp out the electronic music scene.
Our goal is to raise funds by April 20th. PLEASE take five minutes to send a donation today!
Thank you.
YOU 2294
J NEXT DEN OF ENLIGHTENMENT IS SATURDAY MAY 5TH
J IMPERIAL GARDENS, 299 Camberwell New Road, London SE5.
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