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April 30, 2007

Virtual Providence: screenshot; Watch Tenet, Moyers' 'Buying the War' online; John Sinclair's 'Guitar Army' reissued

Photo by Sheila Lennon
An "avatar" in Second Life -- a computer-generated figure represents the user in the virtual world.

Photo by Sheila Lennon
The Providence Biltmore Hotel in Eyegloo's Virtual Providence in Second Life. (Click it to enlarge it.)

Virtual Providence in Second Life: Screenshots from Arnell Milhouse's presentation at Wednesday's Providence Geeks meeting at AS220. That's a computer-generated Second Life "avatar" wearing a Providence Geeks T-shirt, at top, and the virtual Biltmore Hotel.

Milhouse, president of the President of the Downtown Merchants Association, and Founder of interactive media services company Eyegloo, intends to recreate downtown, building by building, in the virtual world. (Launch is still a couple of months away.)

Brian Jepson interviewed Milhouse after the presentation. Here's the video.

Kicked out the jams: Guitar Army: Rock & Revolution With the MC5 and the White Panther Party has been reissued 35 years after its initial publication in 1972.

The blurb at Amazon:

"Guitar Army was our manual for revolt. It's a rainbow-colored Howl, still resonating today with the singular value of idealism."-Michael Simmons

John Sinclair, manager of the notorious Detroit band MC5 and leader of the leftist revolutionary vanguard White Panther Party, is the still-charging embodiment of a dazzlingly optimistic time in which change felt necessary and possible.

Sinclair was the martyr of the original war on drugs, sentenced to ten years in prison for possession of two marijuana joints. Guitar Army is the iconographic book that proclaimed "Rock and Roll is a Weapon of Cultural Revolution" for young, revved-up readers in 1972. Its author was released from prison just three days after 15,000 people came to see John Lennon, Yoko Ono, Archie Shepp, Allen Ginsberg, and other musicians and leaders demand his freedom.

The updated Guitar Army includes two dozen previously unpublished period photographs, recent writings from John Sinclair, and an introduction from Michael Simmons that leads the reader through the revolutionary times to Sinclair's life today.

A bonus CD contains rare music recordings of MC5 band members, the revolutionary rock group UP!, Black Panther Bobby Seale on the White Panthers, and original White Panther Party rallies.

· Excerpts and more links

· The John and Leni Sinclair Papers at U.Mich.

· John Sinclair Radio

· There's a hometown review by Terry Lawson in the Detroit Free Press, 35 years later, Sinclair's still a poet

· Alt-review at Znet: Kickin' Out the Jams: A Review of John Sinclair's Guitar Army (Feral House 2007

· Sinclair at Wikipedia

Monday links:
Bill Moyers Journal: Buying the War: Watch the show, read the transcript at the link.

The George Tenet “60 Minutes” interview video at Crooks and Liars. Text transcript at CBS.

Most People Are Depressed For a Very Good Reason at Violent Acres

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Posted by Sheila Lennon  at 10:10 AM | Permalink