Daily Dreamtime

Coachella, pt. 3: plastic crunch, raver cruft, ghosts of desert past.

(Photos: crowd above, security chart below, by eecue of blogging.la, more here, cc-licensed).

I've been posting Coachella notes (one, two) to BoingBoing between band sets, from inside my buddy Wayne's biodiesel tour bus.

I hear there are several temporary cell towers on-site while the event lasts, to keep the voice, data, and SMS service moving. So unlike other desert events (say, Burning Man), phones are everywhere at Coachella, in-hand.

People walk while txting, wandering from stage to stage with eyes fixed on display. Fans hold them up during night performances, to snap photos or video or pay tribute by beaming display-light back at the band.

Stepping between tight rows of cross-legged attendees, waiting for one act to go on, I smell weed. I glance down, looking for the source glow. But all I can make out are luminous Sidekicks, fingers punching out txts, blotting out glow in staccato code.

We watched one superstar techno headliner play earlier tonight, to a packed field under black sky.

When the music ended and those tens of thousands of fans exited, a chorus of crinkly, plasticky sound rose from beneath all those feet.

Stomp, crunch, crackle; flattened water bottles and brittle glowsticks.

The government charges that she provided $300-an-hour prostitutes to clients in the Washington area, operating the business by phone and e-mail from her home in California. An investigation begun in 2004 by the IRS and the U.S. Postal Service allegedly found that she instructed her escorts, whom she called "subcontractors," to convert her share of fees into money orders and mail them to a California post office box.

Palfrey, who has a bachelor's degree in criminal justice and once studied law, served 18 months in state prison in the early 1990s after she was caught running a prostitution ring in California. She started her Washington business while on probation in that case.

She told reporters, "I believe there is something very, very rotten at the core of my circumstance, and without money to hire my own investigators I must rely upon your acumen and talent . . . to uncover the truth." She refused to answer questions after reading her statement.

Asked if he actually expects Tobias to testify in Palfrey's defense, Sibley said witnesses can be subpoenaed to testify and must then "show up and tell the truth."

He rejected a reporter's suggestion that releasing the phone records amounted to blackmail.

"I don't know why that's blackmail," Sibley said. "I call that due process of law." He added, "We don't have any options left."

The Black Panthers: Vintage Prints By Stephen Shames

Stephen Shames... Shoot-Up at Panther Office in Oakland (1969, Vintage gelatin silver print). From The Black Panthers: Vintage Prints By Stephen Shames at Steven Kasher Gallery. "...At the tail end of the largely nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the legendary Black Panther Party in 1966 in Oakland, California. The Party, revered by some and vilified by others, burst onto the scene with a revolutionary agenda for social change and the empowerment of African-Americans. Its methods were so polarizing that in 1969, FBI head J. Edgar Hoover designated the organization as the country’s greatest threat to internal security.
During the height of the Party’s activities, from 1967 to 1973, photographer Stephen Shames had unprecedented access to the organization. He captured not only its public face — street demonstrations, protests, and militant posturing — but also unscripted behind-the-scenes moments, such as private meetings held in the Party headquarters, scenes from the Panther schools and free meal programs, and Bobby Seale at work on his mayoral campaign in Oakland.
Stephen Shames’s Black Panther pictures were taken while he was still a student at the University of California, Berkley. Their immediacy and intimacy connect less to the prevalent photojournalistic styles of the day, and connect more to the inside-view documentary styles of Danny Lyon and Larry Clark."

http://www.historicphotoarchive.com/caps2/00195.html