Section A · Page 8
The University Daily Kansan
Wednesday, April 22, 1998
Flaming Lips ditch instruments for boom boxes
Band will supply stereos at concert
By Chris Horton chorton@kansan.com Kansan staff writer
Live music does not get any more post-modern than this.
At 9 tonight, The Oklahoma City band The Flaming Lips will bring its boom box orchestra to The Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire.
The band will leave its instruments at home and instead supply 50 portable stereos to audience members who will play cassettes, which will feature a variety of music and sounds. The end effect will be an amalgamation of sound greater than the sum of its parts, said Wayne Coyne, lead singer and guitarist.
Coyne, along with bandmates Michael Ivins and Steven Drozz.
"We'll hand out tapes to people from the crowd, and once we get going, we'll have a series of compositions that get more and more complicated." Coyne said.
has been experimenting with playback of prerecorded sounds during the past two years.
"It was a small idea to try to make small pieces of music into a bigger piece," Coyne said.
The experiment originally was conducted with the use of four car stereos in an Oklahoma City parking lot.
Coyne said he got excited and tried the concept with 50 cars.
"It was there that we heard the pieces combine for the first time," he said.
He said that the 50-car experiment was a learning experience that prepared him for the next direction he would take with the idea.
a hassle."
The Flaming Lips released Zaireka, a four CD album, to critical acclaim last October on Warner Brothers Records. The album required that all four discs be played at the same time, which meant that it took four stereos to listen to one album.
The sounds in tonight's performance will include music recorded by the band, insect noises and whatever else makes its way onto Coyne's four-track tape recorder, he said.
"It is a little bit of an event. It takes some getting together to do it," Coyne said, "But it shouldn't limit us just because you need it
"I'm going to mow my lawn this afternoon — I'll be recording that," Coyne said.
"I hope people come not expecting a rock concert. It isn't that sort of trip." Coyne said.
He said it was important to have an open mind to enjoy the band's musical experiment.
John Nguyen, Roeland Park junior, said he had not decided whether he would go to the show.
"I'm not a big fan of the band, but I've heard it's interesting," he said. "It depends on my funding."
Tickets for the 18-and-older show are $10. Kelly Rodriguez of Pipeline Productions, the company that is promoting the show, said tickets had been selling well.
"The Flaming Lips always do well in Lawrence," Rodriguezsaid.
want Lawrence. Routt iguald萨 said,
"We thought we'd bring the boom box experiment because of the band's large fan base here."
the Flaming Lips, an Oklahoma City band, experiments with their boom box orchestra. The band will pass out 50 stereos to audience members to create a concert tonight at the Bottleneck, 737 New Hampshire. Contributed art
Historians get hooks into revised image of pirates
Thieves of the sea raised the flag high for democratic life
The Associated Press
CARACAS, Venezuela — In the lore of Jolly Roger movies, Disneyland and Long John Silver, pirates were drunken, peg-legged bandits who made captives walk the plank and eat their own ears.
chance to live free.
Now, historians are taking a second look at the seafaring thieves and learning many were not as brutal as people think.
To be sure, pirates were not generally nice guys. But at a time of tyranny in most countries, they elected their own captains, divided up their booty fairly, offered an early version of worker's compensation and gave Black slaves a rare
"There was this extraordinary democracy among pirates," said David Cordingly, author of "Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among The Pirates." The book is one of several offering a revisionist view of pirates.
Artifacts such as rare African jewelry that was hacked apart to be shared equally seem to indicate a certain sense of fairness among pirates. New information is coming from the discovery of sunken pirate ships and research into court documents, government correspondence and statements by victims of pirate violence.
new research has revealed that pirates voted on most major decisions, such as whether to attack another vessel or where to sail next.
Despite the revisionist movement, historians say buccaneers should not be romanticized. A
favorite torture method was tightening a leather cord around a captive's forehead until his eyeballs popped out of his skull. Crews that resisted pirate invasions often had their throats slit and were thrown overboard to the sharks.
"They were nasty, brutal and vicious people. But they lived in an age which was extraordinarily nasty, brutal and vicious," said Kenneth Kinkor, a leading pirate expert.
In pirate society, everyone got their fair share of stolen loot, Kinkor said. Two shares typically went to the captain, 11/2 shares to the quartermaster and one share to each crew member. By comparison, captains of merchant ships often got 15 times more than the crew, who at times were left with almost nothing
Pirates had a form of disability insurance centuries before it became standard. They were paid handsomely if they lost an arm or a
leg in battle. If they were killed, their families sometimes received payments.
Up to a third of many crews were Black, most of them former slaves, Kinkor said. They had the same right as white pirates to booty and the vote, and some were elected captains by predominantly white crews.
The 1984 discovery of the Whydah, a pirate ship that sank in 1717, forced experts to reassess their view of buccaneers, opening up a whole new page in history that never has been seen before, said Barry Clifford, a Cape Cod shipwreck salvager who located the Whydah off the coast of Massachusetts.
"The deck of a pirate ship was the most empowering place there was for a Black man during the 18th century." Kinkor said.
Last month, Clifford and a crew that included Maxwell Kennedy, son of the late Robert F. Kennedy,
uncovered what they say is an even bigger find: a fleet of up to 18 elaborate French warships and pirate vessels that went down the night of May 3, 1678, after hitting coral reefs off Venezuela's coast.
If confirmed, it would be only the second documented discovery of a pirate shipwreck in the world. Clifford expects it to yield a treasure trove of artifacts including swords, pistols, muskets, pottery, gold, medical supplies, navigational instruments and bronze cannons.
The disaster near Venezuela decimated the French navy in the Caribbean Sea and helped usher in the "Golden Age" of pirating, Kinkor said. The famed era of maritime lawlessness last from 1680 to 1725, at its height, 10,000 pirates roamed the seas.
"It was a chance to break free. It was a maritime revolution," Clifford said.
often treated prisoners decently to encourage other ships to surrender rather than fight to the death. There is only one documented case of pirates making someone walk the plank, and only a couple cases of them making prisoners eat their own ears or lips.
Barbarous behavior aside, pirates
Pirates spent a lot less time in combat than commonly imagined, Kinkor said. The black skull-and-crossbones Jolly Roger flag was raised not to signal an attack but as a warning to surrender. Most captains did. If not, all an-red flag went up, marking an impending raid and robbery.
Child's shooting in South Africa revives bitterness, racism debate
Many pirate ships imposed rules such as no smoking below decks after sunset, lights out by eight, no women or boys aboard and no gambling, which often led to fights.
The Associated Press
"You can't just think of these guys as drunken, ignorant louts," Kinkor said. "Privacy is not just this simple Saturday matinee."
She died 10 days ago of a gunshot, reportedly fired by a drunken white man annoyed by children walking on his family's land.
BENONI, South Africa Angelina Zwane was born into near feudal conditions, living the six months of her life in a cinderblock shack without running water or electricity.
The white coffin, less than 3 feet long, sat at the front of the Benoni Town Hall, topped by yellow and white chrysanthemums.
The Black infant received a hero's burial yesterday, with hundreds of mourners jamming a town hall to sing and pray while Black and white political leaders spoke of the significance of her short life and callous death.
Angelina's killing revived some of the bitterness of apartheid, and the squalor her family endured sparked fresh anger about the plight of most Blacks four years after the nation's first all-race election ended white minority rule.
Outside the funeral service, a group of Black youths danced and shouted, "Farmer, farmer, bullet, bullet," an anti-apartheid chant
that referred to killing white farmers.
Mourners, some wearing colors of the ruling African National Congress, cheered loudly when Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, former wife of President Nelson Mandela, entered and raised her fist in an anti-apartheid salute.
Most mourners followed the coffin to a graveyard in this town 15 miles east of Johannesburg.
She described Nicholas Steyn, the 42-year-old suspect in Angellina's killing, as a gun-toting racist who shouted that he didn't want any more "kaffirs" — a derogatory term for Blacks—on
"Angelaina's family represents the majority of people in this country that have no place to live," said Michael Mundanee of the militant Pan Africanist Congress, who spoke at the funeral.
Madikizela-Mandela blended poplist rhetoric with an acknowledgment that some whites truly wanted to reconcile with Blacks after apartheid.
"What can we say of our promises for a better life ... when we find you in the worst squalor." Madikizela-Mandela said to Angelina's family.
his land.
But Madikizela-Mandela also said white shop owners stopped her on the street this week and offered donations for the Zwane family.
"This confirms that although transformation is slow, we are getting there," she said.
In another sign of change, a speaker from the white-led National Party that ruled during apartheid received a polite reception and applause from the mourners.
"The death of this child may be the beginning of the process of reconciliation ... that will break the cycle of violence," said former Cabinet minister Sam de Beer.
The shooting provoked an unprecedented response from government and Black leaders, with Mandela and some of his Cabinet ministers visiting the scene to condemn it as proof of racism in South Africa.
Angelina was being carried across one of Steyn's fields when a bullet slammed through her head and into the back of an 11-year-old cousin, Francina Diamini, who attended the funeral in her hospital robe. Steyn, who last week chose to remain in jail for his own safety, faces charges of murder and attempted murder.
Who is this boy's father?
The world learns the identity of Eric Cartman's father tonight at 9, when Comedy Central airs a new episode of *South Park*, cable television's highest-rated show. Viewers have waited seven weeks for the answer. For newcomers to the program, here is a primer on the most popular suspicits:
Jimbo: The uncle of Cartman's friend Stan's uncle loves guns, as does Cartman.
Ned: Cartman may have gotten his tendency to have Vietnam flashbacks from Jimbo's war buddy.
Mr. Garrison: He is intimate with Cartman's mom, but Jimbo says the teacher is gay.
Mr. Hat Mr. Matur
Garrison's foil
would make a
unique father,
considering that
he is a puppet.
Chef The school cook, a friend of Cartman's, has the same heavy physique.
mine a dad: Stan might not much appreciate being Cartman's cousin, much less his half-brother.
Kyle's dad: The devoutly religious father of Cartman's friend Kyle wouldn't cheat, would he?
Jesus: South Park is known for its irreverence, but would the show go this far?
**Mephesto:** The man who runs the genetic engineering ranch knows who the father is.
Kevin: Mephisto's friend? clone? probably couldn't have produced offspring eight years ago.
Aliens: By far the most popular theories indicate that Cartman is not entirely human.
Grandpa: Stan's grandfather does like to talk sexy, but such a case would be one for the record books.
Kenny's dad: the alcoholic father of the boy who always dies could be prone to unfaithfulness
Officer Bradbury:
He has Cartman's
double chin, but
he lacks the boy's
flamboyance.
Chief Running Water The first suspect in the mystery denies responsibility, but is he lying?
Andrew Rohrback / KANSAN
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