New anti-rave bills working their way through Congress are meant to stick it to the makers of illegal drugs, but music promoters say they'll be a civil rights nightmare. H.R. 3782 would punish rave promoters for "reasonably knowing" that a controlled substance was used at their event. That broad, vague wording leaves the door wide open for police to arrest anyone who puts on a music festival, much less a rave. "It gives police more latitude to act on a whim or personal prejudices," performer/promoter Oliver Brown tells Mike Connor of Metro Santa Cruz.
The ink is barely dry on the sale of SLAMM, a San Diego music biweekly, but the new owners have set Aug. 21 as the launch date for a new redesigned alternative newspaper, San Diego CityBeat. The new weekly will target the 21- to 45-year-old crowd and San Diego's central university and historic neighborhoods, Publisher Charles Gerencser says. "I wouldn't have moved my pregnant wife and sold my house in Los Angeles, where I've lived my whole life, if I didn't think this was going to be an amazingly successful venture," Gerencser says.
Security agencies may already be poring over your grocery list. In a fit of anti-terror zeal, an eager beaver at a national grocery chain gave the company's records for all preferred customers to three federal agencies, Eric Baard of The Village Voice reports. Meanwhile, security forces, both public and private, are devising ever more sophisticated ways to spot potential terrorists. If you like hummus, you might be in their cross-hairs.
Publisher Mark Bartel of City Pages (Twin Cities) has fired Editor Tom Finkel because they disagreed on whether the paper should change direction, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reports. Finkel came to City Pages in 1997 from Miami New Times. "I don't want to play this like Tom and I have been butting heads for 4 1/2 years; I really like Tom," Bartel tells the daily. "I just felt like I wanted the editorial to take more chances, to be edgier."
Most people work out their gender identification as toddlers. Others don't. Leyla Kokmen of City Pages (Twin Cities) explores the world of transgendered people, those who don't fit in a culture that has only two pronouns -- he and she. "Do you really think I'd choose to go this way?" former drag queen Morgan O'Sullivan laments. "It's not fun. I wish I had been born a female. It would have been a lot less painful." As Kokmen details, the transition from one gender to the other, or even stopping somewhere in between, is a tortured process that ultimately brings peace to most who make the switch.
Friends and associates described him as a vampire: nocturnal, with a passing resemblance to Nosferatu, and a thirst for the party drug GHB, which he drank like blood. But "English Shaun" also was a keen businessman, a British stockbroker who now stands accused of masterminding the ecstasy-based drug ring that fueled the Phoenix rave scene of the 1990s. Before it fell apart in a haze of addiction, paranoia and competition from mobster Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, Shaun's empire reportedly grew to include scores of rave kids, some of them kept in company-funded apartments, where they rested up between sales runs. Phoenix New Times reporters Susy Buchanan and Brendan Joel Kelley chronicle the tale of drugs, sex, and money.
"That we keep finding incompetence at The Tennessean is apparently no longer news," says Editor Bruce Dobie, telling the Scene's readers that 13 years of "Desperately Seeking the News" is enough. The column had become "far too formulaic and predictable," Dobie complains. "Bruce is wrong, as editors often are," argues media columnist Henry Walker, who nevertheless is forced to admit, "What the editor giveth, He can taketh away."
