100%

Scanned image of the page. Keyboard directions: use + to zoom in, - to zoom out, arrow keys to pan inside the viewer.

Page Options

Download this Issue

Share

Something wrong?

Something wrong with this page? Report problem.

Rights / Permissions

This collection, digitized in collaboration with the Michigan Daily and the Board for Student Publications, contains materials that are protected by copyright law. Access to these materials is provided for non-profit educational and research purposes. If you use an item from this collection, it is your responsibility to consider the work's copyright status and obtain any required permission.

September 30, 1983 - Image 15

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Michigan Daily, 1983-09-30
Note:
This is a tabloid page

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

vi s

IRW

lw

w

mr

IW

7

PSN
from

Page 1

beyond rallying on the Diag and
speaking to dozing regents.
"It's very frustrating going through
the system-you feel like you're
beating you're head against a brick
wall. It seems like the radical approach
is more to the point," says Valerie
Flapan, an original PSN member who
participated in the sit-in.
Now in its second year, the group has
grown to about 50 members and is
gearing up for more intense confron-
tations with University officials.
"In the future, we're going to be get-
ting ourselves into positions where they
are going to have to confront us," says
LSA sophomore Naomi Braine. "If we
do another sit-in, in a military research
lab say, we will be stopping the fun-
ctioning of that lab."
W ITHOUT radical change, PSN
members fear the end is near.
Not only the final end of a nuclear Ar-
mageddon, but a local end as well-the
end of what a university should be.
They see the administration building,
built in the late 1960s and designed to
withstand rioting students, as a symbol
of the University's drawing away
from human contact. They see
the humanities losing ground to
technical fields, and corporations and
the Defense Department tightening
their grip on campus.
"Things that are going on at the
University extend far beyond Ann Ar-
bor and go way up to United States
policy . . . I'm just terrified," says
Flapan, an LSA sophomore.
But before the group takes on the
Pentagon, it must work out internal
problems. While older members
struggle with burn-out, some newer
members are leery of the group's in-
creasing radicalism.
Peter Michelson, an LSA freshman
who is thinking of joining PSN, thinks
the group's "'ripped up jeans and long
unkempt hair" image is driving away
potential members.
Michelson, who regards sit-ins as a
"real throwback" to the 1960s, says
PSN's appearance "is going to turn off
more people. . . The '60s was a real

radical time and radicals scare a lot of ,
people."
Back then, campus radicals did scare
a lot of people. But while the clothes and
music still linger on, the days are gone
when 12,000 students would fill the Diag
for a peace rally, or 2,000 students would
crowd around North Hall for a takeover
of the ROTC building.
PSN needs to come to terms with the
1960s, both as an inspiration and as a
stigma it's trying to escape.,
PSN's ideas on peace, education,
democracy, and the dehumanization of
technology owe much to the idealism
that grew out of the student movement
of the 1960s.
Phrases like "positive energy" and
"consciousness raising" suggest that
the world has moved on and left this
group behind.
"It's something we're constantly
being confronted with," says Flapan.
"Throwbacks from the '60s, get out. We
don't need you any more. It's 1980."
Although most PSN members don't
consider themselves throwbacks to the
Vietnam era, one of the group's co-
founders said the period's influence-
cannot be ignored.
"We come from the 1960s. We can't
deny the 1960s. They're our
heritage...our history," says Tom
Marx, a recent University graduate.
"We can sit out in the Diag and hand
out literature because of the 1960s.
Women don't have to be back in dorms
at 10 p.m. because of the 1960s. There's
a $5 pot law because of the 1960s," he
says.
But even Marx, a familiar face at
rallies and regents meetings, admits
times have changed.
".I don't think we're going to do what
happened in the 1960s where you had a
whole campus mobilized around an
issue...I don't believe PSN has to
become this huge entity in order to be
effective."
PSN's main goal this year is to close
down certain University research
projects which members say may be
used for advancing the Cruise Missile,
fuel-air explosives, and the Stealth
Bomber.
The issue seemed dead over the
summer after the regents turned down
a faculty and administration proposal
for restrictions on non-classified
research, but PSN has regrouped for
another campaign against the projects.

"We can get military research off
campus, but I don't think we need 30,000
or 35,000 students behind us in order to
do it," Marx said.
He admits, however, that "we' re
beginning to realize what a long
struggle it's going to be."
PSN members have vowed to use
civil disobedience tactics to convince
the Defense Department to take its fun-
ds somewhere else.
"I've been doing more and more
thinking about the teachings of Gandhi
and I think researchers can

meant joining a group where he was no
longer "hit over the head politically."
Without PSN, "I might just lock
myself up in my room and drink or
something and that's what I see my
fello students doing," says O'Neill.
IN MANY WAYS, PSN is like a
family, a tight-knit group of friends -
many of whom live together. There's a
"getting back to the garden" attitude
prevalent among the group, with water
fights in rain storms, green ribbons

I.,
..........
.. ...........
.............
. ....... ......... ..............

'We come from the 1960s. We can't deny the
1960s. They're our heritage .. our
history.'
-Tom Marx,
PSN co-founder

Mustani
mania
Yellowman.
Prism Productions
Second Chance
9 p.m., Monday, October 3
By C. E. Krell
HE IS.NOT OF Oriental persuasion,,
nor is he from some strange planet.
However, he does merit a discussion of
color.
Ourdiscussionof color beings and en-
ds with the absence of it. Black. Rather
than discuss black dogs, black shoes,
black records even, we will talk about
black music. Specifically, we will
discuss a music made primarily by
blacks in Jamaica. Reggae music will
be most of what it is in this article.
It grows in popularity everyday, it
seems. More and more people are
listening to it. Funny, but it seems that
though the popularity is growing, the
music is not advancing like it has in the
past. Creatively, for the most part,
although there are many fine and in-
teresting records being made, reggae

music is sort of at a lull. True oc-
casional records kill hard, cut sharp,
are wonderful. but much of the music
identical, indeed, with the popularit of
the DJ style
(rap/speak/sing/rant/toast/boast)
many records use the identical tune.
Back to that man, whose name is ac-
tually colorful. The Mustard Marvel
(not his real, or stage name yet). He
doesn't do anything different or special
in reggae music. He just toasts like a
million other toasters (albeit in his own
manner). But what is special, and this
is where we go back to color, is that a
yellow tinted man purveying black
music is incredibly popular with white
fans. So fuck all this race/color crap
anyway.
His name is Yellowman, and is the
hippest thing going in roots rock since
the Great Dead Man. This guy sells lots
of records in Jamaica, and he does this
while making an extraordinary amount
of them (one count was twelve albums
in two years), and making them all of
reasonably the same quality. And in
their form, they're damn good. He has a
partner named Fathead, but I don't
know if he'll be there. The band
providing the Golden Gipper with his
background will be Saggitarius.
I said that this would end with black.
Second Chance, October 3, for about
eight fifty. The end: The opening band
will be Detroit area Sunsplash starring
reggae act Black Market.

change...maybe regents can change,
maybe administrators can change. I
really hope they do because if they
don't it could mean the end," says
David Miklethun, who founded the
group's Ann Arbor chapter with Marx.
"If we can shut down a lab for one
day, I think that's a great success.
That's one more day," he says.
The fear of defense research is
closely tied to a fear of all technology
unless it is used "for people, not for
profit."
"Computers scare the shit out of me
- not because of computers them-
selves, but because of who's controlling
their use," Marx says. "1984 is here. It
arrived a few years ago...I really
believe that we've got a year or two left
at this University before it's just totally
in the control of the corporations and.
multinationals."
For Mike O'Neill, another PSN mem-
ber, the University is rapidly losing any
atmosphere of collegiality.
"We've gone an incredibly long
distance from Plato, who was speaking
in the actual groves of academe to
people," says O'Neill, an LSA
sophomore, who is also editor of the
MSA News, the student government's
newspaper.
He says becoming a PSN member

pinned on chests, and cartoon chalk
drawing on the Diag.
"A problem I have with a lot of the
Marxist groups is they're so rigid,"
Marx says. "You know, what fun is it?
If you're going to have a revolution like
that, then I'd rather not have a
revolution.
"We would have much greater bur-
nout syndrome if we didn't have the
support we have for each other; if we
weren't able to laugh at the same time
that we cried; if we weren't able to hug
each other at the same time that we're
getting upset about (Defense Depar-
tment) research," he says.
The real shift in PSN from political
group to political family came during
the two weeks of meticulous planning
before the administration building sit-
in, according to Julia Gittleman, an
LSA senior.
"Those meetings would go on until 12
and then we would have a party from 12
to 3 a.m.," she remembered. "For two
weeks there I saw the same 25 PSN
people at least twice a day. I grew to
really care for and love them."
But the cost of that intense in-
volvement was high. Some of last
year's members are hesitant about
making the commitment again.
"We had 35 people at our (Sept. 18)
meeting, which isn't that much more
than we had often last year. It's just
that half the faces have changed," says
Braine.
"Scmne people are feeling that PSN is
becoming their entire life and they
don't want it to be that way because you
can very quickly get to a point where
you know only PSN people, you only
talk about politics, you sort of do school
as a very sideline activity that you
remember now and then," she says.
Mary Berridge, an LSA sophomore
who was elected to the Michigan
Student Assembly last spring, said
there isn't time to be a part of both MSA
and PSN and questions the effec-
tiveness of some of last year's tactics.
"When we did the rallies, it was a
really great thing if we got 200 people on
the Diag as opposed to 40. We'd be
really happy. But then what did that
do," says Berridge, who will concen-
trate on her commitment to MSA this
year.
Although she thinks MSA will be a
closer group this year than in the past,
she says she will miss the tight-knit cir-
cle in which an active PSN member
moves. With a recent 24-hour vigil on
the Diag and handing out literature
daily, the group has become more ap-
proachable to outsiders, another
change PSN must adapt to.

Yellowman: Colorful reggae

Buddy
Buddy
Buddy Rich
Office of Major Events
Power Center
8 p. m. October 3.
By Jim Boyd
ARE YOU the kind who stops dead
in your tracks at the sound of drums?
Have you stood motionless in the mid-
dle of the diag and searched frantically
for the source of the conga rhythms?

The natives are restless. "Where," they
ask, "is Buddy Rich?"
"He is near," the drums seem to in-
tone, "the rhythm tide will bear his
body soon, and his percussive presence
will wash over our city." The natives
cease their worry at this augury of good
tidings.
The congas continue to beat out their
veiled message: "This man has
produced half a century of jazz. It is a
long and happy story." Buddy started
playing drums in the Berigan Band in
'37 and then proceded to play with Dizzy
Gillespie, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey,
Charlie Parker, and Oscar Peterson.
He played jazz at the Philharmonic in
'48 and in '59 picked up with the Harry
James Band. In the '60s he capitalized
on the new Big Band sound.
Much of the vitality that his bands
have exhibited since is due to the fact
that he recruits musicians straight out

of school:
Texas Sta
members
The fine
match for
Last Janu
appearan
because hi
the day of
surgery th
up, and he
the Power
The conce
Replacem
paign - or
up support
The she
Power Ce
Everyone
of it, so be

nPIZZappyZ
Large Pepperoni Pizza
$4.99 EVERYDAY
Free
995m1822 Delivery

Conlin'
Corner of
South University
and Washtenaw
769-9680

Trav

iw

Comb
Airli
Hc
30-5:00
ervice Chc

c
O
L
0O
6
7
O0
c)
x1

M-F 8:3
No S

Peace Vigil: No more Nagasakis

-

I £~ ~ ~ ~ 2f31Weeke

t n vU#aitPnrl /CPr tPmhPr ' () 1 Qft'

lU YK K 4 .a G a ui rc.{ , Y" , -,yAs .

J
rw..aasw st-s..,riww.rvw.rx.+m r-, ,. ......_ .- . «.. r. vaw, ,yw. +. ... ..-~ _

Back to Top

© 2024 Regents of the University of Michigan