When The Drumming Stops

Bass player and rapidly aging punk rocker Underend Vicodini is an unlikely hero. He loves New York City like nobody's business but does it still love him despite his lack of affluence and influence? His former band, The Gutter Astronomers, was riding high in the 1980s, releasing albums and touring across the country playing to packed nightclubs filled with eager fans, but the Great Recession finds the band members middle-aged and struggling not to drown in the seas of gentrification and disillusion. When lead singer Mickey gets an offer to reunite the band, he jumps at it. But can the old bandmates overcome their acrimonious break up? Can they get back into it without shredding their lives? Can Underend Vicodini find inner peace and, more importantly, a reasonably priced apartment below 14th Street or in Brooklyn? Steven Wishnia is a New York-based musician and journalist. Born on the Lower East Side, he grew up in Brooklyn, New England, Edinburgh, and Long Island. He has played in numerous bands, including the False Prophets, an eclectic punk group that recorded two albums released by Alternative Tentacles. After the False Prophets broke up in 1987, he earned an MA at New York University's School of Journalism, writing for failing newspapers before working for many years as news editor at High Times. Recipient of two New York City Independent Press Association awards, he currently works as a freelance writer and editor, most often for AlterNet.org and Junior Scholastic, and often performs musically with artist Mac McGill.

Take a guided tour from a writer who grew up and studied on Native American reservations and join those throughout the world—from Siberia to South America, Australia to Africa—who venerate the drum for its healing and celebratory powers. Through painting, cleansing, blessing, smudging, dedicating, chanting, and performing, you’ll find your own special beat, transforming the drum into a medicinal tool. Become one with a purchased or homemade instrument. Draw on the knowledge of Native American and other cultures to drum away fear, purify, establish a sacred space, and reach into areas of the consciousness that would otherwise be inaccessible. Extra special bonus: a CD with more than an hour’s worth of music for a Sacred Directions ceremony, meditation, trance, and more.

A strange young man, Barry Clinton. Unlike most young missionaries, who came to the island to save souls, this one had come with a belligerent skepticism and a driving determination to battle sickness and starvation. He had come to the Ile du Vent with a Bible and a few meager medical supplies - ready to make the little Caribbean island a better place in which to live. The Cross on the Drum is the story of the strange friendship of Barry Clinton and Catus Laroche - high priest of vodun, the savage, ritualistic religion which no white man had ever dared defy. It tells of the tormented, embittered passions of the other islanders - white and black - and how they undermined the bond between these two men, changing their mutual respect into brooding, vengeful hatred, and turning the island's drowsy, sunlit tranquility into a feverish, drum-pounding battleground. Hugh B. Cave, whose knowledge and deep understanding of life and customs in the West Indies distinguished his earlier works, Haiti: Highroad to Adventure and Drums of Revolt, has written here an explosive, dramatic novel of Christianity and voodoo on a Caribbean island.

In this vivid ethnography of social movements in the barrios, or poor shantytowns, of Caracas, Sujatha Fernandes reveals a significant dimension of political life in Venezuela since President Hugo Chávez was elected. Fernandes traces the histories of the barrios, from the guerrilla insurgency, movements against displacement, and cultural resistance of the 1960s and 1970s, through the debt crisis of the early 1980s and the neoliberal reforms that followed, to the Chávez period. She weaves barrio residents’ life stories into her account of movements for social and economic justice. Who Can Stop the Drums? demonstrates that the transformations under way in Venezuela are shaped by negotiations between the Chávez government and social movements with their own forms of historical memory, local organization, and consciousness. Fernandes portrays everyday life and politics in the shantytowns of Caracas through accounts of community-based radio, barrio assemblies, and popular fiestas, and the many interviews she conducted with activists and government officials. Most of the barrio activists she presents are Chávez supporters. They see the leftist president as someone who understands their precarious lives and has made important changes to the state system to redistribute resources. Yet they must balance receiving state resources, which are necessary to fund their community-based projects, with their desire to retain a sense of agency. Fernandes locates the struggles of the urban poor within Venezuela’s transition from neoliberalism to what she calls “post-neoliberalism.” She contends that in contemporary Venezuela we find a hybrid state; while Chávez is actively challenging neoliberalism, the state remains subject to the constraints and logics of global capital.

Dreams Beyond Time: On Sacred Encounter and Spiritual Transformation offers readers an overview of dreams research as applied to non-ordinary dreams. Lee Irwin describes four basic types of dreaming: normative, mythic, psychic, and transpersonal, and he illustrates each type with specific dream examples. These types of dreaming are then used as a lens to look more closely at additional dream types that indicate dreaming as a process of creative discovery. Through virtual dreaming encounters, latent human potentials are revealed and suggest aspects for spiritual development based on dream recording, interpretation, and analysis. In turn this leads to a metaphysical description that is pan-sentient, illustrating a vivid, living universe of process-becoming in which certain dream types reveal mythic, psychic, and transpersonal capacities as intrinsic to a deeper more awakened sense of intersubjective self-awareness. While dream theories from many diverse authors are explored, the author uses an existential and phenomenological method to analyze dreaming contents in relationship to altered states of mind, trance, out of body and near-death experience, meditation, imagination, and stages of lucid self-awareness. Transpersonal dreams are given considerable attention in relationship to mystical traditions, paranormal research, and the comparative anthropology of self.

This concise guide explains the theory behind drumming for therapy, as well as giving practical advice on facilitating and leading drum circles. The book explains why drumming is therapeutic, offers hands-on guidance for using drums in group therapy and details specific techniques to lead to increased engagement. Incorporating art therapy into drum circles, it provides step-by-step instructions on making and painting a multi-tonal drum from scratch. Emphasis is also placed on how to create a therapeutic or safe place while conducting a drum circle and making art.

Christoph T. M. Krause lives in Cologne, Germany. He is a passionate collector of old telephones. The Drum Dial has taken him by storm. Krause loves its design, colours, compact workmanship in its interior and most of all, its unusual way of dialling. Almost all telephones of the 1950s are equipped with rotary dials, but Siemens broke new grounds with the Drum Dial. In this second volume, Krause presents the chronology of newly discovered patents, which, since 1931 and with interruptions due to World War II, were developed over two decades, resulting in an innovative total work of art, a "telephone" that is one of a kind.