No pithy crap here - just a shout-out to the enduring spirit of Mark Sandman, bassist/vocalist for "low jazz" trio Morphine. He fell into his final sleep while playing a gig in Rome. Into the irresistible orbit, Mr. Sandman, may you float ever so.

Those of you who have seen "The Matrix" recognize the phrase above this paragraph. Some of you may understand my (fair!) use of Keanu Reeves' immortal line in context with audio-collage artists Negativland - the Northern Ca. performance group has enjoyed more success warping cultural conventions with pure mind power than Uri Geller has had with flatware - while others won't understand and probably never will. (The exit is here, Trinity.) The difference between The Passenger and Negativland is that while some of the folks at Warner Brothers may get miffed about my use of "Matrix" dialogue to enhance the old column, they can't do a goddamn thing to stop it. Negativland has not been as fortunate. Last year, the Recording Industry Association of America moved to block the release of a Negativland album at the manufacturing level, citing unauthorized samples of Pink Floyd, placing the group in the unpleasant position of having to quantify its art. To make a long story short, the mere act of visiting Negativland's official site qualifies, in certain, tyrannical circles, as an act of rebellion. Send as many friends to this site as you can - it's engaging reading, and much of it is funny as all hell. Enjoy the U2/Casey Kasem parody, in particular - a little souvenir of the last time The Agents tried to crush The Artists. You'll never take Negativland alive, you ... you androids.
 

Hey, as long as that big red rock is up there, mocking us with its vast stretches of virgin, unspoiled land, we'll keep firing crap at it - orbiters, polar landing craft, surveyors, Pathfinders, espresso makers, AOL floppies, the works. Mars? It's just Earth with attitude, baby! In line with mankind's quest to leave its mark on everything and anything foreign - the same inexplicable urge that takes you whenever you pass a water fountain with a pocket full of change, or a bathroom wall with a Sharpie - NASA presents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Just stop by the Mars 2001 Lander page and add your name to its mounting database; next year, the rocket scientists will burn the assembled names to disc and fire 'em off to the Big Red Marble. Ray Bradbury predicted something remarkably similar, except in his version, we fly there ourselves, no robots - and the Martians pick us off as we leave the ship, and we never get to put our names on anything.
 

"Americans don't get dance music. They invented it, but they don't get it," lamented a recent issue of British dance publication Mixmag. Well, I'm not at all sure that's the case - that we invented dance music, that is: I rather think it just happened, a product of the world community. I don't doubt that we're doing our best to screw it up, much as we screwed up radio, reducing the amount of decent stations down to perhaps a dozen nationwide. Once more, as we did when pop was foundering at the beginning of the Reagan years, and when techno reached Los Angeles clubs and died, we should look to the United Kingdom to bail our backward asses out. Even now, there are nearly 100 pirate radio stations broadcasting to London and vicinity, and even the worst of them is worlds better than the best of the legal, no-repeat Tuesday embarrassments we listen to during the morning commute. Pirate Radio Zone provides an oft-updated list of these stations, a brief primer that will help you to launch your own station (got a compressor/limiter and tower block handy?) and a short history of the pirate dial - which reveals, among other things, how pirate radio earned its moniker. You can't get any of them over here - the signals are too weak - but as Mixmag so smartly put it, we don't get it anyway, so why should it matter?
 

In sixth grade, I was offered the chance to make my own filmstrip with color markers and transparent film stock, so I remade "Desk Set" (Walter Lang, 1957) with a giant, killer man-eating robot in the Katharine Hepburn role. Time has passed, as time is wont to do, but film is, indeed, forever - and if I wanted to remake my remake, I could do so in high style with the fabulous animation tools provided by Alan Watts' 16 Color Cinema site. Even a talentless scribbler like The Passenger - can't even draw a simple man-eating robot! - can turn out vividly entertaining animations with relative ease, ready to be displayed on the site for a global audience of 8-second film fans. The animations are crude - some are pornographic, many are pointless, a few are beautiful and nearly all are masterpieces, each in their own fresh and unexpected way. And oh yes, quite a few of them are worth seven bucks admission. You're getting them for free. Glorious, ain't it?

"Everything will turn out all right on the other side," Mark Sandman once sang. For his sake, and for the sake of everyone who loved his band, I sure hope he's right. Talk to you next week, friend.