EW Magazine – Win a CD – Boy Meets Monkee – Council on Ideas stories

From: “Heidi Hanel”

In the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly (a double issue featuring some=

of what they consider to be their best photographs), there is a great
abstract style cartoon image of the Monkees on page 136. It’s really cute.=

However, the guys aren’t mentioned in the top ten moments in pop history in=

an article earlier in the magazine. 🙁 The Beatles on the Ed Sullivan show=

was ranked number one.

Heidi

+++++++++++++++++++++++

From: “Band 6”

You can win a copy of the new Michael Nesmith CD reissue here:

www.bandsix.btinternet.co.uk/updates.htm

Hopefully if this CD sells well, then Camden plan to release a further
2-on-1 CD – but not until 2001 – Tantamount To Treason and Nevada Fighter.

This will probably have the addition of an unreleased track from that era –
“Cantata In Country And Western”.

Kirk & Sue
www.bandsix.btinternet.co.uk

++++++++++++++++++++++++

From: Carol

Message-ID:
Peter Tork, Micky Dolenz, and Davy Jones will all be on an episode of Boy
Meets World that is showing in syndication on Monday, August 7.

(check local listings, times vary)

Carol

+++++++++++++++++++++++

From: Randi

Subject: Council on Ideas in NM Newspapers

http://www.abqjournal.com/news/86802news07-24-00.htm

Monday, July 24, 2000

Unique Think Tank Convenes in Namb=E9

By Jennifer McKee
Journal Staff Writer
It’s official: Globalization is a threat to human rights.
After a day and a half sequestered in a Namb=E9 retreat house, a panel=
of
decorated anthropologists, physicists and other mental giants wrote a
three-page, single-spaced assessment Sunday morning of what they saw as the
most crucial issue facing the world today.
The five concluded that globalization has given humanity the ability t=
o
make decisions affecting everyone on Earth, often negatively, and harm the
biosphere in which we live.
The group’s communiqu=E9 ended the latest chapter in an unusual Namb=
=E9
think tank =97 one that, in spirit, started with the invention of Liquid Pa=
per
and ties the 1960s pop band, The Monkees, to some of the world’s most
powerful minds.
The five are members of the Council on Ideas, a project of the Gihon
Foundation based in Namb=E9. Every two years, the Foundation invites five
heavy-weight thinkers to its grassy headquarters 20 miles north of Santa Fe
for a day and a half dedicated to identifying “the most crucial issue facin=
g
society today,” according to Gihon literature.
The purpose, according to Michael Nesmith, head of the Gihon
Foundation’s board of trustees, is to seed the world with ideas. What the
world does with those ideas is out of his hands.
“There’s the natural impetus of the idea itself, which we really don’t
control,” he said.
The Gihon Foundation merely facilitates the idea. They bring in the
great minds, put them up in nice hotels and give them good food. At the end
of the council weekend of work, the foundation announces its idea to the wo=
rld.
After that, Nesmith said, the idea has a life of its own. It may thriv=
e
and change the world, or it may die with little attention. No one knows wha=
t
seemingly random connections the idea will help create.
Nesmith ought to know. He has lived his life among seemingly random
connections.
In the early 1960s, his mother, Bette Graham, was a single mom in
Dallas, raising her only son by working as a secretary and part-time
commercial artist.
If an artist makes a mistake, she just paints over it. Secretaries at
the time had no way to correct typing mistakes.
Graham “connected those two dots,” Nesmith said, and invented Liquid
Paper in her kitchen. A few years later, she moved her business into a
portable, metal building in her back yard. (It’s now on display at the Giho=
n
Foundation headquarters.) The rest, as we know, is secretarial history.
Graham built the company into a multimillion dollar outfit and sold it to
Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million. Graham died in 1980.
She started the Gihon Foundation in 1978 with the aim of taking ideas
and using them for the public good.
By that time, Nesmith was a household name in his own right, achieving
fame in the late 1960s as the wool-hatted member of The Monkees. He also ha=
d
a solo singing career and is widely credited with inventing the idea behind
MTV. Nesmith won the first Grammy in the category of home video for a music
video he made called “Elephant Parts.”
So it may not seem all that strange to Nesmith that an idea forged in =
a
tiny New Mexico town could crawl its way to global change.
“There are some hidden forces at work,” he said. “There’s a diversity =
of
influences, and you say to yourself, ‘How did this possibly happen?’ You
just connect some dots.”
Nesmith coined the Council on Ideas 10 years ago. The first panel coul=
d
not come to a consensus and produced nothing =97 short of the members’ own
experiences =97 in Namb=E9. Subsequent councils, however, have identified
everything from world civilization to humanity’s willingness to learn as
“crucial issues.”
This year’s panel included Anna Roosevelt, an award-winning
anthropologist; Nikki Giovanni, a professor and poet; Murray Gell-Mann, a
physicist, winner of a 1969 Nobel Prize and co-founder of the Santa Fe
Institute; M. Cherif Bassiouni, winner of the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize; and
Stanley Karnow, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist known for his
comprehensive coverage of the Vietnam War.
“It’s a very valuable exercise,” Karnow said. “Everyone has something =
to
say, coming from different directions.”
The diversity of the group is no accident. According to Nesmith, a tea=
m
of nominators spends about a year selecting the panel.
After the group read its communiqu=E9 at a noon press conference and s=
pent
the afternoon eating a five-course meal under a tent in the foundation’s
back yard, all participants agreed they were happy with their work.
Yes, it’s a bit esoteric. But they were not invited to Namb=E9 to
implement change, only to identify where it ought to happen.
“We’re not responsible for solutions,” Giovanni said. “Advertising
studies impact. The rest of us do what we think we have to do.”

***************************************************************************=
*****
www.sfnewmexican.com

Putting heads together

By TOM SHARPE/For The New Mexican, The New Mexican – 7/24/2000

NAMBE – The next time you ponder world issues, remember Liquid Paper and Th=
e
Monkees.

These two anachronisms converge every two years in the Council on Ideas,
when scholars assemble at an elegant Namb=E8 compound to consider the most
important issue of the day.

The 2000 Council on Ideas concluded its weekend retreat on Sunday.

The semiannual event is funded by the Gihon Foundation, set up by the
inventor of Liquid Paper, the late Bette Graham, and administered by her
son, former Monkee Michael Nesmith.

He said that after his mother died in 1980, the foundation doled out grants
from $5,000 to $25,000 to business proposals and social services for a
decade. But he said he never thought they were enough to make a difference
and felt they were redundant with government programs.

So in 1990, the Gihon foundation switched gears and began convening council=
s
to consider the weightiest issue of the day at the foundation’s new
headquarters in Namb=E8.

Nesmith, who lives next door, also has moved his mother’s workshop to Namb=
=E8
and enshrined it as a museum, with mixers and other items used to create
Liquid Paper as well as examples of the early products.

Graham was a Dallas secretary who used her art skills at home to create a
fluid that masked her typing errors at work. By 1964, her homemade product
was selling so well that she moved the operation out of her kitchen and int=
o
a portable building in her back yard.

Nesmith helped her mix, package and distribute Liquid Paper, which caught o=
n
in the precomputer days. The company went global. Graham continued to direc=
t
it until 1979, when she sold it to Gillette for $47.5 million, leaving her =
a
wealthy woman.

Before she died in 1980, she set up a traveling exhibit of art works by
modern female artists and endowed the Gihon Foundation, named after a river
in the Bible, to assist women in business.

Graham’s traveling art collection, including works by Georgia O’Keeffe,
Grandma Moses, Louise Nevelson, Mary Cassatt and Janet Fish, was permanentl=
y
hung in a refurbished barn on the 12-acre Namb=E8 estate.

In the meantime, Nesmith had his own share of fame.

In 1965, the 22-year-old aspiring guitarist was chosen at an audition for a
television serial patterned after the Beatles film Hard Days Night.

The Monkees ran on NBC from 1966 to 1968 and continues in reruns worldwide.

After the show ended and the group broke up, Nesmith went on to a solo
career in music and video. He has lived part time in Namb=E8 with his partn=
er
Victoria Kennedy for the last 11 years. He has published a novel and is
pursuing Internet marketing with his Web site at www.videoranch.com. And hi=
s
time is also occupied by running his mother’s foundation and its activities=
.

The first Council on Ideas, made up of columnist Georgie Anne Geyer,
television executive Lawrence Grossman and playwright Wendy Wasserstein,
couldn’t reach a consensus.

So Nesmith refined the process, choosing five panelists from different
disciplines and ethnicities via a complex system that begins months earlier
with meetings with local leaders in major cities. This year’s council began
with a meeting in the fall of 1999 in Seattle.

The council begins on Saturday morning with Nesmith giving the group, each
of whom are paid $5,000 plus expenses, a short talk on the need to reach a
consensus and discard issues on which they disagree.

Then they are left alone.

On Sunday morning, after an evening in Santa Fe, the panelists return to
Namb=E8 to finish writing their statement in time for a noon news conferenc=
e
followed by a catered luncheon. This year’s luncheon was made by Los Angele=
s
chef Celestino Drago.

The 2000 Council on Ideas included poet Nikki Giovanni, physicist Murray
Gell-Mann, lawyer M. Cheriff Bassiouni, anthropologist Anna C. Roosevelt an=
d
journalist Stanley Karnow. They were assigned to answer the question “What
is the most important issue of our time?”

This year, for the first time, selected reporters and others were allowed t=
o
listen in on the deliberations via a headset wired to a microphone in the
room, provided that the listeners agree to notify foundation officials when
the panelists need something.

In a telephone interview last week from his home in Potomac, Md., Karnow,

who won the Pulitzer Prize for reporting on Vietnam and recently published
Paris in the Fifties, admitted he didn’t know what to expect.

“I’ve been kicking around the world for 50 years now, so I have some ideas
about things, but I’m a blank piece of paper here,” he said.

But by Sunday’s news conference, Karnow seemed like an old pro at the
process. Santa Fe resident Gell-Mann, a Nobel Prize winner for his discover=
y
of the quark, the smallest known division of atoms, said he had typed most
of the statement.

Bassiouni, an expert in international law at DePaul University in Chicago,

and Roosevelt, an expert in the people of the Amazon region and a resident
of Evanston, Ill., also spoke at length about their ideas and the
deliberations.

But the most memorable comment came from the reticent Giovanni, the only
black person on the panel, in response to a question about issues upon whic=
h
she disagreed with the others.

“What I see is that people will take a sexual preference, or what they
perceive as a sexual preference, and they’ll beat Matthew Shepard to death,=
“
she said. “They used to lynch us. Now, we are using homosexuality as an
excuse to kill people and frighten the rest of the population into silence.=
“

Giovanni, who teaches at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Va., said she wanted
to bring up gay issues, as well her beliefs that prisoners should be allowe=
d
to vote and that fundamental Christianity is “sick,” but discarded these
items because the other panelists did not fully agree.

You could criticize the Council of Ideas as the ultimate sound bite. Its
statement goes to no one other than the general media and carries no author=
ity.

But Nesmith said its most interesting effect is that on the panelists who
are forced to find common ground.

“It stimulates people on a level they’re not used to,” he said.

“Something happens, but I don’t know exactly what it is.”

“What is the most important issue of our time?”

@fix:The 2000 Council on Ideas issued a statement that reads, in part:

“We are living in a time of accelerating globalization, and not only in
commerce, finance, and communications. We now have the ability to make very
significant changes on a global scale that affect humankind and the rest of
the biosphere.

“The human race is facing a wide range of tightly connected challenges,
including issues of war and peace, extremes of poverty and wealth,
intolerance and tolerance, resource exploitation and biological diversity,
and crime and the rule of law.

“The potential use of weapons of mass destruction by individuals and groups
as well as nations poses a very serious danger. Meanwhile, conflicts with
conventional weapons are causing tragedy in many parts of the world. Yet th=
e
major organizers of large-scale violence usually remain unpunished as the
international community pursues expedient political settlements, ignoring
the maxim that without justice there can be no peace.

“The appearance of centralized and stratified societies over the last ten
thousand years or so, the growth of human populations, and the development
of new technologies have greatly increased human impacts on the environment=
.
Today, locally and globally, the physical environment is being degraded and
biological diversity is being lost on a large scale. It is important to
implement the ‘planetary bargain,’ by which developed nations share the cos=
t
of environmental protection in the developing world.

“Achievement of economic and social justice includes the need for reducing
the enormous gaps between the rich and the poor among and within societies.
Access to resources, justice, education, technology, and security is often
very unequal, and these inequalities are often associated with differences
in race, ethnicity, gender, age, and nationality.

“In addressing these and other crucial challenges, their interdependence
must be recognized. Yet our transnational and national institutions deal
with them in a compartmentalized way. There is no intregrative strategy. In
addition, the bureaucracies need to pursue their goals with greater
adaptability, including accountability and transparency, responsiveness to
criticism, and flexibility in the face of change. Responding to these
concerns requires balance between the rights and prerogatives of communitie=
s
and those of individuals.”

For the complete text of the statement, see www.gihon.com.

Randi L. Waddell

The Bill Bixby Webpage
http://www.geocities.com/~randiwaddell/
The Joey Heatherton Home Page
http://www.geocities.com:80/Hollywood/Bungalow/7284/Joey.html

++++++++++++++++++++++++

Members have reminded us that the Monkees will no longer be carried by the=

Screen Gems Network in August. This list is for news alerts, not for
crusades or rally’s, but if you wanted to comment on this, Thera Wennemer
has found an e-mail address you could write to:

support@screengemsnetwork.com

Some have suggested writing to Nick-At-Nite, but they have previously
stated that they would not bring the show back because of low ratings in
previous outings. But don’t let me stop you!

thanks!

brad
www.monkees.net

To purchase Monkees CD’s, Videos and Collectable rare items, visit
www.monkees.net

The Monkees Alert list is moderated, meaning you cannot post directly to
the list yourself. To submit an item for the list, send to:
bradpager@flextools.com

For info on posting to, subscribing, or removing yourself from this list,
send an e-mail to: alert@flexquarters.com for an automatic response. Thanks=
!