And lived with, even as an adult, the Berlin Wall, and I remember the whole world rejoiced
when that thing came down.
How in the world can our country turn around and a couple of decades later be doing the
very same thing, and at a grosser scale?
Exactly what the barrier will cost in terms of dollars is unclear.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that the cost of construction and maintenance
of 670 miles of border fencing could cost U.S. taxpayers up to $49 billion.
And you're listening to 99.5 FM WBAI New York.
It's 6.59 p.m. in 60 seconds.
Time for Off the Hook.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall, I cut myself while shaving,
now I can't make a call.
We couldn't get much worse, but if they could they would.
Von Diddley Bond for the best, expect the worst.
I hope that's understood.
Von Diddley Bond.
The telephone keeps ringing, so I ripped it off the wall, I cut myself while shaving,
now I can't make a call.
Good evening.
The program is Off the Hook.
This is Red Hacton Studio Engineering, and I'm joined by a number of people tonight.
I think I'll just go around the room in order.
In the corner there we have Voltaire.
Hey there.
Oh, sorry.
Hello.
Not Kevin.
Hello.
Rob T. Firefly.
Good evening.
Hello.
And then we have Jason and Josh from Surrender.
Hello.
And then we actually have Junt in the corner.
Say hi.
Hi.
And then on the phone we have Bernie Estan in Philadelphia.
Bernie?
Uh-oh.
Oh, there we go.
Hi, Bernie.
Are you there?
I'm here.
Can you hear me?
Yes, I can hear you.
I can hear you now.
That's kind of sound.
Well, Happy New Year from Philadelphia.
Thank you.
And then Emmanuel should be on the line from Berlin.
Hello.
And then Emmanuel should be on the line from Berlin.
If that wasn't the noise we heard.
It was him.
Uh-oh.
It was the fire engines coming to put out the fireworks.
Well, good.
We'll try to get him back on the line.
But in the meantime...
Now, if he's in Berlin, what time is it there right now?
It would be past midnight.
It would actually be tomorrow.
As in, like, a minute past midnight on New Year's Eve?
Well, actually, I think it would be an hour past midnight.
An hour and one second, I believe.
Wow.
There must be still much celebration going on in Berlin right now as we speak.
Yeah.
All right.
Well, while we're waiting, if you want to do some stories, I think I'll try to get Emmanuel
back on the line.
All right.
We have some stories to talk about.
The first one, Britain aims to restrict access to websites.
So everybody knows that UK isn't the best with privacy stuff and censorship, especially
when it comes to technology.
And it appears that their culture minister, which sounds pretty Orwellian, the name.
But anyway, he has said that they want to do a program that's like the movie rating
system for websites, which sounds pretty scary.
But the scariest part, at least for us across the pond, is that they want to work with the
Obama administration for that.
So let's hope that they don't get too far with that, because it doesn't sound very official.
It sounds like just something that he's saying offhand.
Yeah.
It's kind of an amusing image, though.
Let me get this straight.
They're trying to take the MPAA rating system, applying it to websites?
Yeah.
I think it's a good time to give a shout out to the movie.
This film is not yet rated at this point, which does a good job at exposing how bad
the MPAA rating system is to begin with.
And it's so subjective a thing, and it's obviously not going to be good for privacy or civil
liberties at all.
Now, implementing a system like this would actually censor people who are of age to see
a R-rated website?
I don't know.
I think it's...
It doesn't sound very official.
It sounds like just something that this crazy old cultural minister got offhand.
Listen, I'm going to cut into you guys.
I believe we have Emmanuel on the phone now.
Yes.
I'm sorry.
We had a bit of an emergency up here on the roof in Berlin, where there's all kinds of
fireworks and things going on, and we jumped the gun and lit off a bunch of things we weren't
supposed to light off, so we lost the connection.
Yeah, it's New Year's here.
It's been New Year's for about an hour now, and you might be able to hear some of the
explosions going off all over the city.
It's simply an incredible scene.
But why don't you guys fill me in, since I don't want to go over what you've already
said.
Have we introduced our special guest yet?
Briefly only.
We haven't had a chance to talk to him yet.
Okay, good.
So why don't you finish whatever it is you're saying.
I don't want to interrupt, and then we'll do something special for you here, and then
we'll talk to our special guest.
I think we're done, actually, with what we were talking about, so feel free to...
Oh, you're finished?
Yes.
Okay, well then let me introduce some people here.
We're standing on the roof somewhere in Berlin with a bunch of people who have just celebrated
New Year's, and we're still celebrating.
Can you hear the explosions?
Yes.
Yeah.
Imagine this.
Imagine a city filled with just bottle rockets and fireworks, firecrackers of all sorts just
coming from every single building.
This is not something the city is putting on.
It's something the people of the city are putting on.
And it's just...
It's an incredible sight.
Now, of course, it's kind of ironic, too, because we're talking to some people tonight
that are involved in a production that has to do with war.
I hope it doesn't bring back any bad memories.
But it's really a festive occasion.
It's something that is not very common in the United States.
We tend to be afraid of these things.
In fact, the Americans who are in this city right now, and I'm with a few of them, tend
to be a little bit apprehensive when...
Well, for instance, people throw firecrackers in their direction as they're walking down
the street.
It's a common thing here in Berlin on New Year's for that to happen.
And we were on the train before, and people were actually lighting firecrackers on the
train.
And you can imagine that's a bit unnerving.
Let me say hi to a couple of people here.
Bicycle Mark is here.
If you could put down that drink for a second.
And to say hi to the folks in New York.
Hello, New York, and Happy New Year from Berlin.
Oh, yeah, and I should say something else.
Well, I think I should probably pass the phone off.
Pass the phone around.
Here we go.
Hi, this is David Dolphin from New York, Ireland.
I'm here with a few other Irish people.
Hello, New York.
Hi, Mom!
That was another Irish person.
This is Brie Pettis saying hello to New York.
And it's a pleasure to talk to you from the next year here in Berlin.
We're on the top of a roof.
And it used to be a clear night.
But now it appears to be foggy, except it's not foggy.
It's just the explosives that have been going off for the entire last hour, exploding.
The smell of sulfur is pervading the entire atmosphere.
And we're not at any sort of exotic hot tub or anything.
It's just pure explosives here, people.
A pleasure to talk to you from the future in 2009.
Happy New Year.
Happy New Year, New York.
This is Martin from Laser.
We're having a great time here.
Everyone is wearing fake mustaches that we laser-cutted.
And we will start some rockets for you now.
Happy New Year.
Hi, New York, from Berlin.
This is John Flanagan.
Happy New Year, New York.
OK, we're back to me now.
You guys hear all that?
Yeah.
All right, we're about to light some battle rockets now.
Listen to this.
Hang on.
All right, now some firecrackers for you.
All right.
Happy New Year.
That really wasn't very much compared to what's been going on in the city,
but for us it was a big thrill.
Thank you.
OK, you know, I dare anybody listening in New York City to do that tonight
and not get arrested.
But here it's unusual if you don't do this kind of a thing.
I'm sorry.
This is just insane.
I didn't know we had this much.
When did we get all of these?
This is incredible.
All right, I'm going to duck inside now.
Guys, if you want to blow up the roof, that's your affair.
I'm going downstairs.
All right.
I've got to get out of here.
Hang on.
I'm going to get out of here.
I'm going to get out of here.
I'm going to get out of here.
Hang on, I'm coming back inside for that.
OK, are you guys still there?
Hey, we're here.
All right, good, good.
Hang on a second while I gather my wits together.
I'm going back into a wood area now.
Here in Philadelphia, they have a tradition here in Anaconda, New Jersey.
They shoot firearms with live rounds into the air.
So I'm going to be wearing my hard hat in an hour.
Yeah, they do things differently in America.
That's certainly true.
But yeah, it's such a festive occasion.
This is the second New Year's I've spent in Berlin.
Before that, I'd spend New Year's in Amsterdam.
And it was also very festive with lots of fireworks.
I imagine lots of parts of the world do this.
Well, you know, there are parts of the states where it's legal, obviously.
It's not every.
In New York City, it's not.
But when I've been in Texas on New Year's, it's fine there.
In Houston, I shot off plenty of rockets.
I don't think it's a U.S. thing.
Okay, well, I'll happily go to Texas to see if the festivity is the same as here.
But maybe we can hear from small listeners in Texas.
They can write to us, OTH at 2600.com.
We'd certainly like to hear their experiences.
But yes, 2009 has arrived.
We can confirm that 2009 is here in Berlin.
And soon 2009 will be where you are as well.
So just to let you guys know, it's all festive and fun here.
Now, any new stories you guys want to talk about?
Things having to do with the changing of the year or anything like that?
Have you already gone over that?
There is an FCC decision just this week that's sort of new-worthy and is probably worth celebrating.
Yeah.
Oh, you may remember we talked a couple of weeks ago about the advanced wireless services ban.
It's around 2155 megahertz to 2180 megahertz where the FCC was going to allow a nationwide Wi-Fi network
that would be free of charge to people with a minimum speed of 768 kilobits per second.
But the FCC was going to mandate content filtering for pornography and other undesirable content.
Well, the FCC just announced they're not going to have any filtering requirement anymore now.
So if this actually goes through within 10 years, it's supposed to cover 95% of the country within 10 years, free Wi-Fi.
But at 768k in 10 years, it'll probably be crawlingly slow.
But the fact that it won't be required to be filtered by government mandate is good news.
You also have to think about the fact that it might be crawlingly slow for multimedia applications and things like that,
I mean, how much bandwidth do you need for checking email or receiving messages and things like that?
More than enough.
Yeah.
And voice. It would handle voice as well, easily.
Now that they govern with this censorship requirement, there are still opponents of it.
Most of the telecom industries are opposing this bill.
Before, it was the telecom industries and civil libertarians in general.
But now we just have to worry about, now that we have the civil liberties intact,
we have to make sure that the plan goes ahead and isn't stopped by lobbyists that represent established interests.
All right. Well, let's move on to our special guest.
I know they've been waiting patiently for us to get through all this nonsense that we've been going through here in Berlin and various other things.
Jason and Josh, welcome to WBAI.
Are you guys there?
Yeah, we're here.
Thanks.
How are you doing?
Now, Jason Hartley is the author of this incredible book.
Actually, I've been reading this book throughout my journeys, Just Another Soldier.
And, of course, Josh Fox, director of Surrender, the play, the production that a bunch of us attended a few weeks ago.
We discussed it on the radio.
Oh, great. The lights just went out here for some reason.
I'm sorry.
Here's the problem.
In Germany, what happens is, if you don't move around, lights go off because they're all intelligent.
Energy saving.
Okay, I just turned them back on.
Yeah, okay.
So, these guys are involved in the production of Surrender, which I believe has been renewed.
It's going to start over again from January 7th to January 25th at the Flamboyant Theatre, 107 Suffolk Street.
Flamboyant.
Flamboyant Theatre.
107 Suffolk Street.
107 Suffolk Street. Is that correct?
That's correct. 107 Suffolk Street, Flamboyant Theatre.
Okay. Now, for people that don't know about this particular show, it's described as a simulated war deployment experience in three acts.
What that basically means is that if you show up as an audience member, you wind up basically inside basic training where you're taught how to carry a weapon,
how to clear a room, how to engage the enemy, and then how to become reintegrated into society.
Now, I know this is something that may strike horror into the hearts and minds of many BAI listeners.
After all, our radio station is pretty much founded on pacifist philosophy.
But I think it's also very important for us to understand what is going on in the world and what kinds of experiences people that we live with are going through.
And I think Jason has done an incredible job sharing that with us.
Jason is a member of the Army National Guard. He was deployed in Iraq from February 2004 to January 2005.
And Jason, first, I'd like to ask you a couple of questions because I know you were over there and you did something that basically got you into a bit of trouble.
You ran a blog. You dared to run a blog about your experiences while you were in Iraq. Do you want to tell us something about that?
Yeah. When we got deployed, the training began in 2003.
Blogs were really just kind of starting to catch on.
It was still sort of the domain of the slightly more geeky.
And I was a computer science major in school at the time.
So it just became like an easy way for me to keep in touch with family and friends.
I figured I would just write stuff once, put it on a blog, then not have to send out a thousand emails to everybody.
For me, it was just an easy way of communicating.
But then once people started reading it, it kind of evolved into something else entirely.
And then once the Army found out about it months later, because the Army is very, very quick at picking up on this stuff,
it became a little bit of a fiasco because they weren't too keen on me sharing my feelings and what was going on with our training and so forth.
But in the end, yeah, it got me in quite a bit of trouble because I took it down, then I put it back up toward the end.
And yeah, the Army is not a big fan of the First Amendment, frankly, when it comes to combat zones and photographs of detainees and that kind of stuff.
Is that the kind of thing that you had on your blog?
It was photographs and stories about detainees and things?
Well, quite a bit.
I was pretty open about everything that I was experiencing.
It was very much not like the hero porn type, Black Hawk Down stuff, which I think is what really kind of annoyed my commander in general.
It's not like, you know, forget all kind of the gross stuff and just say how great of a job we're doing.
It was very personal.
My audience was not going to be other soldiers and whatnot.
It was just kind of me and my family and anybody who might want to peek in on it.
And yeah, I kind of learned a difficult lesson that way.
But in the end, I'm happy that I did it.
And I think there are people out there who would enjoy the fact that I was able to do that.
And I feel good about it.
Can you tell us something about how you would set up a blog while deployed overseas?
And what kind of connectivity was there to start with?
You know, you'd be surprised.
We spent five months before we went to Iraq and frigid upstate New York training.
And we actually had decent access to internet while we were there.
We actually had somebody install DSL into our barracks, which was great.
And then once we were in Iraq, I was there for OIF-2, which was the second year, basically, that the war was going on.
And it was at this really great juncture where the Army had no idea what the hell they were doing on any front, really.
And we actually hired a company out of Baghdad, came to our base, and installed high-speed internet with a satellite.
Completely unfiltered, unregulated.
The Army didn't even know about it.
And my day-to-day experience in Iraq was not that different than it was back home,
because my computer was right next to my bed.
And I could get back from work, sit down, write about my day,
download things I probably shouldn't if my mom's listening, and then go to bed.
And once we left, the Army finally got wise, like, maybe we should, you know...
Because we had an instant message.
Okay, Mom, we're going to go on a raid now.
Be back in a couple hours, you know, see ya.
I mean, operational security wasn't really probably the way that it should have been.
But we actually had decent connectivity while we were there,
which was actually incredibly easy for me to update a blog and send out emails
and just about everything else that I would do back home.
It was just kind of slow.
And I blame the, like, LimeWire and guys downloading things they shouldn't.
Kind of killed a lot of our bandwidth, but it was amazingly good.
What I'm curious about, the Army was upset that this blog was up.
What did they think was going to be happening with the Internet being available
to everybody serving over there?
You know, the Army is not very proactive about anything.
They wait until something blows up and then, you know, literally and figuratively,
then they kind of react to it.
I don't think anyone thought about it, you know, but then once...
The rationale was they thought, well, the enemy could be reading this stuff
and we shouldn't allow them that because, you know, whatever,
which was really kind of a lame excuse because there was nothing that was in my blog
that isn't, you know, completely accessible through any other...
You know, in the newspaper, for crying out loud.
But clearly they really didn't think about it.
Now, what motivated you to want to put up a blog in the first place?
Well, I'm a suburban kid from Utah.
I'm probably the most, like, the least interesting human being ever born
and it was just the first interesting thing that had ever happened to me.
And it seemed like, how could I not write about this?
You know, I was... I definitely had to do it and I just had the means to do it
and so I did. That's all it was, really.
Amazing. Now, the blog, I believe, can still be found at justanothersoldier.com?
Yes, it can be. Basically, everything that got cut out of the book
is on the blog there at justanothersoldier.com,
which is still a lot of material, particularly all the photographs,
because the book kind of got published very quickly and we couldn't include photographs.
So there's a lot of... There's definitely still a lot of really interesting material,
even though it's stuff that got cut from the book.
I'd like to think of it as kind of like a DVD extras, basically.
It's the extra feature from the book is the website now.
But there's still plenty of fun stuff to read if you were to go there.
And the book is called Just Another Soldier.
It's published by Harper and I guess it's available everywhere, right?
It should be, you know, online, bookstores. It's easy to find.
Cool. And it's... Like I said, I've been reading it over the last few weeks.
It is an incredible story,
incredible series of emotions that you feel reading this.
And it's just really well done. It's a great piece of work.
Now, Josh Fox, you're the director of the show Surrender,
which Jason is also involved in.
Do you want to tell us how this all came to be?
How did you get in touch with Jason? How did the show come into being?
Sure. Sure. I can do that.
Jason Hartley is a mutual friend of a friend of a friend,
Laura Wagner, who is a film producer,
who was producing a film that I was directing called Memorial Day.
And we needed a military advisor for that film.
And I'll put in a plug now because Memorial Day actually,
after three years in the making, is going to open in February in New York.
It'll open at the IFC Center, 6th Avenue and 3rd Street, February 4th.
So people who've seen Surrender or who will see it can go to see
Memorial Day right afterwards at IFC.
But we needed a military advisor because essentially my company,
International Wow Company, is a company of quite a few actors.
International Wow started in 1996 in Thailand.
It's become a network of actors and directors, designers,
writers in 29 countries,
basically 150 people getting together to do projects.
I was working on this film called Memorial Day, which tracks a group of people
from a crazed beach weekend in Maryland over to Iraq.
And so we needed someone to train our actors to become soldiers.
And also me because I wanted to know what to do, how to create this film.
So luckily Laura knew Jason and then I started to look at his blog
and read his book and I realized that we had already shot about half of the film.
And we were looking for Jason to come in, or somebody to come in.
And Jason's blog and his book is incredibly in your face.
It's extreme and it doesn't pull any punches.
And that's sort of what we were looking for in terms of our work as well.
It's a confrontational approach.
And I thought, wow, I might actually get along with this person.
So we had a meeting up in New Paltz, which was I think really kind of
intimidating in a way. I think I was scared to meet Jason, this guy who had been in Iraq.
And I don't know.
Yeah, Josh came with a whole entourage.
And we sat there, Josh talked for 45 minutes and his entire crew sat down and thought,
this guy must be really important because he has a whole crew that just sits there with him.
Yeah, thanks.
But actually we got along really well and then basically we spent
a few weeks with our actors, between 12 and 15 actors
training in these combat techniques and it was astounding
because I have to say the last time I was in WBAI
I was here with Theaters Against War, THAW, which is 350 member theaters
and we were here quite a few times. I was one of the steering committee members there.
And here I am doing military training and having a blast, having an unbelievable
time. And it keys into something really fundamental, a survival instinct
inside of people and it's transcendent in a way. And we're the group of guys
in the stack, lined up there, ready to raid a room
and you have your rifle and you have your buddies. There's nothing
you'd rather be doing at that moment. And I thought, isn't this interesting? This is a complete
utter contradiction. Contradiction inside of myself. Contradiction
for the actors. And everybody got into it and it became a little bit
like an addiction. And when we ended up, we got so carried away with it, we ended up
shooting a scene that we probably shouldn't have shot in our warehouse in Brooklyn
with some live rounds. We ended up getting raided by the street crime unit.
Live blanks, right? Live blanks. Yeah, sorry. Anyway, we were so hyped up on this
training that we ended up getting raided by the street crime unit and almost getting killed.
The cops came in with weapons out. Like, they did what
you would do. You were filming it and they were doing it for real. Right, we were filming it.
We had like 20 guys in the house with a fake barrack set up
and all these rifles. And they drew, you know, nines in my
face and it was really, you know, not so fun.
Did you get that on film? No, no. Well, I don't know. Actually,
someone claims to have got it on film, but I won't look at it because it was as close
as I've ever come to getting, at least as far as I know, shot by the New York
City police. But anyway,
the training was so interesting that I wanted to offer this to the general public.
And I thought, let's figure out a way to have the training happen
in an hour and a half. People can do it, get involved in it, and then let's take it a step
further. So when talking with Jason over it, we talked about this and planned it over the course of
about a year. You know, let's give them the
training, a crash course, and then let's throw them into a military installation
or essentially what would be another part of the training, like when you would go on training raids
and do that with actors. And then let's do it, let's extend it a little bit
further and actually put people in the position of soldiers coming home. Because that, I don't know
if the army trains you for that in the same way. Not well.
So the idea would be a three-act structure. One with training with Jason, another one
where you raid this Iraqi village, which is populated
by actors, some of whom who you are compelled to shoot, some of whom you are
compelled to search, others of whom you're compelled to do nothing to, I guess.
Or sympathize with. Sometimes you mix those three things up. Oh yeah, right, sometimes that's
part of the point, right? That sometimes you end up shooting civilians.
And that you have this intense experience where the war machine
or the war training takes over and that takes over
your, that is what does the operation. The way you've been trained
in just an hour and a half leads you into a scenario
which you wouldn't ordinarily find.
I guess, which you wouldn't ordinarily do, right?
And then you're stuck with the repercussions of this. And then you come home on a plane,
you get on the plane and then you, the audience
all together gets on this plane and the stewardesses are there giving you stuff
and then the stage opens up and each, we play
out seven or eight scenes of homecoming. There's a funeral, there's a hospital, there's a bedroom
scene. And each scene an audience member is called onto the stage
to read a karaoke scroller where they actually play the key role
in the scene. So you have your girlfriend yelling
at you in an argument at home and one of the audience members is on stage
and responding. I think one of the people in the studio actually was in that role.
So it's worked fabulously well. We ran it for three weeks,
three and a half, four weeks at the Ohio Theater, our beloved Ohio Theater on Wooster Street.
And we're so excited by it. And it's a 32 person cast,
about a 50 person operation. And everyone just wanted to just put it on again.
So we juggled our schedule around and we're reopening it January 7th
through the 25th. Everything is at wowsurrender.org.
That's easy to remember, wowsurrender.org. That's our website. Tickets,
you can see photographs, you can read FAQs, you can read audience reactions
which are really kind of embarrassingly off the charts.
So it's a big deal. John, I'm a little curious about that. The audience reactions. Now when you first
started doing this, it must have been kind of a nail biter not knowing how this was
actually going to turn out with people. What kinds of, what are some of the classic
reactions you got from people going through basic training off the streets of Manhattan?
Well, I wanted to pile as many risks as I possibly could into this. You know, first of all,
we didn't know how people would react to the training. Then we didn't know how people would react to having
to go into a war. I mean, and the war simulation is really loud.
I mean, it's insanely loud. We give out, sometimes give out earplugs.
And we didn't know how people would react to being called up on stage. But you know,
what's so interesting is how compelling this indoctrination process can be.
Once you step into that hallway and Brandon Smith
says, stand right here. Here's your boots. Go up the stairs.
Take your uniform. This, no one really bucks the system.
My biggest anxiety with the training was what, I mean, I've trained soldiers a lot, but
that's easy because they're all there to be trained. Plus there's mechanisms
in place that they don't want to do it and so forth. But I was worried, how can we take essentially
people off the street? And the first thing that I do is yell at them, teach them how to do the
push-up and then continue to punish them for an hour and a half when they screw up
my simple rules, right? And I thought, well, what if someone just were to say no?
I'm not sure what I would do. What's interesting is after having done this for like three plus weeks
is I've learned a lot about the whole concept of obedience to authority
is when there's the illusion of authority and you tell someone, do this, do a push-up
even though you're physically incapable of doing it probably or you're a girl or whatever
and they do it anyways is really interesting.
There's a hundred plus
people in the theater. So that's where you are and
the interesting thing, I mean, International Wild Company is an experiment in culture
and we do collaborations with other countries, we do collaborations with other cultures
and when you step into another culture, like when you get off a plane, like you're in Berlin right now,
I love Berlin because you can fire fireworks and that's completely normal and if you're in New York
it's not completely normal. Well, if you walk in and step into the culture of the military
there are certain things that are completely normal and certain things that are abnormal and it was all about
creating that atmosphere, you know, where
to say no, I don't really want to do that is, there's so much
downward pressure on you to not, you know, but I think it's also, the thing about it is
when someone's teaching you something, you want to do it well. You know, if they're teaching
you math, they're teaching you computers, whatever it is, you're just
compelled to do it well and so people start plugging into that instinct
and then they realize that what they're learning how to do well is to kill people.
And that becomes... Definitely, yeah, it's amazing because I was one of the
people in this, as were three other people I believe in the studio,
Jens, Voltaire, and Not Kevin. You're all there, right? And you all took part in this?
Yep. Yes. Now, Not Kevin, in fact, you even became a member
of the cast. Do you want to tell us how that came about?
I kind of just started showing up.
That's the key to international wow. If you keep showing up, you've got a lot to do.
Yeah, I came out of the play
and I was just kind of so blown away that it was kind of stuck in the back
of my mind for about a week and I just couldn't stop thinking about it.
Well, you actually were blown away because you were dead. Yeah, I was killed.
That's right. Some of the audience members don't make it through the second
act. There is a hospital, you know,
and each of the squads suffers some kind of casualty and some of those people who end up in the hospital
room end up dying and they go to the death room, which I'm not going to talk about
what happens in the death room. That's for the people who have been there to
elaborate upon. But back to audience reactions,
it was really, it went and it has
been going quite about as well as we could have imagined.
It's a long show. It's three and a half hours and no one ever complains about the
it's like you start being inside of that reality
and I think that that's one of the reasons why we were really compelled to bring it back
because it had seemed to be working so much
and it has created a family or community or whatever you want to call it
around the production and people, obviously like Not Kevin, who are here
in the studio inviting us in here, a little bit off topic for your program,
to talk about this. We just want to keep doing it
and hopefully the listeners of this program
WBAI will come down. Check out wildsurrender.org and take a look
at it and come down and see us January 7th through the 25th and be a part of that too.
You really do have to suspend your disbelief for a little bit and what you guys are saying is so true
because when I was down there, yeah, I'm being yelled at, I have to change my
clothes, I have to hold my weapon in just the proper way, I have to do push-ups
when told to do push-ups and within a few minutes, your
resistance is changing to just wanting to be accepted and then
when you're through all of this, when you go through all of this for a few hours with these people
who are yelling orders at you, all of a sudden this camaraderie begins to develop
and you just want to please them and when it's over, you feel like you've really been through something together
with them. Does that parallel what happens to you when you go into the military?
Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing that we've been able to do that on kind of like a
micro-scale with the show but it's identical
to what I feel in the military is you're with a group of people and you're vastly
different. You're from all different parts of the United States and sometimes not even in the United States
and then that camaraderie develops quickly. Any time you
suffer together builds camaraderie very quickly
because it's a way of coping with it. The only guys who don't make it through training are the ones who don't
make friends and occasionally people,
we have people quit, maybe a handful. Every time we do a show, it's
normal. Every time we do a show? Yeah, well you're doing
stuff, Josh. I thought you were talking about the military, not about theater.
It's analogous, it's similar. There's always a handful of dudes who quit because somebody
kind of like, they don't get along, they don't surrender to the camaraderie
if you will. I know it's bad.
And they don't make it. So yeah, I think it's a natural
mechanism in human beings, a social aspect. You be tight to deal
with whatever the thing you are suffering at that moment. This is what you find in the
theater as well also, I think. That that was one of the main connected
points, right? Because you're working with a group of people towards this incredible difficult
set of obstacles in the theater always and you develop a real
camaraderie relationship with each other
and that was one of the things that we wanted to open up as well. And I might add, just because this
program, I think Surrender is seeking to
break that barrier down between the audience, between the spectator and the actor,
between the artist and the audience. And also, I think of that in a
correlative way to the way the internet functions. Because I think we
were raised on film, TV, reading books
at a certain point, these media that have narratives that you don't interact with.
And now it's a totally different thing. Our brains are
organized towards the internet, which we can interact with, which we can shape and move and change
at any moment. And I think Surrender is a lot about that principle.
The principle of you are here and you're constantly making choices
against it or with it, towards it. It's about
what are you going along with and how does that experience
change? And a really weird thing happened to me. When
we closed the show, I took one of the huge flat screens
from the theater and put it in my room and I was watching a movie.
And I'm sitting there kind of shaking and freaking out with
needing to be at the theater. And I was watching this movie and I
started to click my knee. It was a mouse.
I wanted to click to the next window because the movie was just not moving
fast enough. It was boring. It was bizarre.
I realized my hand was tapping at my knee as if I was trying to click to
another window. And I felt like this had something to do with Surrender. Something to do
with the experience. It's a new form of theater. A new form of going to a narrative.
Going into a narrative. It's still very much controlled. It still has its own arc.
You can't change that. But it does have that other feeling of you are
there. It's reacting to you. And you can react to it.
We're speaking with Josh Fox and Jason Hartley of the
production Surrender taking place at the Flem Boyan Theatre.
Did I say it right this time? Flem Boyan. Flem Boyan. I'll get it right when they say it.
We're on 7 Suffolk Street from January 7th to the 25th.
Four of us in the studio have been through this already. What would you guys say
to many of our listeners? I don't consider myself to be
a pro-military person by any stretch of the imagination. Yet I
found the whole experience to be fascinating. What would you say to people who are...
I think there are quite a few members of our audience that might be a bit hesitant about this.
How would you explain it to them in a way that they might
be willing to go through this?
I was a wuss the first time around. You guys actually participated. I was
just an observer. Because I wasn't really sure. The whole
participatory thing was a little weird to me. I didn't want to go in and get
yelled at and make a fool of myself. So I opted to just
watch, which you can do. But it was
so good. One of the other things I was afraid of was just being an observer.
I thought, well, they're going to laugh at me because I don't want to do this.
I'm going to get put down. But you actually get treated very well. You're like a VIP
when you get there. They have a liaison for you. You're first on the plane.
You get to watch everything without having to be yelled at. So that helped to calm my
nerves. I had such a good time. I went back a week later and did
the thing for real. So it was a lot of fun.
Alright. It really is something
amazing to try doing something a little bit different and
just see how someone else lives their life. I think
through Jason's book and through this play, you just learn
so much. I think that opens up eyes
and wakes people up and helps us understand each other a bit more.
Jason, I'd just like to go into some more of your background. I know that I found
this part of the book to be particularly fascinating. Your expulsion from
school. Tell us this story because I think a lot of our listeners might identify with
this. I went to school. I'm from Salt Lake.
I went to school in Utah. The culture there is very centered around the
Mormon church. It's very conservative. I had a complaint when I was in high school that I
didn't feel as though kids really were treated in a way that would prepare
them for adulthood. I had a bunch of bad citizenship.
I had to do all these service hours. I wanted a way of expressing my dissatisfaction with the way
that the school treated its students. I thought the way to do it would be through a literary
terrorism, if you will. I wrote an underground newspaper where I just basically complained
in what I tried to be as funny as I could be and also as profane as possible
because Mormons love that. I made this little newspaper.
I had seen the movie Pump Up the Volume with Christian Slater, fine film.
It really got me fired up. I thought, I'm going to do this. I made this little
eight page newspaper. I figured out a whole time when there was no supervision
at the school and distributed it into the lockers.
It was then on Monday morning when everyone opened the lockers and had their own newspaper
but it created quite a fiasco. I had taken great lengths to hide my
identity which did absolutely no good because all my English teachers looked at it
and said, well, Jason wrote this. Long story short is I got
expelled for my writing which is not unsimilar to how
the army reacted when I did virtually the exact same thing.
That was kind of an interesting experience.
My mom didn't pocket me for a few weeks. I never graduated. I had to
go back a year later and get a diploma through a whole...they wouldn't even take me at the
alternative high school where all the pregnant kids and drug addicts go.
I got kicked out of the whole district because they were so furious.
Wow. It sounds like you're a rebel against any kind
of authority. How did you wind up in the military with that attitude?
I've thought about this a lot and I get asked this a lot. I think what it is is the army
provides me with a structure that I can continually rebel against my father perpetually.
It's also interesting to be on the authority side of it.
It takes self-loathing to a whole new level. Why rebel against authority when you
just become the authority? I don't know. This is probably not therapy
hour. But yeah, it's kind of...
There's a lot of duality I suppose in everything that I do and that's one big
structure of duality that I love.
On the activist question that you brought up earlier, I think it's very, very
important to look at these issues with the complexity that they deserve.
I've been an activist for a very long time and one of the things that I find
frustrating is a little bit the black and white aspect of being against
four things. Because you're against this war, does it mean you're against the soldiers?
Does it mean that you're against people? Does it mean that you're against these systems?
I think in meeting Jason and being the very
unique and compelling artist that he is,
the thing here that I would hope to offer to the audience
and to the BAI listenership who I know are
like me, activists in so many ways,
that this is an opportunity I think to examine that and to actually take a
look at something that you probably don't have access to or you may not have had access
to in your life and reconfigure a little
bit of how those arguments work because
I think it actually makes a more compelling case for
the anti-war movements or the anti-war effort
to be able to make contact in the language that the military uses with
them. This is about communicating.
I think half of 1% of the United States has been to Iraq or Afghanistan.
A very, very, very small percentage of people, a very specialized group of people
have to carry all these things out no matter who protests. And I think it's
extraordinarily important to be able to make contact, to know how those two
cultures work, I mean to make contact between those two cultures because I saw this
anti-war culture and this military culture not being able to talk at all to each other.
So hopefully in some small way this begins to bridge that gap and
that this begins to then take those issues in a pragmatic way and say how do we
solve this? How do we stop this? How do we solve these problems? How do we deal with this
moral question? Because if you just shut the door and you say I'm not going to deal with that at all
like many of my friends at Thaw were saying we don't need a military. Why are you talking to
that guy? Why are you talking to those people? I just thought that that was wrong headed. I really did.
And I would encourage the fear barrier to go away and
do surrender and deal with surrender because I think it strengthens your ability to be an activist and
to be a thinker because these are things that happen in the world. You know what I'm saying?
That's where I'm jumping in. The duality aspect of it I think is where
Jason and I are meeting and where we're trying to discuss this
inherent contradiction and trying to deal with the thorny problems
the double emotions, the difficulty
of the question that you asked. The thing that I've always kind of approached with a lot of my writing
is there's all these kind of irreconcilable things that
occur simultaneously such as the big question is how can you be a good person
and be a good soldier at the same time? I mean first if you assume which I assume
maybe some people will disagree but I assume that there is a need for
soldiers. People will fight. That's just the way mortality is structured. So if you assume
that you need an army how can you be a good soldier and how can you be a good person?
And I hope that when people leave the theater they feel on some level
the same way that I did when I left Iraq was well I don't know
quite what to make of this because I have these two things that just they don't
I can't reconcile. I can't resolve it and I think that causes you to really
do some good thinking frankly and also when you start enjoying
some of this stuff too I think if you're really honest that's another that's a fantastic
question you'd ask yourself is wow why was that fun?
People you know for lack of a better word if I were to be brutally honest about my experience in Iraq
the best word to use to describe it is fun. It's not the
most accurate but it's the closest and a lot of people react that way too
to the show and you can find out more about it at wowsurrender.org
I think that last point
sure I think the last point you made really
touched on it the same way I felt when I came out of the theater that I went through this
week long period of just thinking and thinking about wait and then coming to the
conclusion that wait that was kind of fun and I was just so drawn back
that I couldn't leave.
Jason I wanted to ask you a question
I'm here in Philadelphia where the U.S. Army
has opened its first Army Experience Center
it's a theater type environment
where ostensibly teenagers
and young people can
experience the Army experience in a virtual reality setting
playing video games
riding virtual
Blackhawk helicopters and Humvees and firing
M16s and that sort of thing
are familiar with this and what do you think of this?
I think the equipment they have at that place is the same thing that we
are starting to use now in training so I believe that what they have there
is the same equipment that I have used on one occasion
Do you have any opinions about how they are recruiting using this
theater mechanism and
have you checked that out yet?
Well it's interesting it almost seems
it does seem kind of crass in a way it's just a video game
it's not a great one but it's just like any other game you might play with a first person shooter
it's really cool to work on how
soldiers communicate and how they do things collaboratively
even though the word collaborative is never used but how you do things together
but yeah I think we also realize that well this is also just kind of fun because it's like a video game
and we can maybe use this as a recruiting tool
This isn't what you might think it's not just a video game this is actual
virtual reality theme park you physically go into this building and you physically
sit in a Humvee and you physically hold a replica
M16 but it's a virtual reality type setting
Yeah I've used that
because when you fire the weapon you're in a turret of a Humvee and it actually
physically rotates and you physically have to move this gigantic
machine gun and it's good for training
I'd be curious to know if you can actually die in the video game because I think that would be a pretty poor
recruiting tactic
Like what? Stringing yourself on the VR cable?
No I meant in the context of the video game if you could be killed
Oh well you can absolutely be killed
Do you think in the training center they've shut that off?
Yeah I think they did like the Kirk in Star Trek 2 kind of thing where it's the no win scenario
everyone wins and is a hero that's a good question
There's a possibility that we will be able to bring the show to Philadelphia
so at that time we'll check it out
I mean let's go down there and check it out because I think that
it does sound a little bit like Surrender without all the bad stuff
that could happen to it. Surrender or the repercussions
Speaking of recruiting tactics this is one of the things I tell people
when I describe Surrender to them but basically it says in the
print when you're reading up about the show that there is no physical exertion
and nobody's going to be yelling at you and the very first thing that happens when you arrive
is that somebody's yelling at you and you're being told to do certain things and told that
if anyone told you that you weren't going to be yelled at and you weren't going to be told to do pushups or something
like that they were lying to you and that's exactly what happens to people
when they enlist in the military is it not?
One of the big jokes when you get to boot camp is there's always some kid that says
drill sergeant I was told that I would get this and the drill sergeant
your recruiter lied and it's like this joke in the military there's all these things you were promised
by your recruiter I didn't write the text for our card and I'm like oh wow
it says that there will be no physical exertion and no one yelling at you so I thought well this is
an excellent time to everything that I say in the first act by the way
I don't make up I'm just regurgitating the abuse that's been
inflicted on me in the military and I'm just completing that cycle of abuse
and one of the things you say is yeah your recruiter lied but it's fine I might raise
my voice a big deal you'll live not that bad. Yeah well actually I don't think of it as that bad
I think it is true that the recruiter lies a little bit
here yeah I'll ask these guys they went through it I'm not sure
but it doesn't feel like it's I think that there's an inherent
sense of real respect for the audience so when you're
we're not going to like not do it all the way. Well look pain
becomes pride when these stories of like your recruiter lying to you you don't have
a soldier who a real soldier say oh I was it's like that's the
stuff that's the good story is it guys you know what my recruiter told me and then you laugh together
it's like that's some of the best part you know is that come on
think of like the worst thing oh I had to push for this or I had to push for that. I've had audience members
come up to me and say I really wish they were harsher. We get that a lot
a lot. I really wish they'd made me push more
There's so much we can learn just by talking
to people who are in these situations like Jason has been in
one of the things in the book that really stuck out for me was
your description of the ID cards that get handed out to military personnel
is this true they're really like handwritten and
laminated with tape or something? I had to get a new ID card while I was
in Kuwait I think it was and it's like you know it's some like little E Ford probably
19 years old is running the machine and like the laminator wasn't working so I have his full on military
ID and it's like well the laminator is broken so he took a piece of
packing tape and covered it with packing tape so then I had like this is
my primary ID and I show it to whomever and they're like you gotta be kidding
me I'm supposed to think this is real it's a military ID the US Army
the DOD doesn't have the money to buy a freaking lamination machine and I'm like
you're trying to explain yeah because it's run by some 19 year old who you know
totally messed up it's like they don't believe you but you know what being in the military
you start to realize it's amazing that anything ever gets accomplished because
it truly is yes
it's true I had for a year an ID card that was covered with a piece of packing tape
awesome there's so many stories that we can learn just by
opening up our minds a little bit and hearing what people have to say
now again the blog is located where? justanothersoldier.com
and the book Just Another Soldier is available
everywhere Surrender starts on January 7th
want to give us some details on how people can become part of that?
sure well you buy a ticket you go to the website wowsurrender.org
there's so much information there the tickets are on SmartTix
so you can charge them over the internet so it's January 7th
through the 25th at the Flamboyant Theater 107 Suffolk Street
which is in the Clemente Soto Velez Cultural Center it's a beautiful
theater it's one of my favorite theaters in the city it's not known but it's huge and
vast and grand and wowsurrender.org all the
information you need is right there
and Josh I believe you're involved in a new project involving energy or something?
in fact actually yes this is something that I'm hoping we talk about more
in the future boy I don't even know where to start or how
if those of you who are curious right now our water system
in New York and in Philadelphia is under severe threat of natural
gas drilling I'm making a documentary about the proposal
to drill for gas in our watersheds in the upper Delaware River
Basin and that's all at waterunderattack.com
basically the 2005 energy bill deregulated oil and gas
drilling and it's caused a huge problem out west with pollution
of water tables and air and causing massive health effects and I went and documented that
throughout the summer and I'm starting to edit that together
all the footage for that film waterunderattack.com that's where it's at
and it's very very very serious very few people in New York know about it
I would love to discuss that at any given point in the future I think I'm out of time
as far as this show goes but at waterunderattack.com
please go take a look at there's trailers there's clips from the film
basically they're proposing 100,000 gas wells in New York and
Philadelphia's watershed and what that does is it pumps millions and millions
upon actually billions of gallons of toxic chemicals directly through the
aquifers and into the ground in order to extract natural gas
from the shale it's deep shale drilling it's something invented by Halliburton
and it's an extraordinarily toxic process it's a threat to New York City's water system
I've been working with city council a little bit on their environmental board
as well as a lot of other people on this film so that'll be coming out
or actually just rolling out slowly over the internet at waterunderattack.com
yeah
I just got locked out of a room where my other phone was so I don't know what time it is are we out of time?
we have about 2-3 minutes
do you guys in the studio have any other questions or comments for these guys?
it sounds great thanks
I just want to thank everybody for listening to this rather unusual program
a little bit off the beaten path of what we usually discuss here at off the hook
but I think it's something of interest to many of our listeners
and certainly something that I encourage people to investigate further
thank you so much
if you have any comments oth2600.com that's our email address
I'm here in Berlin actually I didn't mention this at all but I've been at the
U.S. Communication Congress which takes place every year at this time in Berlin
and it's a great gathering of hackers from all over the world
this year for the first time it sold out completely
they had to refuse people entry and I just think this is proof of the hacker community
is getting bigger and bigger and we're involved in various things
so definitely you'll be hearing more about what happened this week over in Berlin as well
a bunch of the interesting talks have actually been kind of trickling out
via the internet obviously
there's been some pretty interesting stuff going on during the conference
we have two events coming up next year
we have the hacking at random camp in Holland and we have the tour camp
in eastern Washington state
tour camp taking place in July over the July 4th weekend I believe
and H.A.R.R.E. taking place in August again in the Netherlands
alright
I think we're pretty much out of time tonight
thanks everyone for listening and thanks for everyone being in the studio
and I'd just like to wish our listeners and everyone here a very happy new year, a happy 2009
and enjoy that free second
there's a leap second in the future
alright goodnight everyone
That's true
A long distance operator
Ways to strong, no it's not for far
A long distance operator
Ways to strong, no it's not for far
I gotta get a message to my baby
And you know she's not just anyone
And you know she's not just anyone
If the call comes from Louisiana
Please let it arrive
If the call comes from Louisiana
Please let it arrive
This phone booth is on fire
It's getting hot inside
If the call comes from Louisiana
Please let it arrive
Everybody want to be my friend
But nobody wants to get higher Everybody want to be my friend
But nobody wants to get higher Long distance operator
I believe I'm stranded in this telephone wire
I believe I'm stranded in this telephone wire
I believe I'm stranded in this telephone wire
I believe I'm stranded in this telephone wire
I believe I'm stranded in this telephone wire
I believe I'm stranded in this telephone wire
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Change-a-loo-ya!