Farewell Václav!

Respect is the most overused word these days. But this great man REALLY deserved it!

Vaclav Havel, former Czech president who helped bring down communism, dies at 75
Once a playwright, the avowed peacenik oversaw the country's bumpy transition to democracy and a free-market economy.

PRAGUE—
Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright who wove theater into politics to peacefully bring down communism in Czechoslovakia and become a hero of the epic struggle that ended the Cold War, has died. He was 75.

Havel died Sunday morning at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic, his assistant Sabina Tancecova said.

Havel was his country's first democratically elected president after the nonviolent "Velvet Revolution" that ended four decades of repression by a regime he ridiculed as "Absurdistan."

http://www.latimes.com/news/obituaries/la-mew-vaclav-havel-20111219,0,4502559.story

Keep on Rockin' in the Free World
How the Velvet Underground and Václav Havel built a blueprint for toppling totalitarians and other censors

..Charter 77, just like the Plastic People of the Universe, is a relatively obscure reference in twenty-first-century America. Yet, its 1970s-era call for freedom of expression in communist Europe is at the very center of the single-most foundational story of how supposed Western cultural decadence combined with dissident aspirations in the unfree world to produce not just unprecedented liberation but a useable blueprint for oppressed people everywhere to cast off the shackles of their masters. Standing at the center of that story is the literal author of the blueprint, a rumpled star child of the 1960s whose love and understanding of rock music helped free his country and inspire freedom in so many others: Václav Havel, the late leader of what came to be known as the “Velvet Revolution.”

That story begins with another story, that of the Velvet Underground, a band whose best-known member, Lou Reed, chafed not under the oppression of Russian tanks but the strictures of postwar Long Island suburbia. A hippie-hating countercultural figure, the teenaged Reed had been given electroshock treatments to “cure” his homosexual tendencies. Reed would later find a mentor in the legendarily alcoholic and writer’s blocked poet Delmore Schwartz, before gaining fame for singing about drug abuse and cross-dressing and fronting a band that openly sang about soul-sapping heroin rather than consciousness-raising LSD during 1967’s Summer of Love.

No one is exactly sure how a copy of The Velvet Underground & Nico found its way to Czechoslovakia before Soviet tanks crushed the cultural opening of the Prague Spring in August 1968. After all, the March 1967 debut album by Andy Warhol’s nihilistic house band barely sold in America, peaking at just #171 on the Billboard charts before quickly disappearing. Rock critics would not come around to declaring it one of the best albums ever made until decades later. There is that famous line, variously attributed to superproducer Brian Eno or R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck, that “only a thousand people bought the record, but every one of them started a band.” And though Czechs were starting bands right and left, as part of an all-too-brief cultural reemergence that saw artists such as filmmaker Miloš Forman and novelist Milan Kundera gain international prominence, there was a lot of catching up to do in 1967 and 1968 for a country that had recently outlawed William F. Buckley’s least favorite band. “It is so strange,” the singer of a Czech Velvet Underground cover band would muse a few years after communism’s demise, “that Prague was so up-to-date.”

http://reason.com/archives/2011/12/18/keep-on-rockin-in-the-free-world