Nexus is a Canadian percussion group that marches to the beat of a different drum. Or different drums — which is to say three thousand different percussion instruments the group has collected from all over the world.

Nexus began thirty years ago as five classically trained, frustrated percussionists tired of keeping time in their local symphony; tired of waiting for the random call for the cowbell or the occasional bang or gong. They formed a band around the idea of expanding the definition of percussion beyond the rhythm section. They’re the first violin. And the trumpet solo. And the woodwind section and the vocals too.

Nexus connects symphonic music, jazz, ragtime and chamber music with African dance songs, Mexican folk music and the music of Bali, Java, China and Japan. It’s music that can go out with a bang or with a whisper. The high priests of percussion are next, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Nexus percussion ensemble: John Wyre, Russell Hartenberger, Bill Cahn, Bob Becker and Robin Engelman

Like alligators in the sewers, the homeless people living in the train tunnels under Manhattan are a kind of urban myth now. The novice documentary filmmaker Mark Singer moved in with them and together they made a sleeper hit called “Dark Days” that exposes their troubled, introspective, and strangely compelling lives. There was a whole neighborhood under there: a filthy shantytown with electricity and running water courtesy of the city of New York.
It was a place dozens of people called home for years before Amtrak evicted them. Mark Singer was 17 when he left his home in London to model in the Big Apple and instead fell in with a group of drug-addicts and social outcasts who won him over with their endearing personalities and humbling ability to survive. Mark Singer sold everything he owned, maxed out credit cards, and lost his own apartment to help his friends get out of the tunnels. The human moles of Manhattan, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Marc Singer ex-model, tunnel-dweller, and filmmaker

and Patrick Markee, senior policy analyst at the Coalition for the Homeless in New York who worked on the tunnels project

The crisis cycle in the Middle East is lurching back to summitry. From the collapse of Camp David talks last summer, the descent into raw, rampaging religious hatred has been ugly, scary and lethal: 90 people killed, mostly Arabs, in a fortnight. Palestinian radio said that 123 protesters were wounded yesterday in more reckless fighting in Gaza and the West Bank. Israel’s Prime Minister Barak, who still makes it his mandate to find a peace agreement with the Palestinians, had given Yasir Arafat a Monday deadline for calm. Else, the Israeli forces would crack down yet harder with heavier weapons, he said.

When the moment came, though, the streets were still riotous, and the rest of the world was not to be shut out: Kofi Annan of the United Nations is shuttling between Barak and Arafat; the Russian foreign minister is on hand; Mubarak of Egypt is engaged; President Clinton’s bags are packed. They’re giving peace another chance, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Charlie Sennot, Middle East correspondent for Boston Globe. Majda Al-batsch, freelance journalist for Agence France Press and Newsweek. John Burns, NY times Middle East bureau chief for Middle East. Daniel Rubinstein, Correspondent for Ha’Aretz.

Serbs at the seat of a people’s revolution enjoyed a delerious moment on the streets of Belgrade this weekend, sitting, drinking, kissing eachother indiscriminately. For people who thought they’d turn to dust and ashes before Slobodan Milosevic went away, it is enough that the long, bungling brutal aftermath of Communist dictatorship is finally over, as the almost unsinkable Milosevic conceded on Friday. The week after the nightmare ended begins a nonetheless staggering reconstruction process for the battered mind of a shrunken state.

Yugoslavia’s new president Kostunica still has Milosevic to deal with: a man with a European price on his head but who thinks of himself rather as an opposition voice. Worse Kostunica has Milosevic’s people to deal with in the courts and customs, banks and state bureaucracies. Then there are Serbia’s neighbors that Milosevic bullied, and the West-so hesitant, then heavy-handed-to address. The Serbian agenda is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Roger Cohen, currently the New York Times Bureau Chief in Berlin. Roger Cohen covered the Balkans for The Times during the Bosnian war and wrote Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo

and Anthony Lewis, The New York Times Columnist.

Iran got to be a demon in American eyes by first being too much of a darling. The Kennedy White House used to refer to the suit-and-tie oil-exporting Shah of Iran as “our kind of Shah.” He owed his job to the CIA, and came to seem more ours than Iran’s when the orthodox mullahs of a fanatical Islam rose up and took their country back in 1979-and seized our American embassy for 444 days-long enough to make Ted Koppel a TV star for his nightly reports on the humiliation of “America Held Hostage.”

It’s six of our presidential campaigns in the past now, but the hostage memories trigger all the other bad “Death to Satan” stuff: the veiled women, the unveiled theocracy, the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Yet in the private spaces of Iran, reporter Elaine Sciolino finds a lot of old Persia and yet another emailing, sensual, gabby Iran, tumbling toward a robust Islamic democracy. Iran behind the mosaic of mirrors is this hour on The Connnection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Elaine Sciolino, author of “Persian Mirrors: the Elusive Face of Iran” and New York Times reporter.

The end of Milosevic in the pictures from Belgrade suggest the last domino falling, ten years after similar scenes of Communism collapsing in Berlin, and Prague and Bucharest. Yet Yugoslavia is deeply different; this will never be remembered as a velvet revolution. It took ten years of appalling ethnic conflict to alienate all the neighbors, then to bring NATO’s American bombs down on Belgrade.

And in the teeming streets of Belgrade, after elections that Milosevic wanted to steal, it took the solidarity of miners and workers with students and the educated classes to take Milosevic out. They did it, said their rumpled, professorial new leader, in the name of their tortured and now widely despised nation of Serbia. “Big, beautiful Serbia has risen up,” shouted Vojislav Kostunica, “just so one man, Slobodan Milosevic, will leave.” The future of the new Yugoslavia, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Steven Erlanger, NY Times reporter

Stojan Cerovic, columnist for “Vreme”, an independent newsmagazine in Belgrade, and Senior Fellow at the US Institute of Peace

Senad Pecanin, editor-in-chief of “Dani”, a Sarajevo weekly publication, and Nieman Fellow at Harvard University

and TBA reporters on the ground in Belgrade.

We know more about Virginia Woolf than any other 20th-century writer, and still the mine of her life isn’t played out. She was the experimental novelist of “Mrs. Dalloway” and “To the Lighthouse,” a sort-of post-impressionist word painter of modern consciousness; a center of the Bloomsbury salon, an unstable genius who drowned herself at 59 in 1941. Almost religiously she kept a diary her whole life chronicling her bouts of madness and love affairs with women.

Her letters, too, fill out the many identities of a Marxist feminist, highbrow snob, trailblazing lesbian, deranged artist: no wonder she seems to be everywhere and sells more postcards than any other subject in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Her new biographer Nigel Nicolson was the son of her lover; he himself was a subject Virginia Woolf studied once as a model of boyhood. The immortal modern, Virginia Woolf, is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Her new biographer, Nigel Nicolson

You’ve heard about Dick Cheney’s golden handshake with his oil-drilling Halliburton Company when he left to run for vice president. But have you heard how Halliburton, on Cheney’s watch, doubled its government contracting to $2.3-billion, while Cheney himself was building his personal fortune toward $50-million. File it under: the oil agenda, or money interests in politics, and how we tend to ignore them.

There’s been more talk about Cheney’s lesbian daughter and his loathing of big government than about his corporate entanglement in US loans and contracts. As with Bill Clinton: it’s easier to talk about sex in the Oval Office than about the Democrats’ debts to Wall Street, Hollywood and trial lawyers. What if Campaign 2000, like politics in general, really is “the conduct of public affairs for private advantage.” Who’s buying whom this season, and why? We’re following the campaign money, this hour on the connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

UMass Professor Tom Ferguson, UT Austin Professor Walter Dean Burnham, Larry Makinson, Executive Director of The Center for Responsive Politics

The Camp David Peace process has ended suddenly in what feels like war in Israel. The theological and historical debates over Jerusalem and sovereignty have turned into a dateline of provocation and police action, with nearly fifty civilian deaths in just a few days. It’s not like the Intifada a few years ago with Palestinian youths throwing rocks and Israeli soldiers firing rubber bullets. This time around, it’s Palestinian police armed with machine guns, and Israelis firing from heavily armed Apache helicopters.

The spark in this tinderbox was Ariel Sharon’s deliberately provocative visit to the contested shrines in Jerusalem’s Old City last week. Sharon hoped to shore up his right-wing credentials by trumpeting Israeli control over the whole of the Temple Mount. The violence he has unleashed my end up strengthening Palestinian claims in Jerusalem. War and Peace in the holy land, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Deborah Sontag, New York Times

Jennifer Ludden, National Public Radio

and Charles Sennott, Boston Globe.

The Bush-Gore opening round turned out to be just that, an opening round: no Mike Tyson knockout here, no roundhouse rights or jolting lefts, no memorable slips, no blood drawn. In a close race two pretty cautious characters seemed to be conserving their fire for the next time, or the time after.

Yet there they were: Bush boyish and conversational in his informal Texas talk: “man’s practicing fuzzy math,” as he said more than once; he’s a big-state provincial, an executive who’s made tough choices, who’s humble enough to have hugged a flood victim in East Texas and cried with him.

Gore sighs and chuckles with satisfaction at all the numbers he knows; no, he wouldn’t get nasty with Bush or defensive about Clinton; but just as a warning about his big bludgeon style, he hit Bush’s tax cuts for the “wealthiest one percent” ten times. With Mary McGrory and Sander Vanocur for the long view, we’re learning what we learned, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Veteran journalists Sander Vanocur and Mary McGrory who covered the Kennedy-Nixon debates.