Sunday 30 May 2010

The way he was...



Dennis Hopper, Hollywood Rebel, Dies at 74

Dennis Hopper, American film actor and icon, dies at 74


Dennis Hopper, the rogue talent who sparked a renaissance in American cinema, has died at the age of 74. The hard-living screen star died at his home in the coastal Los Angeles suburb of Venice at around 8am local time, surrounded by family and friends, Alex Hitz, a close friend, told Reuters.

The actor and film-maker was believed to have been suffering from terminal cancer and was admitted to the Cedars Sinai Medical Centre shortly before Christmas. His recent months were mired by a messy and public divorce case with his fifth wife. In March, he appeared on Hollywood Boulevard when he was honoured with a star on the Walk of Fame.

Hopper will perhaps be best remembered for his landmark 1969 movie Easy Rider, the film that introduced mainstream Hollywood to the counter-culture. His freewheeling tale of two bikers on an odyssey through America became one of the most successful independent pictures ever made, galvanising the industry and opening the doors for a new generation of film-makers that included Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Francis Ford Coppola.

But Hopper was to prove too turbulent a personality to ever be regarded as a safe bet by the industry. His 1971 epic The Last Movie proved a critical and commercial disaster and his middle years were blighted by drug and alcohol abuse. He would later confess that he used cocaine in order to sober himself up for further drinking bouts.

In front of the camera, he became known for compelling, wild-eyed performances in films such as Tracks, River's Edge and Apocalypse Now. Arguably his most memorable turn came as the psychotic, helium-snorting Frank Booth in Dennis Lynch's 1986 classic Blue Velvet. "You have to let me play Frank Booth," Hopper reportedly told Lynch at the time. "Because I am Frank Booth."

After cutting his teeth at the fabled Actor's Studio in New York, he made his film debut alongside his friend James Dean in 1955's Rebel Without a Cause. He went on to work with Dean again on Giant and had a supporting role in the 1957 western Gunfight at the OK Corral. Other notable roles include The American Friend, Speed and True Romance.

The failure of The Last Movie did not quite kill off Hopper's career as a film-maker. His directing credits include the acclaimed Out of the Blue and Colors, a Los Angeles gang saga that starred Sean Penn. In later years he found a fresh lease of life as a painter, photographer and collector of modern art. He married five times and is survived by his four children.

"There are moments that I've had some real brilliance, you know," he reflected recently. "But I think they are moments. And sometimes, in a career, moments are enough."


RIP Dennis!

Internotional Times - Issue Zero

Pigeon held in India on suspicion of spying

Indian police are holding a pigeon under armed guard after it was caught on an alleged spying mission for arch rivals and neighbours Pakistan, media reported on Friday.The white-coloured bird was found by a local resident in India's Punjab state, which borders Pakistan, and taken to a police station 40 kilometres (25 miles) from the capital Amritsar.
The pigeon had a ring around its foot and a Pakistani phone number and address stamped on its body in red ink.
Police officer Ramdas Jagjit Singh Chahal told the Press Trust of India (PTI) news agency that they suspected the pigeon may have landed on Indian soil from Pakistan with a message, although no trace of a note has been found.
Officials have directed that no-one should be allowed to visit the pigeon, which police say may have been on a "special mission of spying".
The bird has been medically examined and was being kept in an air-conditioned room under police guard.
Senior officers have asked to be kept updated on the situation three times a day, PTI said.
Chahal said local pigeon fanciers in the sensitive border area had told police that Pakistani pigeons were easily identifiable as they look different from Indian ones, according to the Indian Express newspaper.

HA!

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La. scientist locates another vast oil plume in the gulf

This one's for you Spacebubs!

 E is for...elefly!

Web-obsessed South Korea father jailed for baby neglect

WTF???

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Girlz With Gunz # 104 (Richard Kern - X is Y)

Richard Kern - The Right Side of My Brain (Excerpts)


♪♫ Aunt Sally - Subete Urimono


Featuring Phew on vocals.
'Football is made up of subjective feeling, of suggestion - and, in that, Anfield is unbeatable. Put a shit hanging from a stick in the middle of this passionate, crazy stadium and there are people who will tell you it's a work of art. It's not: it's a shit hanging from a stick.' - Valdano

Saturday 29 May 2010

Jon Savage: He's Not Like Everybody Else

Essential viewing for any N.Y.C. resident who's into punk style, and specifically the spontaneous, from-the-gut creativity of its original British practitioners: "The Secret Public: Punk Montages, Photography, and Collages 1976-1981," an exhibit by Linder Sterling and Jon Savage that opens tonight at Chelsea's Steven Kasher Gallery as a part of Boo-Hooray's "pop-up/parasite" series of art shows. Sterling, in addition to being one of Morrissey's only close friends (legend has it he wrote the Smiths song "Wonderful Woman" for her), designed iconic record covers like the Buzzcocks' "Orgasm Addict" and later fronted her own band, Ludus. Savage, pictured above in the late-'70s next to a Joy Division flyer he made, wrote about the scene for Sounds, Melody Maker, and The Face, and is probably best known for his book England's Dreaming,
widely considered the definitive history of punk music. In other words, the man knows his shit. So we picked up the phone and asked him to tell us about the real legacy of Malcolm McLaren, the records you need to put on your shelves (he's DJing tonight's opening until 9:00 p.m., in case you needed another reason to go), his take on the state of modern rock music ("one huge major suckathon"), and how art helped him kick speed.
The full Q&A, and more images from the exhibition, after the jump.
Through May 23 at Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, New York, NY; 212-966-3978. Brought to you by Boo-Hooray, a "pop-up/parasite" series of art shows curated by Johan Kugelberg.
What's the biggest misconception about punk?
Everything gets boiled down to a very simplistic idea, and actually punk was extremely complex. Just look at the New York bands that were called "punk" and who played at CBGB's and what a huge diversity there was there; now people tend to think it was just the Ramones. And the same goes for British punk. People in the U.S. think of it in terms of the Sex Pistols and people with Mohicans and stupid stuff like that. And there was a lot more going on.
Page 16 of London's Outrage # 2 fanzine, Jon Savage, February 1977, 11 3/4 x 8 1/2 in.
Is this exhibit an intervention into that received wisdom?
Well, I hope so. The magazine I did with Linder [The Secret Public] came out of the Manchester punk scene, which was the most creative punk scene toward the end of '77. Punk in London had already ended that summer, in terms of it being creative and interesting, and it had become very quickly co-opted into the music industry. And the whole idea of punk in the early stages was that you could do whatever you wanted to do. If you wanted to play music, you could do it; if you wanted to do artwork, you could do it; if you wanted to go out on the street looking like a Christmas tree, you could do it. The Secret Public came out of that, and out of my friendship with the Buzzcocks... who are in fact playing this week at Irving Plaza. The magazine came out on New Hormones, which was the Buzzcocks' record label. So it was all part of a friendship and an idea of possibility.
 Buzzcocks/Magazine handbill, montage, Linder Sterling, 1978
Before coming to Manchester you studied at Cambridge.
Absolutely. I studied classics.
So how were you first swept into punk?
Before I had my academic and professional training, I was a pop fan. I was brought up in West London and from the age of nine was completely obsessed with pop music. I'm a child of the '50s, and so my parents had intense expectations: They wanted me to be a lawyer, or an accountant. I was nine when the Beatles hit in the UK, and that was it for me, really.
I got bored with hippie music in 1971. And one of the key points was going to see the Grateful Dead in '72 in the UK. And they were so bad. I went, and I wanted to be beamed up, I wanted to be taken to the furthest reaches of the cosmos, and instead I got fucking country rock. It was awful. And bad versions of "Johnny B. Goode." It was so lame. And so I went back into hard rock; a big group then was the Flamin' Groovies, and their album Teenage Head. And I liked glam rock. In '75 we started to get the first reports of the New York scene, and the first Patti Smith album, and then the first Ramones album, and it was obvious something was happening.
Linder[1].jpg
Montage from SheShe, [issued with cassette], Linder Sterling, Birrer, 1981, 11 5/8 x 8 3/8 in.
You're best known as a writer, but this exhibit shows that you were an artist and photographer in your own right.
It's all about specialization, and people don't like you being able to move across fields. Writing's my core work. I'm a child of pop music: I grew up with those groovy magazines, with pictures and text, the music press in London in the '60s, and then Rolling Stone when it was great in the late '60s, which had great montages by Satty in every issue. So the idea that you combined visuals and words was very much on my mind. The simple A4 format of the fanzine was incredibly liberating, and it tied in with the onset of the Xerox machine. It all really worked. In the UK at the time you could buy the really early Beat books, and they had these great montage magazines, these great William Burroughs cut-up magazines, by people like Claude Pelieu and Norman O. Mustill.
This was a direct influence on The Secret Public, then?
Well, montage is a great form. Because it's a way of condensing a lot of information. And that's a lot of what punk was about. Punk was about acceleration, dealing with information overload. And this was thirty years ago; a lot of things that punk was dealing with have now of course happened. It's very strange for me, in my fifties, to be living in the future that was prophesized when I was a young man. And that's what's happened.
In The Secret Public there was a lot of sex stuff, which I'm very pleased about. Because Linder's stuff is just fantastic, all that kind of protofeminist sex stuff I just love. In my case it was all to do with being a gay man at a time when it wasn't so great to be gay, and also having this particular view of the prevailing idea of masculinity, which I still think is pretty poor and pretty thin... The conventional idea of masculinity—sports and beer—it's pretty sad, really. I mean, it doesn't mean you have to be gay to like more than that.
LInder-1.jpg
The Masculine Principle Has Gone Far Enough, montage, Jon Savage, 1977
For montage, your instrument of choice wasn't a brush or a camera. It was... a scalpel?
Yes. One of the times I was doing montage, I took speed, and I was listening to the Television album, Marquee Moon, and I had a scalpel, and I was so out of it on speed that I was rolling the scalpel between two of my fingers. That was the last time I ever did speed. That's my memory of the scalpel.
The scalpel got you off speed.
Thank you.
What did the name Secret Public allude to?
It's that very English idea that the Puritans brought to the U.S., of hiding everything in closets, sexuality in particular. And punk was a lot about wearing very sexually aggressive clothes—that was what McLaren and Westwood were promoting out of the Sex shop. The whole thing with punk was, We're gonna lift up the stone, and we're gonna show you all the beasts that are crawling around underneath. Because it's fucking time.
Those were your politics, at the time?
Yeah. It was like, Britain is fucked. It's involved in this ridiculous kind of nostalgia for the war, and for the '40s and '50s. It's all a fucking nightmare, and this is what it's really like... and let's move into the present and the future, please. Huge areas of London and Manchester were derelict at the time. And out of that dereliction you had a kind of freedom. If you were young and stupid, because you didn't know any better. You had this kind of playground. You didn't need money.
You were very much part of a culture of independently produced, D.I.Y. magazines. How do you feel about online publishing?
I struggle with it. Part of me is very old-school, in that I love the physical thing. It's like stocks and shares. There's something to me not quite real about it, because I can't touch it... My thing with the internet is very simple: It's much harder to make an impact on the internet. 'Cause there's so damn much of it. One of the reasons punk made such an impact was all to do with focus and scarcity. And I can't see that happening again. My whole point with those pictures I took in North London [featured in the exhibit], they were all of complete dereliction, and then suddenly the last two frames, you're underneath this motorway, and there's this graffiti that says The Clash. There seemed to be absolutely nothing in London at that point except two or three punk rock groups. And they were the only signs of life. Scarcity and focus: It's very difficult to see how you're going to get that back again.
You came out of punk, and wrote about it for several magazines throughout the late-'70s and '80s. And yet your first book was about the Kinks.
Well, it's a question of being a young writer and being offered a book. But I'd known and loved the Kinks since I was a kid. When I was 10 I saw them playing "You Really Got Me" on television and I couldn't believe people could look so fantastic, and be so girly, and make such a noise. And The Clash and Pistols sang songs by all those '60s mod-era pop groups, like the Who and the Kinks and the Small Faces.
What are your five essential pre-punk records—the ones that laid the groundwork for what was to come?
You'd have to have something from the U.K. mid-'60s, something garage-y. "I'm Not Like Everybody Else," by the Kinks; or "Substitute" by the Who.
Then you'd have to know about the whole Velvets/Stooges/MC5 axis. I've just been rediscovering "I'm Sick of You" by the Stooges, which is completely awesome and vile, and which is based on a riff by the Yardbirds, from "Happening Ten Years Time Ago."
Then you've got the whole Nuggets thing, '60s American garage. The intensity of it. The 13th Floor Elevators. "Psychotic Reaction," by the Count Five.
'66 you had all these records that were really nasty. "Seven and Seven Is" by Love, "Have You Seen Your Mother Baby?" by the Rolling Stones, they're all completely insane records, very kind of apocalyptic. And then at the end of the year you had "Good Vibrations" and the whole start of hippie culture, which was great in another way.
You'd have to have glam rock, and I'd go for "Dynamite" by Mud, which is killer. Check it on YouTube... There are a couple of Sex Pistols guitar riffs in there. [laughs]
Also the Sweet, "Ballroom Blitz" and "Teenage Rampage."
And then you have the weird, fringe pre-punk stuff from all those insane people in America making insane records, and the ultimate of that would have to be the Electric Eels' "Agitated."
Oh, and the first Pere Ubu single: "Heart of Darkness" and "Final Solution."
Both bands from Cleveland.
Cleveland! For Brits, Cleveland is real weird shit. I mean, New York is kind of understandable, and London's got a big thing about New York, a good thing. But yeah, Cleveland, "the mistake on the lake." What's that all about?
Is there anything going on today in music that's interesting you?
It's difficult. It's definitely an age thing. Most modern rock I just cannot listen to; I think it sucks. People like Arcade Fire... suck. What are all these men doing with these old-guys' beards, and they're in their late-twenties, and they've got these horrible brown beards that are a different color from their hairdos? What is that all about? It's retarded. It's boys trying to be men. One huge major suckathon, I'm sorry. It just doesn't rock. Rock music has got to have that primal urge in it. It's gotta make you want to drive your car 130 miles per hour, take class-A drugs, have bad sex, and just be irresponsible and vile.
Pop music has become a victim of its own success. When I was a kid it was definitely marginal, it was for the weirdos and the freaks and the mutants and the people who wanted to be different. And now it's just the same as everything else. So I tend to listen to a lot of electronic music. Because it sounds modern. You know, like it was made in 2010.
How would you summarize Malcolm McLaren's legacy?
Well, without Malcolm: None of us, in our present form. Terribly simple. We wouldn't have been doing all this. He just started everything in the U.K. He was the catalyst, he was the spark. End of story.
Andy Comer @'GQ'
(Thanx Stan!)

In memorium

In Memoria e Amicizia
In Memory and Friendship:
Rocco Acerra
Bruno Balli
Alfons Bos
Giancarlo Bruschera
Andrea Casula
Giovanni Casula
Nino Cerullo
Willy Chielens
Giuseppina Conti
Dirk Daenecky
Dionisio Fabbro
Jacques François
Eugenio Gagliano
Francesco Galli
Giancarlo Gonnelli
Alberto Guarini
Giovacchino Landini
Roberto Lorentini
Barbara Lusci
Franco Martelli
Loris Messore
Gianni Mastrolaco
Sergio Bastino Mazzino
Luciano Rocco Papaluca
Luigi Pidone
Bento Pistolato
Patrick Radcliffe
Domenico Ragazzi
Antonio Ragnanese
Claude Robert
Mario Ronchi
Domenico Russo
Tarcisio Salvi
Gianfranco Sarto
Giuseppe Spalaore
Mario Spanu
Tarcisio Venturin
Jean Michel Walla
Claudio Zavaroni
RIP - You'll Never Walk Alone.

Heysel football disaster remembered 25 years on

Archive footage of the Heysel clashes
On 29 May, 1985, 39 football fans died during violent clashes between Liverpool and Juventus supporters at the European Cup final in Brussels.
As a result of the disaster at Heysel Stadium, UEFA banned English clubs from taking part in European football for five years, with Liverpool serving an extra year.
For lifelong Liverpool fan Chris Rowland, the events of that night are as clear today as they were 25 years ago.
"I remember all of it," he said. "The memory has stayed crystal clear in my mind."
More than 60,000 Liverpool and Juventus fans were at the rundown stadium when violence erupted about an hour before kick-off.
A retaining wall separating the opposing fans collapsed as the Italian club's supporters tried to escape from Liverpool followers.
Thirty-two Italians, four Belgians, two French and a man from Northern Ireland died while hundreds of fans were injured.
Mr Rowland, who was not involved in the violence, was aged 28 at the time and regularly travelled with friends throughout Europe to support Liverpool.
"It started out like all the European trips," he said. "There was no reason to suspect it would be very different to any of the others."
But when Mr Rowland, now aged 53, arrived at the stadium half an hour before the match, it became clear that something was amiss.
"We saw people charging over the wall and charging towards us," he explained. "Our first thought was that they were attacking us.
"We saw chaos around the turnstiles and the shabby state of the ground."
He said he heard a sound similar to that of a heavy metal gate clanging - which he later realised must have been the wall falling.
Belguim riot police during the Heysel disaster  
Mr Rowland, who lives in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, became aware that someone had died later that evening.
But it was not until reading the morning newspapers the following day that he realised the real extent of what had happened.
"It was incredulous that something of that scale could have happened," Mr Rowland added.
"You cannot begin to understand the enormity of it. It was awful, absolutely awful."
Inside the stadium's dressing room waiting to play was Liverpool defender Gary Gillespie.
'Completely useless' Mr Gillespie said he and his teammates had no idea what was happening.
"We we very much cocooned in that dressing room," he said. "We did not really know what the situation was outside.
"As we were getting changed in the dressing room there was the usual banter, obviously the usual nerves because it was such a big occasion, and then we got conflicting reports about what had happen."
Following the tragedy, there was widespread criticism of the Liverpool fans and English football supporters in general, who had gained a reputation for hooliganism in previous years.
UEFA imposed the ban on English clubs and in 1989, 14 Liverpool fans were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter at a five-month trial in Belgium.
They were given three-year sentences - although half the terms were suspended.
There has never been an official inquiry into the incident to find out exactly what happened.
Some people claimed Juventus supporters provoked Liverpool fans by hurling stones and other missiles, others blamed the lack of police presence, poor organisation and a decrepit stadium.
Italian journalist Giancarlo Galavotti, London correspondent for the Gazzetta dello Sport newspaper, was at the Heysel Stadium on 29 May, 1985.
He described the Belgian policing of the event as "completely useless".
"I could really tell, let's say 15 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour, before the fatal clash occurred that it was a very serious and dangerous situation that was developing," he said.
"Irrespective of what was the behaviour of some sections of the Liverpool fans, if Belgian police had been adept in policing the situation, like the Italian police were the year earlier in Rome, I do not think there would have been such a tragedy happening in Brussels in 1985."
Liverpool supporter Graham Agg, 48, from Netherton, Liverpool, also criticised the Belgian police and the state of the stadium.
Juventus fans at Heysel Staduim in 1985 
 "How they got permission to hold a European Cup final was beyond belief," he said. "It was falling down. There was no security.
"The terrace was crumbling - you could pick up bricks. It was a disgrace.
"In Liverpool's history it is one of the dark days, but a very small minority caused the trouble.
"Even when they did cause the trouble, they did not intend for people to die. If it had been held in a proper stadium it would never have happened."
The game eventually went ahead, despite objections from both managers, and Juventus won 1-0 with a second-half penalty.
The Heysel Stadium, built in 1930, was demolished and replaced by the all-seater Stade Roi Baudouin.
A plaque to remember the 39 people killed was unveiled at Liverpool's Anfield stadium on Wednesday.
A two minutes' silence was held at the city's town hall on Friday when the bells were rung 39 times - a gesture that is being repeated on Saturday. 
Katie Dawson @'BBC' 

BP Engineers Making Little Headway on Leaking Well

21C Magazine’s Ashley Crawford – Mediapunk interview

Ashley Crawford
Richard Metzger called 21C his favorite magazine of the 90s and “The most unabashedly intellectual and forward-thinking journal that I have ever seen, anywhere.” Editor Ashley Crawford joined the magazine in 1990 when the magazine was still a publication of Australian Commission For The Future “a comparatively short-lived governmental entity.” Ashley took the magazine international with the help of publishing house Gordon & Breach in 1994. The magazine continued in this form until 1999. After a short lived online revival helmed by Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) in the early 00s, the magazine went back into long-term hiatus.
Now it’s back in a new digital form. Ashley was kind enough to answer a few questions about the magazine’s past, present, and future for the inaugural Mediapunk interview.
You can read the magazine online here or follow them on Twitter here.
How did you get involved in 21C? Were you the editor from the beginning or were you brought on later? Were you involved the Australian Commission For The Future before 21C?
OK, strange history. 21C was already up and running and had, from memory, two editors before me. I was running an independent arts/culture magazine called Tension. It was actually in the process of folding when the Commission for the Future approached me to take over. The Commission was a government body and the magazine was funded accordingly. I worked under the government structure editing the magazine from 1990-93 in that version and even then, although it had a strong Australian flavor, it was beginning to tackle cyberspace, information overload, virtual reality etc.
In 1994 I was approached by a Swiss-based international company, Gordon & Breach, who wanted to start an international art magazine – World Art. I accepted but didn’t really want to let go of 21C and so organized a take-over of the magazine. Accordingly I ended up editing and publishing a revised version of the title from 1994 to 1999. Given we were suddenly international in scope I made the most of it and approached folk I’d been a fan of for some time, amongst them such people as J.G. Ballard, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, Mark Dery, Andrew Ross, R.U. Sirius, Claudia Springer, McKenzie Wark, Darren Tofts, Michael Moorcock, Thurston Moore, Erik Davis and others. To my utter amazement they all responded enthusiastically.
How different was the 1990-93 version from the 1994-1999 version?
Extremely. The earlier version was extremely parochial with a strong Australian flavor. We changed the format and structure entirely. The earlier version had a strong socio-political flavor whereas the second version, while maintaining some of that eg; covering Noam Chomsky, tended towards the more speculative which you can see in the selection on that archive site up now. The posthuman, cyberpunk etc.
In the newer material we tend to be going weirdly post-cyber. Where once it was replicants and cyborgs now it seems to be zombies. Where once it was the glittering on-line (albeit wonderfully gritty) world of Neuromancer and Snow Crash, today it seems to be the blasted wilderness of Cormac McCarthy, Brian Evenson and Brian Conn or the strange, fantastical but distinctly visceral rituals of Ben Marcus or Matthew Derby.
What was your background before 21C?
Actually I was trained as an old-fashioned reporter on a newspaper before the days of training in universities – trained on the street as it were. Never attended uni although I’ve lectured in innumerable colleges around the world. Age 17 saw my first slaughtered body on a police rounds job – a poor women cut into a million pieces – long story. Probably did insurmountable damage to a young mind. This was, mind you, 1979, and being threatened by the mafia etc, was part of the job. Fear, adrenalin, alcohol, nicotine and speed were part of the job. Then I got assigned to writing on rock music where fear, adrenalin, alcohol, nicotine and speed were ESSENTIAL to the job. Try snorting cocaine with Ian Drury, trying to out-drink Mark E.Smith or getting thrown into jail with Nick Cave as starting points…
But I was always attracted to the mind-games of folk like Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard. Then along came the cyberpunks and through 21C I had the opportunity to meet and/or correspond with some incredible minds; Ballard, Acker, Gibson, etc. There is a kind of adrenalin / challenge to addressing such folk – sadly they’re rarities in our world.
In the early 00s, Paul D. Miller edited two issues of a new, online edition of 21C – what happened with that, and how did the new version come about? Why now?
The DJ Spooky combo came about when a long-term 21C contributor, Mark Dery, invited me on-board as executive editor of a magazine he’d taken editorship of called Artbyte in New York in 2001 shortly after 21C had died in its print-form. Dery had fantastic ambitions for Artbyte but unfortunately the publisher was, to say the least, eccentric. We didn’t stand a chance.
Paul was an contributor to Artbyte. When 21C died he asked if I would be happy for him to try and get it running on-line and I said why not? But of course Paul’s busily running around the world being DJ Spooky and simply couldn’t put the energy into it to do anything but maintain a fairly token presence.
Ever since 21C passed away people have been asking me for back issues or how to source specific articles. It’s been driving me nuts. Also I keep coming across things that I’d love to see covered more thoroughly. Most recently, the plethora of writers of decidedly post-cyberpunk dystopic fiction that I’ve tentatively dubbed Apocalypse Noir in the current issue.
21C Apocalypse Noir
What have you been up to since 21C folded?
Predominantly freelancing in the realms of visual art and travel, soaking up alien cultures in as real a way as is possible in the wired world. Been spending a fair bit of time with Australian indigenous people in the bush, discovering their totally unique culture(s). A lot of newspaper and magazine work.
Magazines and other publications have been rushing iPad apps out the door. Will we be seeing 21C in the App Store?
We’re looking at that right now. I’d love to see it as an App. But I’d also love to see it as hard copy. We have a lot to sort out and, as Mark Dery has pointed out, at the moment it’s just white heterosexual grumpy men featured, so we have to address that urgently.
And on the subject of the iPad – do you see the future of magazines in e-readers of various types?
I still cherish the notion of magazines – and more particularly books – as object. 21C was fairly renowned for its design and illustration and I have yet to see an equivalent on-screen. I’m also concerned that reading substantial articles/essays on-screen is somewhat tiring – maybe that’s generational – but a great deal of what is published on line is intentionally brief – attention spans are getting slighter and slighter to the point that a celebrity telling the world that she burped after breakfast is a hot ticket on Twitter. I’m more of a fan of the approach taken by Harper’s or The New Yorker – not necessarily the subject matter, but the intelligence and effort put into the research and argument. The kind of approach you see in 21C by such writers as Mark Dery and Erik Davis. It’s all too rare in this age.
Can you do that on an iPad? We’ll know soon enough I hope.
I was going to say – there’s something of a new renaissance in indie magazines right now – stuff like Dodgem Logic, Coilhouse, and Steampunk Magazine. They’re all quite successful in their own right, though I’m not sure how many people’s livelihood each of them is able to support. And then there’s stuff like Lulu and Mag Cloud that enable people to get into print with very low risk. So it’s a surprisingly exciting time for print.
Are there any magazines coming out right now that you’re fond of?
I love parts of lots of magazines but few of them have the depth that I hanker for. A part of that is the twitter age of low concentration spans. A part of it is lack of first-hand training. A part of it is a lack of decent pay – few writers can afford to take weeks off to do decent research. I wish something like Steampunk or Coilhouse (or 21C for that matter) had the resources of the New Yorker… we can but dream…
One issue of Coilhouse actually had a piece that had originally been published online years before called “Dark Miracle” by Joshua Ellis (still available here). It was a piece of long form journalism that was “crowdfunded” (before the term had been invented, I think, and way before Kickstarter). I think that’s probably where longer form journalism is headed, especially for the indies – it’s gonna have to be paid for by someone in advance. Two of my big interests right now are “journalist as brand” and “journalism as a service” (as opposed to product).
I can only speak for myself here, but I have a terrible attention span – I’ve always got dozens of browser tabs open, I’m constantly on Twitter and I was a smart phone “early adopter.” But I still read long form journalism (from places like The New Yorker and The Atlantic and Vanity Fair) and even entire books on my laptop and Blackberry. It usually takes me a while, because I’m dividing up my attention, but I do it. So I do think there’s at least some audience there.
Speaking of distractions – have a read of this – I think it’s pertinent to our discussion.
Again only speaking for myself: I’ve been having better luck focusing on reading on mobile devices – my Blackberry and my iPod Touch. There’s just less less stuff going on on them, and I can curl up on the couch and read. That’s something I think is encouraging about dedicated devices like the Kindle – they should make it easier to focus on reading longer pieces. I’m not that worried about arguments about those sorts of devices being “passive” – sometimes it’s best to be passive for a little while.
I did notice something this morning that may be pertinent. It’s my habit to have a read of the New York Times every morning on-line. This morning there was a large and shifting bright red Coca Cola add to one side. It made it impossible to concentrate on the text. Ads in old-style newspapers don’t move and, although they may work subliminally, they’re fairly easy to ignore. The Coke ad on-line was a constant distraction making it impossible to ignore and, indeed, making it impossible to complete an article and after a minute or so I gave up and quit the NY Times altogether for the day. If this is the future of on-line advertising then not only print is dead, so is reading.
What advice would you give young professional journalists? What advice would you give “citizen journalists” in terms of learning the ropes?
I’ve done quite a lot of mentoring for younger writers in recent years. Almost all of them seemed bogged down in an academic approach where each and every word seemed to pose a problem rather than a pleasure. We seem to have two extremes – one is university speak which is unbearable, the other is border-line illiteracy. The first rule of thumb is GET YOUR FACTS RIGHT. The second is the old maxim, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE AND WHY. Don’t assume all your readers know who or what you are referring to.
Klint Finley @'MediaPunk

Dark Miracle by Joshua Ellis

There’s an old story that in the hours before dawn on July 16th, 1945, a young woman named Georgia Green was being driven back to school at the University of New Mexico by her sister Margaret and her brother-in-law Joe. Suddenly, she saw a bright flash of light, and she gripped Joe’s arm hard enough to make him swerve the car. “What’s that light?” she asked.
The thing is, Georgia Green was blind.
At that moment, some fifty miles away, a tall, gaunt man in a porkpie hat was also staring at the light, through a pair of darkened welder’s glasses. He was the architect of Georgia Green’s dark miracle, and he was very, very tired — as tired, perhaps, as anyone can be and still move and breathe. It had been a long road coming out to this empty desert spot, which he called Trinity. It had been a long war.
Some of the men around him cheered. Some of them wept. A few, mostly scientists, were quietly sick in the sand beyond the dim lights of their camp. But he just stood and watched the great glowing mushroom cloud that rose in the darkness like a judgment from one angry god or another.
I am become Death, thought Robert Oppenheimer, remembering an ancient Hindu text. I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
* * *
Here are the facts: at fifteen seconds before 5:30 in the morning, Mountain Standard Time, on July 16th, 1945, the first atomic bomb was detonated, at a site code-named Trinity. It was the culmination of almost two and a half years of intensive work, done primarily by a group of scientists and engineers in a secret city roughly a hundred and fifty miles north of Trinity, called Los Alamos. The project’s director was a brilliant and depressive Berkeley physicist named Robert Oppenheimer.
On August 6th, a bomb called “Little Boy” was dropped by a bomber named the Enola Gay on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, another bomb — “Fat Boy” — was dropped on Nagasaki. The combined death toll is estimated to be between 100,000 and 220,000 people, possibly much higher if later deaths from radiation exposure are counted. Almost all of the casualties were civilian.
The bombings had replaced Operation Downfall, a planned invasion by Allied forces of Japan. Estimates by the American Secretary of War suggested that such an invasion would most likely result in as many as fourteen million casualties — most of them Japanese. This was the justification for the bombings; horrible as they were, it was felt by many in the Allied chain of command that the alternative was far worse. The use of atomic bombs, they were sure, would cause the Japanese Emperor Hirohito to surrender.
They were right. On August 14, 1945, Hirohito surrendered to the Allies, ending World War II — a war which had caused an estimated sixty-two million deaths in fifty-one countries around the world.
Immediately after the bombing, many of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project — including Oppenheimer himself — urged American President Harry Truman to share the bomb with the world, giving control of atomic weapons to a transnational organization of some kind, to prevent any one nation from using atomic weapons.
Truman demurred…but unbeknownst to him, a spy at Los Alamos named Klaus Fuchs had already given detailed plans for the Trinity bomb to the Soviet Union.
And so the Cold War began.
Continue reading


An interview w/ Richard Kern


One of the premier visual stylists of the No-Wave scene in 1980s New York, filmmaker and photographer Richard Kern worked with musicians and performers like Lydia Lunch, Henry Rollins, Kembra Pfahler and Lung Leg, a.k.a. Elizabeth Carr — who, most famously, appeared on the Kern-shot cover for Sonic Youth’s 1986 album EVOL.

Kern now photographs full-time, producing pastel-hued, soft-pornographic nudes of nubile young women for publications like VICE, who calls him their “favourtie girlie photographer” and hosts a show on their broadband network entitled Shot by Kern. EYE WEEKLY caught up with him for an espresso at the Drake during his brief artist residency at Studio Gallery, which is also currently hosting a from-the-vaults show of his work, including a film series.

What is a good photo to you?
I know it when I see it. It has to be a little bit weird. At the show, there’s only one photo you could call “sexy.” Most of the stuff is just people standing there, doing things without clothes on. Well, they have panties on or whatever, but it’s not like they’re adopting sex poses.

It’s impossible not to notice the marked shift in style that happened in your work in the early ’90s. It’s like you became a different person.
It was 1988, around there. It was when I got off drugs. Everything lightened up quite a bit. The films still had humour, but most of my aggression had lifted.

What’s your opinion on the remarkable lifespan those films from the ’80s have had?
It’s extremely weird! I think it was a really lucky time to be doing them. It was right at the beginning of the video age, and I put them out on video, so people who were looking for something interesting had alternatives — you could see something different.

You’re associated with the No Wave and Cinema of Transgression movements. Was making art for you just a by-product of being a listless young person, or was there any intentionality to it?
It’s more like a “fuck you” to everybody. That was the big statement. Back then my favourite band was the Sex Pistols: everything was shit; fuck everybody; you’re all stupid. And then I stopped drugs and it was like, "Wait, I’m stupid!" Except, people still identify with those films.

You collaborated with Lydia Lunch, and those films [The Right Side of My Brain, Fingered] have dated very well. Would you say she was approaching art-making in the same way? What was your working relationship like?
The reason those films stand out is because of her. She’s in them and her personality is all over them. The second one, Fingered, was made in direct response to The Right Side of My Brain, which got bad reviews. People were like, “What is this shit? This is misogynist!” And we were like, “You think that’s bad? Wait until you see the next movie.” We wanted people going in and expecting a Maya Deren film or something and leaving totally disturbed.

There are a lot of young women now who like and identify with those films.
Yeah. It wasn’t that way at the beginning. It was the exact opposite.

Lung Leg has become an underground post-feminist icon. Does that seem strange to you? Do you feel the burden or responsibility of that?
No, I don’t. It’s just that it seemed like everyone else finally figured out what we thought we were doing. Ideas get into society and mutate and affect people’s opinions. Video is really powerful for that kind of stuff.


But did you ever have any kind of feminist intentions in making those films?
My main intention was, “I’ll make these films, people will watch them and I’ll fuck up their heads.” I always thought, this is a Trojan Horse: they think they’re coming to see something cool and it’s gonna really fuck them up. Just your basic anarchist manifesto.

A lot of your recent photography is notable for its extreme prettiness, softness, exquisiteness.
It’s the same stuff; it just doesn’t have that darkness in it. And jokes! A lot of jokes. If you watch [my film] Manhattan Love Suicides it has a lot of the same jokes that are in some of the photos. The girl with her head in the toilet, that kind of thing.

Aside from getting clean, does that aesthetic shift have to do with getting more successful, with having more resources at your fingertips?
I pretty much live the exact same lifestyle as I did then. I’ve had a couple of good years with photography, and I can actually make a living at it, but there aren’t that many photographers who get rich. When I got off drugs I was so broke a friend of mine was letting me stay at their house. And the only thing I could afford was black-and-white photos, so that’s what I shot.

How has underground culture changed since you started working?
I know underground culture is out there somewhere right now but I don’t know what it is. I don’t do Facebook or Twitter. I’m on the ’net nonstop but, and it may be a stupid thing to say, but I feel like Facebook is like joining a fraternity. It’s just a giant group of people saying, “Hey, let’s all do this.” The challenge to me now would be to somehow get outside of all of that stuff, where nobody is. All I know is that if there’s something you want to do you’ve just got to do it, all the time. People who are making good art aren’t sitting around on Facebook all day.

Why are you so private and exclusive when you do your photography work?
I think a lot of people are surprised when they work with me that it’s not some crazy shoot. It has to be quiet. It has to be small. And when I do do something that’s commercial and there are a lot of people around, the first thing I say is “Don’t talk. If you’ve got anything to say to me, say it outside.” Because I’m just walking around thinking. It’s about me and the model.

Do you keep touch with a lot of the models you work with?
Yes, quite a few. I don’t hang out with them, but everyone has email accounts. Big shock, though, when I see someone I shot 20 years ago. Big shock when I look in the mirror! Lung Leg, for example: you just think of this 18-year-old girl with this really beautiful face. She doesn’t look quite like that any more. She still has the exact same style. But it looks like she’s had a hard life.

David Balzar @'Eye Weekly'

Currently reading...

When shorts were short...



My Nana (god bless her little cotton sox) brought me this Liverpool strip when she came out to Australia back in 1987. The first problem was that I was no longer 12 years old! 
When the replacement arrived, which I still have, it truly was quite astonishing how small the shorts were!

For Stacey XXX

A new translation of Dante's "La Commedia" by the avatar of no-wave cinema, Amos Poe


As some of you may know, Amos Poe is one of the leading figures of the no wave cinema movement and is considered by many to be the father of the modern indie American cinema. (see Celine Danhier's "Blank City"). His films include: "The Blank Generation", "Unmade Beds", "The Foreigner", "Subway Riders", "Alphabet City", "Rocket Gibraltar", "Frogs For Snakes", "Steve Earle:Just An American Boy" and "Empire II".
CHECK OUT THE NEW FRAMES!
His current project LA COMMEDIA di Amos Poe is inspired by Dante Alighieri’s 700 year-old literary masterpiece “La Divina Commedia” and Edward Muybridge’s 19th century breakthrough “The Horse In Motion”, arguably the first “motion picture”.

HA!

(Thanx BillT!)
Mickey Scouse
Shouldn't laugh but...

Getting your fix at the doctor’s office

Lessons from the mephedrone ban

On 17 March I was giving a lecture in Barcelona when I received a call from CNN. They wanted my reactions to the international press conference that the Lincolnshire police were holding on the deaths of two young men that they claimed had taken mephedrone (the new synthetic drug also known as "meow meow" or "M-cat"). At that point I realised that all sense had left the ongoing debate on the question of the harms and control of this drug.
Why were the police holding a press conference when they had no idea if the men had taken any drugs? Why implicate mephedrone when the only established facts were that deaths occurred in the context of a heavy alcohol binge that went on into the early hours of the morning? As a stimulant, mephedrone is likely to reduce not increase the risk of alcohol-related respiratory depression (suppression of breathing). There was little evidence at the time of serious harms from mephedrone use, despite it having become almost as widely used as MDMA (ecstasy). Moreover, the earlier epidemic overdose use in Israel had not revealed significant harms and few if any mortalities.

The "media madness" that followed the Scunthorpe event probably tipped the balance in the decision to ban mephedrone which was enacted by a depleted ACMD in an intemperate and rushed manner, and which lead to the resignation of several more members and a coruscating editorial in the Lancet.

It has been revealed today that my suspicions were correct – there was no evidence that either of the two had taken mephedrone. It appears they took some other sedative drug – probably methadone – which is highly dangerous in combination with high levels of alcohol.
It is probably too late now to reverse the government decision to make mephedrone Class B but we do need to learn the lessons from the debacle of its being banned on limited evidence and media hysteria. The first lesson is that the police and other public bodies should not make pronouncements and certainly not hold press conferences on mere conjecture or hearsay; the public interest is not served by inciting media attention in this way. In addition the media should apply some traditional journalistic principles such as evidence collecting and testing and allow the scientific process to take place before claiming harms of drugs, especially new legal highs.
There are lessons for government and their advisers too. They should have the courage to resist media hysteria and let the truth drive decision-making. Moreover there should be proper research investment in the science of new drugs. Quite frankly, it is an insult to the country that the ACMD report on mephedrone didn't have some basic pharmacological facts about the drug, even though it had been under review since last summer and the data could have been obtained within a few days or weeks at little expense.
What we now require is a guaranteed minimum set of core pharmacological and behavioural data to be acquired for any new drug that is being considered for classification and control in the UK, before a decision to ban it is made. The new Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs (ISCD) is currently developing a set of guidelines for this that we hope the government will endorse.
The whole mephedrone debacle illustrates what has been known for many years – there is a real need for a new approach to the drug laws. The 1971 MD Act is 40 years old, and in its current classification system is fatally flawed and not fit for purpose. In this new world where drugs may be invented one day and sold over the internet the next, there needs to be a fundamental revision or better still a completely new approach to drug classification.
Finally there is a personal lesson from the Scunthorpe deaths to young people who drink and take drugs. Alcohol itself is very toxic (killing by acute poisoning, hundreds of young people each year through respiratory failure) and these actions are magnified when in combination with other drugs that suppress breathing such as opiates (heroin, morphine, methadone) and GHB/GBL. If in doubt, don't drink and drug.
David Nutt @'The Guardian'

What did I do wrong?


I don't know where to start!

How The U.S. Government Killed The Safest Car Ever Built

Happy Birthday Anna XXX

Teenagers' deaths 'NOT caused by mephedrone'