Sunday 26 September 2010
An extract from Paul Kelly's introduction to 'How To Make Gravy'
In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself inside a tent of mirrors. Ahead lay a labour of trouble. All around, a thronging darkness. A deep slumber had caused me to stray, and to go forward was the only way back.
Six weeks previously, in October 2004, my manager Rob had rung to say the Spiegeltent was coming to Melbourne for the summer. Would I do some shows? I'd played in the tent before, at the Edinburgh Festival. Built by Belgians in 1920 of wood and canvas, and decorated with mirrors, velvet, brocade and leaded glass, it travels around the world hosting cabaret shows. Spiegel is Flemish for mirror, and the mirrors in the booths and on poles all around are the main feature, multiplying the audience in the intimate circular space. The staff like to tell you that Marlene Dietrich performed there back in the day. It's a fun place to play, fits around three hundred people. They walk in with a different kind of buzz, like children at the circus.
'They've suggested you put together a show you wouldn't do elsewhere,' said Rob. 'You know, an exclusive. They'll give you a few nights.'
I said I'd think about it, and not long afterwards found myself awake in the middle of the night with an idea fully formed in my brain: I know! I'll sing a hundred of my songs in alphabetical order over four nights. Twenty-five songs a night, each night a different song list. I called Rob the next morning before I had time to talk myself out of it, wrote a blurb for the Spiegeltent's program and started a list.
Preparing for and performing that first A–Z season was like running a marathon. I'd written close to three hundred songs in the decades since I started out, but had lost touch with many of them. I had to relearn words and chords as well as work on pared-back arrangements that would sound good without the colour and rhythm of a band. Some songs I had lost touch with due to natural attrition. I no longer had a connection to them, and couldn't sing them in a true way any more. Their faults outweighed their virtues. Clunky rhymes, false conceits, banal verses. They'd worked for me once, but, badly made, had long since worn out. Those songs wouldn't come back.
Others, however, had been neglected due to the performer's eternal problem – balancing the old and the new. Your audience have paid their money and want to hear their favourites. So inside you, two people are at war: the stern artist who wants to keep his art fresh, testing out new and obscure material, and the needy show-off who wants to get over right here, right now to the audience in front of him. To harness that hunger in the room and give it satisfaction. And so release yourself and them.
My strategy with the band had been to rotate the songs, the familiar and the unfamiliar. So we had a set each night that gave us a kick to play and also included enough songs to keep the audience happy. But over the course of a tour, a set would evolve that worked really well and we'd tend to stick to it, with only minor tinkering.
This meant that perfectly good songs weren't getting a run often enough. I was like the coach of a sporting team with a huge squad, relying too much on his stars, proven match-day winners. Meanwhile talented players languished on the bench, some for so long that they didn't turn up to training any more.
The decision to field four separate teams over four nights changed all that. By the end of the first season I realised I was onto something. The audiences had enjoyed these shows in a different way. They felt they were part of a game. Some came one night, some two or three, some all four. Those who'd come every night exchanged addresses with some of their fellow 'completists', previously strangers but now bonded as if they'd walked the Kokoda Trail together. Others said to me, 'Will you do it again? We came on night three but we'll pick another night next time.'
Next time? The last thing I wanted to think about was a next time as I headed home to lie down for a couple of days. But there was a next time. Then another and another. The memory feat became easier and my fingers began to know where to go without stumbling; I was no longer searching for old friends who'd dropped off the radar. I'd held a reunion and they'd all come, and now we were keeping in touch regularly. I'd found the gift that keeps on giving.
Right from the start, I realised the shows needed theatricalising, something to spruce up the doggedness of one man singing a list. So I decided to add some storytelling around the songs for variety, and not being a natural raconteur, wrote and memorised a script. Guests joined me onstage now and then, including my nephew Dan Kelly playing guitar. His role grew larger over time as I took the shows to other cities and countries. The performances were recorded with a view to releasing them eventually as a CD collection, and I began to imagine a book to go with it.
I went back to my show notes, put them next to the song lyrics and let my mind brew. I wanted to find a key I could turn, to feel a little click that would set me writing in a new way. Over time I found a series of keys, some to big rooms, some to little rooms, some to dark cupboards. Many days I was locked out of the house altogether.
Before too long a mongrel beast emerged. Was I writing an idiosyncratic history of music, a work diary or a hymn to dead friends? There were lists, letters, quotes, confessions, essays and road stories. Could I get them all to fit? Could I make the architecture sing? And what kind of megalomaniac would assume that setting his lyrics down and writing commentary around them – a kind of Midrash – would be interesting to others?
Just your everyday writer kind of megalomaniac, I suppose. The kind that says, Homer sang of heroes and so shall I. Of all the good people who travelled with me, who shared the dark hours and sweet moments, my twentieth- and 21st-century chums whom the gods neither helped nor hindered, I'll sing. Of those who helped me make the sounds I couldn't make on my own, the sounds that make me swoon, I'll sing. Of those I never met who sang to me across space and time, I'll sing. And hope my song becomes a charnel house, a place for those not yet born to visit, where my companions and I will remain strewn among each other, long after our days are done.
The kind of dreamer who hopes to make a new kind of book for new machines. A book for the ears as well as the eyes. A book that sings and talks and plays.
The kind of dreamer who hopes to make a new kind of book for new machines. A book for the ears as well as the eyes. A book that sings and talks and plays.
The kind of man who, appalled at his poor memory, throughout his life and in the middle of his life – though who's to say it's the middle? – kept putting out a net to catch scraps from the rushing river on its way to the wine dark sea.
Why The 100 Club Must Be Saved
The Cavern went years ago, the Hacienda is now posh flats- ironically bearing the same name- while the Astoria is going to be some sort of shopping precinct. Our city centres are becoming sanitised and scrubbed. Those grubby corners where popular culture gets made are disappearing.
One by one, we are losing the iconic venues.
So what, you may ask. Why should we care? In this modern download age of zippy-fast communication these places have had their time, haven't they? But they are never just buildings. They are steeped in the dust and grime of history.
The latest victim of the relentless profit drive in 21st century UK is London's 100 Club, which is under threat of closure. One of the longest running venues in the world, it started putting live gigs on in 1942.
It was formally a jazz club and the place where, in the autumn of 1976, the key punk festival took place that saw the coming of age for the movement that would be so influential in British pop culture. Over two days The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, The Damned and The Clash played their breakout shows and Siouxsie And The Banshees played their first gig.
Since then the 100 Club has hosted so many cool gigs. It was the London venue for the second wave of punk, a Metallica warm-up, Rolling Stones secret shows and the Horrors' breakout gig. It was the venue of one of the key early Oasis shows. Gallows have played there many times.
I've played there myself and loved its sense of history and sense of occasion and the iconic logo on the wall behind the stage. So many bands, so many styles, are all part of its continuing diverse tradition. The club's unique ambience has survived many different eras of music, in a way that the serial new venues geared solely for profit never can never match.
The 100 Club, though - described by Aerosmith's Joe Perry as "the finest rock'n'roll club in the world" - is talking of shutting by Christmas because of a soaring rates bill and a high rent. Instead of helping small business or cultural landmarks, modern UK seems intent on crushing them in the relentless drive for profit.
Maybe this time with the surge in internet-driven people power, we can do something about this. We can't let these faceless profiteers keep on stealing our culture.
There are, of course campaigns to keep it open. Facebook is full of them. They may work. This could also be an opportunity for the Bertie Wooster-lite mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to actually do something for the rock'n'roll he pays lip service to.
The unlikely Clash fan (another Tory music fan who doesn't listen to the lyrics?) has a chance to do something for the culture of the city. The rest of us need to stand up and be counted. We don't all want to live in a plastic corporate culture.
John Robb @'NME'
I also hope it gets saved as I fell down drunk behind the bar worked there for a number of years back in the early eighties...
Is Video Killing the Concert Vibe?
James Franco brings 'Howl' to life, aurally
Photo: Aaron Tveit, left, as Peter Orlovsky and James Franco, right, as Allen Ginsberg in "Howl." Credit: Oscilloscope Laboratories
This weekend, "Howl" opens in New York and San Francisco. It's the story of Allen Ginsberg, his iconic beat poem and the legal battle that followed its publication. The movie, written and directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, opens in Los Angeles on Oct. 1.
KPCC's Alex Cohen talked to filmmakers Epstein and Friedman about casting James Franco as Ginsberg and their work at bringing the writer to life on screen. "He had a personal connection to the beats," Epstein said.
In a nice use of radio, the piece includes Franco reading "Howl" as Ginsberg. "I imagined it that James Franco probably spent a lot of time in the studio just focusing on the sound, the voice, creating this poem," Cohen said. "Bringing it to life."
"He did indeed do all of that," Epstein said."But in fact that was the last layer of the work we did together."
How much does Franco sound like Ginsberg? The earliest recordings of Ginsberg reading "Howl" are from 1956, the year the poem was published. In this MP3, from the Ginsberg archive at the University of Pennsylvania, he reads all three parts.
At the time it was published, the poem's sexual content was expected to be controversial -- when Lawrence Ferlinghetti published it, the ACLU assured him it would defend him on 1st Amendment grounds, and he was arrested and tried in 1957.
Later, Ginsberg would become a kind of spokesperson -- for the beats, for open homosexuality, for alternative religious practices, for drugs -- but in the earliest recordings, he was a poet with only the first inklings of what his role might mean.
It's that pre-headline Ginsberg that you can hear in the early MP3, and it sounds like, from Franco's reading, that it is that Ginsberg that the actor is evoking. He's pretty close. At the Poetry Foundation, D.A. Powell asked the filmmakers, "Is Franco lip-synching Ginsberg?" No, they replied, but they find it "wonderful" that people think he is.
Carolyn Kellogg @'LA Times'
REpost: William S. Burroughs & David Bowie: (The Rolling Stone Interview February 1974)
Beat Godfather Meets Glitter MainmanRolling Stone
February 28, 1974
by Craig Copetas
February 28, 1974
by Craig Copetas
...Burroughs: Politics of sound.
Bowie: Yes. We have kind of got that now. It has very loosely shaped itself into the politics of sound. The fact that you can now subdivide rock into different categories was something that you couldn't do ten years ago. But now I can reel off at least ten sounds that represent a kind of person rather than a type of music. The critics like being critics, and most of them wish they were rock-and-roll stars. But when they classify they are talking about people not music. It's a whole political thing.
Burroughs: Like infrasound, the sound below the level of hearing. Below 16 MHz. Turned up full blast it can knock down walls for 30 miles. You can walk into the French patent office and buy the patent for 40p. The machine itself can be made very cheaply from things you could find in a junk yard.
Bowie: Like black noise. I wonder if there is a sound that can put things back together? There was a band experimenting with stuff like that; they reckon they could make a whole audience shake.
Burroughs: They have riot-control noise based on these soundwaves now. But you could have music with infrasound, you wouldn't necessarily have to kill the audience.
Bowie: Just maim them.
Burroughs: The weapon of the Wild Boys is a Bowie knife, an 18-inch bowie knife, did you know that?
Bowie: An 18-inch bowie knife.... you don't do things by halves, do you? No, I didn't know that was their weapon. The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.
Burroughs: Well, it cuts both ways, you know, double-edged on the end...
Albert Hofmann's psychedelics doubts
Psychedelics are back! As readers of Scientific American know, scientists have recently reported that psychedelics show promise for treating disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety in terminal cancer patients. This weekend, researchers and other enthusiasts are gathering in New York City for a two-day celebration, "Horizons: Perspectives on Psychedelics," sponsored by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS, along with other groups.
Overall, I'm thrilled by the psychedelic revival. I've had good trips, which gave me first-hand evidence of the drugs' therapeutic potential. But like many other people, I've also had bad trips, which left me feeling alienated from, rather than blissfully connected to, the world. In fact, it's worth recalling that the godfather of psychedelic research—the chemist Albert Hofmann, whom I interviewed before his death in 2008—occasionally harbored doubts about these potent drugs.
In 1943, when war wracked the world, Hofmann was in Basel, Switzerland, working for the pharmaceutical company Sandoz. On April 16, he was investigating a compound related to ergot, a toxic extract of a fungus that infects grain-producing plants. Hofmann hoped that the ergot compound, which he had originally synthesized five years earlier, might have potential for stimulating blood circulation.
During his experiments, Hofmann was overcome by what he recalled later as "remarkable restlessness, combined with a slight dizziness." He guessed that he had absorbed the ergot compound through his skin. Three days later, to test his theory, he dissolved what he thought would be an extremely small dose of the chemical—250 millionths of a gram, or micrograms—in a glass of water and drank it. Within 40 minutes Hofmann felt so disoriented that he rode his bicycle home.
When he arrived at his house he spotted a female neighbor, who looked like a "malevolent, insidious witch with a colored mask." Inside his house "furniture assumed grotesque, threatening forms." Hofmann feared he was losing his mind or even dying. He was tormented by the thought that his wife and three children would never understand "that I had not experimented thoughtlessly, irresponsibly, but rather with the utmost caution."
Gradually, "the horror softened and gave way to a feeling of good fortune and gratitude." This sense of well-being persisted through the following morning. When Hofmann walked out into his garden after a rainfall, "everything glistened and sparkled in a fresh new light. The world was as if newly created."
Thus did Hofmann discover the psychotropic properties of lysergic acid diethylamide, LSD. Hofmann's psychedelic research continued. In the late 1950s he showed that psilocybin and psilocin are the primary active ingredients of Psilocybe cubensis, a "magic" mushroom consumed as a sacrament by Indians in Central and South America...
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John Horgan @'Scientific American'
The sun at night
Neutrinos are ghostly subatomic particles which are created in abundance by the sunlight-generating nuclear reactions in the core of the Sun. To them solid matter is as transparent as a pane of glass.
Hold up your hand. You would never know it but about a 100 million million neutrinos are passing through every square centimetre of your flesh every second. That’s why it is possible to image the Sun on the other side of the Earth by looking down through almost 13,000 kilometres of rock.
This picture was obtained by the Japanese Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector, situated in the Kamioka metal mine in the Japanese Alps. While sunlight takes about 30,000 years to work its way out from the centre to the surface of the Sun, neutrinos take just two seconds.
Once at the surface, it is only another eight-odd minutes of free-flight before they get to the Earth. Consequently, neutrinos reveal what the core of the Sun is like “now”.
Since the Sun’s light was made at the height of the last Ice Age, for all we know its nuclear fires could have gone out 29,000 years ago. However, solar neutrinos, on account of being in the heart of the Sun just over eight minutes ago, tell us all is well with the Sun and there is no need to worry. For now.
Marcus Chown @'New Humanist'
Saturday 25 September 2010
YouTube wins Spanish copyright case
A Spanish federal court has dismissed copyright infringement charges against Google’s YouTube that could have brought the online video service to a halt by forcing it to monitor every piece of content.
Telecinco, a Spanish broadcaster, had brought the charges against YouTube, arguing that it should be liable when users upload material that violates copyright protection.
Google, which owns YouTube, praised the court’s decision to reject the charges on the basis that YouTube offers users tools to remove content that infringes on copyrights.
“This decision is a clear victory for the internet and the rules that govern it,” Google said on its blog.
The ruling follows a similar victory in the US in a case brought by Viacom, creating clearer legal direction for Google’s copyright responsibilities on YouTube. Viacom has said it will appeal against that decision
It comes as Google steps up efforts to make the site a destination for professional content, as well as the home-made videos for which it is still best known.
Television programmes and films are already available for free viewing on the site in some countries, including shows from Channel 4 and Channel 5, the UK broadcasters. Vevo, its music video subsidiary, is expected to launch in Europe later this year.
YouTube has also shown live broadcasts of a U2 concert and Indian Premier League cricket matches, and Google has explored offering pay-per-view movies with Hollywood studios.
Under European law, owners of content are considered best placed to monitor how their work is being used rather than service providers such as YouTube.
The company said that more than 24 hours of video is uploaded to its website every minute and that the task of screening all of that content would make it and other social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace “grind to a halt”.
YouTube said it had created a content identification tool that allows content creators to remove edited copyrighted material and alerts them if something is wrongfully uploaded. This “Content ID” service is used by more than 1,000 media companies.
Aaron Ferstman, head of communications for YouTube’s operations in Europe, the Middle East and Africa said the decision “demonstrates the wisdom of European laws” and that YouTube hopes to work with Telecinco in the “spirit of copyright protection.”
@'FT"
Friday 24 September 2010
Man jailed for killing hamster in microwave
A man who killed his hamster by cooking it in a microwave has been jailed for nine weeks.
Anthony Parker, 29, of Holyrood Way, Hartlepool, admitted causing unnecessary suffering to a Syrian hamster in February.
He was also banned from keeping animals for five years by Hartlepool magistrates.
The court heard Parker put the animal, called Suzie, in the microwave after a drunken row with his girlfriend.
Neil Taylor, prosecuting, said the animal had been killed in a cruel way.
He said: "It was clear the hamster died in agony."
The animal's lips were burned and its eyes were opaque. A post-mortem examination showed Suzie had been exposed to microwave radiation.
Parker had initially denied the offence because he made a confession to police when he was drunk.
He later said he had no recollection of events. But he changed his plea before Wednesday's hearing.
The court heard he told officers he had not meant to kill Suzie.
Adrian Morris, defending, said his client had previous convictions for drink-driving and a public order offence which happened six years ago.
But there was nothing on his record linked to cruelty.
He said: "He effectively comes before this court a man of good character."
Suzie's death would have been rapid and the "cruelty and suffering were not prolonged", he said.
But Mr Taylor said: "This is a man so drunk he puts a hamster into a microwave and kills it."
Explosion Rocks Honeywell Uranium Facility Run by Scab Workers
Union workers have been locked out at the uranium enrichment facility in Metropolis, Illinois for two months now after contract negotiations broke down over Honeywell's demand that workers give up their retiree health care coverage and pension plans. The Metropolis uranium facility is the only one in the United States that can convert U308 into the extremely deadly UF6.
Because the plant is the only conversion facility of its kind in the United States, familiarity with the Metropolis plant, and not just generic experience in the field, is essential to ensuring the plant's safety. Concerns have been raised by local community members and union officials that replacement workers at the Honeywell facility cannot safely operate the plant since they have no site-specific experience in this type of conversion facility.
Workers claim that Cote is far more interested in keeping his record profits high than actually protecting workers and the surrounding community. They believe that Honeywell CEO David Cote is willing to risk radioactive contamination in order to demand that uranium workers cut their retiree health care and pension plans.
On Saturday, nuclear regulators allowed Honeywell to start up core production at the facility, where core production had been shut down for over two months due to concerns about the training of replacement workers. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission delayed reopening the plant for several days after questions were raised about the unusually high levels of uranium that were appearing in the urine tests of several nuclear workers.
The following day, a hydrogen explosion rocked the plant. The blast shook the ground in front of the plant and could be heard a mile away, according to local reports. State Trooper Bridget Rice said that police were called to investigate to the scene of the explosion after receiving several phone calls reporting an explosion at the plant. Nuclear Regulatory Commission spokesman Roger Hannah also confirmed that there was indeed "a small hydrogen explosion that was very loud" at the Metropolis facility.
The plant splits hydrofluoric acid into hydrogen and fluoride. The hydrogen then gets scrubbed and released into the atmosphere and fluorine goes into the process. If the hydrogen and fluorine recombine, it can be very reactive and cause a non-radioactive hydrogen explosion. On Saturday, hydrogen was accidentally recombined with fluorine causing a massive explosion that could be heard a mile away and leading to the plant being temporarily shut down.
Honeywell Spokesman Peter Dapel released this statement: "There was a noise at Metropolis Works yesterday that occurred as a result of the normal venting of one of our systems.... The union workforce is very familiar with the procedure that caused yesterday's noise, having executed similar processes on at least two occasions earlier this year prior to the work stoppage with the exact same outcomes. It is common to plants that work with fluorine, and characteristic of plants that are following correct procedures."
However, union spokesman John Paul Smith claims that the workers who worked at the plant for decades said very minor explosions had occurred, but no explosion of such a magnitude that it could be heard outside of the plant. State police also could not cite an incident where they had been called to the plant to investigate an explosion at the Metropolis facility that had been reported to them by local community members.
Workers and local community members see this explosion as evidence that the quickly trained replacement workers are not qualified to operate the plant.
Local union officials claim that the workers are not properly trained to work in the plant. In a statement released last week USW Local 7-699 claimed, "The Union workforce was required to have extensive on-the-job training on running units from qualified trainers for several months prior to being qualified. We have recently learned that several Fluorination workers were deemed 'qualified' by company personnel after one week of training. Furthermore, Union employees were required to have been a qualified operator for six months on a running unit before they were allowed to begin to train another employee. The company is currently training their own employees with people who themselves are not qualified."
Additional concerns have been raised about the safety records of the replacement workers at the Metropolis facility who are employed by the Shaw Group. In 2009, a subsidiary of the Shaw Group was made to pay $6.2 million to the federal government for forcing its workers not to report safety and site violations when working on nuclear plant sites in Alabama and Tennessee.
Local community members are claiming that Honeywell is also not properly reporting safety violations at the nuclear facility in Metropolis. A recent report by Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) says Honeywell has failed to notify the NRC of 37 reportable unplanned, uranium contamination events at its Metropolis facility between January 2008 and January 2010.
The Metropolis facility had previously been shut down after a release of deadly toxic UF6 gas in December of 2003, which hospitalized four community members and lead to evacuations of dozens of residents near the plant. This was only the second time in American history (the first being the infamous Three Mile Island disaster) where a site area emergency forced the evacuation of a community surrounding a nuclear power facility. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission at the time found that Honeywell "failed to implement some parts of its emergency response plan and did not provide sufficient information to local emergency responders".
The Environmental Protection Agency has also been very critical of the safety record of the uranium enrichment facility. According to the report by Sam Tranum of Uranium Intelligence Weekly, in May of 2009 the EPA listed the Metropolis facility as being "in significant noncompliance - a high priority violator" of the Clean Air Act and that the Metropolis facility had been in violation of the Clean Air Act for the nine months prior to that. Also, the EPA found that the Honeywell Metropolis uranium facility had been violating the Clean Water Act for about two years, but returned to compliance in December of 2009...
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Mike Elk @'HuffPo'
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