Friday 5 November 2010
Per Bojsen-Moller - The Greatest Dub Techno mix in the World... Ever!
1 - Rhythm & Sound w/ Jah Batta - Music Hit You [Burial Mix]
2 - Rhythm & Sound - No Partial [Rhythm & Sound]
3 - Rhythm & Sound w/ The Chosen Brothers - Mash Down Babylon [Burial Mix]
4 - Rhythm & Sound - Outward [Rhythm & Sound]
5 - Maurizo - M4 [Maurizio]
6 - Basic Channel - Quadrant Dub II [Basic Channel]
7 - Round One ft. Andy Caine - I'm Your Brother [Main Street Records]
8 - Maurizio - M4.5 [Maurizio]
9 - Carl Craig - The Climax (Basic Reshape) [Planet E]
10 - Rhythm & Sound w/ Tikiman - Music A Fe Rule [Rhythm & Sound]
11 - Rhythm & Sound - Smile w/ Savage [Rhythm & Sound]
12 - Rhythm & Sound - Carrier [Rhythm & Sound]
13 - Maurizio - Domina (Maurizio Mix) [Maurizio]
14 - Rhythm & Sound - Queen In My Empire Version [Burial Mix]
15 - Rhythm & Sound w/ Cornell Cambell - King In My Empire [Burial Mix]
16 - Maurizio - M5 [Maurizio]
17 - Rhythm & Sound - Range [Rhythm & Sound]
18 - Rhythm & Sound w/ Tikiman - Why [Burial Mix]
19 - Rhythm & Sound - Free For All Version [Burial mix]
20 - Rhythm & Sound w/ Paul St. Hilaire - Free For All [Burial mix]
21 - Round Two ft. Andy Caine - New Day [Main Street Records]
22 - Maurizio - M6 [Maurizio]
23 - Rhythm & Sound - Mango Drive [Rhythm & Sound]
24 - Basic Channel - Q1.1 [Basic Channel]
25 - Rhythm & Sound - See Mi Version (Basic Reshape) [Burial Mix]
26 - Maurizio - M7 (Unreleased Mix) [Maurizio]
27 - Round Three ft. Tikiman - Acting Crazy [Main Street Records]
28 - Round Four - Found A Way [Main Street Records]
29 - Rhythm & Sound w/ Tikiman - Never Tell You [Burial Mix]
30 - Rhythm & Sound w/ The Chosen Borthers - Making History [Burial Mix]
via kfmw
EDit:
mixed by Per Bojsen-Moller aka mirrorcube
Joy Division by Kevin Cummins
Although they only released two albums during their short run, Joy Division remains one of the most important and beloved bands of the late-’70s post-punk movement, influencing generations of cold, black-clad imitators. In the three decades since Ian Curtis’s death, he has become one of music’s darkest and most solemnly worshiped cult figures. He has been immortalized in countless books and films, printed on all kinds of T-shirts, and his song “Love Will Tear Us Apart” probably holds some kind of record for teenage mixtape overuse.
But even if you think you’ve seen enough of Joy Division to last you a lifetime, you’ll want to make space for Kevin Cummins’s Joy Division (Rizzoli New York, 2010), a book that combines the author’s striking black-and-white images of the band with photos of their instruments, set lists, and flyers, and Curtis’s lyrics and notebooks.
It’s illuminating, as a fan, to examine Curtis’s cross-outs and fun to ogle the concert flyers and fantasize about having attended those shows. Equally absorbing is an unexpected, pitch-perfect foreword by Jay McInerney, who talks about blasting Closer while he wrote Bright Lights, Big City. And the inclusion of a long discussion between Cummins and Bernard Sumner is a great music-nerd read.
But it’s Cummins’s photos, each blown up to fill an entire, large page, that make the book essential for all Joy Division lovers. Known for his photography of the Manchester music scene, Cummins shows the band against the stark backdrop of the dying industrial city in winter, its old churches, plain residential buildings, roads, and (in one famous series) bridges covered in a thin blanket of snow. There are plenty of concert shots here, but it’s the intimate portraits of individual band members (Curtis especially) in their dusty, paper-strewn practice space and those photos of the band around Manchester that hit the hardest.
Judy Berman @'Flavorwire'
Street Art Way Below the Street
A vast new exhibition space opened in New York City this summer, with a show 18 months in the making. On view are works by 103 street artists from around the world, mostly big murals painted directly onto the gallery’s walls.
It is one of the largest shows of such pieces ever mounted in one place, and many of the contributors are significant figures in both the street-art world and the commercial trade that now revolves around it. Its debut might have been expected to draw critics, art dealers and auction-house representatives, not to mention hordes of young fans. But none of them were invited.
In the weeks since, almost no one has seen the show. The gallery, whose existence has been a closely guarded secret, closed on the same night it opened.
Known to its creators and participating artists as the Underbelly Project, the space, where all the show’s artworks remain, defies every norm of the gallery scene. Collectors can’t buy the art. The public can’t see it. And the only people with a chance of stumbling across it are the urban explorers who prowl the city’s hidden infrastructure or employees of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
That’s because the exhibition has been mounted, illegally, in a long-abandoned subway station. The dank, cavernous hall feels a lot farther than it actually is from the bright white rooms of Chelsea’s gallery district. Which is more or less the point: This is an art exhibition that goes to extremes to avoid being part of the art world, and even the world in general...
Continue reading
Jasper Rees @'NY Times'
Paddy Hill to finally recieve counselling after false imprisonment for 16 years
Looming over me in his cluttered, pet-filled Scottish farmhouse, Hill thrusts his face into mine and grips my knees in a vice-like grip. Contorting his face in simulated fury, he shrieks the obscenities that were hurled at him during the police interrogation, the day after 21 people were killed and 162 others injured in the 1974 Birmingham bombings.
"They jammed a pistol in my mouth and smashed it around, breaking my teeth so badly it was agony to even have a sip of water until I finally saw a dentist, two weeks later. They told me they knew I was innocent but that they didn't care: they had been told to get a conviction and that if I didn't admit to the bombing, they would shoot me in the mouth. They slowly counted to three, then pulled the trigger. They did that three times. Each time, I thought I was going to die," says Hill, pulling up his lip to show his toothless upper gum before rolling down his trouser leg to reveal scars and cigarette burns he says were meted out to him later by the same policemen.
It is tempting to assume that, since his release almost 20 years ago, Hill, now aged 64, must have slowly recovered not only from the inquisition – which left him so battered that his two-year-old son needed medication to recover from the shock of seeing him afterwards – but also from the hell of the 16 years of wrongful imprisonment that followed.
The six innocent men were, after all, later awarded compensation ranging from £840,000 to £1.2m. Surely they were also given counselling? Surely they were not just left to cope with their fury, trauma and wasted decades?
But they were. In the 20 years that followed his release on 14 March 1991, Hill has had to fight for help; a battle he has, until now, failed to win.
Quickly spending his compensation money trying to buy back the love of the family he had lost during his years inside and on helping other innocent prisoners still behind bars, he could not afford to pay for medical expertise for himself. Strugging to function in an unrecognisable world, unable to comprehend the depths of his own disturbance, Hill was reduced to ricocheting around the NHS.
Over the years, without funding or guidance, Hill has managed to convince some of the country's best psychiatrists to see him on a pro bono basis. They did their best but, one after another, have been forced to admit they do not have the expertise to help anyone so acutely traumatised. Hill's various GPs offered him drugs, which he refused. "It's not a depressive thing. It's mental. It's my head I need sorting out. I don't need filling full of pills," he says. The charities he approached were forced to turn him away, because their funding only allows them to help with the rehabilitation and resettlement of guilty prisoners.
"There was no lack of money for falsely imprisoning us, torturing us and putting us through a kangaroo court," Hill says. "But when we came out, there was a sudden shortage of memory and of money. The victims of the Dunblane shooting or the Paddington rail crash, for example, they got counselling immediately, as they should have done. But we were victims of the state: it was the state that took us hostage and traumatised us and now they don't want to recognise that in any shape or form. In the end you give up fighting for help."
Over the last 10 years Hill has been visibly shrinking. Twenty years ago, he was a strong, stocky man weighing more than 12 stone. When he appeared on the steps of the court of appeal on 21 November 1991, a free man, he appeared resilient and determined to forge a future.
The psychological stress of the intervening years has, however, played a cruel physical game. Now he is barely nine stone, his hands shake and his face is wizened. He looks broken. But woe betide anyone who mistakes his physical frailty for weakness or defeat: with every year that passes, the tension inside Hill increases. As he rolls cigarette after cigarette in his sitting room, he is as taut as a wire, veins throb in his neck and, even when he speaks gently, he boils with barely repressed fury.
"Every day, all day, all I think about is getting a gun and shooting police. But I'm not evil: I'm traumatised and I desperately need help," he says. "I'm coming apart at the seams. I can't live in this world because after 16 years in jail, I'm not equipped to deal with it any more. The intervening years have made it worse. I'm like a hand-grenade with a loose pin, just waiting to explode.
"Prison kills you emotionally. It's a dark, deep, evil, brutal world filled with anger, violence, jealousy, paranoia. You become brutalised – it's like being in a war zone," he adds. "Prisons are human dustbins. They're full of people who would kill you at the drop of a hat. For 24 hours a day, every day, you're at risk of being stabbed, slashed or having boiling water thrown over you. After a while, it doesn't mean anything if you see that sort of thing happening to other prisoners. You don't feel a thing. It becomes normal to see someone with a big blade sticking into them or be sitting watching TV and have people burst in and throw boiling water with sugar in over someone sitting near you. You don't blink. It doesn't mean anything to you. I became dehumanised and I still am dehumanised."
Shortly after Hill's release, Dr Adrian Grounds, a forensic psychiatrist with expertise in the psychological consequences of wrongful imprisonment, agreed to see him. Without funding from the NHS, the appointment was a personal favour. The diagnosis, however, was no less brutal for the kindness with which it had been offered. "He said the damage done to me was irrevocable but that I needed at least 10 years of intense counselling, starting immediately, otherwise my condition would get worse as time went on," says Hill.
But nothing happened. No help was offered and Hill didn't know where else to turn. Instead, he closed in on himself.
"My flashpoint is very low: anger comes over me in waves and, over the years, it has got worse and worse," he admits in sad mortification. "I'm too paranoid to socialise. I don't sleep and I don't eat. If I had a choice, I wouldn't live with me. Suddenly the shutters come down and I'm reliving it all again; all the horror, all the torment. When I come to, it's hours later and everyone's gone, and I'm still sitting there, staring at the walls with tears pouring down my face.
"Prison killed me: I am dead. I have had to explain to my kids that I feel nothing for them. I have had to tell them I would rather spend my time with strangers than with them, because you expect to feel nothing for strangers. I hardly ever see my kids now. I can't handle relationships."
Ten years ago, Hill married Tara, an artist he met at a fundraising event for the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation. A warm, practical woman, she tolerates Hill's disappearances – last Christmas, he disappeared for three days – his moods and his furies because, she says, she simply feels so terribly sorry for him. "He's such a tortured man: my heart just goes out to him. Yes, he's difficult to live with but it's not his fault; it's because of what's been done to him by the state. He's such a gentle man. He's just such a sad man. So damaged."
Last month, Hill was suddenly told that he had been given funding by his local NHS Ayrshire & Arran health trust for two months' care at London's Capio Nightingale Hospital with the one man in the country who might be able to understand him: Professor Gordon Turnbull, the only consultant psychiatrist in Britain sufficiently specialised in the psychological after-effects of trauma to help Hill. Turnbull, who counselled the Beirut hostages Terry Waite and John McCarthy, and survivors from the Lockerbie bombing and the Gulf wars, says Hill is one of the most traumatised people he has ever come across.
"Being the victim of a miscarriage of justice in your own country is very much more traumatic than being a conventional hostage, who has been held against his wishes in a foreign country by people who have a different belief system," he says.
"It's totally shocking that there is no method of helping these victims re-emerge into society. The state makes less provision for their release than those who have been rightfully imprisoned. The state has an obligation to rehabilitate these victims."
Gareth Peirce, the solicitor who represented the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six defendants, has spent years fighting to get help for Hill and other victims of miscarriages of justice. "When the men came out, it was around the time of the Beirut hostages and the papers were full of how they were going to start a programme of support – and not just for them, but for their families too," she said. "It seems to me that the analogy was so close. These men here had come out of a trauma of immense proportion where they were held hostage in their own country. They emerged surviviors from that extreme trauma but without knowing the extremity of it and its effects."
Pierce says the failure of the government to provide appropriate treatment for Hill is a "national disgrace". "Now he's been offered some help but will it even scratch the surface?" she asks. "They have actually been denied the best expertise for 20 years. They were thrown out on to the pavement and no expertise was made available to them. They were left, stumbling around for help. They didn't know where to go and the state didn't offer it."
Hill had to set up the Miscarriages of Justice Organisation – Mojo – to help other former prisoners, released by the court of appeal after their sentences were quashed. "It's the survivor providing help for other survivors," says Pierce. "It's incredibly impressive but horrible and tragic too. Over the years, the government has repeatedly promised these survivors to set up some sort of refuge for them and every promise has not been fulfilled."
Back in his farmhouse, with the prospect of finally getting the help he has fought for, Hill admits he is now wrestling a new enemy: fear. "I'm scared," he says "I'm scared of the anger counselling will unleash. What if there's too much to put back in the box? What if there's too much to contain?
"I'm not expecting miracles though: I'd settle for just stopping the nightmares and the flashbacks. I'd settle to just be able to stop me crying. I just want to know what it's like to feel happy again. I want to feel normal."
Amelia Hill @'The Guardian'
ADL slams Shas spiritual leader for saying non-Jews 'were born to serve Jews'
The Anti-Defamation League on Tuesday condemned comments about non-Jews made this past weekend by Shas spiritual leader Rabbi Ovadia Yosef.In a sermon given on Saturday on laws concerning what non-Jews are permitted to do on Shabbat, Yosef said: "Goyim [non-Jews] were born only to serve us. Without that, they have no place in the world – only to serve the People of Israel."
"Why are gentiles needed? They will work, they will plow, they will reap. We will sit like an effendi and eat." According to Yosef, death has "no dominion" over non-Jews in Israel.
"With gentiles, it will be like any person - they need to die, but [God] will give them longevity. Why? Imagine that one’s donkey would die, they’d lose their money. This is his servant... That’s why he gets a long life, to work well for this Jew.”
On Tuesday, the ADL said that Yosef's comments contributed "to an atmosphere of hatred and a global trend of intolerance."
"It is disturbing to see any religious leader, and particularly Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, use their podium to preach such hateful and divisive ideas," ADL chief Abraham H. Foxman said.
"In a world where bigotry and prejudice are prevalent, it is especially important for religious leaders to use their influence to teach respect and acceptance," he continued.
In August, Yosef sparked controversy when he called for Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to "perish from this world" and said that Palestinians were "evil, bitter enemies of Israel."
Wednesday 3 November 2010
Tuesday 2 November 2010
MMFlint But, the bottom line: The REPUBLICANS are killers. They started TWO wars, thousands are DEAD. AND they DESTROYED our economy. That's it.
Iran envoy: atom bomb would be strategic mistake
Ali Asghar Soltanieh, Iran's ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), suggested the Islamic Republic could never compete in terms of the numbers of warheads possessed by the nuclear-armed major powers.
It would therefore be at a disadvantage in relation to these countries if it developed atomic bombs, Soltanieh said.
"That is the reason we will never make this strategic mistake," he told a conference at IAEA headquarters in Vienna. "We are as strong as those countries without nuclear weapons."
He was speaking a few days after Iran said it was ready to resume negotiations with the six powers involved in efforts to defuse a long-running dispute over its nuclear program.
The United States and its allies suspect Iran is seeking nuclear arms capability and wants Tehran to curb its activity.
Iran says its activities are solely aimed at generating electricity so that it can export more oil and gas...
Continue reading
Fredrik Dahl @'Reuters'
(More) sanity!
American Socrates on an Upbeat
Noam Chomsky, after all these years, retains the power to shock — in the bright title of his new collection, Hopes and Prospects, and with what sounds like good news in this conversation.
It’s Professor Chomsky’s cheerful conviction, drawing on his own trials in the Vietnam War resistance, that anti-war understanding and feeling run much deeper and stronger today in a freer, more humane America. It’s because of that popular war opposition today — inarticulate and ill-led, perhaps, but nonetheless verifiable — that the US assaults on Iraq and Afghanistan have not incuded the saturation bombing and chemical warfare that were standard fare in Vietnam and Cambodia.
He is sure that the anti-incumbent rage reported in the Tea Party overlaps substantially with his own chronic dismay at elite manipulations and moral corruption in our politics. The larger part of the Tea Party, he says, is built on real grievances in longer hours, shorter pay, ever-rising job insecurity.
In short, there’s a vast pool of discontent out there to be organized by the Left, he says, if the United States had a functioning Left even as it did in the 1930s. As we say, “If we had ham, we could have ham and eggs — if we had eggs.”
Noam Chomsky does not pine idly, as I do, for the Anti-Imperialist League of a century ago — when Mark Twain, the biggest rock star in the land, declared: “I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle puts its talons on any other land;” and the impeccable William James, father of philosophical Pragmatism, fulminated Jeremiah-Wright-style: “God damn the U.S. for its vile conduct” in the Philippines, as James put it in 1903. Nor is Chomsky compelled, as I often am, to reach back to the Transcendentalist purity of the great Thoreau, who withheld his taxes and went to jail during the war with Mexico and roared in protest, in the Tea Party spirit, “Why the United States Government never performed an act of justice in its life!”
No, Professor Chomsky is inclined to believe there is more and stronger anti-imperialist sentiment today than in Concord, Massachusetts in 1846, when Thoreau spent his night in jail, or even in 1967, when thousands of young men decided to leave their country rather than be drafted, and Chomsky himself risked a long prison sentence for counselling them.
We live in the gravest of emergencies — nuclear and environmental. Our country is led by a president that Noam Chomsky never much celebrated. And still he observes that “general consciousness has changed” in his time, fundamentally for the better.
General consciousness has changed on all sorts of issues. There are lots of things that were considered perfectly legitimate in the early 1960s that are almost out of the question now.Women’s rights, environmental concerns, gay rights, civil rights for blacks… a lot of things have changed in the country. It’s gotten a lot more civilized. And one part of that is anti-imperialism. Take a look at polls now. The majority for some time has been in favor of withdrawing from Afghanistan. Now that didn’t happen in the case of Vietnam till it was way beyond the level of any fighting now. So it’s important, it’s real. The Anti-Imperialist League was an important pocket of American intellectual history. It did not succeed in impeding the war effort [in the Philippines]… In the case of the Iraq War, it’s probably the first time in the history of imperialism, the only time I can think of, when there was massive popular opposition to the war. My students here, for example, insisted on calling off classes and joining a big demonstration in Boston, and it happened all over. This was before the war started, before the war officially began. There was massive protest, and that’s one of the reasons why, awful as it was, it was somewhat constrained, certainly as compared with Indo-China. Well, these are signs of anti-imperialism. You’re perfectly right that they’re not organized, but we shouldn’t romanticize Thoreau and Mark Twain. They were important. It’s good that they did what they did, but it was nothing like the scale that we take for granted now.
Professor Noam Chomsky with Chris Lydon in his MIT office, October 19, 2010
Noam Chomsky is the closest thing we have to Socrates in the American public square: a scathing questioner of virtually every common premise about who we Americans are and what we’re up to in the world. We’ve never heard him as mellow as this — ever wary of a hemlock ending, but good-humored about that, too.
Noam Chomsky and Christopher Lydon @'ZCommunications'
Alcohol 'more harmful than heroin'
Alcohol is more harmful than heroin or crack, according to a study published in medical journal the Lancet.
The report is co-authored by Professor David Nutt, the former UK chief drugs adviser who was sacked by the government in October 2009.
It ranks 20 drugs on 16 measures of harm to users and to wider society.
Tobacco and cocaine are judged to be equally harmful, while ecstasy and LSD are among the least damaging.
Harm score
Prof Nutt refused to leave the drugs debate when he was sacked from his official post by the former Labour Home Secretary, Alan Johnson.
He went on to form the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, a body which aims to investigate the drug issue without any political interference.
One of its other members is Dr Les King, another former government adviser who quit over Prof Nutt's treatment.
Members of the group, joined by two other experts, scored each drug for harms including mental and physical damage, addiction, crime and costs to the economy and communities.
The BBC's home editor, Mark Easton, writes in his blog that the study involved 16 criteria, including a drug's affects on users' physical and mental health, social harms including crime, "family adversities" and environmental damage, economic costs and "international damage".
The modelling exercise concluded that heroin, crack and methylamphetamine, also known as crystal meth, were the most harmful drugs to individuals, but alcohol, heroin and crack cocaine were the most harmful to society.
When the scores for both types of harm were added together, alcohol emerged as the most harmful drug, followed by heroin and crack.
'Valid and necessary'
The findings run contrary to the government's long-established drug classification system, but the paper's authors argue that their system - based on the consensus of experts - provides an accurate assessment of harm for policy makers.
"Our findings lend support to previous work in the UK and the Netherlands, confirming that the present drug classification systems have little relation to the evidence of harm," the paper says.
"They also accord with the conclusions of previous expert reports that aggressively targeting alcohol harms is a valid and necessary public health strategy."
In 2007, Prof Nutt and colleagues undertook a limited attempt to create a harm ranking system, sparking controversy over the criteria and the findings.
The new more complex system ranked alcohol three times more harmful than cocaine or tobacco. Ecstasy was ranked as causing one-eighth the harm of alcohol.
It also contradicted the Home Office's decision to make so-called legal high mephedrone a Class B drug, saying that alcohol was five times more harmful. The rankings have been published to coincide with a conference on drugs policy, organised by Prof Nutt's committee.
'Extraordinary lengths'
Prof Nutt told the BBC: "Overall, alcohol is the most harmful drug because it's so widely used.
"Crack cocaine is more addictive than alcohol but because alcohol is so widely used there are hundreds of thousands of people who crave alcohol every day, and those people will go to extraordinary lengths to get it."
He said it was important to separate harm to individuals and harm to society.
The Lancet paper written by Prof Nutt, Dr King and Dr Lawrence Phillips, does not examine the harm caused to users by taking more than one drug at a time.
Mr Partington, who is the spokesman for the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, said millions of people enjoyed alcohol "as part of a regular and enjoyable social drink".
"Clearly alcohol misuse is a problem in the country and our real fear is that, by talking in such extreme terms, Professor Nutt and his colleagues risk switching people off from considering the real issues and the real action that is needed to tackle alcohol misuse," he said.
"We are talking about a minority. We need to focus policy around that minority, which is to do with education, treatment and enforcement."
A Home Office spokesman said: "Our priorities are clear - we want to reduce drug use, crack down on drug-related crime and disorder and help addicts come off drugs for good."
RA 231 - Space Dimension Controller
The time-traveling producer brings out a funk-filled selection for the RA podcast.
Space Dimension Controller was born sometime in the 24th century. Lucky for us, then, that he traveled back in time, crashed his Electropod and has been stuck here for just long enough to release some of the finest and funkiest electro-tinged records of 2010. (That, or he’s Jack Hamill, a young Belfast producer obsessed with hardware.) SDC’s sound may be retro-tinged, but it has excited everyone from Kyle Hall (who remixed SDC on Clone’s Royal Oak) to Josh Wink to the brains behind legendary techno label R&S.
Download:
Space Dimension Controller-RA.231
Space Dimension Controller-RA.231
Monday 1 November 2010
The Mission is Terminated (again): Throbbing Gristle break up
This was posted at the Throbbing Gristle website. TG were always a volatile proposition, but this is still somewhat shocking, and terribly disappointing, news.
In the evening 27th October TG members and their associated managements
received two emails from Genesis P-Orridge stating he was no longer willing to perform in Throbbing Gristle and returned to his home in New York.
Cosey, Sleazy & Chris have concluded that once more, and for the time being, Throbbing Gristle has Ceased to Exist, at least as a live entity.
Therefore, and with deepest apologies, TG must cancel their scheduled performance at Archa Theatre, in Prague, Czech Republic on 30th October.
It being too short notice to offer an alternative set.
In order not to disappoint fans of the old quartet, Cosey, Peter & Chris have offered to perform live under the name X-TG at Arena Del Sole, Bologna, Italy
on 2nd November & at Casa Musica, Porto, Portugal on 5th November.
We hope fans will appreciate and enjoy this new project and the trio is looking forward to performing exciting new and radical electronic musics together.
(Thanx to Richard Metzger!)
Once upon a life: Athol Fugard
Athol Fugard doing a read-through of his play Master Harold in 1982. Photograph: Observer
It was on a winter's day in 1982 that I came to my senses and realised that I was an alcoholic. And that I was in serious trouble.
It started with breakfast at the hotel I preferred to stay at when I was in New York – the Royalton. They were good to me there, and the rooms were lovely and large. I ordered my usual breakfast: a poached egg with a double Jack Daniels, my bourbon of choice.
Whisky was my drink. If you're going to be serious about drinking – and I was a professional – you've got to go for whisky. I had acquired a taste for bourbon because it wasn't always possible to get single malts in the pubs I drank in. I was a solitary drinker, but I was very good company when I was drinking, like the millionaire in the Charlie Chaplin film City Lights. I didn't turn into a monster. I've no record at all of any violence, either by me or directed at me. And I had got to know New York City very well. I had favourite watering holes all over the city, seven or eight different bars that I knew, and where I was known; about half of them were part of a chain of Irish pubs called Blarney Stone, and they were my favourites.
The irony in all of this is that it came at a time when I was on Broadway with a big success – my latest play, Master Harold and the Boys – which was about to embark on a national tour. It still amazes me that my drinking hadn't, by this point, affected my work (Master Harold is, if I'm honest, a well-crafted play). I don't doubt that it would have eventually damaged my writing, and most probably that was just around the corner.
I know for an absolute certainty that I was on the point of losing the handful of people who were terribly important to me in my life: firstly my family – my wife Sheila and daughter Lisa – and then a few trusted friends who I was putting through hell in their concern for my future. There was no way I couldn't be aware of how profoundly unhappy it made them; how much it hurt them to see me in that condition.
I'm still surprised when I think about it now, ending up at night in the condition that I so many times did, almost out of control, that I was never mugged, or walked out into busy traffic to be hit by a bus. The previous weekend had been a disastrous trip to Chicago to audition actors. I knew that on my return I was going to have to fire the actor who currently held the part – a young man with powerful people behind him. I was having a bad time and ended up drinking very heavily, even for me.
That January morning I was eating with a friend, one of the designers working on Master Harold, someone I had known for years. As we sat together in the hotel's bar/restaurant, she suggested that it was time to take a very hard look at myself and what I was heading for, and asked me if I wanted to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I immediately backed off and said no – no-no-no, no, you just leave me alone. That was my first response, always, to anyone who wanted to help me – and still is. Eventually, she had to leave and with astonishing discretion left a little paper napkin, placed on the table next to my drink, on which she had written the telephone number of the local AA branch.
There they were, the serviette and the drink. I sat looking at those two, I can promise you, for quite a long time. Which one did I go for? I ate my poached egg. I left the Jack Daniels. And I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I was in big trouble.
Master Harold is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There's a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven't passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who's stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father.
There was no way of avoiding my father's drinking. He was a jazz musician with a band called the Orchestral Jazzonians in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He had lost a leg in his childhood in an accident and was very often in hospital – it's what eventually killed him, when gangrene developed in the stump. I always had to smuggle in small bottles of brandy – that was his drink of choice – and sit at the bedside with these two little bottles in my side pockets while we waited for a moment when the eagle-eyed nurses weren't focused on us. Then I would slip them over and he would drink it under the sheets.
He was a great storyteller, and to reward me for the little favours I did for him he would re-tell potted versions of the wonderful adventure novels he had read as a boy, such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories or White Fang and Call of the Wild and The 39 Steps. I loved him. But it was a very conflicted love. Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground. But it was impossible for me, a little white boy on 1940s South Africa, to do that because he was a black man; he was a servant. That is what Master Harold is all about.
I took the napkin with me to the phone box at the back of the restaurant, called the number. Got a voice, who spoke simply: "How can we help?" I said: I think I'm in trouble with my drinking. The voice asked if I wanted to attend a meeting. I said yes. I was given the address of an episcopal church in Gramercy Park, whose monthly meeting was happening that very evening. I went along and sat quietly, at the back of the group, and I listened to people. One man came up and said: "Welcome – I see you're a stranger, a new face." I said yes. He said: "Do you want to talk about anything?" I said no.
I have survived a lot of things in the course of my 78 years, and I know I have an instinct for survival. When the meeting was over, that instinct took me back to my hotel room and not to my bar. I don't think I slept that night. I knew I had an even more painful job ahead of me the next morning. When I met my producer, before the meeting to fire the young actor, he noticed that my hand was shaking and asked why. I told him I was going to try and stop drinking. He said: "Listen, take my advice – don't stop drinking today."
But I didn't drink anything that day. I never went back to Gramercy Park – the truth is, I don't like groups too much. I'm a loner. So I white-knuckled it. I had all the horrors that go with withdrawal, but I just sweated it out by myself.
The bigger problem was that I believed that, in a certain way, alcohol was necessary for me as a writer. Not that I needed to be drunk, but I needed the stimulus and the imaginative freedom that it gave me. Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page. And for that I needed whisky.
That was the terror I lived with – that I would not be able to write again. That little devil was on my shoulder all through the next few years. Every time I wrote something, it was whispering in my ear: "You should have a couple of drinks – it will make everything so much better." I don't know whether that's true or not, and it's too late to worry about that now. But the next play I wrote, Road to Mecca, has proved over time to be one of my most successful. Now a pot of herbal tea is just as good for me as the two double whiskies I used to have before going to bed.
It is almost 30 years since that breakfast. I don't quite know how I did it, because I'm not somebody with a lot of self-control or willpower, but I haven't had a drink since. I call it my tea-bag birthday: 18 January 1982. On that day, every year, I get a box of herbal teas from the friend who scribbled the address on that paper napkin in the bar. I've never really shared the date with anyone else. But my friend remembers, and by God so do I.
Avoiding fatal heroin overdoses
Fatal heroin overdoses account for 300 deaths every year in Australia, but according to a visiting US addiction specialist many of these might be avoided.
Dr Sarz Maxwell advocates the wider public use of Naxolene Hydrochloride, better known as Narcan.
It is a pure opioid antagonist that reverses the effects of opiate overdose, such as heroin. Narcan is currently only administered by emergency personnel in Australia.
Dr Maxwell, the Medical Director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, wants Australia to follow the US where injecting heroin users and their families have ready access to the treatment.
@'ABC'
Rule #1: Do NOT inject alone!!!
Israeli Police Shoot Arab Legislator in the Back - Protest Met With Rubber Bullets
Israeli police injured two Arab legislators yesterday in violent clashes provoked by Jewish rightwing extremists staging a march through the northern Arab town of Umm al-Fahm.
Haneen Zoubi, a parliament member who has become a national hate figure in Israel and received hundreds of death threats since her participation in an aid flotilla to Gaza in the summer, was among those hurt.
Ms Zoubi reported being hit in the back and neck by rubber bullets as she fled the area when police opened fire. In an interview, she said she believed she had been specifically targeted by police snipers after they identified her.
Police denied her claims, saying they had used only tear gas and stun grenades.
Some 1,500 police were reported to have faced off with hundreds of Arab and Jewish demonstrators in the town yesterday.
Shimon Koren, the northern police commander, admitted special paramilitary forces had been used against the Arab counter-demonstration, as well as an undercover unit more usually deployed at Palestinian protests in the West Bank.
An officer disguised as an Arab demonstrator, from the so-called “mistarvim unit”, was among the injured, apparently after police fired a stun grenade at him by mistake.
Ms Zoubi harshly criticised the police violence. “The police proved that they are a far more dangerous threat to me and other Arab citizens than the fascist group that came to Umm al-Fahm,” she said.
The march was organised by far-right settlers allied to Kach, a movement that demands the expulsion of Palestinians from both Israel and the occupied territories. The movement was formally outlawed in 1994, but has continued to flourish openly among some settler groups.
The organisers said they were demanding the banning of the Islamic Movement, which has its headquarters in Umm al-Fahm.
The Islamic Movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has angered Israeli officials by heading a campaign in Jerusalem’s Old City to highlight what he says is an attempted Israeli takeover of the Haram al-Sharif compound that includes the al-Aqsa mosque.
He was also on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza in May, and claimed at the time that Israeli commandos had tried to assassinate him. Nine passengers were killed, some of them by close-range shots to their heads.
The sheikh is currently serving a three-month jail sentence over clashes with the Israeli security forces close to the al-Aqsa mosque.
Michael Ben Ari, a former Kach member and now an MP with the rightwing National Union party, who attended the march, said Israel must not be a “stupid democracy and let people who want to destroy us have a voice”.
Baruch Marzel, one of the march organisers, told Israel Radio: “If the Kach Party was outlawed, then the Islamic Movement deserves to be outlawed 1,000 times over.”
On hearing of Ms Zoubi’s injuries, he added: “It was worth going to Umm el-Fahm. She is our enemy.”
Afu Aghbaria, an Arab MP with the joint Jewish-Arab Communist party, was also hurt. He said he had been hit in the leg.
Arab leaders said the clash had been triggered by undercover police who began thowing stones from among the demonstrators -- a tactic that the unit has been caught on film using at protests in the West Bank.
Mohammed Zeidan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the main political body for Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the total population, condemned the police actions.
“Racism is no longer found only in documents or on the margins, like with Marzel, but has become a phenomenon among decision-makers and carried out on the ground. What happened today in Umm al-Fahm is a menacing escalation.”
The committee demanded a state investigation into what it called “exaggerated violence” by the police.
Police said nine Arab demonstrators had been arrested for stone-throwing.
Four police officers were reported to be lightly injured. The far-right marchers were escorted away by police, unharmed.
Ms Zoubi, a first-term MP, shot to notoriety this summer after she was among the first passengers to be released following Israel’s violent takeover of the Mavi Marmara.
Ms Zoubi contradicted the Israeli account that the nine passengers had been killed by commandos defending themselves, accusing the navy of opening fire on the ship before any commandos had boarded. She also claimed several passengers had been allowed to bleed to death.
She was provided with a body guard for several weeks after receiving a spate of deaths threats and general villification in the parliament.
The Israeli police have been criticised in the past for lying about the strong-arm methods used to quell protests by the country’s Arab citizens.
A state commission of inquiry found in 2003 that the police had used live ammunition and rubber bullets, in violation of its own regulations, to suppress solidarity demonstrations inside Israel at the start of the second intifada.
Thirteen Arab citizens were killed and hundreds injured in a few days of clashes in 2000. Police had falsely claimed that the deaths had been caused by “friendly fire” from among the demonstrators.
A recently parliamentary report revealed that there were only 382 Muslims in Israel’s 21,000-strong national police force – or less than 2 per cent.
The establishment of the undercover “mistarvim” unit against the country’s Arab population caused outrage among civil rights groups when it was first revealed last year.
The far-right march in Umm al-Fahm was timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary this week of the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded Kach. At a commemoration service in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel told hundreds who attended that the government was allowing the Palestinians to “establish an Ishmael state in Israel”.
Ms Zoubi reported being hit in the back and neck by rubber bullets as she fled the area when police opened fire. In an interview, she said she believed she had been specifically targeted by police snipers after they identified her.
Police denied her claims, saying they had used only tear gas and stun grenades.
Some 1,500 police were reported to have faced off with hundreds of Arab and Jewish demonstrators in the town yesterday.
Shimon Koren, the northern police commander, admitted special paramilitary forces had been used against the Arab counter-demonstration, as well as an undercover unit more usually deployed at Palestinian protests in the West Bank.
An officer disguised as an Arab demonstrator, from the so-called “mistarvim unit”, was among the injured, apparently after police fired a stun grenade at him by mistake.
Ms Zoubi harshly criticised the police violence. “The police proved that they are a far more dangerous threat to me and other Arab citizens than the fascist group that came to Umm al-Fahm,” she said.
The march was organised by far-right settlers allied to Kach, a movement that demands the expulsion of Palestinians from both Israel and the occupied territories. The movement was formally outlawed in 1994, but has continued to flourish openly among some settler groups.
The organisers said they were demanding the banning of the Islamic Movement, which has its headquarters in Umm al-Fahm.
The Islamic Movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has angered Israeli officials by heading a campaign in Jerusalem’s Old City to highlight what he says is an attempted Israeli takeover of the Haram al-Sharif compound that includes the al-Aqsa mosque.
He was also on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza in May, and claimed at the time that Israeli commandos had tried to assassinate him. Nine passengers were killed, some of them by close-range shots to their heads.
The sheikh is currently serving a three-month jail sentence over clashes with the Israeli security forces close to the al-Aqsa mosque.
Michael Ben Ari, a former Kach member and now an MP with the rightwing National Union party, who attended the march, said Israel must not be a “stupid democracy and let people who want to destroy us have a voice”.
Baruch Marzel, one of the march organisers, told Israel Radio: “If the Kach Party was outlawed, then the Islamic Movement deserves to be outlawed 1,000 times over.”
On hearing of Ms Zoubi’s injuries, he added: “It was worth going to Umm el-Fahm. She is our enemy.”
Afu Aghbaria, an Arab MP with the joint Jewish-Arab Communist party, was also hurt. He said he had been hit in the leg.
Arab leaders said the clash had been triggered by undercover police who began thowing stones from among the demonstrators -- a tactic that the unit has been caught on film using at protests in the West Bank.
Mohammed Zeidan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the main political body for Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the total population, condemned the police actions.
“Racism is no longer found only in documents or on the margins, like with Marzel, but has become a phenomenon among decision-makers and carried out on the ground. What happened today in Umm al-Fahm is a menacing escalation.”
The committee demanded a state investigation into what it called “exaggerated violence” by the police.
Police said nine Arab demonstrators had been arrested for stone-throwing.
Four police officers were reported to be lightly injured. The far-right marchers were escorted away by police, unharmed.
Ms Zoubi, a first-term MP, shot to notoriety this summer after she was among the first passengers to be released following Israel’s violent takeover of the Mavi Marmara.
Ms Zoubi contradicted the Israeli account that the nine passengers had been killed by commandos defending themselves, accusing the navy of opening fire on the ship before any commandos had boarded. She also claimed several passengers had been allowed to bleed to death.
She was provided with a body guard for several weeks after receiving a spate of deaths threats and general villification in the parliament.
The Israeli police have been criticised in the past for lying about the strong-arm methods used to quell protests by the country’s Arab citizens.
A state commission of inquiry found in 2003 that the police had used live ammunition and rubber bullets, in violation of its own regulations, to suppress solidarity demonstrations inside Israel at the start of the second intifada.
Thirteen Arab citizens were killed and hundreds injured in a few days of clashes in 2000. Police had falsely claimed that the deaths had been caused by “friendly fire” from among the demonstrators.
A recently parliamentary report revealed that there were only 382 Muslims in Israel’s 21,000-strong national police force – or less than 2 per cent.
The establishment of the undercover “mistarvim” unit against the country’s Arab population caused outrage among civil rights groups when it was first revealed last year.
The far-right march in Umm al-Fahm was timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary this week of the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded Kach. At a commemoration service in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel told hundreds who attended that the government was allowing the Palestinians to “establish an Ishmael state in Israel”.
Jonathon Cook @'Counterpunch'
jayrosen_nyu Quoting @GregMitch: "Experts hired by CBS who said 87,000 at Beck rally find 215,000 for Jon." http://bit.ly/deS5MX Liberal bias worth 128K.
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