Sunday 3 July 2011

When Country Was King

A fact that’s been nearly lost to music history in general, and to Southern Californians in particular, is that from the 1940s right through 1960, our part of the state was well known for country music. We had our own unvarnished sound before Buck Owens and Bakersfield rose to prominence in the early 1960s. Merle Travis and Wynn Stewart may be our most famous exports, but be sure to check out Skeets McDonald, Molly Bee, Cliff Crofford and Billy Mize—and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.
The performances of that time have a vitality and authenticity that’s lacking in today’s Nashville product. Once you’ve been introduced to the canon of SoCal country, you’ll be hooked. For this, we can thank the scores of Dust Bowl and southern migrants, who in the 1930s brought their fulsome musical traditions to the Golden State. To accommodate these newcomers and the impulses of those who already lived here, dance halls and honky-tonks blossomed like California poppies.
As we were discussing the genre’s recent past, Americana musician James Intveld, an avid student of the California-roots sound, asked me, “Have you ever written anything about the Riverside Rancho?” It was a simple question that led to the discovery of a wealth of glittering dance palaces and musky clubs that exist now only in memories...
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Elisabeth Greenbaum Kasson @'LA'

The Pentagon After Mr. Gates

How Oxycontin Has Spread Through America


I left a very white, very affluent Philadelphia suburb for NYU in 2007. When I go home, Oxys always come up in conversation with friends: Who got really "bad" (and can you believe it was him?!), who started selling, or what new pill-based friendship is the strangest. On one visit, I found pens gutted to be used as straws (to snort pills) and tin foil in my old best friend’s bedroom, to smoke Oxys.
In Glen Mills, Pennsylvania, suburban moms and dads enjoy a short commute to the city and send their kids off to a “Blue Ribbon School of Excellence” to prepare them for the educational institutions to which they aspire. Aside from school and work and partying in big houses, there is not much to do.
Boredom tends to inspire some creative takes on “fun.” Out of my town, for example, came the Jackass crew. Their worm snorting and reckless self-injury (shocking their testicles, paper-cutting their eyelids) might not have occurred if they had the resources of a city. When Jackass star Ryan Dunn died in a drunk-driving accident June 20, he crashed his car on Route 322, a road members of my community use regularly.
Drugs are another common way to escape boredom. Pop one pill and working at the local pizza parlor after school might not be such a drag.
Of all the prescription pills people used – Xanax, Klonopin, Percocet, Vicodin, Adderrall, Rittalin, Codeine – OxyContin, the brand name for slow-release oxycodone, is king. The most potent painkiller of its class (opioids like codeine, Percocet and Vicodin), Oxys are what you graduate to. Being hooked on percs wouldn’t make sense. Eventually, as tolerance increases and more pills are needed (not just to get high but to avoid withdrawal) Oxys seem like the way to go...
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Kristen Gwynne @'AlterNet'

The Spam Factory's Dirty Secret


On the cut-and-kill floor of Quality Pork Processors Inc. in Austin, Minnesota, the wind always blows. From the open doors at the docks where drivers unload massive trailers of screeching pigs, through to the "warm room" where the hogs are butchered, to the plastic-draped breezeway where the parts are handed over to Hormel for packaging, the air gusts and swirls, whistling through the plant like the current in a canyon. In the first week of December 2006, Matthew Garcia felt feverish and chilled on the blustery production floor. He fought stabbing back pains and nausea, but he figured it was just the flu—and he was determined to tough it out.
Garcia had gotten on at QPP only 12 weeks before and had been stuck with one of the worst spots on the line: running a device known simply as the "brain machine"—the last stop on a conveyor line snaking down the middle of a J-shaped bench [DC] called the "head table." Every hour, more than 1,300 severed pork heads go sliding along the belt. Workers slice off the ears, clip the snouts, chisel the cheek meat. They scoop out the eyes, carve out the tongue, and scrape the palate meat from the roofs of mouths. Because, famously, all parts of a pig are edible ("everything but the squeal," wisdom goes), nothing is wasted. A woman next to Garcia would carve meat off the back of each head before letting the denuded skull slide down the conveyor and through an opening in a plexiglass shield.
On the other side, Garcia inserted the metal nozzle of a 90-pounds-per-square-inch compressed-air hose and blasted the pigs' brains into a pink slurry. One head every three seconds. A high-pressure burst, a fine rosy mist, and the slosh of brains slipping through a drain hole into a catch bucket. (Some workers say the goo looked like Pepto-Bismol; others describe it as more like a lumpy strawberry milkshake.) When the 10-pound barrel was filled, another worker would come to take the brains for shipping to Asia, where they are used as a thickener in stir-fry. Most days that fall, production was so fast that the air never cleared between blasts, and the mist would slick workers at the head table in a grisly mix of brains and blood and grease...
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Ted Genoways @'Mother Jones'

War criminals in charge

HA???

Zizek "Assange is a terrorist in the same sense that Ghandi was a terrorist"

Wikihead: The most Terrifying Journalism in Recent Memory

@exiledsurfer
WikiLeaks
Quote of the day: Goodman: "One minute left." Zizek: "Yeah, but one minute in this broader Christian sense where time is eternity."

FUCK SCAF!

Via

Democracy Now! Slavoj Žižek, Julian Assange & Amy Goodman (Livestream)

Mokhov - Eternal Wings (Free download)


W/ thanx XXX

Normal *ahem* service will be...

For Helen

W/ all our love from the clan in Exile XXX

Sean Oliver

Sean - my friend. 
Your name came up AGAIN tonight. 
Man so many people still think of you with SO much fondness in our hearts.
I don't know what to say but if there IS an afterlife not only are you playing (a mean) bass up there but you also know what you mean to us mere mortals left behind...

 Storm The (Fugn) Reality Asylum

If you can spare any money pass it on to sickle cell research (please) 
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sickle-cell_disease

Sean Oliver - Furious Fire

Eric Dolphy - BlowfugnblowRIP!

A Series of Floating Human Organs and Clothes

Via

Saturday 2 July 2011

Booze and bigotry

UN names North Korea chair of arms control agency

Misrata band lays down a soundtrack for Libya's rebels

Belarus

Greece

Temple Grandin (2010)


Temple Grandin

DJ Harvey - Sarcastic Disco Vol 2


1 - Spring - Wendy Carlos
2 - Our Prayer - The Beach Boys
3 - Hollywood Symphony - Holger Czukay
4 - We Have Come To Bless This House - Severed Heads
5 - Clash (Shugyru of the Sun) - Logic System
6 - Can't Be Serious - Ginny
7 - Transfer Station Blue - Michael Shrieve
8 - Camino del sol - Isabelle Antena
9 - Don't you know I did it - John Forde
10 - My Boss - Linda Di Franco
11 - Woman of the World - Double
12 - Memories - Amadeo
13 - Love for the sake of love - Claudja Barry
14 - ???
15 - pause
16 - Fragrance - Holger Czukay
17 - Irena's theme - Giorgio Moroder w/ 'Sensuous Black Woman' accapella
18 - Nocturne - Bryan Ferry
19 - Riding to Rio - Strange Cargo
20 - 95 in the shade - Hudson Ford
21 - pause
22 - Rendezvouz with the Sun - Howard Wales
23 - Hallucinations - Roy Budd
Download

For Some With Autism, Jobs to Match Their Talents

Jacques Greene - Lay It Down (Nacho Lovers Remix)

Greece Prevents Boats From Leaving For Gaza

Stuck in Dock, Flotilla Activists See the Hand of Israel

♪♫ Radiohead - Little By Little (Caribou RMX)

King Kenny becomes Doctor Dalglish

Jay McKinnon

WTF???

Via

Grief Intrusion by the Daily Mail

Complain here:
http://www.pcc.org.uk/complaints/form.html
Donate for Sophie

Friday 1 July 2011

All good things come to an end...?

...will 'Exile' return?
Who knows!
Years/months/weeks/days/hours...
twitter/exilestreet
Facebook/Mona Street

Moodymann - It's 2 Late 4 U And Me

The Way We Were


Channel 4 UK programme first broadcast circa 1984 / 1985-ish. Hosted by the late Tony Wilson, it's a compilation of performances by bands taken from his previous TV shows in the late 70's, such as So It Goes. Includes Sex Pistols, Clash, Buzzcocks, Iggy Pop, The Fall, Elvis Costello, Blondie, Penetration, Wreckless Eric, Ian Dury, Tom Robinson, Magazine, John Cooper Clarke, XTC and Joy Division - many of them making their TV debuts
(BIG thanx to commenter 'The Herb Whisperer' over at Dangerous Minds)
Will never forget Tony Wilson on Granada Reports (the 6PM news bulletin for the Liverpool/Manchester area) holding a microphone to incoming waves at Blackpool beach (?) asking "Is this the new wave?" LOL!

DeepChord - ClashMusic DJ Mix Podcast (May 2011)

Tommy Four Seven - Talus

Patti Smith - Gloria

Surplus 1980 - Relapse In Response

Monckton Bunkum






Extreme weather link 'can no longer be ignored'

Black Cab - Combat Boots

Damn! Should have bought a ticket in advance for their gig tonight...