Saturday 31 December 2011

♪♫ The Urban Voodoo Machine - Goodbye To Another Year

(Happy New Year Slim!)

Stefan Stern: Nobody tells the whole truth. But is a bit more of it too much to ask?

Rory Foster 
1875: Joseph Bazalgette knighted for taking crap away from our homes. 2011: Peter Bazalgette knighted for delivering crap to our homes.

New Year Honours for the great, the good – and the Tory donors

Spaceboy says: I love the smell of resolution in the morning...

The Struggle Continues...

♪♫ Sally Timms/Jon Langford - Broken Bottle

Exile's best of 2011

My top 3 albums of 2011...so fugn close but after much thought:
3/PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Wins the best production of the year too and the use of Niney The Observer's 'Blood & Fire' in 'Written On The Forehead' was simply genius...

2/Richmond Fontaine - The High Country
Willy Vlautin...read his books, hear his songs!
g
and
1/Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting
After first coming across this Burial remix of 'Wayfaring Stranger' I didn't think that Mr Woon would let me down. This album became the soundtrack to a lot of nocturnal rambles this past year...


Song of the year:
Atari Teenage Riot - Black Flags (feat. Boots Riley)

Best cover version of the year:


Gig of the year (local):
Black Cab at Cherry
  Combat Boots (live at Cherry)

Gig of the year (international):
Omar Souleyman at Nortcote Social Club

Free gig of the year:
Sun Ra Arkestra at Fed Square

'What did we just see?' moment at a live gig
Plan B performing 'Stay Too Long' at the Big Day Out
Our collective jaws dropped at the conclusion of their set that day...

Album track of the year:
David Lynch - Strange and Unproductive Thinking

12" of the year:
Burial VS Massive Attack - Paradise Circus/Four Walls



The if I had the money I probably would have bought it artifact of the year goes to this.
Biggest disappointment gig of the year goes to the Nick Drake tribute...gawd I was bored at this gig. So fugn polite. Am I the only person who doesn't get Robyn (I'm bonkers me I yam) Hitchcock? It was so nice to see Green Gartside on stage again tho for the first time since I caught the trio Scritti#1 (with Tom and Nial) numerous times back in the late 70's...
Biggest disappointment of the year also goes to the gigs that ill health stopped me from going to (Underground Resistance/HTRK and Black Cab at The Tote)
...and how on earth did I miss this band until this year?


Pygmy of the year? Well there could only be one winner...
This one's for you Spaceboy
XXX

Ron Paul Photographed With Stormfront Director

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Stormfront Founder Don Black Says White Supremacists Thought Ron Paul Was ‘One of Us’

Friday 30 December 2011

The Coming Collapse of China: 2012 Edition

Thatcher government toyed with evacuating Liverpool after 1981 riots

Thatcher 'considered arming police' during 1981 riots

The Radio Luxembourg Story

Radio Luxembourg - Story (mp3)
A dip into the rich history of Radio Luxembourg. Often referred to, erroneously, as a pirate, 'Luxy' was thoroughly licensed from its start in the early 1930s. In the days when the BBC distanced itself from entertainment, Luxembourg rose to the challenge, beaming the UK with a first taste of commercial radio. Commercial it was too, in a 21st century brand integration way. The transmitters were seized during the War, and happy presenters were replaced by the tones of Lord Haw Haw, whose 'Germany Calling' call-sign can be impersonated by the generation which heard him, and which later saw him hanged for treason. The new Luxy flourished after the War. Having moved to its famous 208m position on the medium wave, it was embraced by a young Britain both before the 'pirate' era - and beyond, as a young UK 'independent local radio' pursued its early 'worthy' programme policy. Owing to the format gap, Luxy bounced through the seventies and only began to suffer real attrition as Radio One moved to FM; and commercial radio was freed for a more populist approach and the growing network seized Luxy revenue. The station eventually waved farewell to 208 in 1991 - and remained on satellite until its closure a year later. The station is remembered to this day for: 'the Ovaltineys' sponsored programmes; the presenters it spawned (Murray, Savile, Edmonds, Freeman); the poor reception ('the Luxembourg effect'); and for being listened to 'under the bedclothes' (unavoidable really, it only managed to occupy its frequencies in the nightime).
Via

John Cage playing amplified cacti and plant materials with a feather


John Cage performing on Nam June Paik's TV special called 'Good Morning Mr. Orwell' from 1984. In the beginning, we see that Cage is joined by Takehisa Kosugi and one other unidentified person. perhaps they were performing a composition or improvisation that they would have done during a Merce Cunningham dance. there is also a cut away to a Joseph Bueys piano performance art piece.
MORE
(Thanx Michael!)

About that long lost Radiohead track...

Christopher Stopa - Sit Still


Via

South Pole Records Warmest Temperature on Record

Read the Out-of-Print 'Blade Runner Sketchbook' by Syd Mead and Ridley Scott

(Thanx Matt!)

Arab spring leads surge in events captured on cameraphones

Image

Russia submerges nuclear submarine to douse blaze

Richard Dixon 
Kim Jong Un rounds off period of official mourning in North Korea and underlines change of direction with release of Morrissey covers album
 
HA!

Egypt police raid offices of human rights groups in Cairo

2011 in review

28c3: How governments have tried to block Tor

Download high quality version: http://bit.ly/v04Z25
Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4800.en.html
Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine: How governments have tried to block Tor
Iran blocked Tor handshakes using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in January 2011 and September 2011. Bluecoat tested out a Tor handshake filter in Syria in June 2011. China has been harvesting and blocking IP addresses for both public Tor relays and private Tor bridges for years.

State of the arms race between repressive governments and anti - censorship/surveillance Tor technology (and why American companies are on the repressive governments' side)

???

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Up And Down Year For Cable News

Mikhail Gorbachev: Is the World Really Safer Without the Soviet Union?

HA!

(Click to enlarge)
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Glenn Greenwald 
Congrats to the telecoms in having courts recognize the full-scale lawbreaking amnesty they bought from both parties

Orangutans 'could video chat' between zoos via iPads

Ker-pow! Women kick back against comic-book sexism

The 10 Most Sampled James Brown Songs

Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz

Late one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.
Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?
It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903...
Continue reading
Paul Marks @'New Scientist'

♪♫ Emmylou Harris & Elvis Costello - Love Hurts (Letterman)

Woody Guthrie's 'New Years Rulin's' (1943)

(Click to enlarge)
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Destroy

'...You know what anarchists have always believed.'
'Yes.'
'Tell me,' she said.
'The urge to destroy is a creative urge.'
'This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.'
- Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis (2003)

Is Don DeLillo really prescient? 

Peace on Earth...


'I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.' - Gandhi

Occupy Facebook

“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson...
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Thursday 29 December 2011

Doug Weir 
last night's Will Self point of view on the media landscape, well worth a listen, audio: text:

♪♫ Jamie Woon - Night Air (Ramadanman Refix)

The Firm

Mickey at home with Maria and Chanelle. Photo credit: Jocelyn Bain Hogg, The Firm
UK photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg spent ten years documenting organized crime life, from the activity of British gangsters in South London to their exile in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With unprecedented access, these glaring images capture the storied villains at home, salacious private parties, unlicensed boxing matches, business talks ,and funerals of the “the old-school Godfathers of British crime” whose deaths would fracture and decentralize the social order within these underworld societies. The Firm was completed in 2001, re-visted in 2008, and is now on view at London’s Foto 8 Gallery through January 14.
“These are not the faces of criminals who hide behind the facade of respectability or the corruption of political influence. They are, in fact, the real thing, men who hold their head up when challenged, and who seek no false redemption in the face of public vilification...”
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Amazing!

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Power!!!

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Four words...

Horse. Lock. Bolt. Door.

♪♫ The Flaming Lips - I Am The Walrus

The 'genuine' Basement Tapes


(Thanx Tony!)

John Domokos - 2011: A year filming protests

Wednesday 28 December 2011

Just Wow!
(update)

Keeping Students From the Polls

The Tyranny of Defense Inc.

Sinead O'Connor ends marriage after 16 days

Bad Call, Mr. President

We Are Not All Created Equal

Demdike Stare - Irrational Advice