Tuesday 16 August 2016

Donald Duck: The Golden Mean (1959)

Contrast and compare with the crap on kid's TV these days

Honk if you're an 8THEIST: how forbidden vanity plates vary by US state

The mystery of the 'The Girls on the Negatives'

Monday 15 August 2016

Hugo Race & Michelangelo Russo - Hobo Blues (House concert @Sagginale Florence 31/05/16)

Got to say that I was very impressed with Hugo and the True Spirit down at my local the other night. Michelangelo was there with his trumpet and harmonica and his array of fx boxes and man the rhythm section of Brett Poliness and Bryan Colechin were really tight and having heard a few Can covers over my gig going years I have to say that their version of Mushroom was probably the best yet. Bryan got as close to the gawdlike genius of Jaki Leibezeit as I have ever heard.

Do catch them if you can as I really can't recommend them highly enough.
Do also check out Hugo's excellent book 'Road Series'. You can read a few essays by him at Overland here.

Marco Fusinato: Double Infinitives

A selection of images from the print media of the decisive moment in a riot in which a protagonist brandishes a rock against a backdrop of fire. Each image is from a different part of the world, from the early twenty-first century, and is blown up to history-painting scale using the latest commercial print technologies
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Sunday 14 August 2016

1966: 50 Years Ago Today (Arena BBC)

Based on Jon Savage's book 1966: The Year the Decade Exploded, Arena marks the year pop music and popular culture ripped up the rule book in articulate, instinctive and radical new ways.
This was the year of Jonathan Miller's Alice in Wonderland, Morgan - A Suitable Case for Treatment, and the year that Strawberry Fields Forever was recorded. Television was still in black and white, but the world outside was bursting with colour and controversy. In America, in London, in Amsterdam, in Paris, revolutionary ideas slow-cooking since the late 1950s reached boiling point. In popular culture and the mass media, 1966 was a year of restless experimentation and the search for new forms of expression - particularly in pop music.
Written by Savage and director Paul Tickell, Arena's film takes viewers back to that moment in a vivid celebration of the music, films and TV that shaped the 1960s

We are not amused

Jim Morin

Stop Treating Marijuana Like Heroin

#CensusFail is a failure to listen to ‘experts’ and it’s complicated...

Pronounced 'Yah-kee Leebeh-tsite'

Half man, half machine. That’s what they say about Jaki Liebezeit’s skills as a drummer and his metronome style of playing. The founding member of legendary krautrock outfit Can has been called “one of the few drummers to convincingly meld the funky and the cerebral” by Jeff Norman. Born in 1939 in Dresden, Liebezeit started out as a jazz musician. Spending the early sixties in Barcelona, he played with Chet Baker and Tete Montoliu, joined the Manfred Schoof Quintet a little bit later, shaped European free jazz and finally took a ride into the psychedelic realm with Can – a group that always stressed that they were anything but a rock band. The 1980s saw Liebezeit as a member of Phantomband, working with Jah Wobble, Depeche Mode or Brian Eno and forming drum ensembles such as Drums Off Chaos and Club Off Chaos. In recent years, most of all, his efforts with Burnt Friedman have been the center of attention
HERE

Saturday 13 August 2016

Off to this NOW

At the local pub 842 steps away...

Headline o'the day

Chemistry. Not an exact science eh?

LOL

New Leonard Cohen album coming

Oh that Leonard Cohen! Weeks away from his 82nd birthday and still working as hard as ever. In a handful of weeks he'll release a brand new album. It's called "You Want It Darker" [my answer: yes please]. It was produced by Adam Cohen, his son, and there are nine new songs. Here's the tracklist.
1. “You Want It Darker”
2. “Treaty”
3. “On the Level”
4. “Leaving the Table”
5. “If I Didn’t Have Your Love”
6. “Traveling Light”
7. “Seemed the Better Way”
8. “Steer Your Way”
9. String Reprise/ Treaty
And here he is on the front cover, hanging out of a picture frame, or a window - Leonard Cohen likes windows - with one of the occasional cigarettes he's smoked since he allowed himself to resume the habit on his 80th birthday
Sylvie Simmons

Trump Sandwich

Via

Trump's son-in-law's newspaper has gone full on ballistic against Trump

...No longer can any worthwhile American say, “But the candidates are the same.” No. It’s not a lesser of two evils. There is one evil. And it is Trump. There is no cover. You can no longer and say, “He’s a business guy.” Or, “I’m bothered by Hillary’s emails.” Or, “They’re all the same.” Or, “He doesn’t mean it.” Or, “He’s an entertainer.”
He means it. He made that crystal clear today. He is calling for internecine war. He is calling for all-out Armageddon. He is calling for battle - beyond this election. This cannot be ignored.
I don’t want to hear that this is a breath of fresh air, he’s not politically correct, or let’s let Donald be Donald. Donald is antithetical to our character. He’s dangerous to our safety. We must stop Donald being Donald at all costs...
...No American who loves this country has the excuse, cover or capacity to waver and shrink and hide behind skirts after this week. If you are with Trump, and his despicable irresponsibility, his bloodthirsty hate for who we are, you have no right to call yourself a patriot...

Tonight, I was arrested at gunpoint by an Arizona highway patrol officer who threatened to shoot me in the back (twice) in front of my 7-year-old daughter. For a moment, I was certain he was going to kill me for no reason. I'm alive, and I need to share the story. PLEASE SHARE IT, because I have an important reason for staying up past 1AM to write it down.Here's what happened:My daughter and I are from San Francisco, on vacation, traveling through the Southwest. Today we were driving from Hoover Dam to the Grand Canyon in a Toyota Camry we'd rented from Fox Car Rental in Las Vegas. In Williams, Arizona, as I exited Interstate 40 to head north toward the Canyon rim, I was pulled over by an AHP officer who'd been tailing me for a couple of miles. I hadn't been speeding, so I wondered if perhaps the car had a broken taillight or something. I rolled down my window and waited.Suddenly, the officer rapped on the rear passenger side window with his pistol. My daughter, who was sitting inches from the barrel of his gun, jumped with fear as the officer yelled at me to roll down the front passenger window, his service weapon pointed directly at me. I knew something was terribly awry and I tried to remain calm, keeping my hands visible as I slowly fumbled for the window controls in an unfamiliar car. My daughter rolled down her window and I explained that we were in a rental car, that we had no weapons, and I was having trouble figuring out how to roll down the front passenger window from my driver's side door. The officer didn't listen, and kept yelling louder and more insistently, ordering me to comply with his request as he leered at me down the barrel of his pistol. My daughter panicked and tried to get out of her booster seat to reach forward to roll down the front window, and the officer screamed her at her not to move as he pointed his pistol at her.Somehow I was able to get the window down, and then the officer ordered me to exit the car with my hands up. I did so slowly and with my hands raised as high in the air as possible, and as he came around to the driver's side of the car he screamed at me to face away from him, as if I were doing something wrong. (I didn't know this was the protocol for being arrested at gunpoint.) Then, as I had my hands in the air, he yelled, at the top of his lungs, in a voice I will never forget, as my daughter looked on in terror, "Get your hands away from your waist or I'll blow two holes through your back right now!" My hands were high in the air as he said this, and I was not in any way reaching for my waist. I was utterly terrified. I've heard stories of police yelling out false things like this before they unjustifiably attack someone as a way to justify the attack, and I thought this was what was happening to me. I braced for bullets to hit me and all I could think of was my daughter having to watch it happen and being left alone on the side of the highway with an insane, violent cop.The bullets didn't arrive, though. I followed every order of the officer as slowly and deliberately as I could, very slowly backed toward him, got to my knees, was placed in handcuffs, and was thrown inside the back of his car. By this time many more officers has arrived, and I could see a couple of them talking to my daughter.Why was I arrested? The car I was had rented had previously had its front license plate lost or stolen, so the car rental company reported this to the Nevada DMV. The Arizona highway patrol officer, who looked up my plate number while he was tailing me, misinterpreted this Nevada DMV report as meaning that I was driving a car with a stolen license plate, and somehow this prompted him to approach me at gunpoint and threaten to kill me in front of my little girl.After a few minutes he released me from the handcuffs, and since I knew the truth, I called him out for over-reacting, and told him he had no reason to threaten to shoot me. He stood by his story that I had made a threatening movement toward my waist, and I said it wasn't true, and he said this wasn't the place to discuss it. He let me go attend to my daughter but continued to "detain" us for another 20 minutes as he talked to his supervisors, presumably plotting damage control.I got his card, his supervisor's number, the case number, and the cards of other officers on the scene. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about it. My daughter is traumatized. She said she wanted to cry to the officers who were comforting her, but she was afraid they would get mad at her. As we drove the final hour to our Grand Canyon hotel, she told me she was confused, because she thought the police were the good guys, and she didn't know why the officer said he would kill me when my hands were in the air. I tried to come up with an explanation but I struggled for words.I'm not sure why I'm writing all this down. Maybe it's because, as I sat in that back of that police car and heard the AHP officer learn the truth from his dispatcher - that the man he'd just captured at gunpoint and threatened to murder was totally innocent - I realized it was very possible that the only reason I was alive was because I am a scrawny 48-year-old white man wearing a Micky Mouse t-shirt and cargo shorts and hiking boots. The officer that arrested me was so pumped up on adrenaline and eager to get a "bad guy" that he could barely control himself, and if I'd looked just a little bit more threatening to him - because I was black, or young, or long-haired, or tattooed, or didn't speak English - I believe he might have pulled the trigger.If you are a person who has ever looked skeptically at the claims of Black Lives Matter, or others who talk about police violence, I urge you to consider what happened to me and put yourselves in the shoes of others. I just survived a bizarre gunpoint situation in which I was as innocent as Philando Castile, who was not as lucky as I was. We live in a society where anywhere and everyone can have a gun at any time, and police are responding with fear in dangerous ways. I got lucky tonight. My daughter and I made it to the Grand Canyon and I'm going to try to salvage what's left of our vacation. Many others - because of the color of their skin or the way they look or because of simple bad luck - did not meet the same fate.Administrative notes:I may not be able to respond to your comments or PMs or tests about this post. The kiddo and I are OK, and looking forward to hiking the Grand Canyon tomorrow. I'm going to try not to spend much time on facebook after I post this, and cell service here sucks. I'm thinking about taking legal action against Arizona for this. I'm really mad about it. Perhaps it's a waste of time, but I feel like I need to do something to try to protect others against officer Oton Villegas, even if it costs me a lot of money in legal fees. If you have any advice about this, please contact me directly.

Love you all
Ken Walton
Via Anne with thanks

Wu Tang freestyle 1997

Wu Tang freestyle from 1997 with Ol Dirty Bastard (R.I.P), The RZA, Method Man, Masta Killa and U-God, DJ Mathematics on the decks
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Via

The Salvation of Sinners and the Suicide Bomb

Alex Bent & the Emptiness - Hold On To Me Forever

(A. Bent, O. Friesen)
Additional vocals by Oliver Friesen
Recorded at Matt's House from June 2015 - January 2016 in Saskatoon SK

This song took me by surprise. I wrote it as a way of coping with loneliness, but since then it's taken on an entirely new meaning. It is my favorite song on the album. The album was written at a time where I chose to be reclusive out of fear of being hurt or humiliated. I found comfort in creating songs that took the stories I saw in my head and painted them into reality. I hope others may listen and find a similar escape within these songs

From 'Dead, In The Water' available August 26th on www.iamtheemptiness.com

Dad, husband, and 44th President of the United States' playlist

In many ways I am going to miss this man...and hasn't Courtney Barnett done well - from behind the bar at my local pub (Melbourne's Northcote Social Club) all the way to the White House

A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

A series of futuristic pictures by Jean-Marc Côté and other artists issued in France in 1899, 1900, 1901 and 1910. Originally in the form of paper cards enclosed in cigarette/cigar boxes and, later, as postcards, the images depicted the world as it was imagined to be like in the then distant year of 2000. As is so often the case their predictions fell some way off the mark, failing to go far enough in thinking outside the confines of their current technological milieu (hence the ubiquity of propellors, not to mention the distinctly 19th-century dress).
There are at least 87 cards known that were authored by various French artists, the first series being produced for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Due to financial difficulties the cards by Jean-Marc Côté were never actually distributed and only came to light many years later after the science-fiction author Isaac Asimov chanced upon a set and published them in 1986, with accompanying commentary, in the book Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000