HOPE

"I wanted to make an art piece of Barack Obama because I thought an iconic portrait of him could symbolize and amplify the importance of his mission. I believe Obama will guide this country to a future where everyone can thrive and I should support him vigorously for the sake of my two young daughters. I have made art opposing the Iraq war for several years, and making art of Obama, who opposed the war from the start, is like making art for peace. I know I have an audience of young art fans and I'm delighted if I can encourage them to see the merits of Barack Obama." -Shepard Fairey

Patti Smith.net

Photograph by Tim N.

Well worth checking out Patti's web site as thoughts, new songs and info can all be found there from time to time.

And from here you can get the interview and performance of 'Wing' & 'Grateful' from the Speigeltent yesterday.

A-Ha...HA!HA!HA!HA!HA!

Patti Smith & Lenny Kaye at world (infamous) Spiegeltent today

Patti Smith & Lenny Kaye at the live broadcast today of Radio National's 'The Music Show'.

Photographs by Tim N.

What if...

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said "I do" to?
What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to painkillers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama were a member ofthe "Keating 5"?
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election
numbers would be as close as they are?

(thanx to smeggers)

Could you torture somebody? Would you?

Stanley Milgram’s 1961 obedience to authority experiment countered the participant’s moral beliefs against the demands of authority. For this study, Milgram took out a newspaper ad that offered $4.50 for one hour of work, at Yale University, for a psychology experiment that sought to investigate memory and learning. Participants were told that the study would look at the relationship of punishment in learning, and that one person would be the teacher, and the other would be the learner (a confederate), and that these roles would be determined by a random drawing. The learner was then strapped into a chair, and electrodes are attached to their arm. It was explained to both the teacher and the learner that the electrodes were attached to an electric shock generator, and that shocks would serve as punishment for incorrect answers. The experimenter then states that the shocks will be painful, but that they will not cause any permanent tissue damage, while in reality no shocks would actually be received. The teacher and learner are then divided into separate rooms.

The experimenter shows the teacher the shock generator, which has 30 switches, with a voltage ranging from 15-450 volts, and are labeled from “slight shock” to “danger: severe shock,” and the last switch labeled “XXX.” The teacher is told that it is their job to teach the learner a simple paired associate task, and that they must punish the learner for incorrect answers, by increasing the shock 15 volts each time. The teacher was then given a 15 volt shock to show that the generator was actually working. When the experiment begins, the learner found the task to be difficult and made various mistakes, which resulted in increasing intensity of the shocks. When the machine reached 75, 90, and 105 volts, the teacher could hear the learner grunting through the wall, and at 120 volts the learner claimed that the shocks were getting painful, and at 150 volts he screamed, “get me out of here! I refuse to go on.” When the teacher questioned progressing, the experimenter said things such as, “you can’t stop now,” or “the experiment depends on your continuing compliance.” As the shock voltage increased the learner cried out, “I can’t stand the pain,” at 300 volts the learner began to pound on the wall and demanded to be let out. When the machine reached 330 volts there was no longer any noise coming from the learner. The experimenter then told the teacher that his lack of response was to be considered as an incorrect answer, and that shocks were to still be administered. The experiment concludes when the highest shock level is reached.

Milgram found that 65% of participants would render shock levels of 450 volts, and that these were everyday normal people. In the post-experiment interview, Milgram asked the participants to rate how painful they thought the shocks were, the typical answer was extremely painful. Most of the subjects obeyed the experimenter, however the subjects did show obvious signs of an internal struggle, and demonstrated reactions such as nervous laughter, trembling, and groaning. These interviews confirmed that everyday normal people can cause pain and suffering to another person, under the right set of circumstances. Milgram also found the tendency of the teacher to devalue the learner, by saying such phrases as, “he is so dumb he deserves to get shocked,” which helped to interally justify the teachers behavior of continuing to administer the shocks. This experiment by Milgram has given a tremendous amount of insight into human behavior and obedience.

Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, "The Perils of Obedience", writing:

'The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.

Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.'

Melbourne psychologist and writer Gina Perry has now tracked down and interviewed four participants in the 1961 experiment and the resulting hour long programme, 'BEYOND THE SHOCK MACHINE' is to be broadcast on Radio National here in Australia today at 2pm (AEST).

It will be available here to download shortly afterwards.

http://www3.niu.edu/acad/psych/Millis/History/2003/stanley_milgram.htm

Free Patti Smith exhibitions here in Melbourne

Patti Smith expo at Anna Schwarz Gallery.

Photo of Patti Smith performing in 'Cowboy Mouth' the play she wrote with Sam Shepard.

Anna Schwartz Gallery

LAND250
Australian Premiere
Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to
photography: “The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of
drawing, recording or writing a poem.” Many of her photographs embody significant personal
meaning, others serve as a visual record of her well-travelled life. This exhibition is a rare
collection of her photographic work.

THE CORAL SEA
Australian Premiere
The Festival presents Patti Smith’s installation The Coral Sea, which includes photographs by
her longtime collaborator and friend, Robert Mapplethorpe. These installation works include
visual records comprising very personal artifacts and objects – offerings from her life.
5 photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe with text by Patti Smith
Film: Jem Cohen
Guitar: Kevin Shields
Production: Stefan Righi
The Coral Sea is on loan from the Fondation Cartier, Paris.
Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs appear courtesy of The Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation, New York City.

THE INFIRMARY

MELBOURNELAND
World Premiere
While in Melbourne, Smith will create a place-specific project, Melbourneland, especially for the Festival.
Responding to her surroundings she will create a unique record of Melbourne with an accumulation of
images added to Anna Schwartz Gallery each day.As part of its Patti Smith residency, the Festival presents an exhibition of her photographic work drawn from pieces created between 1967 and 2007, offering audiences a rare opportunity to explore the photography of the punk poetress.

Patti Smith began to take photographs in 1967 for use in collages. In 1995, she returned to photography, using a vintage Polaroid Land 250, and found solace in the creative expression of the artform when she was grief-stricken at the untimely loss of her husband, her brother and some of her dearest friends. "The immediacy of the process was a relief from the long involved process of drawing, recording, or writing a poem."

Many of Smith's photographs, which she refers to as, ‘relics of my life … souvenirs of my wanderings”, embody significant personal meaning: Robert Mapplethorpe's slippers, Virginia Woolf's bed, Hermann Hesse's typewriter and Arthur Rimbaud's utensils. Others serve as a visual record of her well-travelled life.

Patti Smith: Photography & Installation
Anna Schwartz Gallery, Flinders Lane, Melbourne city
Thu 9 Oct – Sat 25 Oct

Centre of Contemporary Photography

Objects of Life is a fascinating exhibition of photographs, objects and video inspired by Steven Sebring's time with Patti Smith during the filming of their extraordinary documentary Dream of Life. During the 11 years of filming, Sebring became increasingly interested in the history and mythology behind the possessions and personal treasures that Smith shared in the film's most intimate moments. It resulted in the desire to return to his roots as photographer and to recontextualise the sacred and the commonplace through his camera lens. Objects of Life consists of 14 large-scale photographs taken by Sebring. This collection ranges from Smith's childhood dress to an ancient urn containing the remains of Smith's close friend and collaborator Robert Mapplethorpe, to black leather boots that have stomped around the world and a video installation of Smith in the course of creating an art piece. The exhibition also includes a rare oil painting by Smith, her largest and most recent work to date. Also featured is a private collection of personal belongings from both artists whose collaboration is grounded by their relationship to the film and to their individual personal experiences.

Objects of Life
Centre of Contemporary Photography, 404 George Street, Fitzroy
Fri 12 Sept – Sat 25 Oct

Laddies and Gentlemen...

Patti Smith is in town for the International Arts Festival.
It seems that she will be everywhere the next three days or so.
This will give you 'Horses' (Live - NY 1975) & Dylan/Smith performing the Grateful Dead song 'Black Peter' (Philadelphia November 1995).

My father and I watched this in Glasgow back in 1976.
I was sixteen.
My father was pissed off and confused.
A woman that looked like a man.
(That made a change, he usually complained the men looked like women.)

It's funny that the music that used to piss off my parents now pisses off my children.

WELCOME TO MELBOURNE

How to get there

"The central problem with these maps is not in the way in which they confront norms of cartography, but the duration to which they are bound. The ephemeral nature of psychogeographic space meant that these sites could quickly shift through the pressures of development. The Situationist maps in turn become an archive of a specific moment in the life of the city. However, if these maps incorporated time, they would be able to show the migration or disappearance of these psychogeographic spaces, highlighting and critiquing the urban trends that were / are shaping the city.

Although the Situationists most likely regarded these maps as a record of the drift and a means for provoking new tactics for inhabiting the city, they also represent a valuable schema for creating new forms of cartography. These maps uniquely propose a networked model in which spatial events are abstracted from the grid and linked according to their typology. As databases form the engines of the contemporary base map, the information they contain may be retrieved in multiple configurations, allowing for a range of methods for visualizing the space of the city. The vocabulary of geo-spatial metadata behind the contemporary base map should be expanded to include a broader set of terminologies, allowing for new interpretations of the urban landscape. For example, querying space according to ambient phenomena such as its emotional associations or pollution levels. Visualizing urban space as a montage of typologies may in fact be closer to the fragmented way in which we create our own mental maps. Perhaps we can begin to use database driven maps to understand place within a system of relations determined by their relevance to our queries, rather than their geographic location."

From: Redifining The Basemap by Alison Sant.

Illustration by Guy Debord.

Paris July 2009

Would love to be in Yirrip for this.

OOPS

Ry Cooder fux up (BIG time) at 2 minutes 40 seconds in footage of last weeks gig in SF with Nick Lowe & Jim Keltner.

(Thanx to the smeggers for this.)

Grateful Dead 'Dark Star' Veneta Oregon 27th August 1972

This here will get you a SBD of 'Dark Star' from the gig.

It was a benefit for the creamery owned by Ken Kesey's brother.

The video above is from 'Sunshine Daydream'.

Make believe maverick

There is an interesting article on John McCain in the current American edition of Rolling Stone. It can be found here.

"During his 1992 campaign, at the end of a long day, McCain's wife, Cindy, mussed his receding hair and needled him playfully that he was "getting a little thin up there." McCain reportedly blew his top, cutting his wife down with the kind of language that had gotten him hauled into court as a high schooler: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt." Even though the incident was witnessed by three reporters, the McCain campaign denies it took place."

The illustration above is by Robert Grossman.

Where are Martin Rev and Alan Vega?

An image flashed into my head of Nick Cave presenting Suicide with the Innovation In Sound 2007 Mojo Magazine award.
They are the only thing missing from the aforementioned ATP festival at Mount Buller early next year.

This will give you Suicide live at Max's Kansas City in 1978.

I was at one of those Clash gigs in Camden in 1978 and the other support band was The Coventry Automatics who later changed their name to The Specials.

Another thing. I keep reading that the Suicide '23 Minutes Over Brussels' was issued as a flexi disc back in 1978 but I had a regular vinyl album that had that and an equally short Berlin gig that also ended in a riot on the other side.
Bought it from Harem Records in Muswell Hill.Never see this in the discographies and don't remember it as a bootleg. Certainly never saw a flexi disc back then.