Problems
29 minutes ago
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Peter Schmidt: artwork for Eno's 'Before & After Science'
The four watercolours on this page were done by Peter Schmidt were originally printed as lithographs and included in the very first copies of Eno's LP "Before and After Science." Later, they were available for purchase through EG.
They're briefly described in an article in Melody Maker article from January of 1977:
This evening I visited Peter Schmidt (the painter who did the cover for Tiger Mountain and Evening Star, and with whom I published Oblique Strategies).He has just returned from a holiday in Madeira, and we look at the 12 watercolours he made there. The last three of the series are quite exceptionally beautiful - a tiny road winds down the side of an almost vertical mountain whose peak is lost in the clouds.
Peter describes his walk from the top of the mountain, and says it was frightening since there were man-sized rocks fallen on the road. We discuss the idea of fear as an aid to perception. I describe an experience I had in Scotland recently where I climbed a very steep hill at twilight - absentmindedly not paying much attention to where I was going - and came to a halt, breathless and exhausted, on a small plateau near the summit. For the first time I looked to see where I was.
The plateau was covered with dead ferns, which glowed a brilliant fiery orange in the dusk. I was tired enough not to try to reduce the experience to words and concepts, so I just stood open-mouthed for some minutes.
This was an instance of exhaustion as an aid to perception - presumably the conscious mind resigns this continual obsession with classification and the attendant reassurance at times like this, and so the quality of the experience is unfiltered.
Later in the evening we talk about the work of Die Brucke, the group of German painters active between 1905-25, who impressed us all so much in Berlin. I particularly liked Otto Mueller and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff.
Peter posed the question: "What could one do now that would have the sense of daring which those works had?" I reply that I think the answer must lie in doing things that are very quiet, which make no assault, and perhaps do not obviously trade in novelty. Like watercolours. At a time when drama is at a premium, reticence and delicacy communicate best.
Before I leave, we discuss the possibilities of marketing visual objects in the way that records are sold. We both agree that this would drastically alter the nature of contemporary painting, since it would once again put it in touch with demand on the level of a genuine response to the work itself, rather than to its "value" (be that financial or "cultural").
I walk from Peter's in Stockwell to Victoria station. It is a cold, exhilarating night. I am thinking about writing a song called "Man Making Measurements And Dancing." I can't sleep until 4.00 am because I have a flurry of ideas which won't wait their turn. It is most annoying.
See also Eno's appreciation of Peter Schmidt and more on 'Oblique Strategies' here.
Tuesday, 17 November 2009
Drug clans take control in shanty town where Madrid's politicians fear to tread
Two men are asleep on a filthy mattress under the weak autumn sunshine. Another, in ragged clothes with his skin stained dark by the sun and dirt, lies motionless on the concrete strip surrounding the small church of Santo Domingo. In the dusty, rubbish-filled esplanade in front, dozens of addicts sit among the garbage, shooting up doses of heroin.On the outskirts of Spain's capital city, Madrid, one of Europe's biggest drug supermarkets thrives in a precarious settlement of some 30,000 people strung along an old cattle-herding path, the Cañada Real Galiana.
About 10,000 drug addicts come every day to this stretch of shambolic housing, where lawlessness has grown in a legal void that local politicians have failed to tackle.
Addicts stumble down the Cañada's wide main street, looking for their dose. Others, employed as look-outs and hustlers, call them in past the high metal gates of the compounds owned by the drug clans.
Thickset men sit out on fold-up picnic chairs, watching their business enter the compounds, which – in some cases – are dominated by huge houses built with money from heroin and crack cocaine. The odd police car drives past, but little disturbs the relentless business of buy and sell...
Get sick of saying it, but the answer is so obvious...you might want to listen to this!
Ketamine drug use 'harms memory'
Frequent use of ketamine - a drug which is popular with clubbers - is being linked with memory problems.The University College London team carried out a range of memory and psychological tests on 120 people.
They found frequent users performed poorly on skills such as recalling names, conversations and patterns.
Previous research has suggested the drug may cause kidney and bladder damage. Experts said users should be aware of the risks.
Ketamine - or Special K as it has been dubbed - acts as a stimulant and induces hallucinations.
It has been increasing in popularity, particularly as an alternative to ecstasy among clubbers, as the price has fallen over recent years...
The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda by John Yoo
'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.
Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war...
Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again
Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".
In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.
The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.
The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.
But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.
But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad...
Johann Hari @'The Independent'
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