A Final Thanks !!! I’m Buzzing !
3 hours ago
Tuesday, 15 June 2010
Monday, 14 June 2010
Memories...
wolon Mr Momus, due to soundtrack a film soon, waxes lyrical over the synthetic-orientalist music in the first porn film he saw http://imomus.com/ 
exilestreet @wolon Remind Mr Momus that the Classic Grand in Glasgow was known to one and all as the Classic Gland back then! Kode9
Kode9 is one of the single most influential people in dance music context, thanks to his expansive DJ sets, his flagship label Hyperdub, or his own productions. His A&R abilities alone-- finding and encouraging Burial, Zomby, King Midas Sound, Ikonika, LV, Cooly G, and nearly half a dozen more-- suggests he has rare and consistently accurate vision. As a DJ he also sets the bar for many of his peers, so the arrival of his second studio mix CD-- a volume for !K7's DJ-Kicks-- is no small event.
His first mix was Dubstep Allstars: Vol. 3, released in 2006 in what felt like a very different era. Back then his vision was much more singular, finding the space between dark, synth-lead dubstep and grime instrumentals, interlocked with a raft of bassy DMZ dubplates. Dubstep was just showing the signs of growth to suggest that it wasn't going to remain the tiny niche community it had been for six years.
Fast forward to 2010 and Kode's vision is far more expansive. "I just wanted to do a snapshot of some of my sets from the last year and the range of music I've been playing," he explains. "Once I'd put the tracklist together, I realized it was a bit tense, so I added the interlude in the middle for a bit of fresh air."
As the interlude suggests, it's a mix with different phases and tempo plateaus, yet it is eclectic without falling into jumbled, aimless "anything goes" freestyling. The first half is quickly-mixed UK funky and UK funky-influenced tracks from Ill Blu, Cooly G, Grievous Angel, Scratcha DVA, and Sticky alongside his own "Blood Orange" and "You Don't Wash (Dub)". It's an overview of the driving, percussive seam of UK funky that has proven such a revelation in the last two or three years, swinging the pendulum away from grime and dubstep halfstep plodding back toward danceable grooves without falling into 4x4 stiffness and techno-sterility. There's even a touch of dancehall and South African flavors, from Natalie Storm and Majuva respectively.
The interlude to which he alludes is a bridge of R&B and soul influenced tracks from Morgan Zarate, Rozzi Daime, and J*DaVeY, which hint at Kode's longstanding love affair with acts like Sa-Ra and his links to Flying Lotus and L.A.'s beat scene. What's notable about this diversion is if you look at Kode9's musical path over the last 15 years, from jungle through UK garage, dubstep, grime, and UK funky, they all are local, London-based genres, so it's telling that Flylo and Kode9's musical dialogue and transnational friendship was founded abroad and nourished by a shared international outlook.
"I met Flying Lotus in Melbourne, Australia in 2006 I think, and we've just stayed in touch," explains Kode. "He's got a musical vision which is rare and not just stuck in his own city. All the Brainfeeder crew are an amazingly talented bunch of freaks, and what is cool about the nights, whether the crowds like it all or not, is that, in quite a focused way, really anything goes."
Like his relentless global DJ schedule, the mix soon moves on, upping the tempos and building momentum. For some parts of this phase, he revisits some of the ideas of Dubstep Allstars Vol. 3, finding the synergies between low percussive dubstep (Digital Mystikz' "2 Much Chat" and "Mountain Dread March") and synthy jams (Zomby) or mid-driven grime (Terror Danjah). Also blended here is a very 2010 sub-section, with Addison Groove's pivotal "Footcrab", Kode9 vs. LD's "Bad", and Ramadanman's juke-influenced "Work Them" suggesting new energetic possibilities at 140 bpm, without having to stray into the world of wobble to generate an impact.
Overall it's a very coherent and forward-thinking mix for someone who recently categorized his musical surroundings as a full of "mini micro sub-niche[s]" and in a "holding pattern before something else comes." As complex and fragmented as this sounds, the suggestion that bass-driven music is currently fragmented seems accurate, so a broader question then follows: Is it impossible for audiences to be truly inspired and blown away by this "holding pattern" of "niches"-- in effect a long tail of smaller but collectively inspirational musical mutations-- or does that effect of being "blown away" instead require the coherence that only comes from one core larger scene, with unity of purpose and relative sonic definition?
"Well I'm not blown away by much to be honest," he admits bravely, perhaps a reflection of his famously high musical standards "Although I crave that fix, and that's what drives me to discover music that I haven't heard before, new and old. Most people that make music or DJ have experienced at least one musical movement that embodied an energy that was singular and that inevitably things get measured against, even if you don't listen to that music anymore or make it. Until that kind of singularity comes that reshapes everything, it all just seems like a fun, but an ultimately transitory mess to get lost in. The point is to create something fresh in the process of getting lost."
World Cup stewards in Durban clash with police over pay
South African riot police in Durban have fired tear gas to disperse hundreds of security stewards protesting over alleged pay cuts.
The clash took place in a carpark at the city's Moses Mabhida stadium shortly after it hosted a match between Australia and Germany.
The stewards said they were being paid only 190 rand (£17; $25) a day, although they had been promised more.
Reports say one woman was injured and at least two people were arrested.
It was not immediately clear how much the stewards were supposed to have been paid according to their contracts.
So far there, have been no public comments on the incident from South Africa's World Cup organising committee or Fifa.
...Did Decriminalization Work?
Pop quiz: Which European country has the most liberal drug laws? (Hint: It's not the Netherlands.)
Although its capital is notorious among stoners and college kids for marijuana haze–filled "coffee shops," Holland has never actually legalized cannabis — the Dutch simply don't enforce their laws against the shops. The correct answer is Portugal, which in 2001 became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine.
At the recommendation of a national commission charged with addressing Portugal's drug problem, jail time was replaced with the offer of therapy. The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is more expensive than treatment — so why not give drug addicts health services instead? Under Portugal's new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail.
The question is, does the new policy work? At the time, critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to "drug tourists" and exacerbate Portugal's drug problem; the country had some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. But the recently released results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, suggest otherwise.
The paper, published by Cato in April, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.
"Judging by every metric, decriminalization in Portugal has been a resounding success," says Glenn Greenwald, an attorney, author and fluent Portuguese speaker, who conducted the research. "It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the drug problem far better than virtually every other Western country does."
Compared to the European Union and the U.S., Portugal's drug use numbers are impressive. Following decriminalization, Portugal had the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the E.U.: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%. Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.
The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%; drug use in older teens also declined. Lifetime heroin use among 16-to-18-year-olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8% (although there was a slight increase in marijuana use in that age group). New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003, and deaths related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half. In addition, the number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and money saved on enforcement allowed for increased funding of drug-free treatment as well.
Portugal's case study is of some interest to lawmakers in the U.S., confronted now with the violent overflow of escalating drug gang wars in Mexico. The U.S. has long championed a hard-line drug policy, supporting only international agreements that enforce drug prohibition and imposing on its citizens some of the world's harshest penalties for drug possession and sales. Yet America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the E.U. (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the U.S., it also has less drug use.
"I think we can learn that we should stop being reflexively opposed when someone else does [decriminalize] and should take seriously the possibility that anti-user enforcement isn't having much influence on our drug consumption," says Mark Kleiman, author of the forthcoming When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment and director of the drug policy analysis program at UCLA. Kleiman does not consider Portugal a realistic model for the U.S., however, because of differences in size and culture between the two countries.
But there is a movement afoot in the U.S., in the legislatures of New York State, California and Massachusetts, to reconsider our overly punitive drug laws. Recently, Senators Jim Webb and Arlen Specter proposed that Congress create a national commission, not unlike Portugal's, to deal with prison reform and overhaul drug-sentencing policy. As Webb noted, the U.S. is home to 5% of the global population but 25% of its prisoners.
At the Cato Institute in early April, Greenwald contended that a major problem with most American drug policy debate is that it's based on "speculation and fear mongering," rather than empirical evidence on the effects of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country's number one public health problem, he says.
"The impact in the life of families and our society is much lower than it was before decriminalization," says Joao Castel-Branco Goulao, Portugual's "drug czar" and president of the Institute on Drugs and Drug Addiction, adding that police are now able to re-focus on tracking much higher level dealers and larger quantities of drugs.
Peter Reuter, a professor of criminology and public policy at the University of Maryland, like Kleiman, is skeptical. He conceded in a presentation at the Cato Institute that "it's fair to say that decriminalization in Portugal has met its central goal. Drug use did not rise." However, he notes that Portugal is a small country and that the cyclical nature of drug epidemics — which tends to occur no matter what policies are in place — may account for the declines in heroin use and deaths.
The Cato report's author, Greenwald, hews to the first point: that the data shows that decriminalization does not result in increased drug use. Since that is what concerns the public and policymakers most about decriminalization, he says, "that is the central concession that will transform the debate."
'What Barry Says' by Simon Robson & Barry McNamara
What Barry Says by Simon Robson & Barry McNamara. Short animation. USA, global domination, war, oil, Iraq, corporatism, new world order, conspiracy, project for the new American century.This controversial film won Best Animation at the Brooklyn International Film Festival in 2004
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