The Hold Steady - Separation Sunday
6 hours ago
Tuesday, 13 July 2010
200+ FREE Wiley tracks
UK grime king Wiley has made more than 200 tracks – including the entirety of his yet-to-be-released new album – available for free download.In a move that is sure to be met with withering response from his record label, ol’ Wiley has uploaded 11 zip files and over 200 tracks , including demos, finished songs and the whole The Elusive LP, which was due to be released in September. He made the move following a recent tiff with his manager.
They are now available for download via this thread at the Grime Forum.
Tension at heart of drug classification
The Home Office has fought for three years to keep details of its review of the drug classification system secret. Now the campaigners who forced its publication think they know why: the document, they say, exposes the illogicality that undermines government drugs policy.
You will remember what happened to Professor David Nutt, the former head of the body which oversees the drug classification system, when he argued official policy should recognise that ecstasy and cannabis were less harmful than alcohol and tobacco. His controversial views cost him his job on the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. But, years earlier, the Home Office had come to the same conclusion.
Using the Freedom of Information Act, this weekend the pressure group Drug Equality Alliance finally got to see the 2006 advice given to ministers [361KB PDF] ahead of a planned public consultation into the legal controls on illicit drugs, a report initiated by the former Home Secretary Charles Clarke.
One section of the paper focuses on the dangers of treating cigarettes and booze differently from ecstasy and cannabis. The authors point out that "alcohol and tobacco account for more health problems and deaths than illicit drugs". They quote figures which suggest that "in terms of death, illegal drugs amounted to 1,388 in 2003 compared to about 20,000 for alcohol and 100,000 for tobacco."
So far, so familiar.
What makes this hitherto secret report such dynamite is the implication that this inconsistency in the way society treats "substances that alter mental functioning" might be making Britain's drugs crisis worse.
In other words, treating malt whisky differently from mephedrone makes it more likely young people will ignore the official advice.
The report appears to support the idea that alcohol and tobacco might be included in the classification system, although "in a way which would stop short of imposing comparable controls".
The tension at the heart of this debate is clear when the report goes on to point out that:
However, the suggestion that "tradition and tolerance" should guide the legal framework surrounding recreational drugs will be seized upon by those who argue that the answer to the drugs dilemma is to end the "un-British" policy of prohibition and regulate all substances based on the harm they cause.
Mark Easton @'BBC'
HA!
charltonbrooker To be fair it's hard writing headlines against the clock with limited space to get your message across, when you're a thick racist cunt.
Miles Davis Quintet Skateboards
The Kind of Blue Deluxe Edition was already an impressive collection for all Miles Davis fans out there. It was released to celebrate the record’s 50th anniversary and it consists of a vinyl record, four CDs and a DVD. Skateboard company Western Edition also celebrates an anniversary, this year is their tenth in business. They put 1 and 1 together and now present an impressive set of skateboards, honoring the original quintet behind the recording of Kind of Blue.
Seriously, even if you never put a foot on a skateboard in your life, isn’t this set of decks worth buying? You can order them at FTCSF or at your local skate shop.
via Radcollector (thanks Cubikmusik!)
The Unknown Loved by the Knowns
“If you want to disappear ... come around for private lessons,” the artist Brion Gysin once offered in a prose poem. And during a period in Paris in the late 1950s, when he and the novelist William S. Burroughs were experimenting with crystal balls, mirrors and other contraptions of the occult, a mutual friend swore that he saw Gysin exercise the powers of dematerialization, perhaps with help from the various narcotics that always seemed to be lying around for the taking.
“Brion disappeared before my eyes, for periods of 10 or 15 or 20 minutes,” the friend, Roger Knoebber, told an interviewer.
But during a ferociously productive, wildly eclectic career in painting, writing and performance that lasted half a century, it often seemed as if Gysin, who died in poverty in 1986, had too great a facility for disappearance, at least as far as his reputation in the art world was concerned. Despite a longing for recognition, he was generally known less for his own work than for his associations with a prodigious number of more famous artists for whom he was, by turns, a teacher, friend and all-around guru: Burroughs, Paul Bowles, Max Ernst, Alice B. Toklas, Keith Haring, David Bowie and Iggy Pop, among others.
As death approached, Gysin feared that his peripatetic life had been only an adventure, “leading nowhere” except through a procession of illustrious homes like Tangier, the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan and the poet’s bunkhouse in Paris known as the Beat Hotel, where he spent several of his most productive years. “You should hammer one nail all your life, and I didn’t do that,” he wrote in a lament cited by his biographer, John Geiger. “I hammered on a lot of nails like a xylophone.”
But now the New Museum of Contemporary Art has gathered the widely scattered pieces of Gysin’s strange, necromantic career and is working to haul him up from the underground once and for all with “Dream Machine,” the first retrospective of his art in the United States. The show, which opens July 7, will include more than 300 paintings, drawings, photo-collages and films, along with an original version of the Dreamachine, the spinning, light-emitting, trance-inducing kinetic sculpture that Gysin helped design with a computer programmer, Ian Sommerville, in 1960 that has become his most famous work. (The exhibition’s catalog includes a paper foldout and instructions to build your own Dreamachine, provided you can locate your old turntable.)
The show is the first devoted to a dead artist by the New Museum since it moved into its sleek new home on the Bowery in 2007. The institution’s programming there has generally reflected its name, showcasing recent art by those still working, many of them young. But Laura Hoptman, the museum’s senior curator and the organizer of the show, said the departure in Gysin’s case made perfect sense because his work remains largely unknown to the American public and his influence — the kind that eluded him during his lifetime — now seems to be everywhere in the contemporary art world.
“I knew about him, and then six or seven years ago it felt like I started hearing his name from everyone,” Ms. Hoptman said. “I kept trying to figure out all the ways they had arrived at Gysin.”
As she learned more about his life, she said, she quickly realized that her challenge would be to try to extricate Gysin from that life, from the reputation that he was a scene maker first, a temperamental and eccentric one — “an exquisite, to use a good old-fashioned term” — and an artist only second, a second-rate one at that.
“But I wasn’t interested in the personality of Brion Gysin,” she said. “A lot of people loved him, and a lot of people loathed him, and I wanted this show to be about his art.”
Gysin’s lack of mainstream success can be attributed in part to the nature of his work, which was always about finding ways — as a gay, irreligious, stateless artist — to escape the controls of conventional society and of the conscious mind. He pursued this mission with vast amounts of kif (a blend of tobacco and marijuana) and with psilocybin pills, supplied by none other than Timothy Leary. In the show’s catalog the poet John Giorno, one of Gysin’s lovers, recalls descending into the New York City subway with him one day in 1965, lugging a suitcase-size tape recorder to create one of Gysin’s sound poems.
“It was very exciting,” Mr. Giorno wrote. “We were stoned, of course, sweating from the heat and seeing with great clarity.”
Another probable reason for Gysin’s failure to achieve fame was the one he grudgingly acknowledged toward the end of his life, his restless zinging from one discipline to another, a disregard of boundaries that resonates strongly today with young “I’m in a band; I paint; I design clothes; I’m an actor” artists.
“There were times in his life when people would recognize this genius at work,” Ms. Hoptman said, “and then — bang — he was off in another direction doing something new.”
The artist Sue de Beer, 36, known for her hallucinatory video work, included a Dreamachine in one of her pieces, from 2007 and said that Gysin’s work had always “connected a lot of things for me, between sculpture and filmmaking.”
She added: “The way he worked certainly speaks to me. I go through phases where I’m writing, and then I’m building, and then I’m trying to find someone with a trained Persian cat, and then I’m hanging out in a sensory-deprivation tank to try to have a psychedelic experience.”
If Gysin had done nothing else, he probably would have earned a footnote in cultural history as the man who supplied the hash fudge recipe for “The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.” (Toklas was an innocent in this caper; she had never heard of the ingredient “canabis sativa,” as Gysin spelled it.)
But Gysin was, among other things, an authority on the Sufi music of the Moroccan village of Jajouka, which led to his serving as a guide there in 1968 for Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. He was also an important literary innovator who picked up where the Surrealists left off, pioneering the Cut-Up Method, the aleatory springboard for Burroughs’s best writing. Gysin stumbled upon the idea in 1959 after accidentally slicing through some newspapers, unmooring words that he then arranged at random. Burroughs adopted the Cut-Up as a narrative technique, one that worked perfectly to expose what he later called “the monumental fraud of cause and effect.”
Gysin considered himself primarily a visual artist, however, and painting and drawing were woven through everything he did. His work, which has affinities with that of Cy Twombly and Mark Tobey, was heavily influenced by Japanese and Arabic calligraphy but also by a strange discovery in 1956 behind a wall of a restaurant he ran in Tangier: a Moroccan curse that included a paper with lines of script arranged in a grid pattern. The motif impressed him deeply and gridded, letterlike images — a kind of meeting of magic and mathematical rigidity — dominated his work.
Burroughs called Gysin the only man he ever respected, and he diligently acknowledged his creative debts to him. But Gysin usually wound up in the shadow of his closest friend and collaborator. It didn’t help that the two men even closely resembled each other, with long faces, fleshy noses and deep-set eyes, though Burroughs wore a hunted look while Gysin always seemed somehow regal, like a “courtier in one of the early German princely courts,” in Burroughs’s telling.
Ms. Hoptman said that in her “mind’s eye Brion Gysin will finally emerge, fully formed, in this retrospective as the artist he really was.” But for a man who was always a “specter, a see-through,” she added, getting at who he really was is much more difficult, as he probably intended it to be.
“This will be one version of him,” she said. “And maybe someday all the musicians he knew or all the people he slept with or all the people he has influenced so deeply will end up giving us their own Brion Gysins.”
Randy Kennedy @'NY Times'
The Tenacious Buzz of Malaria
The Romans called malaria the "rage of the Dog Star," since its fever and chills so often arrived during the caniculares dies, the dog days of summer, when Sirius disappeared in the glow of the sun. To avoid it, ancient Romans built their grand villas high in the hills, fled the mosquito-ridden wetlands that encircled Rome, and prayed for relief at temples dedicated to the fever goddess, Febris.
It was the emperor Caracalla's physician, Serenus Sammonicus, who in the second century came up with Rome's first antimalaria quick-fix, one that later became literally synonymous with magical solutions everywhere. An amulet should be worn, Sammonicus advised, inscribed with a powerful incantation: "Abracadabra."
It didn't work, needless to say. Thanks to deforestation and flooding that extended mosquito habitat, malaria worsened near the end of the Roman empire, contributing to its decline. It took a lot more than Abracadabras for the malaria parasite, Plasmodium, to unclench its tentacles: a state-run quinine distribution program in the early 1900s, the ruthless swampland reclamation programs of Mussolini a few decades later, a blitz of DDT around midcentury, and the general economic transformation of the lot of the Italian peasant all had to run their long and arduous course before malaria departed from Italy, centuries after Rome fell.
Yet the spirit of Sammonicus's cure for malaria still beckons. You'd think a pathogen as wily as Plasmodium would command a bit more respect. The malaria parasite has been responsible for half of all human deaths since the Stone Age, and one in 14 of us alive today still carry genes that first arose to help protect us from its ravages. Malaria has shaped our trade and settlement patterns, and our demographics. Today, it sickens 300 million every year, and kills nearly 1 million, despite the fact that we've known how to cure it (with parasite-killing drugs) and prevent it (by avoiding mosquito bites) for over a century. And even as the fight against malaria gains momentum, research reveals that malaria's tentacles continue to dig ever deeper.
Part of malaria's wicked genius is that since ancient times, it has fooled us into thinking it is a trivial problem, easily solved. Diseases such as yellow fever, or plague, or polio, have always filled us with dread. But not malaria. Almost all of our attempts to squelch it, from thousands of years ago to today, have treated the disease as a weak foe, allowing malaria to flourish, nearly unchecked, to this day...
Continue reading
Sonia Shah @'WSJ'
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