The New Lost City Ramblers - Same (1958)
4 minutes ago
Tuesday, 24 August 2010
Shed - RA Podcast
Tracklist:
Low Density Matter – Blue Steel [Keysound]
Becoming Real – Fast Motion (DVA’s Hi Emotions Remix) [Ramp]
Cosmin TRG – See Other People (Falty DL Remix) [Rushhour]
Delphic – Doubt (Kyle Hall Remix)
Duncan Powell – Pushin’ (Falty DL Remix) [2nd Drop]
Andrea – Got To Forget [Daphne]
T++ – Cropped [Honest Jon's]
Cosmin TRG – Béton Brut [Hemlock]
Screed – Side [Synthetic Catalogue]
Robert Hood – Towns That Disappeared Completely [M Plant]
Jason Fine – Many To Many (Ben Klock Remix) [Kontra]
Rok & Jonzon – Sequential Polka [International Gigolo]
Silent Phase – Fire (Rewired Mix) [R&S]
Eliphino – Let Me Love You Forever [Brownswood]
Sepalcure – Love Pressure [Hotflush]
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Shed - Second Skin
Monday, 23 August 2010
The string bag and the octopus: a political parable
So who, in this crap-shoot, is likely to side with whom?
Certain points of tension made themselves apparent immediately yesterday.
Bob Katter feels that Warren Truss has been mean to him on television, as recently as election night.
Tony Windsor said he would work with anyone apart from Barnaby Joyce, whom he considers to be a "fool".
Rob Oakeshott, while restraining himself from open expressions of hostility, has ominously declared the election result to be a "stimulus package for democracy".
To assume that these men - conservative regional MPs - would automatically show a tendency to flock with their own kind is to miss something very central to human behaviour.
Did you ever wonder why it is that, of all the MPs who could have defended the right-winger Kevin Rudd against the ambitions of Julia Gillard, his staunchest allies - at the end - were members of the party's hard Left?
The answer is that no-one despises a left-winger like another left-winger.
Internecine hatred has a purity and intensity which far outstrips the limp-wristed attempts at hostility essayed by those whom Fate has ignorantly decreed to be adversaries.
Just as the geo-political rule in Europe dictates that countries should reserve their loftiest contempt for states with whom they share a direct border, Australian politicians tend viscerally to despise their ideological helpmeets.
Granted - this can be very confusing.
An uninitiated person might expect, for example, the newly-elected Independent National Party MP Tony Crook to be naturally sympathetic to the Coalition.
But Mr Crook has just displaced Wilson Tuckey.
And if you think that there is any more poisonous hatred than that which exists between a regional sitting Liberal and a National Party type sniffing round his electorate, then you haven't been paying attention.
Of all the cross-chamber hostilities occasioned by the Rudd government's first term, the only point at which one MP actually established a physical chokehold on another came in a Coalition joint party room meeting last year, in which the Liberal MP Alby Schultz succumbed to teasing about being stalked by the National Party and lunged at Chris Pearce, a talented concert pianist who was at that time the Member for Aston.
Bob Katter, who once upon a time was a National Party MP, now cannot stand his former National colleagues.
He views them as cats' paws to the Liberal Party.
Mr Katter's contempt is heartily reciprocated, and the strongest resistance within the Coalition to the prospect of constructing a formal alliance with him will doubtless come from within the ranks of the junior Coalition partner.
The three conservative independents have announced their determination to stick together.
Labor hopes to pick at least one of them off, and has already reportedly offered Mr Oakeshott a ministry.
Like accomplices under intense police interrogation, the three may prove vulnerable to suspicion and paranoia in the days and weeks ahead, Labor hopes.
Mr Crook, the ink still drying on his ballot papers, has hastened to associate himself with the independent crossbenchers, letting it be known that he would offer substantial cooperation in return for about $850 million in regional spending.
This brings us to the matter of demands.
All three of the "conservative" independents have nominated broadband and regional telecommunications services as a major issue.
Mr Oakeshott has indicated that he would like to see a legislated emissions trading scheme.
Mr Katter would like to see more made of ethanol.
Of the three, there is no doubt that Mr Katter's shopping list is likely to be the most baroque.
He is extremely concerned about Filipino bananas, and yesterday signalled his frustration with the excessive behavioural regulation of regional Australia.
"We're not allowed to fish much at all. We're not allowed to go camping or shooting - or even boiling the billy. We've got a terrible problem with deadly flying foxes. They're going to kill many more people than taipan snakes do in Australia. Rural Australia is closing down."
Mr Katter has never been more potent than he is right now.
Both major parties knew this election result would be close, but who among them would seriously have thought that by Monday this week they'd be hunkered down nutting out lateral-minded ways of bringing the deadly flying fox problem under control, possibly by means of issuing hunting licences to the Katter clan, or distributing baits concealed in discontinued Filipino bananas?
In 2002, South Australia's Mike Rann - inches from minority government - found himself negotiating with the former Liberal Party MP Peter Lewis, and anxiously addressing all of the concerns dear to Mr Lewis' heart, including the spread of a noxious plant called branched broomrape.
Despite the fact that half of the Labor caucus had never heard of it ("I thought it was some sort of complicated naval disciplinary technique", confessed one MP), branched broomrape eradication became a top priority very quickly.
The lone Greens MP Adam Bandt has indicated that he is more likely to side with Labor.
Of Andrew Wilkie, the former spy and former Greens candidate who seems a good chance to whip the Tasmanian seat of Denison from the clutches of the ALP, not too much is yet known; he says he is prepared to talk to anyone, but the long war he fought against the former Howard government over Iraq would suggest that - in the absence of other factors - his sympathies might lie elsewhere.
If the ABC's Antony Green (an election junkie who must be the only person in Australia who is actually pleased to learn that Election 2010 is poised to go on forever) is correct and the seat score ends up with the Coalition holding 73 seats and the Labor Party 72, what happens next?
If Labor can secure the Greens MP and Andrew Wilkie and chisel off two of the rural independents, it could construct a minority government.
If the Coalition can bump up its broadband offer, declare a foreign banana crusade and promise to keep Barnaby Joyce in a cupboard, it might be able to corral Windsor, Oakeshott and Katter and thus ensure an Abbott in the Lodge.
And if neither is able to construct a durable agreement, then it's back to the polls we go.
Anabbel Crabb @'The Drum'
Mexican Police To Patrol NY?
In a series of events which has caused wide notice and a storm of protests, the government of Mexico, through its consulate in New York in the United Nations, has announced it will begin patrolling the New York City borough of Staten Island to “safeguard” its nationals there.
The actions of Mexico come after a series of incidents the Mexican government terms “bias attacks.”
Ironically, these so-called “hate crimes” have been perpetrated by blacks and Asians, indicative of rising tensions between various ethnic groups in the U.S. The Catholic Examiner and NBC New York both reported the Mexican government’s intention to mount surveillance, patrol and police in and around the Staten Island community of Port Richmond, which in recent years has seen a large influx of Mexican illegal immigrants.
Since the Examiner’s coverage, however, councilor officials, city hall and the local press have begun to carefully de-emphasize any possible role of Mexican law enforcement or military in efforts to secure the neighborhood.
Mexican officials have set up a neighborhood office and a local phone hot line for their nationals to report “bias incidents”—regardless as to whether they are in the United States legally.
New York City police had been monitoring the situation and investigating the reported assaults as local crimes. The actions of the Mexican government have caused Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly to order what many observers say is the most concentrated police mobilization since the World Trade Center disaster.
The main street of Port Richmond was swiftly transformed into what the New York Times described as a war zone like atmosphere with over 120 newly assigned officers, high-intensity night lighting, two huge “sky tower” police observation posts, frequent helicopter overflights and 20 police cars to watch the center of the relatively small neighborhood. Several long-term residents described it as a constant hornet’s nest of activity.
Both published reports and residents say that reports of fights between Mexicans and other groups began years ago, in the late 1990s or early 2000s. Many charge the present round of incidents started in 2003 with one loss of life in 2006, which might not even be connected to the present series of events.
At a major community gathering held at the historic St. Phillips Baptist Church, speakers addressed the current situation in the neighborhood and the borough, while Mexican councilor officials looked on.
But while the Richmond anti-violence organization and assorted left-leaning journalists who attended may have been expecting a mea culpa from local residents, what they got instead was a blast of community push-back. Speaker after speaker from the black community told of horrendous conditions the largely illegal immigrants had brought to their community. Speakers described the pattern in communities affected by an influx of illegals.
Community residents, many of whom are black first-time homeowners, told of constant disputes, alcohol and drug sales, late night disruptions, trespassing and public urination.
Others in the audience, who declined to testify, spoke of men wearing clothes bearing symbols of La Raza, Aztlan and other militant pro-Mexican groups.
They also spoke of repeated attempts to summon the state liquor authority’s enforcement agency to deal with the surging illegal liquor sales in the area, with little in the way of a response.
Jeff Smith @'American Free Press'
Proms 2010: Cornelius Cardew interview - what does a bun sound like?
This year’s Proms season offers plenty of interesting premieres. But none has aroused such puzzled curiosity as Bun No 1, which is being performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra next Friday. Titles normally offer some clue, but what on earth would a musical bun be like? Sweet and sticky, perhaps, or circular? Its composer Cornelius Cardew offered a few clues. “It’s filling but not substantial … it’s a stone bun soaked in milk … I thought of it as a nice present to an orchestra, the way one gives a bun to an elephant.”
This might suggest Cardew was one of those amiable musical jokers like Gerard Hoffnung, but far from it. Cardew had a sharp sense of humour, but it’s hard to think of any composer more serious and piercingly self-critical. He was a kind of Wittgenstein of music, constantly setting out reasons in his diary for acting in a certain way, testing his convictions against reality, and then adjusting or even rejecting them outright.
That intimidating poise and total self-possession showed itself young. By the mid-Fifties, when he was a student at the Royal College of Music, Cardew was already alarming his professors with his passion for European avant-garde composers such as Stockhausen. He was phenomenally gifted musically, and once learnt the guitar from scratch in two weeks so he could take part in the UK premiere of Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau san Maître, which has one of the hardest guitar parts ever written. Then an encounter with the more freewheeling avant-gardism of American composers sent him off in a new direction. He spent much of the early Sixties working on a vast graphic score entitled Treatise, as beautiful to look at as it is puzzling to hear (graphic art was another of Cardew’s talents, which provided him with a living for several years).
But even before he finished Treatise, Cardew was chaffing at the self-enclosed, airless quality of modernism, and hankering for a form of music-making that would be more communal and democratic. With a few comrades-in-arms he founded the Scratch Orchestra, a determinedly amateur group dedicated to creating its own repertoire and ethos, often through improvisation. Cardew’s biggest piece for the group was The Great Learning, a large-scale setting for chorus and players of writings by Confucius.
It was The Great Learning that led to Cardew’s first encounter with the Proms. It was not a happy one. In 1972 he and the Scratch Orchestra were invited by William Glock, a great champion of the avant-garde, to perform part of The Great Learning in that year’s Prom season.
Glock naturally imagined he was going to get the original version, but Cardew had moved on yet again. He was now a convinced Maoist, with a scorn for anything that smacked of bourgeois individualism. He’d drastically revised The Great Learning, spicing the Confucian sentiments of the original with new slogans, such as “Revolution is the Great Learning of the present. A revolution is not a dinner party; it is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another”.
Glock politely declined the new version and asked for the original, but Cardew refused point-bank. Eventually a compromise was reached. But the episode was a turning point for Cardew. From then until his untimely death (caused by a hit-and-run driver in 1981) he turned his back on the “normal” musical world and devoted himself to writing revolutionary songs and organising political rallies.
So which Cardew will we hear in Bun No 1? The free-form graphic composer or the advocate of democratic improvisation? Bun No 1 dates from 1965, a period when Cardew was still in thrall to European modernism. According to Cardew’s biographer John Tilbury, it’s well worth reviving. “The piece was written in Rome when Cardew was studying orchestration,” he says, “and there’s never a dull moment. It’s like a series of very strong, vivid images, not connected to each other, and it has a strong granitic quality, with piercing woodwind lines somewhat like Varese.” So not sweet and sticky, but not insubstantial either.
Cornelius Cardew’s Bun No 1 will be performed by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov, with music by John Cage, Howard Skempton and Morton Feldman, at the BBC Proms on August 20 at the Royal Albert Hall and on BBC Radio 3
Don Letts - This much I know
The evolution of the Notting Hill Carnival traces the evolution of multiculturalism – it's a cultural barometer. But it's also in danger of losing its conscience. I want to remind people that it was something born of struggle.
For my parents Carnival was a reminder of home, and somewhere they perhaps wanted to return to.
The black British youth was confused when I was growing up. We'd try to emulate American blacks or our Jamaican brothers, but we were somewhere in between.
Everything I learned about my culture came through reggae. The first time I heard about [political activist] Marcus Garvey was through music, not school.
I met Malcolm McLaren in 1972. He dressed as a teddy boy then. He connected the counter-cultural dots for me – made me aware that I could be part of it, too.
There were two shops on the King's Road in the 70s that attracted disaffected youth: my shop, Acme Attractions, and Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm's shop, Sex. Friendships were made by people who were attracted by their differences.
When punk came along, everyone picked up guitars. I wanted to pick something up too, so I picked up a camera and reinvented myself as a film-maker.
The downside of affordable technology is mediocrity. Back in the 70s every three minutes of film cost £20. Now you can get a 90-minute digital tape for a fiver. The price used to weed out people who were just fucking about.
Youth culture in the west is increasingly conservative. Music has become a soundtrack for consumerism. It feels like punk never happened.
Racial problems are more complicated now. I've got mates who moan about Polish people stealing their work. I'm like, "You can't say that. That's what people said about our parents."
I gave a lecture last week and the kids in the audience said, "Don, you sound like an angry old man." I said, "It's because you kids aren't bloody angry enough."
I was never a herd person: I was always a freak. I just refused to be defined by my colour.
Gareth Grundy @'The Guardian'
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