DOPE!

@'Fans In A Flashbulb'

Been a L O N G time since I have been to an opium and marihuana party, and I've lost the pics! Damn!

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@'Mondo-Blogo'

The man who played with fire

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Photo: Reuters

Four years ago, a sometime hacker, based in Melbourne and now gone semi-legit, started a blog to share a few ideas and think out loud about some things. Nothing remarkable about that except the name - IQ.org - a pretty prime piece of real estate, grabbed early in the internet/web/blog explosion.

Like many blogs by people working in IT, it sought to understand political and social realities through mathematical reasoning. Power, it announced, was a conspiracy - even those organisations understood to be open and legit players relied on the essence of conspiracy, which is an imbalance between information inside and outside the group. The more you reduce that imbalance towards zero, the less powerful the conspiracy becomes, even if it has weapons and wealth at its disposal. When information is evenly shared, the conspiracy, by its very nature, ceases to exist.

If this rather clumsily written paper, ''Conspiracy as Governance'', is being read with more interest than most blog posts, it's because the author is one Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, and its now visible, if not legendary, public face.

The Assange myth (ex-hacker, lives in airports, appears computer-generated himself) has now been the subject of innumerable articles, but with WikiLeaks about to launch a massive new cache concerning the Iraq war - a cache rumoured to be as large as 200,000 documents - and major US news networks drawn in to release the most newsworthy items, it was never likely that interest would diminish, especially among the US security apparatus.

Then, stunningly, a month ago, Assange was accused of rape and harassment in Sweden, with the investigation of the rape charges dropped and then revived in the space of a week. The extraordinary coincidence of the charges, coming at a time when Assange was seeking a Swedish residency permit in order to take full protection from the country's journalist shield laws, led many to wonder if the conspiracy was biting back.

This was amplified by the nature of the charges, which can be uniquely damaging to character and reputation, while also quelling full discussion of their veracity or otherwise. With the Iraq war document drop, and a final decision by the Swedish prosecutor's office imminent, it's pretty certain that Assange, the cast of characters around him and his compelling vision of political action will be hitting the news again, very soon.

The public facts of the matter are by now reasonably known: on August 20, two women went to the Klara police station in Stockholm to make complaints against Assange for rape and the particularly Swedish crime of ''ofredande'', best translated as ''infringement'' or ''misconduct''. Ofredande covers a wide range of things, from berating someone in the street, to stalking, to various misconduct between friends or more-than-friends. The subsequently leaked police report detailed that both women made allegations about unsafe sex and an alleged refusal by Assange to take an STI test.

The police opened parallel files on the same incidents, one for rape, the other for misconduct, and a junior fill-in prosecutor issued warrants on both charges. These were then leaked to the Expressen newspaper, making world news headlines on the Friday evening. The news caught the eye of holidaying chief prosecutor Eva Finne, who had the case notes couriered to her and dismissed the rape charge immediately, leaving the misconduct charges standing.

To add to the confusion, one of the complainants told Aftonbladet newspaper that she never wanted Assange charged with rape in the first place, and that ''this was about a guy who has a few problem attitudes to women''.

It is now that things get very strange, because the complainant reveals herself to be Anna Ardin, the political officer/press secretary for the ''the Brotherhood'', a Christian group within the Social Democrats, the party that has dominated Swedish politics and government for a century.

Once rather conservative, the Brotherhood has become a focus for leftish, third-worldish type Christians, and it was Ardin who had organised a series of speaking engagements for Assange. Assange had stayed at Ardin's flat for a week, in the middle of which he had had a dalliance with the second complainant, who had been taking photographs at one of his speaking appearances.

News that Ardin was a complainant rocked the student/youth political milieu, because one of her prior roles had been as gender equality officer in the student union at Uppsala University, Sweden's Oxford. Several months ago, Ardin had also published on her blog a 10-step guide to taking revenge on ex-lovers, one of which was to ''get them in trouble with the law''.

The misconduct Assange was charged with is a misdemeanour, and it appeared that the rape charge had been dissolved. But that week, Ardin and SW (the other complainant) hired leading lawyer Claes Borgstrom to represent them, and Borgstrom petitioned a yet higher prosecutor. Borgstrom is not merely a high-profile brief; he has recently been the Social Democratic party's spokesman on gender equality. The prosecutor he approached was Marianne Ny, head of a special unit on ''crime development'' based in Gothenburg, a unit explicitly tasked with exploring and extending sex crime laws in areas of social behaviour.

On September 1, Ny announced she was re-opening the investigation into the charge of rape. Aftonbladet journalists who asked Borgstrom what the allegation was based on were told there was more evidence than had been revealed in the widely leaked police reports, but he would not disclose what it was.

Assange noted that he was yet to be confronted with any explicit charges of rape and that ''the whole process has gone on without my input''. He hired Sweden's most celebrated lawyer, Leif Silbersky, and then changed representation when it became clear that Silbersky's other case (defending a brace of men charged with a helicopter-based robbery of a bullion warehouse) was taking all his time. Some people think Sweden's boring. God knows why.

With the rape case re-opened, amid great confusion, it was inevitable that Ardin's politics and background would come under scrutiny.

The milieu of hackerdom is not without its conspiracy enthusiasts, who pointed to her stint in the Washington DC branch of the Swedish foreign service, that she had been deported from Cuba for working with the US-backed dissident group The Women in White, and that her close cousin Mattias Ardin is a lieutenant-colonel in Afghanistan.

Others focused on the role of Expressen newspaper, which had been leaked the report of the initial rape charges, in contravention of Swedish law, and then leaked the contents of a later police interview with Assange.

Expressen is right-wing, and has long been opposed to Sweden's policy of armed neutrality, advocating closer ties with the US. According to journalist Israel Shamir, the US threatened to cease sharing intelligence with SEPO, the Swedish secret service, should Assange get residency and be protected under its media shield laws - laws that would specifically frustrate any attempt to extradite Assange to the US.

Others who have tangled with secret services were in no doubt that something was afoot. Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan who had been sacked for criticising the US-UK alliance with the highly repressive country, said that ''Julian Assange has been getting the bog-standard 'kompromat''', the old KGB term for sexual compromise. Murray himself had been falsely accused of trading visas for sex. Others were more sceptical, with Mattias Svensson, editor of alternative magazine Neo, saying of arguments about US involvement: ''My instinct is that they're ridiculous''.

One of the country's leading legal commentators, Marten Schultz, argued that the chaotic progress of the case was because of an asymmetry in the Swedish legal system that allows police and prosecutors to leak information and thus damage reputations, while defence lawyers are legally prevented from doing so.

Everyone connected agrees that it's a mess and an embarrassment, and most will say that Assange's rights have been infringed, with leading international lawyer Geoffrey Robertson arguing that the Australian government should ''carpet'' the Swedish ambassador for Assange's treatment, and that Assange should make a case in the European Court of Human Rights.

Will the imminent document drop return attention from the Strindbergian drama of Assange and the two women to the two major wars that have been WikiLeaks' major focus? Even if the rape investigation peters out, it's unlikely.

Guy Rundle @'The Age'

Call for 'Gaza style' inquiry on Afghan deaths

Limehouse Dreamin' (23 Skidoo with home made Dreamachine. Filmed by Stan Bingo mid 80's)

...and?

A ManU supprter writes: "The boy is a joke, a disgrace to football, its about time that gerrard was either banned from the game or taken out of it physically…he (sic) just a spineless, cowardly, gutless thug who gets away with everythink (sic), then again the refs are anfields 12th man."

WSB by Shinro Ohtake

♪♫ Gil Scott-Heron & Brian Jackson - H2O Gate Blues

The Girl With Kaleidoscope Eyes

Joshua Petker

@'TAXI'

How Canada’s new copyright law threatens to make culture criminals of us all

An extract from Paul Kelly's introduction to 'How To Make Gravy'

In the middle of the journey of my life I found myself inside a tent of mirrors. Ahead lay a labour of trouble. All around, a thronging darkness. A deep slumber had caused me to stray, and to go forward was the only way back.

Six weeks previously, in October 2004, my manager Rob had rung to say the Spiegeltent was coming to Melbourne for the summer. Would I do some shows? I'd played in the tent before, at the Edinburgh Festival. Built by Belgians in 1920 of wood and canvas, and decorated with mirrors, velvet, brocade and leaded glass, it travels around the world hosting cabaret shows. Spiegel is Flemish for mirror, and the mirrors in the booths and on poles all around are the main feature, multiplying the audience in the intimate circular space. The staff like to tell you that Marlene Dietrich performed there back in the day. It's a fun place to play, fits around three hundred people. They walk in with a different kind of buzz, like children at the circus.

'They've suggested you put together a show you wouldn't do elsewhere,' said Rob. 'You know, an exclusive. They'll give you a few nights.'

I said I'd think about it, and not long afterwards found myself awake in the middle of the night with an idea fully formed in my brain: I know! I'll sing a hundred of my songs in alphabetical order over four nights. Twenty-five songs a night, each night a different song list. I called Rob the next morning before I had time to talk myself out of it, wrote a blurb for the Spiegeltent's program and started a list.

Preparing for and performing that first A–Z season was like running a marathon. I'd written close to three hundred songs in the decades since I started out, but had lost touch with many of them. I had to relearn words and chords as well as work on pared-back arrangements that would sound good without the colour and rhythm of a band. Some songs I had lost touch with due to natural attrition. I no longer had a connection to them, and couldn't sing them in a true way any more. Their faults outweighed their virtues. Clunky rhymes, false conceits, banal verses. They'd worked for me once, but, badly made, had long since worn out. Those songs wouldn't come back.

Others, however, had been neglected due to the performer's eternal problem – balancing the old and the new. Your audience have paid their money and want to hear their favourites. So inside you, two people are at war: the stern artist who wants to keep his art fresh, testing out new and obscure material, and the needy show-off who wants to get over right here, right now to the audience in front of him. To harness that hunger in the room and give it satisfaction. And so release yourself and them.

My strategy with the band had been to rotate the songs, the familiar and the unfamiliar. So we had a set each night that gave us a kick to play and also included enough songs to keep the audience happy. But over the course of a tour, a set would evolve that worked really well and we'd tend to stick to it, with only minor tinkering.

This meant that perfectly good songs weren't getting a run often enough. I was like the coach of a sporting team with a huge squad, relying too much on his stars, proven match-day winners. Meanwhile talented players languished on the bench, some for so long that they didn't turn up to training any more.

The decision to field four separate teams over four nights changed all that. By the end of the first season I realised I was onto something. The audiences had enjoyed these shows in a different way. They felt they were part of a game. Some came one night, some two or three, some all four. Those who'd come every night exchanged addresses with some of their fellow 'completists', previously strangers but now bonded as if they'd walked the Kokoda Trail together. Others said to me, 'Will you do it again? We came on night three but we'll pick another night next time.'

Next time? The last thing I wanted to think about was a next time as I headed home to lie down for a couple of days. But there was a next time. Then another and another. The memory feat became easier and my fingers began to know where to go without stumbling; I was no longer searching for old friends who'd dropped off the radar. I'd held a reunion and they'd all come, and now we were keeping in touch regularly. I'd found the gift that keeps on giving.

Right from the start, I realised the shows needed theatricalising, something to spruce up the doggedness of one man singing a list. So I decided to add some storytelling around the songs for variety, and not being a natural raconteur, wrote and memorised a script. Guests joined me onstage now and then, including my nephew Dan Kelly playing guitar. His role grew larger over time as I took the shows to other cities and countries. The performances were recorded with a view to releasing them eventually as a CD collection, and I began to imagine a book to go with it.

I went back to my show notes, put them next to the song lyrics and let my mind brew. I wanted to find a key I could turn, to feel a little click that would set me writing in a new way. Over time I found a series of keys, some to big rooms, some to little rooms, some to dark cupboards. Many days I was locked out of the house altogether.

Before too long a mongrel beast emerged. Was I writing an idiosyncratic history of music, a work diary or a hymn to dead friends? There were lists, letters, quotes, confessions, essays and road stories. Could I get them all to fit? Could I make the architecture sing? And what kind of megalomaniac would assume that setting his lyrics down and writing commentary around them – a kind of Midrash – would be interesting to others?

Just your everyday writer kind of megalomaniac, I suppose. The kind that says, Homer sang of heroes and so shall I. Of all the good people who travelled with me, who shared the dark hours and sweet moments, my twentieth- and 21st-century chums whom the gods neither helped nor hindered, I'll sing. Of those who helped me make the sounds I couldn't make on my own, the sounds that make me swoon, I'll sing. Of those I never met who sang to me across space and time, I'll sing. And hope my song becomes a charnel house, a place for those not yet born to visit, where my companions and I will remain strewn among each other, long after our days are done.
 The kind of dreamer who hopes to make a new kind of book for new machines. A book for the ears as well as the eyes. A book that sings and talks and plays. 

The kind of man who, appalled at his poor memory, throughout his life and in the middle of his life – though who's to say it's the middle? – kept putting out a net to catch scraps from the rushing river on its way to the wine dark sea.

Why The 100 Club Must Be Saved

The Cavern went years ago, the Hacienda is now posh flats- ironically bearing the same name- while the Astoria is going to be some sort of shopping precinct. Our city centres are becoming sanitised and scrubbed. Those grubby corners where popular culture gets made are disappearing.

One by one, we are losing the iconic venues.

So what, you may ask. Why should we care? In this modern download age of zippy-fast communication these places have had their time, haven't they? But they are never just buildings. They are steeped in the dust and grime of history.

The latest victim of the relentless profit drive in 21st century UK is London's 100 Club, which is under threat of closure. One of the longest running venues in the world, it started putting live gigs on in 1942.

It was formally a jazz club and the place where, in the autumn of 1976, the key punk festival took place that saw the coming of age for the movement that would be so influential in British pop culture. Over two days The Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks, The Damned and The Clash played their breakout shows and Siouxsie And The Banshees played their first gig.

Since then the 100 Club has hosted so many cool gigs. It was the London venue for the second wave of punk, a Metallica warm-up, Rolling Stones secret shows and the Horrors' breakout gig. It was the venue of one of the key early Oasis shows. Gallows have played there many times.

I've played there myself and loved its sense of history and sense of occasion and the iconic logo on the wall behind the stage. So many bands, so many styles, are all part of its continuing diverse tradition. The club's unique ambience has survived many different eras of music, in a way that the serial new venues geared solely for profit never can never match.

The 100 Club, though - described by Aerosmith's Joe Perry as "the finest rock'n'roll club in the world" - is talking of shutting by Christmas because of a soaring rates bill and a high rent. Instead of helping small business or cultural landmarks, modern UK seems intent on crushing them in the relentless drive for profit.

Maybe this time with the surge in internet-driven people power, we can do something about this. We can't let these faceless profiteers keep on stealing our culture.

There are, of course campaigns to keep it open. Facebook is full of them. They may work. This could also be an opportunity for the Bertie Wooster-lite mayor of London, Boris Johnson, to actually do something for the rock'n'roll he pays lip service to.

The unlikely Clash fan (another Tory music fan who doesn't listen to the lyrics?) has a chance to do something for the culture of the city. The rest of us need to stand up and be counted. We don't all want to live in a plastic corporate culture.

John Robb @'NME' 

The Clash's Mick Jones: 'I'd love to help save the 100 Club' 

I also hope it gets saved as I fell down drunk behind the bar worked there for a number of years back in the early eighties...

Bobby Seale bound and gagged

Dorian Cope on the Chicago Conspiracy Trial

'Small Business' - yeah right!

Scenes from China

@'The Big Picture'