deviatar Now defense spending bill in House reportedly includes ban on transfer of Gitmo detainees to US for trial; not clear how that happened
Saturday, 18 December 2010
Friday, 17 December 2010
Hail, Hail, Rock'n'Roll
It was just a day after the 30th anniversary of John Lennon's death that Nick Clegg, seemingly without a flicker of irony, chose to denounce those protesting against a rise in university tuition fees as "dreamers". Well, he may say so, but I'm sure they're not the only ones. It got me to thinking about dreamers and their songs, from Lennon's Imagine, to the Staple Singers' Respect Yourself, via Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Billy Bragg. It is my fervent hope, in these politically distasteful times, that the songs of the protesters, the songs of the dreamers, might enjoy something of a renaissance.
For the last couple of years, Britain's principal musical protest has been in the form of revisiting old songs in the hope of stalling the X Factor juggernaut – last Christmas of course it was Rage Against the Machine's Killing in the Name keeping Joe McElderry off the top of the charts; this year – as pondered by my Film&Music colleague Tom Ewing, we have Cage Against the Machine, a rather wonderful plot to keep Matt Cardle's cover of a Biffy Clyro hit away from the top spot by encouraging us to buy John Cage's 1952 avant-garde composition 4'33" – a song in which the players are instructed not to play at all. Now some 87,000-strong on Facebook, the campaign's mission statement is simple: "Together," its masterminds insist, "we can make it a silent night on Radio 1."
Cage was a dreamer, but 4'33" is not really silent, nor is it really a protest song. Rather, it was one of Cage's explorations of the "activity" of sound, the culmination of an idea he first mentioned in a lecture at Vassar college in the late 1940s, speaking of a desire to compose "a piece of uninterrupted silence and sell it to Muzak Co. It will be three or four-and-a-half minutes long – those being the standard lengths of 'canned' music … It will open with a single idea which I will attempt to make as seductive as the colour and shape and fragrance of a flower. The ending will approach imperceptibly."
Crucially, Cage was inspired by the work of his friend, the artist Robert Rauschenberg, who in 1951 had produced White Paintings, a series of seemingly blank canvasses (though in truth they were painted with white house paint). The idea was that the canvasses would change colour according to differing light conditions wherever they happened to hang, their appearance shifting to reflect the time of day, say, or the shape of the exhibition space, or even the number of people in the room.
Cage described these canvasses as "airports of the lights, shadows and particles", and the following year he created 4'33", an aural equivalent. Though it is, in many respects, a soundless composition, Cage's intention was that 4'33" would similarly reflect the ambient sounds of wherever it was performed – the musicians, the room, the audience. After all, as Cage put it: "Everything we do is music."
This is, in many ways, how we hear all songs; 4'33" is simply the rawest example. The light, literal and metaphorical, affects the way that music falls on our ears; we hear a song differently indoors to outdoors, alone or in company, sitting still to when we are in motion. The aural canvas appears a different colour when we are in love, when we are in despair, when we have painted it with the layers of our emotional lives.
Cage once spoke of his experience of visiting an anechoic chamber and finding himself startled to hear not silence but two distinct sounds: "one high, my nervous system in operation, one low, my blood in circulation". Even without intention, he found, we are contributing to the music.
And I think there is something rather beautiful in the idea that if those silent four minutes and 33 seconds come to be played on Radio 1 this Christmas, we will each hear it quite differently; not a silent night at all, but a musical blank canvas coloured by the sound of our own blood pumping, by the lights, shadows and particles of our lives.
Laura Barton @'The Guardian'
Blackwater Founder in Deal to Sell Company
Erik D. Prince, founder of the private security firm formerly known as Blackwater Worldwide, has reached a deal to sell his embattled firm to a small group of investors based in Los Angeles who have close ties to Mr. Prince, according to people briefed on the deal.
Blackwater, now called Xe Services, was once the United States’ go-to contractor in Iraq and Afghanistan. It has been under intense pressure since 2007, when Blackwater guards were accused of killing 17 civilians in Nisour Square in Baghdad. The company, its executives and personnel have faced civil lawsuits, criminal charges and congressional investigations surrounding accusations of murder and bribery. In April, federal prosecutors announced weapons charges against five former senior Blackwater executives, including its former president.
The sale, which is expected to be announced on Friday, came after the State Department threatened to stop awarding contracts to the company as long as Mr. Prince owned the firm, people involved in the discussions said. These people requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about the confidential talks. The sale is intended to help shake the stigma associated with its ownership under Mr. Prince...
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Andrew Ross Sorkin & Ben Protess @'DealB%k'
Photos of the Year
Kyrgyz riot policemen try to protect themselves during clashes with opposition supporters demonstrating against the government in Bishkek on April 7, 2010. Opposition followers killed Kyrgyzstan's interior minister, took the deputy prime minister hostage and captured state television in a deadly revolt on April 7 against President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. A source in the office of Interior Minister Moldomus Kongantiyev revealed that he had been killed in riots in the northwest hub of Talas where the first protests had erupted. (VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Images)
BreakingNews Neither Julian Assange nor WikiLeaks committed any crime in Australia, prime minister says - AP
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