Thursday, 28 April 2011

Brains of Buddhist monks scanned in meditation study

Gitmo, Wikileaks and a window on tyranny

Why We Need An Open Wireless Movement

Morrissey on the Royals

Fervent anti-Royalist Morrissey, whose swan song masterpiece in The Smiths was entitled The Queen Is Dead, has taken the impending Royal Wedding to lash out at the British monarchy. Morrissey used an interview on BBC Radio 5 yesterday to dub the Royal Family as dole bludgers, accusing them of being ‘benefit scroungers’.
Morrissey questioned an interviewer who asked him if he’d be amongst the estimated two billion people watching the ceremony globally. “Why would I watch the wedding? Why would I watch it? I couldn’t take any of that seriously. I don’t think the so-called royal family speak for England now and I don’t think England needs them. I do seriously believe that they are benefit scroungers and nothing else. I don’t believe they serve any purpose whatsoever.”
Warming up to his topic, he added: “The press reports from Buckingham Palace tell you that people love them, but go out now and speak to people on the street and they will laugh at you. They really will.” Morrissey once fantasised in ‘The Queen is Dead’ back in the 1980s of breaking in to Buckingham Palace armed with just a “sponge and a rusty spanner”. His hatred of the Queen extended to her son Charles, Prince William’s old man, suggesting that he’d like to “appear on the front of the Daily Mail, dressed in your mother’s bridal veil.”
As recently as a few years ago he said of William’s Dad “The very idea of Charles being King is laughable. You might as well say that Ronnie Corbett will be king one day. I think that would give people more pleasure.” Clearly nothing has changed.
Via

♪♫ Nostalgia 77 - Simmerdown (feat. Josa Peit)

HA!

domknight Dominic Knight

I will shortly be releasing the Certificate of Inauthenticity for Donald Trump's wig.

The Story Of This Is The Sea: An Interview With Mike Scott Of The Waterboys

You only had to take one look at Mike Scott in the early 1980s to know that he was born to write. His carefully cultivated appearance – long dark overcoat with collar turned up to the wind, shoulder length hair only a shampoo away from Bob Geldof's unkempt mop and tucked away beneath a Greek fisherman's cap – gave him the look of a poet, conveying an earnest, literary image no doubt enhanced by his study of English literature in his native Edinburgh. Like Morrissey, who formed The Smiths around much the same time as The Waterboys were born, Scott was a bookish romantic and also a product of punk culture: while Morrissey was running the New York Dolls fan club, Scott was publishing a fanzine, Jungleland. But unlike Morrissey, Scott wasn't immersed in the kitchen sink culture of 1950s England encapsulated by Alan Sillitoe, and neither did he write of gritty streets and the day-to-day minutiae of dreary disappointment. Instead he buried himself in the work of William Butler Yeats, Robbie Burns and William Blake, dreaming of "unicorns and cannonballs, palaces and piers / Trumpets, towers and tenements, wide oceans full of tears". Scott sought to give voice to a sense of the epic rather than the prosaic, almost guitar music's polar opposite of The Smiths, and he wasn't alone: U2 had made tentative steps towards grand themes on their early releases just as The Waterboys had on their first two impressive but nonetheless mildly technologically hamstrung albums. By 1985, however, the year that their third album, This Is The Sea, emerged, Scott had perfected a concept that The Unforgettable Fire, a year earlier, could only aspire to, a sound that rapidly became known as 'The Big Music'.
It took its name from a Waterboys song, the first single to be released from their second album, A Pagan Place. Though metaphorical in intent, its lyrics applied perfectly to the scale and grandeur with which Scott was beginning to carve his style: "I have heard the big music," he sang, "and I'll never be the same… I have climbed the big tree, touched the big sky / I just stuck my hand up in the air / and everything came into colour / Like jazz manna from sweet, sweet chariots". The album, however, was less successful at creating this sense of sweet euphoria: though its aim was ambitious – something to which opener 'A Church Not Made With Hands' and the mournful 'The Thrill Is Gone' testify, not to mention the eight minute waltz of 'Red Army Blues' – its reach sometimes fell somewhere short of Scott's target, partially due to the claustrophobic sound, a result of the fact that some of its tracks were little more than glorified demos. But that was, as Scott would have it, the river, and now he was looking to further, wider horizons: to the sea. With its follow up, Scott wasn't going to make the same mistake again...

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Wyndham Wallace @'The Quietus'

WSB

(Click to enlarge)

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Crash

Available
HERE

Josh Homme & Alain Johannes - Aqua Unit Patrol Squad One Theme

Arabic Calligraffiti: How Calligraphy Found Its Way Into Urban Arts

(Preview)

The 'carnival barker' speaks...

...#bellend

Glenn Greenwald: FBI serves Grand Jury subpoena likely relating to WikiLeaks

Steadman's unused Fear & Loathing title

Video from 1998 shows artist Ralph Steadman at work on the title treatment for the film Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. This version ultimately wasn't used.
HERE