Thursday, 28 April 2011

charlieconnelly Charlie Connelly

I refuse to accept this wedding is a 'fairytale' until the Archbishop of Canterbury is eaten by a wolf wearing a lace cap and shawl.

ROFL!!!

AdamBienkov Adam Bienkov

Sleeping rough before protesting against the govt: illegal and wrong. Sleeping rough before bowing your head to the Royals: a patriotic duty

WikiLeaks: The Guantánamo files database

The Mark of Cain (A documentary by Alix Lambert about the culture of Russian prison tattoos)

The Mark of Cain documents the fading art form and language of Russian criminal tattoos, formerly a forbidden topic in Russia. The now vanishing practice is seen as reflecting the transition of the broader Russian society. Filmed in some of Russia;s most notorious prisons, including the fabled White Swan, the interviews with prisoners, guards, and criminologists reveal the secret language of The Zone and The Code of Thieve.
The prisoners of the Stalinist Gulag, or "Zone," as it is called, developed a complex social structure (documented as early as the 1920s) that incorporated highly symbolic tattooing as a mark of rank. The existence of these inmates at prisons and forced labor camps was treated by the state as a deeply-kept secret. In the 1990s, Russia's prison population exploded, with overcrowding among the worst in the world. Some estimates suggest that in the last generation over thirty million of Russia's inmates have had tattoos even though the process is illegal inside Russian prisons.
The Mark of Cain examines every aspect of the tattooing, from the actual creation of the tattoo ink, interviews with the tattooers and soberly looks at the double-edged sword of prison tattoos. In many ways, they were needed to survive brutal Russian prisons, but mark the prisoner for life, which complicates any readmission to normal society they may have. Tattoos expressly identify what the convict has been convicted of, how many prisons he;s been in and what kind of criminal he is. Tattoos, essentially, tell you everything you need to know about that person without ever asking. Each tattoo represents a variety of things; cupolas on churches represent the number of convictions a convict has, epaulets tattooed on shoulders represent the rank of the individual in the crime world and so on and so forth.
The unflinching look at the Russian prison system is slowly woven into the film. Cells meant to hold 15 hold 35 to 45 men. Drug resistant tuberculosis runs rampant through the prison populations and prisoners are served three meals a day of watery slop. There are allegations of brutality by the guards. As these men deal with pestilence, violence and grossly substandard living conditions, the prison guards and administration put on a talent show.
The film served as source material for David Cronenberg's 2007 dramatic movie, Eastern Promises. He commented, "This is a very courageous documentary on the tattooing subculture in Russian prisons. I don't know how it ever got made, but it's beautiful, scary, and heartbreaking."
(Wiki)
Via

Saw this when it was on SBS many years ago. Starting at 11:47 check out the work of Aleksander Borisov, one of the most amazing tattooists ever...

Group passes on $500k-plus to WikiLeaks

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...