Ceramic Buddha Machines

The experimentalists at Fm3 continue to impress with their commitment to unorthodox music delivery when the trend remains digital and ephemeral. Back in April they announced a new line of ceramic-bodied players for their series of Buddha Machines, that essential collection of ambient loops in a case the size of a box of matches. The new players will be available at the end of the year. Being ceramic they’re probably a little less portable than the plastic versions, and might also be more fragile. For durability and retro cachet I would have opted for Bakelite if that material is still being manufactured anywhere. (It seems it is, thanks Wikipedia.)
Back in the digital and ephemeral world, Fm3 also have a Buddha Machine app for iPhones and iPads. If that seems to defeat the object of the loops being encased in a box of their own you do at least have the option of mixing six of the machines at once. For an idea of how far the mixing and extrapolation of these sounds can be taken, Robert Henke’s two ambient mixes of Buddha Machine samples from 2007 and 2008 are still available as free downloads on his website.
John Coulthart @'feuilleton'

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...meanwhile over at Stormfront!

#fuckyouwashington

So I was angry. Watching TV news over dinner — turning my attention from scandals  in the UK to those here and frankly welcoming the distraction from the  tragedies in Norway — I listened to the latest from Washington about  negotiations over the debt ceiling. It pissed me off. I’d had enough.  After dinner, I tweeted:  “Hey, Washington assholes, it’s our country, our economy, our money.  Stop fucking with it.” It was the pinot talking (sounding more like a  zinfandel).
That’s all I was going to say. I had no grand design on a revolution.  I just wanted to get that off my chest. That’s what Twitter is for:  offloading chests. Some people responded and retweeted, which pushed me  to keep going, suggesting a chant: “FUCK YOU WASHINGTON.” Then the mellifluously monikered tweeter @boogerpussy suggested: “.@jeffjarvis Hashtag it: #FUCKYOUWASHINGTON.” Damn, I was ashamed I hadn’t done that. So I did.
And then it exploded as I never could have predicted. I egged it on  for awhile, suggesting that our goal should be to make  #fuckyouwashington a trending topic, though as some tweeters quickly  pointed out, Twitter censors moderates topics. Soon enough, though, Trendistic showed us gaining in Twitter share and Trendsmap showed us trending in cities and then in the nation.

Jeff Howe tweeted:  “Holy shit, @JeffJarvis has gone all Howard Beale on us. I love it. And  I feel it. Give us our future back, fuckers. #FUCKYOUWASHINGTON.” He  likes crowded things. He’s @crowdsourcing. He became my wingman, analyzing  the phenom as it grew: “Why this is smart. Web=nuance. Terrible in  politics. Twitter=loud and simple. Like a bumper sticker.  #FuckYouWashington.” He vowed: “If this trends all weekend, you think it won’t make news? It will. And a statement. #FuckYouWashington.”
And then I got bumped off Twitter for tweeting too much. Who do the  think they are, my phone company? Now I could only watch from afar. But  that was appropriate, for I no longer owned this trend. As Howe tweeted  in the night: “Still gaining velocity. Almost no tweets containing  @crowdsourcing or @jeffjarvis anymore. It’s past the tipping point.  #FuckYouWashington.”
Right. Some folks are coming into Twitter today trying to tell me how  to manage this, how I should change the hashtag so there’s no cussin’  or to target their favorite bad man, or how I should organize marches  instead. Whatever. #fuckyouwashington not mine anymore. That is the  magic moment for a platform, when its users take it over and make it  theirs, doing with it what the creator never imagined.
Now as I read the tweets — numbering in the tens of thousands by the  next morning — I am astonished how people are using this Bealesque  moment to open their windows and tell the world their reason for  shouting #fuckyouwashington. It’s amazing reading. As @ericverlo declared,  “The #fuckyouwashington party platform is literally writing itself.”  True, they didn’t all agree with each other, but in their shouts, behind  their anger, they betrayed their hopes and wishes for America.
@partygnome said: “#fuckyouwashington for valuing corporations more than people.”
@spsenski, on a major  role, cried: “#fuckyouwashington for never challenging us to become more  noble, but prodding us to become selfish and hateful….  #fuckyouwashington for not allowing me to marry the one I love….  #fuckyouwashington for driving me to tweet blue.”
@jellencollins: “#fuckyouwashington for making ‘debt’ a four letter word and ‘fuck’ an appropriate response.”
@tamadou:  “#fuckyouwashington for giving yourselves special benefits and telling  the American people they have to suck it up or they’re selfish.”
@psychnurseinwi: “#fuckyouwashington for having the compromising skills of a 3 year old.”
I was amazed and inspired. I was also trepidatious. I didn’t know  what I’d started and didn’t want it to turn ugly. After all, we had just  witnessed the ungodly horror of anger — and psychosis — unleashed in  Norway. I’ve come to believe that our enemy today isn’t terrorism but  fascism of any flavor, hiding behind anger as supposed cause.
But at moments such as this, I always need to remind myself of my  essential faith in my fellow man — that is why I believe in democracy,  free markets, education, journalism. It’s the extremists who fuck up the  world and it is our mistake to manage our society and our lives to  their worst, to the extreme. That, tragically, is how our political  system and government are being managed today: to please the extremes.  Or rather, that is why they are not managed today. And that is why I’m shouting, to remind Washington that its *job* is to *manage* the *business* of government.
The tweets that keep streaming in — hundreds an hour still — restore  my faith not in government but in society, in us. Oh, yes, there are  idiots, extremists, and angry conspiracy theorists and just plain jerks  among them. But here, that noise was being drowned out by the voices of  disappointed Americans — disappointed because they do indeed give a  shit.
Their messages, their reasons for shouting #fuckyouwashington and  holding our alleged leaders to higher expectations, sparks a glimmer of  hope that perhaps we can recapture our public sphere.  No, no, Twitter won’t do that here any more than it did it in Egypt and  Libya. Shouting #fuckyouwashington is hardly a revolution. Believe me,  I’m not overblowing the significance of this weekend’s entertainment.  All I’m saying is that when I get to hear the true voice of the people —  not the voice of government, not the voice of media, not a voice  distilled to a number following a stupid question in a poll — I see  cause for hope.
I didn’t intend this to be anything more than spouting off in 140  profane characters. It turns out that the people of Twitter taught me a  lesson that I thought I was teaching myself in Public Parts, about the potential of a public armed with a Gutenberg press in every pocket, with its tools of publicness.

* * * For an excellent summary of the saga as it unfolded on Twitter, see Maryann Batlle’s excellent compilation in Storify, as well as Gavin Sheridan’s Storyful. CBS News Online’s What’s Trending was the first  in media to listen to what was happening here. David Weigel used this  as a jumping off point for his own critique of Washington and the debt  “crisis” at Slate. Says Michael Duff on his blog:

 Everybody knows you guys are running the clock out,  waiting for the next election. But you can’t have it both ways. You  can’t go on TV to scare the shit out of us every day and then expect us  to wait patiently for 2012. You can’t use words like “urgent” and “crisis” and then waste our time with Kabuki theater.

Either the situation is urgent and needs to be solved now, or it’s  all just an act that can wait for 2012. This isn’t 1954, gentlemen. The  voters are on to you now. We know you’re playing a game and we know  you’re using us as chess pieces.
That’s why #fuckyouwashington is trending on Twitter. We’re tired of being pawns.
Every politician in Washington needs to pay attention to this outrage, and remember who they’re working for.

And then there’s this reaction from no less than Anonymous: “@jeffJarvis you’ve started a shit storm. Nice going.”
: MORE: Handelsblatt writes about the Twitter movement.
Jeff Jarvis @'BuzzMachine'

jayrosen_nyu Jay Rosen

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Russell Brand on Amy Winehouse

When you love someone who suffers from the disease of addiction you await the phone call. There will be a phone call. The sincere hope is that the call will be from the addict themselves, telling you they’ve had enough, that they’re ready to stop, ready to try something new. Of course though, you fear the other call, the sad nocturnal chime from a friend or relative telling you it’s too late, she’s gone.
Frustratingly it’s not a call you can ever make it must be received. It is impossible to intervene.
I’ve known Amy Winehouse for years. When I first met her around Camden she was just some twit in a pink satin jacket shuffling round bars with mutual friends, most of whom were in cool Indie bands or peripheral Camden figures Withnail-ing their way through life on impotent charisma. Carl Barrat told me that “Winehouse” (which I usually called her and got a kick out of cos it’s kind of funny to call a girl by her surname) was a jazz singer, which struck me as a bizarrely anomalous in that crowd. To me with my limited musical knowledge this information placed Amy beyond an invisible boundary of relevance; “Jazz singer? She must be some kind of eccentric” I thought. I chatted to her anyway though, she was after all, a girl, and she was sweet and peculiar but most of all vulnerable.
I was myself at that time barely out of rehab and was thirstily seeking less complicated women so I barely reflected on the now glaringly obvious fact that Winehouse and I shared an affliction, the disease of addiction. All addicts, regardless of the substance or their social status share a consistent and obvious symptom; they’re not quite present when you talk to them. They communicate to you through a barely discernible but un-ignorable veil. Whether a homeless smack head troubling you for 50p for a cup of tea or a coked-up, pinstriped exec foaming off about his “speedboat” there is a toxic aura that prevents connection. They have about them the air of elsewhere, that they’re looking through you to somewhere else they’d rather be. And of course they are. The priority of any addict is to anaesthetise the pain of living to ease the passage of the day with some purchased relief.
From time to time I’d bump into Amy she had good banter so we could chat a bit and have a laugh, she was “a character” but that world was riddled with half cut, doped up chancers, I was one of them, even in early recovery I was kept afloat only by clinging to the bodies of strangers so Winehouse, but for her gentle quirks didn’t especially register.
Then she became massively famous and I was pleased to see her acknowledged but mostly baffled because I’d not experienced her work and this not being the 1950’s I wondered how a “jazz singer” had achieved such cultural prominence. I wasn’t curious enough to do anything so extreme as listen to her music or go to one of her gigs, I was becoming famous myself at the time and that was an all consuming experience. It was only by chance that I attended a Paul Weller gig at the Roundhouse that I ever saw her live.
I arrived late and as I made my way to the audience through the plastic smiles and plastic cups I heard the rolling, wondrous resonance of a female vocal. Entering the space I saw Amy on stage with Weller and his band; and then the awe. The awe that envelops when witnessing a genius. From her oddly dainty presence that voice, a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness. A voice that was filled with such power and pain that it was at once entirely human yet laced with the divine. My ears, my mouth, my heart and mind all instantly opened. Winehouse. Winehouse? Winehouse! That twerp, all eyeliner and lager dithering up Chalk Farm Road under a back-combed barnet, the lips that I’d only seen clenching a fishwife fag and dribbling curses now a portal for this holy sound. So now I knew. She wasn’t just some hapless wannabe, yet another pissed up nit who was never gonna make it, nor was she even a ten-a-penny-chanteuse enjoying her fifteen minutes. She was a fucking genius.
Shallow fool that I am I now regarded her in a different light, the light that blazed down from heaven when she sang. That lit her up now and a new phase in our friendship began. She came on a few of my TV and radio shows, I still saw her about but now attended to her with a little more interest. Publicly though, Amy increasingly became defined by her addiction. Our media though is more interested in tragedy than talent, so the ink began to defect from praising her gift to chronicling her downfall. The destructive personal relationships, the blood soaked ballet slippers, the aborted shows, that youtube madness with the baby mice. In the public perception this ephemeral tittle-tattle replaced her timeless talent. This and her manner in our occasional meetings brought home to me the severity of her condition. Addiction is a serious disease; it will end with jail, mental institutions or death. I was 27 years old when through the friendship and help of Chip Somers of the treatment centre, Focus12 I found recovery, through Focus I was introduced to support fellowships for alcoholics and drug addicts which are very easy to find and open to anybody with a desire to stop drinking and without which I would not be alive.
Now Amy Winehouse is dead, like many others whose unnecessary deaths have been retrospectively romanticised, at 27 years old. Whether this tragedy was preventable or not is now irrelevant. It is not preventable today. We have lost a beautiful and talented woman to this disease. Not all addicts have Amy’s incredible talent. Or Kurt’s or Jimi’s or Janis’s, some people just get the affliction. All we can do is adapt the way we view this condition, not as a crime or a romantic affectation but as a disease that will kill. We need to review the way society treats addicts, not as criminals but as sick people in need of care. We need to look at the way our government funds rehabilitation. It is cheaper to rehabilitate an addict than to send them to prison, so criminalisation doesn’t even make economic sense. Not all of us know someone with the incredible talent that Amy had but we all know drunks and junkies and they all need help and the help is out there. All they have to do is pick up the phone and make the call. Or not. Either way, there will be a phone call.

rustyrockets Russell Brand 
For Amy bit.ly/q0ofr5

♪♫ Amy Winehouse - Wake Up Alone (Original Demo)

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