President Obama: No To Decriminalization, Yes To More War On Some Drugs

The Mp3 Experiment Eight

For our latest mission, over 3,500 people downloaded an MP3 file and pressed play simultaneously. The event began at sunset in two starting points by the Hudson River. The masses converged on Nelson Rockefeller Park as twilight ended and participated in a series of synchronized activities involving flashlights, camera flashes, glow sticks, and masks.
Created by Charlie Todd & Tyler Walker
http://improveverywhere.com

Innocent people's DNA profiles won't be deleted after all, UK minister admits

FBI Hunting Hackers Who Took Down Koch Brothers’ Websites

DJ Spooky - 'Sonification of Ice Assets' (Download)

Includes ice-sonification movies, audio tracks and still images.
Ice-crystal sonification created in collaboration with Robert AlexanderNASA JPFP Fellow

HERE

Smoking # 103

Du Juan

Saul Bass Meets Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

(Click to enlarge)

Many of today's artists and designers have and will always be inspired by the one and only Saul Bass, an American graphic designer and filmmaker who was best known for designing innovative title sequences and posters for movies like North by Northwest, Vertigo, and Psycho.
Nathan Boyd is one of Bass' admirers. "Saul Bass just blows my mind!," he tells us. "His style is so simple yet so complex! It really captures the feeling of the time those movies were made but, at the same time, works really well today. How is that possible?!"
Boyd, who you may remember as the one behind that clever Disney x Star mashup series, has been creating Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles posters in Saul Bass' trademark style. Why did he choose to illustrate these famous turtles?
"TMNT practically was my childhood," Boyd says. "There is so much nostalgia connected with TMNT for me. I'm a Star Wars fan, first and foremost, but the Ninja Turtles was something that I shared with my brothers growing up. We not only enjoyed the cartoon, but also the comics, the action figures (no matter how ridiculous) and quoting the first movie almost line for line. It's impossible, for me, to think of TMNT without thinking about all the good times I had with my brothers."
Boyd has plans to create one poster for each of the turtles and possibly one more for Shredder. "Still thinking about that one," he says. Love how they bring you right back to your childhood.
Alice @'My Modern Met'
Nathan H. Boyd's website

Stereogum Presents… STROKED: A Tribute To Is This It

The Strokes‘ debut album Is This It was first released on 7/30/01. To help us celebrate this 10th Anniversary, we asked some of our favorite indie bands to cover each track. The resulting collection, STROKED: A Tribute To Is This It, is in the spirit of our previous free tribute albums for Radiohead’s OK Computer, R.E.M.’s Automatic For The People, and Bjork’s Post.
Is This It was recorded in NYC at Transporterraum with Gordon Raphael. When it was finally released in the States in the Fall of 2001, a decade after Nevermind, it helped not only put contemporary New York City in the forefront of music lovers’ minds, it offered an easy reference for people to dig backwards into the Big Apple’s rock ‘n’ roll past. For certain younger fans, it was maybe the first time they carefully considered Television (the late ’70s), the Velvet Underground (mid ’60s to early ’70s), and other lesser known garage and rock and whatever bands that inhabited a dirtier, grubbier Manhattan. The title’s pure Richard Hell. The original sexy album cover a minimalist echo of New York Dolls (via Roxy Music). It’s no coincidence that 2001 NYC — eventually, especially Brooklyn — ended up being known for its post-punk revival. (See, for instance, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Liars, Black Dice, Vice Records’ No New York nodding collection Yes New York, etc.) Is This It was a history lesson, but one with enough new ideas to also offer a roadmap.
In a strange way, Is This It sounded like something entirely new and entirely familiar at the same time. That’s one secret to its appeal. That, and the simple head-nodding hooks on modern classics like “Last Nite,” “Someday,” and “Hard To Explain” are so immediate. It’s a clean, but scruffy collection. It’s honed and tight, but also just loose enough — loose mostly in the presentation. People watching MTV in ’01 won’t forget the first time they saw the way Julian Casablancas didn’t seem to give a shit in the “Last Nite” video. Or how the bands’ minds appeared elsewhere when they performed on Late Night Television. It’s a kind of charisma you can’t teach or practice, one that felt as natural as their messy hair.
The Strokes maybe never topped Is This It, but you can’t blame them for that. Part of the record’s appeal is also the youthfulness of it, something you can’t replicate even a year later. That said, they definitely found a way to bottle it on the album itself: If you listen to it now, 10 years later, it sounds as fresh (and vintage) as ever. Which is maybe why its sound continues to surface in 2011 among both shaggy rock groups, yeah, but also kids with keyboards in their bedrooms and folks wearing sunglasses behind their laptops.
Tracklist and download
HERE

Norway Attacks: How a Once Moderate Region Became a Haven for the Far Right

People react at the end of a memorial service at Oslo Cathedral on Sunday, July 24, 2011, in the aftermath of the Friday attacks on Norway's government headquarters and a youth retreat in Oslo Emilio Morenatti / AP

In 2005, Norway's populist, far-right Progress Party ran election-campaign posters that featured a dark-skinned man pointing a gun at the camera and the slogan "The perpetrator is of foreign origin." Today, these posters carry a terrible irony: Anders Behring Breivik — a tall, blond, blue-eyed farmer not of foreign origin — massacred dozens of Norwegian schoolchildren on Friday, July 22, in what seems to have been a deranged attempt to spark a revolution against the influx of foreigners he felt was diluting Norway's heritage.

It is dangerous to look for answers in the mind of a madman. It does not necessarily reveal anything useful about a nation if one of its citizens murders under the banner of a particular ideology. But if Breivik's psychopathy is unique, in Norway and other Nordic countries his political beliefs are surprisingly widespread. It may seem shocking, but Scandinavia — for years a model of tolerance and cooperation and the sponsor of dozens of worthy international conferences and treaties — has become the latest European haven for xenophobic populist thought.

Norway's Progress Party, of which Breivik is a former member, won more than one-fifth of the national vote in the latest parliamentary election, in 2009. Last year, the Swedish Democrats became the first far-right party to enter the Swedish parliament when it captured nearly 6% of the vote despite a furor that erupted when local candidate Marie-Louise Enderleit posted a comment on Facebook that migrants should be shot in the head, put in a bag and sent back to their home countries. Denmark's Folkparty, which recently ran an anti-immigrant campaign under the slogan "Give us Denmark back," secured 14% of the vote in a 2007 election and has since been an influential coalition partner in government. And the True Finns became the third largest party represented in the Finnish Parliament after winning 19% of the vote in elections in April.

"It is the end of an era," Anders Wildfeldt, lecturer in Nordic politics at the University of Aberdeen, says of the entrance of the far right into the Nordic political mainstream. Citing the success of xenophobic parties in other parts of Europe, Wildfeldt adds, "It's becoming increasingly inaccurate to discuss Scandinavian exceptionalism..."

Continue reading

Eben Harrell @'TIME'

Debut for A Clockwork Orange music

Songs written by author Anthony Burgess for a musical version of his novel A Clockwork Orange are to be performed in the UK for the first time.

Burgess adapted A Clockwork Orange for a stage musical in the 1980s after his book was turned into a controversial film by director Stanley Kubrick.
The music will be performed next year in Manchester during a series of events to mark the novel's 50th anniversary.
The story follows a violent teenage gang leader in a lawless society.
The film caused an international outcry when it was released in 1971, leading Kubrick to withdraw it from cinemas.
'Ownership of the story' The musical was "a kind of revisioning of the story", according to Dr Andrew Biswell, director of the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester.
Burgess, who was born in Manchester, was a prolific composer as well as the author of 33 novels. He died aged 76 in 1993.
"The music is really important because it establishes a tone and a mood," Dr Biswell said. "It's pretty close to West Side Story - that's one of the obvious influences on it.
"There's this scene in prison, where one of the prisoners is kicked to death, which is very throwaway and jolly. That's completely different from the corresponding episode in the film, which is very gloomy and depressing.
"The reason why Burgess wanted to make his own stage adaptation, quite a long time after Kubrick made the film, was to assert his own ownership of the story."
In 1990, Burgess's script was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, but the production rejected his music in favour of new songs by Bono and The Edge of U2.
Burgess's songs will be performed by graduates of the Royal Northern College of Music at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation.
A separate musical version of the story, featuring a new score and script, will be staged featuring black actors at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, London, from September.
The anniversary will also include an exhibition about the film, featuring props, photographs from deleted scenes, location photography and rejected artwork at the John Rylands Library in Manchester.
@'BBC'
(Thanx Stan!)