Wednesday, 10 August 2011

Who are the rioters? Young men from poor areas ... but that's not the full story

John Hiatt - Dirty Jeans and Mudslide Hymns

Hackers Deface BlackBerry Blog Over London Riot BBM Assistance

Hacking becomes latest weapon in UK riots

Labels React to Sony/PIAS Warehouse Fire

Smoking # 105 (Frances Bean Cobain)

Hedi Slimane

‘Children of the Drug War: Perspectives on the impact of drug policies on young people’ Damon Barrett (ed)

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Ken Kesey’s cross-country 1964 bus trip with the Merry Pranksters was supposed to be a movie. “The world’s first acid film,” as Tom Wolfe explained, “taken under conditions of total spontaneity barreling through the heartlands of America, recording all now, in the moment.” That’s why the bus was packed not just with LSD, speed and grass, but also speakers, mikes and wires.
But the Pranksters were lousy moviemakers; the footage was chaotic, out of focus and all but impossible to edit. It ended up moldering in rusty cans on Kesey’s Oregon farm. Still, we saw the film another way, by reading “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” Mr. Wolfe’s still-dazzling retelling.
And now — hold on — with that merry band long dispersed or dead, the amazing moment has arrived after all. “Magic Trip,” a new documentary by Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood, rescues the old footage, and Kesey’s vision, through a miracle of digital restoration and editing.
To which we can only say: Whoa! How often does that happen? A book gets its own corroborative video, 40-some years late. The same indelible images, the word made fleshy. Here’s Kesey in his prime, his legendary charisma made obvious. There’s Neal Cassady, hopped-up at the wheel, and, man, he won’t shut up. And there are those other young men and the women they loved, ogled, chased and ignored. There’s Stark Naked at Larry McMurtry’s house, tripping badly. Here’s Generally Famished, pregnant and tired and mostly not acting like an idiot. The whole story of what free love was like for women in the prefeminist ’60s is captured in her weary, wary eyes.
Nearly 50 years on, the film shows why squares in shiny shoes thought the Pranksters were ninnies. It helps explain why the ’60s were necessary, if not always interesting. And it only deepens our admiration for Mr. Wolfe, who married a wild imagination to a writer’s discipline, and got his raw material into shape. In 1968.
@'NYT'

Film Hitches a Weird Ride on Kesey’s Bus

Kim Salmon: Spare a dollar for the maker, music doesn't play itself

When I began working as a musician in Fremantle some 35 years ago, I earned around $600 per week. I had a regular gig and it was ongoing. Nowadays I'd think myself very lucky to make that sort of wage playing music. It's usually much less. And compared to many musicians, I'm doing very well.
Last year in Melbourne, the city's entire live music industry rallied to get the Victorian government to recognise the industry's cultural and economic contribution to the state.
This town's reputation as the best live music scene in the country was trumpeted proudly throughout the media. Much was made of a loved pub, the Tote, being forced to close as a live music venue thanks to restrictive licensing laws. It became the symbol of the struggle to maintain a vibrant music scene in a heartless environment of profiteers, bureaucrats and dollar-driven decisions.
Thanks, however, to the industry figures and musos who took part in the rally, public awareness of the importance of the industry grew and became something that government would notice. Thanks to the rally, the Tote reopened as a music venue just a few months after its high-profile closure. It was considered a victory for live music in this state.
And, one year after the Tote's historic reopening, what of the musicians who create this live music so cherished by the state? Are they able to get a guaranteed fee for playing in this victorious, symbolic pub?
Err, actually … no.
Why is it that after dedicating my life to playing music, I now earn less than ever?
People like to blame digital technology for the ease of obtaining music free, doing its makers out of their income. Technology will always change things - it is said that some theatre organists committed suicide with the advent of the talkies. Maybe true, sadly, but there are still organists.
I blame attitudes.
''It must be wonderful doing what you love for a living,'' people often say to me.
Or, ''Put yourself in my shoes, I've got a business to run,'' which is a common refrain to working musicians from those who don't want to pay much for their services. The attitude behind this remark is taken as some kind of given and perfectly acceptable.
Well, I am in your shoes, Mr Publican. I've also got a business to run. The business of paying the sound guy, fellow musos, transport, rent. I've walked more than a mile in your shoes and I'm still not where you are.
Another thing I've heard said too many times is ''Why don't you get a real job?'' as if it's too much fun to be a real job.
Others will tell you to treat your music like a hobby and if you get paid for it, that's the icing on the cake. This is a big part of the problem; in my view there are so many people who are prepared to treat it like a hobby, that the professional musician is undermined.
Dodgy preconceptions dog other professions: nurses will work unhealthy shifts for inordinately low wages because they ''have a desire to help the sick''; teachers ''only work during school hours and they get all those holidays'' - students' reports seemingly writing themselves … so they don't need to be paid as much as people from the private sector; CEOs ''are all psychopaths so we have to let them have seven-figure salaries … '' I could go on.
What I'm driving at is that the way certain professions are treated seems to be dictated by entrenched preconceptions. It seems perfectly reasonable to many that music publishers, record labels and publicans have a business to run and should be compensated for their work.
Yesterday, the government released its report into the live music industry's annual economic contribution to the state, which was calculated at more than $500 million.
It is time attitudes changed to more fairly benefit those without whom there would be no music industry - the musicians.
Via

Pill targeting hepatitis C launched in UK

Exile On Fleet Street

Rupert Murdoch’s strange, covert reign over British public life did not begin all at once. It came about gradually, by accretion, and started with his purchase in 1969 of a dusty old tabloid called The News of the World.
In the same year, the BBC — keen to understand the man who some said would transform British media — dispatched one of its cherished sons to interview Murdoch. David Dimbleby — then a 30-year-old reporter, today the august host of the BBC’s flagship political debate program — set about Murdoch with the clipped vowels and polished cunning that will be familiar to viewers of Question Time. Halfway through the report Dimbleby speaks to Murdoch’s second wife, Anna. Here, he strikes on a more informal line of questioning, and says with an almost coquettish lilt in his voice:
“I expect it’s awful to be the wife of a media tycoon. I mean, don’t you feel cut out of so much of his life?”
Anna considers for a moment. Then she says:
“I don’t like it when people call him a tycoon. Tycoon is a sort of Americanism. He’s a good Australian businessman, and he’s come over here.” The beginnings of a smile flicker over Anna’s face; she suppresses it, and adds: “And he’s going to show you how to do it.”
That answer was an impromptu, perfect encapsulation of the Murdoch project as it was then conceived. For 30 years Murdoch has considered himself the ultimate outsider at the heart of the British establishment, a man “over here” and determined to bring a value system shaped by the colonial experience — one that insists on egalitarianism, robustness, and competition — to bear on an old British elite that he considered hypocritical, complacent, and, above all, beholden to repulsive class prejudice. That outsider mentality has lain behind everything Murdoch has done, from the culture of tabloid sensationalism pioneered at the News of the World, to the breaking of the print unions in Fleet Street in the 1980s, to the assault launched on Britain’s sleepy- four-channel television landscape by the Sky pay-TV network. It drove him to sell the British people a new idea of themselves, and their country. In our millions, we bought it...