Saturday, 3 September 2011

The girl with the Damien Hirst tattoo

First Listen: Wild Flag - 'Wild Flag'

Last September, Carrie Brownstein wrote, "I have no desire to play music unless I need music." During her post-Sleater-Kinney forays into music blogging and sketch comedy, she explained, "I started to need music again, and so I called on my friends and we joined as a band." Hence: Wild Flag, a new group she'd formed with former Sleater-Kinney bandmate Janet Weiss, Helium's Mary Timony, and The Minders' Rebecca Cole. Soon, they would record an album.
Let's look back, past the swirling cloud of expectation that has subsequently gathered around the first full-length recording by said "supergroup," and focus on that statement. Out Sept. 13, Wild Flag the album sounds more than anything like the work of four people who need music. People who, after more than two decades of playing, still need it as much as they did the day they started.
A lot of the album, in one way or another, is about music: the way it pulls you into the moment, the way it moves and seduces, the way it communicates across barriers of space, time, and language. "We love the sound, the sound is what found us / Sound is the blood between me and you," they sing in the indelible chorus of "Romance."
When they're not singing out loud, Brownstein and Timony's guitars speak volumes: They're two of the most wonderfully lyrical players out there. Add Weiss' exuberant beats, Cole's keyboard flourishes, and some killer multi-part vocal harmonizing by all four, and you've got a supergroup superball sound that bounces between Television, Wire, and The Go-Gos but always lands in a place very much their own.
The album is a no-frills affair, recorded live (except for the vocals) in The Hangar, a cavernous Sacramento recording studio that occasionally doubles as a skate park. It sounds live, as hard to imagine as that is: a real live record with a beating heart, a record that needs you as much as you need it.
Rachel Smith @'npr'

Hear 'Wild Flag' In Its Entirety

NHS plans will mean putting wealthy first, says doctors' leader

Henry Rollins Speaks On The Freeing of the West Memphis Three

For those of you who have been following the West Memphis Three case for so many years, you perhaps saw the news from a couple of weeks ago that sent you reeling: Damien Echols, Jessie Misskelley and Jason Baldwin were set free after serving more than 18 years in prison.
If you are not familiar with this agonizing -- yet simultaneously fascinating -- case, I encourage you to learn about it. It is the perfect tragedy. In 1993, three 8-year-old boys were found dead in a secluded area of West Memphis, Ark. With no physical evidence and a very suspect confession, three teenage boys were found guilty of the murders in a trial that was the stuff of bad television.
The teenagers became known as the West Memphis Three. They are now free. With a new trial about to start -- featuring new evidence to be introduced by the defense, earlier witnesses recanting testimony and new witnesses with new information set to testify -- suddenly the prosecution seemed uninterested in doing battle again. Interestingly, Echols, who was on death row after having been found guilty of murdering three people, now was seen fit to leave his cage and go free. Someone blinked. It wasn't Echols.
I bring all of this up because this case seemed to be embraced by a lot of bands, musicians and young people all over the world. In the West Memphis Three, a lot of people saw themselves. Heavy-metal albums found in their rooms, antisocial behavior -- the very stuff of youth -- were used in court. In lieu of any physical evidence placing them at the crime scene, this "evidence" supposedly showed that these three were definitely the ones who did it.
In a real court of law, this would have been laughed out of the courtroom.
I found out about the case more than a decade ago. I read about it online and it seemed to me that justice had not been served. After seeing a documentary on the case, Paradise Lost, with Metallica providing the soundtrack, I decided I was angry enough to get involved...

@'LAWeekly'

Cryptocurrency

When the virtual currency bitcoin was released, in January 2009, it appeared to be an interesting way for people to trade among themselves in a secure, low-cost, and private fashion. The Bitcoin network, designed by an unknown programmer with the handle "Satoshi Nakamoto," used a decentralized peer-to-peer system to verify transactions, which meant that people could exchange goods and services electronically, and anonymously, without having to rely on third parties like banks. Its medium of exchange, the bitcoin, was an invented currency that people could earn—or, in Bitcoin's jargon, "mine"—by lending their computers' resources to service the needs of the Bitcoin network. Once in existence, bitcoins could also be bought and sold for dollars or other currencies on online exchanges. The network seemed like a potentially useful supplement to existing monetary systems: it let people avoid the fees banks charge and take part in noncash transactions anonymously while still guaranteeing that transactions would be secure. Yet over the past year and a half Bitcoin has become, for some, much more. Instead of a supplement to the dollar economy, it's been trumpeted as a competitor, and promoters have conjured visions of markets where bitcoins are a dominant medium of exchange. The hyperbole is out of proportion with the more mundane reality. Tens of thousands of bitcoins are traded each day (some for goods and services, others in exchange for other currencies), and several hundred businesses, mostly in the digital world, now take bitcoins as payment. That's good for a new monetary system, but it's not disruptive growth. Still, the excitement is perhaps predictable. Setting aside Bitcoin's cool factor—it might just as well have leapt off the pages of Neal Stephenson's cult science-fiction novel Snow Crash—a peer-to-peer electronic currency uncontrolled by central bankers or politicians is a perfect object for the anxieties and enthusiasms of those frightened by the threats of inflation and currency debasement, concerned about state power and the surveillance state, and fascinated with the possibilities created by distributed, decentralized systems...

Continue reading

James Surowiecki @'technology review'

Bitcoin: FBI Admits To Engaging In Infiltration, Disruption and Dismantling of Competing Currencies

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/philographics.gif

Major Movements in Philosophy as Minimalist Geometric Graphics

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

Here's a list of all of Open Leaks' disclosures so far - also has the names of those killed from WikiLeaks' releases: is.gd/kWFSg3

Friday, 2 September 2011

French & Saunders Read a Madonna Interview

jaraparilla Gary Lord

Australian govt finally finds an offence to charge Julian #Assange: publishing name of an ASIO officer: canberratimes.com.au/news/national/… #WIKILEAKS