The Verve: Live In London 1992 (TREON Remaster)
23 minutes ago
Sunday, 4 September 2011
Systematically Biased Reporting
In June of 2010, a year and a half after the Israeli military launched what a United Nations investigation described as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” the New York Times sent a photographer into Gaza to capture a slice of daily life. Ethan Bronner, the Times Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote the narrative for the photo essay entitled “Gaza, Through Fresh Eyes,” in which he gushes about “jazzy cellphone stores and pricey restaurants … endless beaches with children whooping it up … the staggering quality of the very ordinary.” Seemingly lifted from an apolitical travel magazine, Bronner’s article merely alludes to families who have been “traumatized,” and omits any mention of the UN allegations of recently committed Israeli war crimes and human rights violations. Other than an oblique reference to “destroyed buildings” and “rubble,” Bronner’s travelogue also elides the vast civilian infrastructure Israel destroyed during the onslaught, including chicken farms, a flour mill, a sewage treatment plant, a UN school, vast tracts of civilian housing, government buildings, a prison, police stations, TV stations, newspapers ... and between 600 and 700 factories, workshops and businesses. The impression left by Bronner? Gaza is an OK place; nothing remarkable to see there, least of all evidence of Israeli war crimes; move along, move along.
And yet, what is not disclosed is that Ethan Bronner is married to an Israeli citizen and has a son who is enlisted in the Israeli army. When news of these familial connections broke, Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote an op-ed recommending that Bronner be reassigned to avoid any potential for bias. Executive editor Bill Keller refused, waiving the Times’s normally strict conflict of interest standards.
Times reporter Isabel Kershner is similarly compromised by elisions and distortions. When Kershner reported on Palestinian refugees in Syria who, in June 2011, nonviolently marched into the Golan Heights to protest, she failed to mention that the Golan Heights is Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel. No government in the world recognizes the Golan Heights as legitimately part of the state of Israel. Kershner also omits the fact that the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homes is enshrined in UN resolutions and that Israel has consistently violated international law in preventing the refugees from returning to their homes. Let us also not forget that at this nonviolent protest the Israeli army killed 22 Palestinian and Syrian protesters. In addressing the apparently overwhelming violence against unarmed protesters, Kershner reports: “Israeli officials say they tried every nonlethal method of crowd control at their disposal” before they opened fire “at the feet of the protesters,” implying that the killings were unintentional, and unavoidable, and defied the laws of physics. Kershner quotes none of the protesters as to what they saw. If she had, she may have heard what activist and eyewitness Salman Fakhreddin told independent journalist Jillian Kestler-D’Amours: “Israel decided to kill people in order to frighten them because Israel is afraid of the delegitimization of the state of Israel and Israeli policy in the international community.” By now it may not be a surprise to learn that Kershner is an Israeli citizen who is married to an Israeli citizen and who spent “a couple decades in Israeli journalism and Jewish education” before joining the American paper in 2007.
In large part because of Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner’s ahistorical, context-free, reporting-in-a-vacuum, the New York Times is to blame for what Adbusters has previously called “the United States of Amnesia.” American citizens are left unaware of Israel’s current and historical violations of international law and are thus unable to question their government’s multibillion dollar military giveaways to Israel, a state that just happens to be these two reporters’ adopted home.
Matthew A. Taylor @'Adbusters'
Ry Cooder’s Elegant Indignation
Cooder’s guitar playing is expressive, elegant, and rhythmically intricate. It frequently has a pressured attack that he has described as having the feel of “some kind of steam device gone out of control.” His sense of phrasing was partly imprinted in his childhood by a record of brass music made by a group of African-American men who found instruments in a field left by Civil War soldiers during a retreat, and played them according to their own inclinations. If you wonder what his sensibility sounds like when applied to rock ‘n’ roll—one version of it anyway—the most widely known example I can think of comes from the period when Cooder had been hired to augment the Rolling Stones during the recording of “Let It Bleed.” He was playing by himself in the studio, goofing around with some changes, when Mick Jagger danced over and said, How do you do that? You tune the E string down to D, place your fingers there, and pull them off quickly, that’s very good. Keith, perhaps you should see this. And before long, the Rolling Stones were collecting royalties for “Honky Tonk Women,” which sounds precisely like a Ry Cooder song and absolutely nothing like any other song ever produced by the Rolling Stones in more than forty years. According to Richards in his recent autobiography, Cooder showed him the open G tuning which became his mainstay and accounts for the full-bodied chordal declarations that characterize songs such as “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Start Me Up,” and “Brown Sugar.” The most succinct way I can think of to describe the latticed style that Keith Richards says he has sought to achieve with Ron Wood is to say that for thirty-five years the Stones have been trying to do with four hands what Cooder can do with two...
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Alec Wilkinson @'The New Yorker'
Four Tet - FabricLive #59 Promo Mix
Four Tet's 30 minute promo mix of his FabricLive #59 'Love letter to London', out on Fabric Records September 19th 2011 (courtesy of Tailored Communication).
FabricLive #59 promo mix tracklist:
1. Four Tet - Locked
2. Floating Points - Untitled
3. Crazy Bald Heads - First Born
4. Sevi G - Beautiful Music (El-B remix)
5. Bad Bwoy Beats - Don't Go There
6. NnG - I Keep
7. Roger O'Donnell - The Truth in You (Four Tet remix)
8. Juk Juk - Winter Turn Spring
9. Michel Redolfi - Immersiens Partial
10. Daphni - Ye Ye
zenjournalist Andrew MacG Marshall
Everybody comes out of the #wikileaks unredacted document dump looking bad: Guardian, Assange, and Domscheit-Berg. Sad end to a great scoop.
♪♫ The Raven - Calamity Jane
Albert Von Schweikert (lead guitar) and Karl Lamp (collaborator) wrote this song in 1967. The Raven was based in St. Pete, Florida and had a #1 hit with Calamity Jane in a few markets across the US. They backed Sonny and Cher and Neil Diamond, and also opened the shows for the Yardbirds (later to become Led Zeplin), the Who, and quite a few others from the 60's. To see more photos and information about the Raven, visit the Facebook pages of Albert Von Schweikert, Marc Maconi, and Paul Purcell.
SLAB - Moon Returning (Monitor Mix)
Sitting in some cafe, opiated, fucked, telling the tale of some hellish war torn miasma...while the memories swirl in my brain and Paul's guitar swirls backwards in some drug fuelled psychedelic haze
There's something wrong in my head....
- Dray
'Exile' contributor Mr. Fugn Moses AKA Dray has started a new blog to do with all thing SLAB!
Check it out
HERE
Alice Cooper - ABC Live In Concert (1972)
The Alice Cooper Group - Hempstead New York ABC In Concert 1972
Setlist
01 Eighteen
02 Gutter Cat/Street Fight
03 Killer
05 School's Out
In Concert was a US TV show. The first show featured Curtis Mayfield, Seals & Croft, Bo Diddley, Jethro Tull and Alice Cooper. Four tracks were broadcast from a show at Hofsta University in Long Island, NY and it included the Hanging Scene in 'Killer' and The 'Gutter Cats' fight.
When it originally aired it created quite a stir due to the over the top theatrics of Alice Cooper:
News Report:
ABC kicked off its first In Concert, pre-empting the Dick Cavett Show, on November 24, 1972, featuring performances taped a few weeks earlier at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York. On the bill was the Senior General of Rock, Bo Diddley, acoustic duo Seals and Croft, R&B man Curtis Mayfield and for the opening act, shock rocker Alice Cooper.
Rock fans in Cincinnati, however, didn't get to see beyond the first few minutes of Alice's violent theatrics. Lawrence H. Rogers II was so mortified by what he saw that he ordered the ABC affiliate he owned, WKRC-TV Channel 12, to yank the show off the air immediately. Channel 12's decision to protect its viewers was responded to within minutes with a phoned-in bomb threat and several car loads of youths picketing the station. Some 4,000 letters of protest, many profane, poured in over the next few days, the biggest mail load that station officials could remember.
Station manager Ro Grignon told TV Guide that he wasn't opposed to rock concerts. "In fact, we think they're going to be a smashing success. We simply found Alice Cooper a little tense."
Meanwhile, the ABC affiliate in Kingsport, Tennessee complained to the network about the performance but ran it nonetheless. WPVI-TV Channel 6 in Philadelphia ran the show on tape delay at 1:30 a.m. Channel 12 in Cincinnati later televised an edited version of the show, sans Alice, to give viewers a chance to enjoy the other, less offensive acts that were on the show. The next In Concert show was sent to affiliate managers via closed-circuit for approval before broadcast
The Footage starts with 'Eighteen' and shots of Alice struggling to get to the stage through the audience, the police pulling him through the crowd, seemingly by his hair at times. The song proper starts with Alice lying on the stage in front of Dennis before sitting with his legs hanging off the front of the stage to sing the song. Eventually he stands up and plays to the camera a bit, swigging from a beer bottle before conducting the final fanfare by pointing to each band member as they play their final three note motif. An advert break followed before Dennis is seen picking out the opening bass notes to 'Gutter Cat Vs The Jets'. Alice throws around a trash can before starting the lyrics lying across it for the second verse.and wielding a nasty looking switchblade which he teases Dennis` hair with.
Then it`s into the taped backing of 'Streetfight' as Neal leaps over the front of his drums and attacks Alice in a very realistic fight scene, with them both wielding switchblades. Neal is victorious and plays to the audience before Alice creeps up and takes him out from behind. Dennis starts the intro to 'Killer'.
If what had already been seen wasn`t enough, this is where the band really blow you away. Alice moves around the stage, seemingly dazed after his fight before snapping out of it and snarling the words at the camera. He kneels at the front of the stage, playing off the audience. The gallows sequence begins with Alice begging the audience "I didn't want to get involved in this". He seems to go limp, as if resigned to his fate before the military drum rolls announcie the appearance of the gallows. Alice is dragged kicking and screaming up the steps and his head is placed in the noose by Glen as Dennis, in vicars outfit now, reads from a prayer book. A crash of thunder and Alice drops. Stunning.
The footage then cuts quickly into 'School's Out' with Alice in top hat and tails and bubbles floating across the stage. He`s right up against the front rows of the audience, interacting and egging them on. The balloons appear as Alice teases the front rows with posters which he throws into the audience while showing the evilest grin you could ever imagine as they tear each other apart trying to secure a poster. He sings the chorus to camera before encouraging everybody to sing along.
And then it`s over. A tour-de-force that shows just how good the original band were at that stage. It`s criminal that the footage has never been officially release. Hopefully one day someone will see the light and release it.
Saturday, 3 September 2011
Arundhati Roy: Facing Down Tanks
Your writings have grappled with ruthless state violence which is often at the behest of corporate interests. Much of the corporate-owned media in India shies away from covering the civil war-like conditions in many parts of the country. The establishment tends to brand anyone who attempts to present the other side’s points of view as having seditious intent. Where is the democratic space?
You’ve partially answered your own question – newspapers and television channels do not make their money from subscriptions or viewership; in fact, corporate advertisements actually subsidize TV viewership and newspaper and magazine readership, so in effect, the mass media is run with corporate money. Some media houses are directly owned by corporations, some indirectly by majority share-holdings. Some media houses in, say, Central India, have a direct interest in mining and infrastructure projects, so they have a vested interest in the push to displace people in the huge, ongoing land-grab in which land and resources are forcibly taken from the poor and given to the rich – a process which goes by the name of ‘development’. It would be foolish to expect objective reporting: not because the journalists are bad people, but because of the economic structure of the organizations they work for. In fact, what is surprising is that despite all of this, occasionally there is some very good reporting. But overall we either have silence, or a completely distorted picture, in which those resisting their impoverishment are being labelled ‘terrorists’ – and these are not just the Maoist rebels who have taken to arms, but others who are involved in unarmed, but militant, struggles against the government. A climate has been created which criminalizes dissent of all kinds.
There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of the poorest people in jails across the country under charges of sedition and waging war against the state. Many others are just charged under the common criminal penal code. There are the other ‘seditionists’ too, of course – those who have been fighting for self-determination after being inducted into the Union of India without their consent, when the British left in 1947. I refer to Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland… in these places, tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured in the nightmarish interrogation centres and army camps all around the country. And now, the Indian army is migrating to the heart of the country – to fight the adivasi people whose lands the corporations covet. They say Pakistan is a military dictatorship, but I don’t think the Pakistani army has been actively deployed against its ‘own’ people the way the Indian army has been: Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Hyderabad, Goa, Telengana, Punjab and now, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa…
You’ve partially answered your own question – newspapers and television channels do not make their money from subscriptions or viewership; in fact, corporate advertisements actually subsidize TV viewership and newspaper and magazine readership, so in effect, the mass media is run with corporate money. Some media houses are directly owned by corporations, some indirectly by majority share-holdings. Some media houses in, say, Central India, have a direct interest in mining and infrastructure projects, so they have a vested interest in the push to displace people in the huge, ongoing land-grab in which land and resources are forcibly taken from the poor and given to the rich – a process which goes by the name of ‘development’. It would be foolish to expect objective reporting: not because the journalists are bad people, but because of the economic structure of the organizations they work for. In fact, what is surprising is that despite all of this, occasionally there is some very good reporting. But overall we either have silence, or a completely distorted picture, in which those resisting their impoverishment are being labelled ‘terrorists’ – and these are not just the Maoist rebels who have taken to arms, but others who are involved in unarmed, but militant, struggles against the government. A climate has been created which criminalizes dissent of all kinds.
There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of the poorest people in jails across the country under charges of sedition and waging war against the state. Many others are just charged under the common criminal penal code. There are the other ‘seditionists’ too, of course – those who have been fighting for self-determination after being inducted into the Union of India without their consent, when the British left in 1947. I refer to Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland… in these places, tens of thousands have been killed, hundreds of thousands tortured in the nightmarish interrogation centres and army camps all around the country. And now, the Indian army is migrating to the heart of the country – to fight the adivasi people whose lands the corporations covet. They say Pakistan is a military dictatorship, but I don’t think the Pakistani army has been actively deployed against its ‘own’ people the way the Indian army has been: Kashmir, Manipur, Nagaland, Hyderabad, Goa, Telengana, Punjab and now, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa…
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