1986 Singles # 23 Julian Cope
1 hour ago
Sunday, 11 September 2011
Sifting through the debris for real legacy of attacks
Less than a week before Osama bin Laden was killed, I visited Ground Zero. Most prosaically, it is a building site. Even with the contours of the inevitably spectacular Freedom Tower becoming more visible, it is the rougher elements that dominate: the cranes; the unpolished, uncovered concrete; the barbed wire on the fences that rim the former site of the twin towers. There's dust in the air and you can't help breathing it in. At first blush, it's all profoundly ordinary.
But stay a while and you are struck by the silence. The sounds of construction may punctuate it, but they do not obliterate it. There's an eeriness here that is anything but mundane. In a town of boundless, infectious, magnificent energy, this site is an island; a place of stillness in a city set to vibrate.
Silence. Stillness. Reverence. It's a new sort of cathedral, haunted by the ghost of what happened a decade ago today. This is the nature of terrorism. It is designed to invade the psyche and haunt it. To change the way you think, and then act. Ultimately it has little to do with those it kills - even if there are 3000 of them. It is about those who remain.
In that sense, the fact that every mainstream media outlet is marking this terrible anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks is a victory for the perpetrators. Terrorism is least successful when it is ignored; when it is denied what Margaret Thatcher called the ''oxygen of publicity''.
But it is impossible to ignore this. It was more than merely symbolic or spectacular. It was cinematic. When the first plane struck the north tower, the cameras of the world rushed to film the carnage. Al-Qaeda gave them 17 minutes to set up. With lenses now trained on the World Trade Centre, images of the second plane smashing into the south tower were beamed live across the globe. You've seen them a thousand times since. Their presence is permanent. But beneath its cataclysmic appearances, the component parts of this attack were surprisingly modest. This was not the product of expensive, high-tech weaponry. It was the work of 19 men with box cutters. In fact, this was their greatest asset. It is difficult to imagine a nation being able to destroy the World Trade Centre. Its weapons are too detectable, its visibility too obvious and the political consequences too grave. The sheer size of this attack conjured up the image of a colossus that could strike anywhere at will, but it was misleading; a vast overstatement.
There was always a danger of misreading these attacks, and we did. From the beginning, we failed to understand what we were confronting. The story of this decade is how this misreading led us to dark places with some lamentable consequences. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, and societies became divided. No doubt much of this pleased bin Laden, whose guilt is plain. But it is worth considering how we got sucked into contributing to the process...
But stay a while and you are struck by the silence. The sounds of construction may punctuate it, but they do not obliterate it. There's an eeriness here that is anything but mundane. In a town of boundless, infectious, magnificent energy, this site is an island; a place of stillness in a city set to vibrate.
Silence. Stillness. Reverence. It's a new sort of cathedral, haunted by the ghost of what happened a decade ago today. This is the nature of terrorism. It is designed to invade the psyche and haunt it. To change the way you think, and then act. Ultimately it has little to do with those it kills - even if there are 3000 of them. It is about those who remain.
In that sense, the fact that every mainstream media outlet is marking this terrible anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks is a victory for the perpetrators. Terrorism is least successful when it is ignored; when it is denied what Margaret Thatcher called the ''oxygen of publicity''.
But it is impossible to ignore this. It was more than merely symbolic or spectacular. It was cinematic. When the first plane struck the north tower, the cameras of the world rushed to film the carnage. Al-Qaeda gave them 17 minutes to set up. With lenses now trained on the World Trade Centre, images of the second plane smashing into the south tower were beamed live across the globe. You've seen them a thousand times since. Their presence is permanent. But beneath its cataclysmic appearances, the component parts of this attack were surprisingly modest. This was not the product of expensive, high-tech weaponry. It was the work of 19 men with box cutters. In fact, this was their greatest asset. It is difficult to imagine a nation being able to destroy the World Trade Centre. Its weapons are too detectable, its visibility too obvious and the political consequences too grave. The sheer size of this attack conjured up the image of a colossus that could strike anywhere at will, but it was misleading; a vast overstatement.
There was always a danger of misreading these attacks, and we did. From the beginning, we failed to understand what we were confronting. The story of this decade is how this misreading led us to dark places with some lamentable consequences. In the process, hundreds of thousands died, and societies became divided. No doubt much of this pleased bin Laden, whose guilt is plain. But it is worth considering how we got sucked into contributing to the process...
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Subatomic Sound System meets Ari Up & Lee Scratch Perry - Hello, Hell is Very Low 7"
The “Hello, Hell Is Very Low” vinyl 45 features a dub and vocal take of a rootical dubstep reflip of the rare and classic “Underground Roots” riddim, known to have been used by Studio One’s Sir Coxsone Dodd’s sound system to lay waste in Jamaican sound clashes (typically played back to back with the only known vocal version, a closely guarded special rumored to have been done for Coxsone by Junior Byles). On this 45, Subatomic Sound System dubs the riddim up proper with maximum respect to the tradition of the masters, Lee Perry & King Tubby, while also turning out the low end, delivering drums and bass big and bad enough knock out even a modern day dubstep club crowd. It also must be mentioned that, this is the first time EVER that Lee “Scratch” Perry and Ari Up of the Slits appear on the same recording, even though they both worked extensively on On-Sound projects with Adrian Sherwood during the 80s. The combination proves strong as they both succeed in striking a clever lyrical balance, delivering vocals that juxtapose conscious culture and spirituality with humor and wordplay.
On the A-Side, “Hello, Hello, Hell is Very Low” features tough lyrics from Lee “Scratch” Perry alongside Ari Up of the Slits and original melodica from Subatomic Sound’s Emch that summons the ghost of Augustus Pablo for some classic melodies. The dubbed out track is centered around Perry riffing on the line “Hello, Hell is very low and Heaven is very, very high!” linguistically playing off the greetings “Hello” vs. “Hi” and with the metaphysical concept of “Hell” being “lo(w)” and “Heaven” being “(hi)igh” in what is on one hand slapstick humor and on the other hand profound moral philosophizing. Ari Up meanwhile shows her respect for dub history and the people of her second home, Jamaica, with lyrics “Underground roots, what we bring to you, rub-a-dub roots, message to the youth…time to know the truth!” exorting the “underground youth” to rise up “overground” while at the same time sending a message to the dubstep generation about the origins of dub and respecting its founders.
On the B-Side, Ari-Up of the Slits delivers “Bed Athletes” a singjay vocal tune in a classic dancehall style. Lyrically she twists the original children’s song melody into a positive minded and humorous sex education course for the “underground youth”, with a verse for the men and another for the women, emphasizing the importance of physical fitness and mental training for mutual enjoyment of each others company in bed, even suggesting that men “learn Ninjitsu” so the art of “Japanese fighting” can be “used ‘pon daggering”.
:)
ActivismPROTIPS Activism PROTIPS
All the best revolutionaries have facial hair. Regardless of gender, to be a successful activist do everything you can to grow a moustache.
Massive Attack - Live PA, Mezzanine Tour, Royal Albert Hall, London, UK: Lamacq Live - BBC Radio 1 1998-06-07
Tracklist:
1.01 [0:00:00] "Angel" (6:19)
1.02 [0:06:19] "Risingson" (5:03)
1.03 [0:11:22] "Man Next Door" (5:54)
1.04 [0:17:16] "Day Dreaming" (5:21)
1.05 [0:22:50] "Tear Drop" (5:34)
1.06 [0:28:24] "Karmacoma" (5:16)
1.07 [0:33:40] "Hymn Of The Big Wheel" (6:21)
1.08 [0:40:01] "Eurochild" (4:54)
1.09 [0:44:55] "Spying Glass" (6:39)
1.10 [0:51:34] "Mezzanine" (5:44)
2.01 [0:56:49] "One Love" (5:15)
2.02 [1:02:04] "Safe From Harm" (7:09)
2.03 [1:09:13] "Heat Miser" (5:28)
2.04 [1:14:41] "Inertia Creeps" (5:26)
2.05 [1:20:07] "Unfinished Sympathy" (5:52)
2.06 [1:25:59] "Group Four" (13:21)
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How Special Ops Copied al-Qaida to Kill It
One of the greatest ironies of the 9/11 Era: while politicians, generals and journalists lined up to denounce al-Qaida as a brutal band of fanatics, one commander thought its organizational structure was kind of brilliant. He set to work rebuilding an obscure military entity into a lethal, agile, secretive and highly networked command — essentially, the United States’ very own al-Qaida. It became the most potent weapon the U.S. has against another terrorist attack.
That was the work of Stanley McChrystal. He is best known as the general who lost his command in Afghanistan after his staff shit-talked the Obama administration to Rolling Stone.
Inescapable as that public profile may be, it doesn’t begin to capture the impact he made on the military. McChrystal’s fingerprints are all over the Joint Special Operations Command, the elite force that eventually killed Osama bin Laden. As the war on terrorism evolves into a series of global shadow wars, JSOC and its partners — the network McChrystal painstakingly constructed — are the ones who wage it.
These days, McChrystal travels around the country to talk about his leadership style. His insights reveal a lot about how the JSOC became the Obama team’s go-to counterterrorism group. “In bitter, bloody fights in both Afghanistan and Iraq,” McChrystal has written, “it became clear to me and to many others that to defeat a networked enemy we had to become a network ourselves.”
McChrystal’s career also reveals a second irony: At the moment of his greatest ascension, to overall command in Afghanistan, McChrystal couldn’t take his own advice.
McChrystal declined to speak for this article. He’s working on a book, due out in 2012, that will probably shed some light on his tenure at JSOC. This piece is drawn from his speeches, interviews I’ve conducted over the years with special operations and intelligence veterans — usually off the record — as well as two insightful new books: Counterstrike by Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt, and Top Secret America by Dana Priest and William Arkin...
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Spencer Ackerman @'Wired'
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