Wednesday, 14 September 2011

The 40-year career of the English singer-songwriter Nick Lowe constitutes a paradox: the songs he has written are better known than he is. He cheerfully acknowledges that many people think that Elvis Costello is the author of the Lowe song “(What’s So Funny ’Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding” and that the Johnny Cash version of “The Beast in Me” has come to overshadow his own, which was used on the soundtrack of the HBO series “The Sopranos.
But at a stage in life when many of his peers are content to live off past glories, Mr. Lowe, now 62, is enjoying a remarkable second wind. Originally a purveyor of witty subversions of Top 40 confections — his first United States solo album, released in 1978, was called “Pure Pop for Now People” — he has reinvented himself in recent years as a writer and performer of spare, reflective songs rooted in the American country music and rhythm ’n’ blues he imbibed as a child.
At the same time Mr. Lowe has remade his image to align it with the more mature content of his work, the latest example of which is “The Old Magic,” a CD released on Tuesday. Once the prototypical long-haired, insouciant rocker, he now affects an avuncular look, with a shock of snow white hair, à la the older Cary Grant, and a pair of black Buddy Holly specs. That way “I won’t have to continually be pretending, like a lot of my contemporaries sadly have to, that they’re still young and copping this act they used to do and are condemned to do,” Mr. Lowe said during an interview in New York last month. “It’s a sort of unseemly sight, and one which I wish to avoid.”
It’s a remarkable turnabout for Mr. Lowe, who was associated with three of the most important British pop movements of the 1970s: pub rock, punk and new wave. An early band of his, Brinsley Schwarz, was the anchor of pub rock, and as a producer, he shaped and supervised Mr. Costello’s influential first five albums, as well as recordings by Graham Parker, the Pretenders, the Damned and Dr. Feelgood.
“When the punk scene came along, Nick was in the right place at the right time,” said Will Birch, an English musician, songwriter and producer who is also the author of two books about 1970s British rock. “He was Mr. Fixit, the guy who could produce a record,” but also “a sort of headmaster who made sure everything was kept very to the point, short and snappy.” A subsequent rockabilly-inspired group, Rockpile, generated gems like “I Knew the Bride (When She Used to Rock ’n’ Roll)” and “When I Write the Book.” But Mr. Lowe also maintained a skeptical distance from what was going on around him. “I’ve never really liked being in somebody’s gang,” he said. “As soon as I feel like I’m being encouraged to join someone else’s gang, I react rather badly to that.”
What set Mr. Lowe on the path to his current sound was a run of bad luck in the early 1990s. His record label had dropped him; he was coming off what he described as “the disastrous end to a love affair”; and even a return to producing seem closed to him, since “the general public had become conditioned to hearing a record sound a certain way, with a certain sheen,” rather than with the “scruffy, homemade sound” he prefers.
But then he had an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. Curtis Stigers’s version of “Peace, Love and Understanding” was included on the soundtrack album of the movie “The Bodyguard” (1992), which went on to sell an estimated 44 million copies worldwide and earn Mr. Lowe a windfall in songwriter’s royalties.
“I didn’t buy racehorses or yachts or anything like that,” he recalled, “but it was a big, big payday, and it enabled me to make a break with the past. I didn’t have the pressure to play the game. I could turn stuff down and avoid the slippery slope of me being forever in a ‘Remember those fabulous punk rock days? Well here they are again!’ sort of thing.”
Instead Mr. Lowe followed the advice of two friends whose records he had produced, Mr. Costello and John Hiatt. Touring with Mr. Costello, he began performing solo, and when he got home to London, where he still lives with his wife and 6-year-old son, he emulated Mr. Hiatt’s habit of “going to work every day” to write songs in a sort of office at a performance space in a neighborhood pub.
What emerged from that process was a CD called “The Impossible Bird,” released in 1994, and a new stripped-down and rootsy sound. “The Beast in Me,” written specifically for Johnny Cash, Mr. Lowe’s former father-in-law, emerged from those sessions, and on subsequent recordings like “Dig My Mood,” “The Convincer” and “At My Age,” that approach has been refined.
” A lot of people overproduce records, and in the early days he and I both did the kitchen sink. But now he’s focused on what he really wants to be, and there is no dead wood at all,” the singer-songwriter Daryl Hall said.
In recent years Mr. Lowe’s virtues as a songwriter and performer have been garnering more recognition, especially among younger musicians. Two tribute albums featuring other artists interpreting his songs, “Lowe Profile” and “Labour of Love,” have been issued, and this year he was invited to do performances-cum-songwriting-workshops at both the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville and the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles.
“Nick Lowe is a major, major influence for me,” said the indie rock and alt-country singer Neko Case, who has recorded a pair of his songs. “He’s the most consistent artist I can think of, and there is something about the lyricism and gracefulness of his songs that I just love. Their cadences are unusual and addictive, and the way he sings them, his phrasing, it’s just beautiful.”
This fall Mr. Lowe will tour with Wilco, which just recorded his tongue-in-cheek late-’70s composition “I Love My Label.” But Mr. Lowe will undoubtedly be doing things in his own understated way, even if it costs him: Huey Lewis, a friend for 30 years who credits Mr. Lowe for jump-starting his career, recalls inviting him to join him onstage for “I Knew the Bride” a few years ago, only to be told “Huey, I don’t rock anymore.”
“Obviously success is crowned with some sort of financial reward, that’s what puts the stamp on it,” Mr. Lowe said of his current trajectory. “That sort of stuff comes along, but that’s not really what I’m after. I’m not a greedy man. I’ve lived well, but I’m not really interested in that. I’m more interested in seeing what happens next, what the end of the movie is.”
Larry Richter @'NY Times'

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Twelve dead as Taliban target US embassy

Medeski, Martin & Wood - Jazz à la Villette 9/11/11

Length: 01:26:56

Tuesday, 13 September 2011

Google faces pressure to block filesharing sites

James Murdoch recalled by MPs

James Murdoch is to be recalled to give evidence to MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport select committee following a vote on Tuesday.
Murdoch, who oversees News International as deputy chief operating officer of News Corporation, will face fresh questions about whether he knew that phone-hacking at the News of the World went wider than one "rogue reporter".
The date of his appearance has not yet been finalised, but it is understood that he could appear in November.
Murdoch insists he was not told about the existence of an email sent by a News of the World reporter marked "for Neville", which is understood to have been a reference to Neville Thurlbeck, who was the paper's chief reporter. That suggested phone hacking was not the work of a single reporter, as the company claimed until recently.
Colin Myler, the former editor of the paper, and Tom Crone, its head of legal, told MPs last week that they told Murdoch about the email and said that is why he approved an out-of-court settlement of £700,000 including costs to Gordon Taylor, the former chief executive of the PFA.
Murdoch told MPs in July that he did not know about the email and was not shown it or informed of its existence. In a statment last week he reiterated that was the case.
A News Corp spokeswoman said: "We await details of the commitee's request, however James Murdoch is happy to appear in front of the committee again to answer any further questions members might have."
James Robinson @'The Guardian'

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Rockets Fired at US Embassy in Afghan Capital

OOPS

The advertisement sought a “regional anaesthetist fellow” to fill a one-year post at the Royal Liverpool and Broadgreen University NHS Trust, Merseyside.

But under the job description section of the advert, posted on the local NHS job website, a hospital employee had inserted the phrase “the usual rubbish about equal opportunities etc…”.

The gaffe, which was in reference to the NHS' equal opportunities policy, was “swiftly” deleted after hospital chiefs were made aware of the damaging comment. An investigation was under way on Monday.

It is understood it was first spotted by a doctor, who has not been named, after they clicked on the advert with a view to applying for the position.

It was later replaced with the new web page that contained phrase “we are committed to promoting equality and diversity”.

The hospital confirmed on Monday night that an internal inquiry had been launched after the advert was published last Thursday, the date applications closed.
Officials would not say if anyone had yet be identified but added the advert had been uploaded internally.
The advert did not disclose a salary, but the hospital it would have be “negotiable” to candidate awarded the “senior post”.
According to the advert, applicants would be required to work with 37 consultants, 21 registrars and almost a dozen “senior house officers”.
The successful candidate to the post, which had “education approval” from the Royal College of Anaesthetists, would also be expected to help establish a teaching programme and workshops for junior doctors.
Cllr Paula Keaveney, from Liverpool Council, said: “They need to look at the process because if something like this gets through without being checked properly, what else could get through?”
A hospital spokeswoman admitted the advert was unacceptable and “in no way reflects” the wider equal opportunities views of the trust.
“The Trust is conscious of its duty to promote equality and is a Stonewall Diversity Champion employer,” she said in reference to Britain's “good practice employers' forum”.
"The Trust will be conducting an investigation into this incident to ensure that this cannot happen again.” She said the trust was “fully committed” to equal opportunities.
She declined to say if anyone had been identified as the investigation was “still ongoing”. She said that a "small number of applicants" had applied for the position.
Andrew Hough @'The Telegraph'

David Cronenberg's 5 Most Intriguing Films

Policing London: Law and not Orde

It is hard to know if Bernard Hogan-Howe, who was appointed yesterday as the new Metropolitan police commissioner, deserves more congratulations or commiserations. The true answer must be a bit of both. Mr Hogan-Howe is a proven police leader who has risen to the most important job in British policing. But he has done it at a time when the force, in London as elsewhere, faces funding and staffing cuts, is struggling to recover from the phone hacking furore and the riots, and has become a plaything in a constitutional spat between a Conservative home secretary and London mayor, both of whom think the new man must also be their man. As the third Met commissioner to hold the office in less than three years, Mr Hogan-Howe will be uncomfortably aware that what goes up can come down too.
It certainly does not help that, between them, Theresa May and Boris Johnson contrived to overlook the claims of the best qualified candidate for the commissioner's job. Sir Hugh Orde, former Northern Ireland police chief and head of the chiefs' association Acpo, had the strongest CV in the field, as well as the strongest policing profile. He also got the backing of two official panels, one comprising civil servants and police experts and the other members of the Metropolitan police authority, both of which decided he was the best candidate for the job. But the home secretary and the mayor each decided they knew better.
The reason for this is not hard to find, since Sir Hugh had been outspokenly clear that he would have been an independent chief, abiding by the traditional principle that the police and not the politicians take the operational decisions. If nothing else, it is a historic irony that the Conservatives – who spent decades denouncing Labour for seeking to politicise the police – have now taken a succession of Met management decisions whose political character far exceeds anything that Labour home secretaries or mayors have ever attempted. This places Mr Hogan-Howe in an unenviable position. Through no fault of his own, he will be labelled the Tories' placeman. No Met commissioner in modern times has come to the job with less authority or legitimacy.
All this makes the new commissioner's job even more difficult than it would have been anyway — and with the Olympics less than 11 months away. The Conservatives have blundered into the delicate and antiquated architecture of British police governance in a deplorably foolish way. The shambles they have created in London policing is a grim precedent for the politicised system they want to introduce elsewhere. Mr Hogan-Howe has our best wishes, but he has been handed a poisoned chalice.
@'The Guardian'

The Journalist and the Spies

On May 30th, as the sun beat down on the plains of eastern Pakistan, a laborer named Muhammad Shafiq walked along the top of a dam on the Upper Jhelum Canal to begin his morning routine of clearing grass and trash that had drifted into the intake grates overnight. The water flow seemed normal, but when he started removing the debris with a crane the machinery seized up. He looked down and saw, trapped in the grates, a human form. Shafiq called some colleagues, and together they pulled out the body. Occasionally, farmers and water buffalo drown in the canal, float downstream, and get stuck in the grates, but never a man in a suit. “Even his tie and shoes were still on,” Shafiq told me. He called the police, and by the next day they had determined the man’s identity: Syed Saleem Shahzad, a journalist known for his exposés of the Pakistani military. Shahzad had not shown up the previous afternoon for a television interview that was to be taped in Islamabad, a hundred miles to the northwest. His disappearance was being reported on the morning news, his image flashed on television screens across the country. Meanwhile, the zamindar—feudal lord—of a village twenty miles upstream from the dam called the police about a white Toyota Corolla that had been abandoned by the canal, in the shade of a banyan tree. The police discovered that the car belonged to Shahzad. Its doors were locked, and there was no trace of blood.
The previous afternoon, Shahzad had left his apartment, in the placid F-8/4 neighborhood of Islamabad, and driven toward Dunya studios, about five miles away. It was five-thirty; the television interview was scheduled for six. According to a local journalist who talked to a source in one of Pakistan’s cell-phone companies, Shahzad’s phone went dead twelve minutes later. His route passed through some of the country’s most secure neighborhoods, and no one had reported seeing anything suspicious. Some Pakistanis speculated that Shahzad might even have known the people who took him away.

It was a particularly anxious time in Pakistan. Four weeks earlier, American commandos had flown, undetected, into Abbottabad, a military town northwest of Islamabad, and killed Osama bin Laden. The Pakistani Army, which for more than sixty years has portrayed itself as the country’s guardian and guide, was deeply embarrassed: either it had helped to hide bin Laden or it had failed to realize that he was there. Certainly it hadn’t known that the Americans were coming.

Less than three weeks after the Abbottabad raid, the Army was humiliated a second time. A group of militants, armed with rocket-propelled grenades and suicide vests, breached one of the country’s most secure bases, the Pakistan Naval Air Station-Mehran, outside Karachi, and blew up two P-3C Orion surveillance planes that had been bought from the United States. At least ten Pakistanis affiliated with the base died. The components of several nuclear warheads were believed to be housed nearby, and the implication was clear: Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal was not safe. In barracks across the country, military officers questioned the competence of Pakistan’s two most powerful men, General Ashfaq Parvez Kiyani, the chief of the Army staff, and General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, the chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, or I.S.I. Some officers even demanded that the Generals resign. Ordinary Pakistanis, meanwhile, publicly disparaged the one institution that, until then, had seemed to function...