SLAB - She Dreamed of Blossom Falling

 

burying sadness in snow

James Blake - Morning Becomes Eclectic (KCRW) 19. September 2011

Revealed

Tribute in Light

Tribute in Light – absolutely spellbinding timelapse captured over a 12-hour period on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 by photographer James Duncan Davidson (whom you might recognize as the official TED photographer)
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The land still lies: Handsworth Songs and the English riots

"I’m sure that a group of people who brought the British state to its knees can organise themselves.” So argued John Akomfrah, the director of the Black Audio Film Collective’s Handsworth Songs at a screening of the film at Tate Modern last month. Made for the Channel 4 series ‘Britain: The Lie of the Land’, the film was released in 1986, a year after riots in Handsworth, Birmingham and Tottenham. Not surprisingly, given that the Tate had convened the event as a consequence of the recent uprisings in England, the question of the continuities and discontinuities between the 80s and now hung over the whole evening, dominating the discussion that followed the screening. Watched – and listened to – now, Handsworth Songs seems eerily (un)timely. The continuities between the 80s and now impose themselves on the contemporary viewer with a breathtaking force: just as with the recent insurrections, the events in 1985 were triggered by police violence; and the 1985 denunciations of the riots as senseless acts of criminality could have been made by Tory politicians yesterday.
This is why it is important to resist the casual story that things have ‘progressed’ in any simple linear fashion since Handsworth Songs was made. Yes, the BAFC can now appear at Tate Modern in the wake of new riots in England, something unthinkable in 1985; but, as Film Quarterly editor Rob White pointed out in the discussion at the Tate event, there is little chance now of Handsworth Songs or its like appearing on Channel 4 now, still less being commissioned. The assumption that brutal policing and racism were relics of a bygone era was part of the reactionary narrativisation of the recent riots: yes, there were politics and racism back then, but not now, not any more…
The lesson to be remembered – especially now that we are being asked to defend abortion and oppose the death penalty again – is that struggles are never definitively won. As the academic George Shire pointed out in the Tate discussion, many struggles have not been lost so much as diverted into what he called “the privatisation of politics”, as former activists become hired as ‘consultants’...

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Mark Fisher @'BFI/Sight & Sound'

6 Things The Film Industry Doesn't Want You To Know About

Axel Boman and the Radioactive Orchestra

'Radioactive Orchestra', a web-based musical interface resultant from a collaboration between Sweden's royal institute of technology (KTH) and nuclear safety and training institute (KSU), is designed to render aurally the processes of atomic gamma decay.
KTH professors Arne Johnson and Bo Cederwall and doctorate Karin Andgren envisioned and developed the project, which was formalized by electronic artist Kristofer Hagbard into an interactive web interface for data exploration and sound track generation.
Gamma decay occurs when a nucleus is unstable, as an atom emits a gamma ray to bring itself to a lower, more stable energy state. every type of material (and every isotope of each type of atom) gives off a characteristic signature in this process,
which the KTH scientists were interested in representing in some physical form. 'radioactive orchestra' was also designed to draw attention to the fact that ionizing radiation is not just a product of nuclear accidents or artificial processes but insteadis omnipresent in our bodies and environment.
The team explains:
'if we could hear the radiation we would have constant sound around us all the time. we would hear different notes repeated,
maybe at quite a steady rate, but it would always be something new. [as it is,] we can't feel ionizing radiation with our senses,
but we could translate it, and that is what this [project] is based on. we translate these characteristic gamma energies to notes
instead, to frequencies. then you get an audio impression directly from the characteristic radiation. these are the patterns
we explore and make [music] from.'

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@'designbloom'

At http://www.nuclear.kth.se/radioactiveorchestra/ you can make your own music!

♪♫ Toddla T - Streets So Warm (feat. Wayne Marshall & Skream)

IsraeliPM The PM of Israel 

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Public Service Announcement *ahem*

www.malecancer.org

Should Guardian journalists reveal their sources?

The Metropolitan police are seeking a court order to make reporters for the UK newspaper, The Guardian, disclose their sources about the News Corp phone-hacking scandal. Reuters editor-at-large, Harold Evans speaks with Guardian's lawyer Geoffrey Robertson, QC about the latest developments.
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The unsung sense: How smell rules your life