Covered: George Harrison, Volume 3: 1990-2003
3 hours ago
Wednesday, 5 October 2011
Occupy Wall Street’s Web Team Finds Anarchy Ain’t Easy
“Hi, everyone. I’m Drew. With the Internet.”
It’s midway through the General Assembly down at Occupy Wall Street. Radiohead failed to show up and overrun the revolution, but the park is still packed. Two rows of people behind me echo Drew’s words – “with the internet” – serving as a human mic, as cops have forbidden the protestors the use of amplified sound. Liberty Plaza is allowed a generator, which runs the laptop and webcam that’s livestreaming the Assembly.
Now that he’s been introduced, Drew continues for us and the cameras, pausing after each few words to give the human mic a chance to keep up: “Right now. Our website. Is having some problems. If you know how to fix those kinds of things. Come find me. After the GA.” The General Assembly crowd is thick, and as soon as he’s done speaking, Drew is lost within it. One night he gives his report back on the Internet Committee while wearing a hideous holiday-inspired sweater, so he’s easier for potential volunteers to spot.
For a protest movement born of the internet, Occupy Wall Street’s technical situation is at times precarious. There are always three or four people hunched over laptops at the center of the camp, circled by cables, hard drives, and on occasion, fresh netbook boxes. If the rain is pelting down, they’re still there working with umbrellas drawn over their faces and keyboards, posting meeting minutes, tending to blog comments, and archiving massive amounts of video. But for the first few days, Occupy Wall Street didn’t even have their own internet connection in the park. Anonymous reportedly hooked them up with a little wifi to tide them over until hotspots were deployed.
It was through Anonymous that Brian, one of the guys who’s now holding down the internal online communications, first found out about the occupation. Almost immediately, he started hitch-hiking here from Washington state, and a month later, he arrived at Liberty Plaza, where he’s been staying for the last eight days.
Brian served in the Marine Corps, he tells me, and he’s skilled in “security and strategic tactics.” On Sunday night, when we meet, he has an earpiece dangling from his neck and his plastic poncho covers a bulky backpack. He and Drew have convened an internet committee meeting just off-site at a friendly bar. They both sit at what ends up being the head of the table. Like others who speak up here, they don’t want to be seen as leaders, even if they hold the WordPress login info.
Who controls the Occupy Wall Street web presence, at this point, probably doesn’t matter. Even if the official website, which is nycga.net, was hit by a denial of service attack, the protest still occupies enough hashtags, twitpics and YouTube videos to get the message out. The idea is, if you don’t rely on a single gatekeeper, you also don’t have one person bearing all the vulnerability — which mostly works.
On Saturday, when news arrived at the park that hundreds of protestors faced imminent arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, a member of the media team asked any of us who held a phone with a video camera to install an app on the fly and head down to the bridge to bear witness by livestreaming it. The work of monitoring potential arrests was now shared among the few dozen of us who made our way to the bridge, tapping through unfamiliar and seemingly unending sign-up screens as we hustled towards a potentially volatile confrontation.
The next night, when I ended up at Brian and Drew’s internet meeting, the group is far more racially and gender diverse than your everyday New York internet event, but the white dudes still dominate the conversation. One guy’s suggestion that we promote a Twitter hashtag to ask for material donations to the camp is met with pushback from another guy who wants us to abandon “corporate tools” for a custom Drupal solution developed by the occupation’s Open Source team. It’s kind of charming: instead of the usual circular debate on the minutiae of different strands of anarchist thought, these guys are having it out over GPL licenses and RSS scraping. Meanwhile, online supporters across the country and the world just want to know how to send us socks and pizza.
Chris, who’s been at the park for five days, joined the internet committee after the mass arrests on Saturday, as he watched people on the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page – which is not officially administered by the occupiers – freak out when updates stopped coming. “They thought we’d been removed from the park,” he says. In reality, it was just a glitch with the official Occupy Wall Street site, which cross-posts to Facebook.
Late that night after the meeting, Julie, a 21 year old New York University student from Harlem, launches a Tumblr to aggregate firsthand stories from occupiers. She’s studying globalization, which took her to London last winter, just as the student occupation against budget cuts took hold. What she’d been studying in the classroom –the Egyptian and Syrian uprisings – was now playing out in the streets below. “So over the weekend,” she says, “when I saw there had been over 800 arrests, I knew I had to come down and try to help.”
Still, that we connected at all in the park is mostly an accident. “Yesterday I just came down to the media table and asked if I could get more involved,” says Julie. “The internet meeting was the one happening next.”
As we talk at the perimeter of the media table, we notice a guy next to us with a clapperboard and another guy holding a shotgun mic. One mentions an internship he had at Comedy Central.
“Who are you guys shooting with?” Chris asks them.
“For the website, I think,” the former intern says.
“You know, we’re working on that,” Chris replies. “We should exchange information.”
Melissa Gira Grant @'BetaBeat'
It’s midway through the General Assembly down at Occupy Wall Street. Radiohead failed to show up and overrun the revolution, but the park is still packed. Two rows of people behind me echo Drew’s words – “with the internet” – serving as a human mic, as cops have forbidden the protestors the use of amplified sound. Liberty Plaza is allowed a generator, which runs the laptop and webcam that’s livestreaming the Assembly.
Now that he’s been introduced, Drew continues for us and the cameras, pausing after each few words to give the human mic a chance to keep up: “Right now. Our website. Is having some problems. If you know how to fix those kinds of things. Come find me. After the GA.” The General Assembly crowd is thick, and as soon as he’s done speaking, Drew is lost within it. One night he gives his report back on the Internet Committee while wearing a hideous holiday-inspired sweater, so he’s easier for potential volunteers to spot.
For a protest movement born of the internet, Occupy Wall Street’s technical situation is at times precarious. There are always three or four people hunched over laptops at the center of the camp, circled by cables, hard drives, and on occasion, fresh netbook boxes. If the rain is pelting down, they’re still there working with umbrellas drawn over their faces and keyboards, posting meeting minutes, tending to blog comments, and archiving massive amounts of video. But for the first few days, Occupy Wall Street didn’t even have their own internet connection in the park. Anonymous reportedly hooked them up with a little wifi to tide them over until hotspots were deployed.
It was through Anonymous that Brian, one of the guys who’s now holding down the internal online communications, first found out about the occupation. Almost immediately, he started hitch-hiking here from Washington state, and a month later, he arrived at Liberty Plaza, where he’s been staying for the last eight days.
Brian served in the Marine Corps, he tells me, and he’s skilled in “security and strategic tactics.” On Sunday night, when we meet, he has an earpiece dangling from his neck and his plastic poncho covers a bulky backpack. He and Drew have convened an internet committee meeting just off-site at a friendly bar. They both sit at what ends up being the head of the table. Like others who speak up here, they don’t want to be seen as leaders, even if they hold the WordPress login info.
Who controls the Occupy Wall Street web presence, at this point, probably doesn’t matter. Even if the official website, which is nycga.net, was hit by a denial of service attack, the protest still occupies enough hashtags, twitpics and YouTube videos to get the message out. The idea is, if you don’t rely on a single gatekeeper, you also don’t have one person bearing all the vulnerability — which mostly works.
On Saturday, when news arrived at the park that hundreds of protestors faced imminent arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge, a member of the media team asked any of us who held a phone with a video camera to install an app on the fly and head down to the bridge to bear witness by livestreaming it. The work of monitoring potential arrests was now shared among the few dozen of us who made our way to the bridge, tapping through unfamiliar and seemingly unending sign-up screens as we hustled towards a potentially volatile confrontation.
The next night, when I ended up at Brian and Drew’s internet meeting, the group is far more racially and gender diverse than your everyday New York internet event, but the white dudes still dominate the conversation. One guy’s suggestion that we promote a Twitter hashtag to ask for material donations to the camp is met with pushback from another guy who wants us to abandon “corporate tools” for a custom Drupal solution developed by the occupation’s Open Source team. It’s kind of charming: instead of the usual circular debate on the minutiae of different strands of anarchist thought, these guys are having it out over GPL licenses and RSS scraping. Meanwhile, online supporters across the country and the world just want to know how to send us socks and pizza.
Chris, who’s been at the park for five days, joined the internet committee after the mass arrests on Saturday, as he watched people on the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page – which is not officially administered by the occupiers – freak out when updates stopped coming. “They thought we’d been removed from the park,” he says. In reality, it was just a glitch with the official Occupy Wall Street site, which cross-posts to Facebook.
Late that night after the meeting, Julie, a 21 year old New York University student from Harlem, launches a Tumblr to aggregate firsthand stories from occupiers. She’s studying globalization, which took her to London last winter, just as the student occupation against budget cuts took hold. What she’d been studying in the classroom –the Egyptian and Syrian uprisings – was now playing out in the streets below. “So over the weekend,” she says, “when I saw there had been over 800 arrests, I knew I had to come down and try to help.”
Still, that we connected at all in the park is mostly an accident. “Yesterday I just came down to the media table and asked if I could get more involved,” says Julie. “The internet meeting was the one happening next.”
As we talk at the perimeter of the media table, we notice a guy next to us with a clapperboard and another guy holding a shotgun mic. One mentions an internship he had at Comedy Central.
“Who are you guys shooting with?” Chris asks them.
“For the website, I think,” the former intern says.
“You know, we’re working on that,” Chris replies. “We should exchange information.”
Melissa Gira Grant @'BetaBeat'
Panel discussion: 100 Fanzines/10 Years of British Punk: 1976 - 1985
PUNKCAST1953-02 Panel discussion: '100 Fanzines/10 Years of British Punk: 1976-1985', associated with the We Are The Writing On The Wall exhibit at The NY Art Book Fair, MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NYC on Oct 1 2011
Panel
Toby Mott
Victor Brand
Michael Gonzales
Moderator:
Vivien Goldman
(Thanx Joly!)
Panel
Toby Mott
Victor Brand
Michael Gonzales
Moderator:
Vivien Goldman
(Thanx Joly!)
Public Enemy In Concert: ATP Festival 2011
Don't call Public Enemy a nostalgia act. Yes, the long-running hip-hop group still makes albums, still tours, still gives a damn. But, more importantly, Public Enemy proved to be current at All Tomorrow's Parties in Asbury Park, N.J. That's a funny thing to say about a two-hour set centered on the performance of a 20-year-old classic album, Fear of a Black Planet. But, when remixed and recontextualized, those songs were just a launching pad for one of the most entertaining sets of the weekend. With never a dull moment, Chuck D and Flavor Flav ran around the stage like young kids at a punk show. Simply put, Public Enemy still brings it.
(npr)
1 hr 51 min 8 sec
DOWNLOAD
(left click to play, right click > "save as" to download)
Scots folk musician Bert Jansch dies after long illness
Influential Scots folk musician Bert Jansch has died after a long illness.
The 67-year-old had been suffering from cancer.
Jansch had a lengthy career as a solo musician and as a member of 1970s folk rock band Pentangle.
Jansch was a leading figure in the 60s folk scene whose career spanned several decades, enjoying critical acclaim and praise from fellow artists even though he may not have shared their celebrity status.
He was a major influence on several generations of guitar players, from Led Zepplin's Jimmy Page and singer-songwriter Neil Young, to performers from later decades like Johnny Marr from The Smiths and Bernard Butler from Suede, and also appeared on a recent album by Pete Doherty's band Babyshambles.
Born in Glasgow and brought up in Edinburgh, he moved to London in the mid 1960s during the folk music boom. His first self-titled album was released in 1965, one song being recorded by fellow Scot Donovan on an EP that went to number one in the UK.
An accomplished solo artist, he joined Pentangle in the late 60s, a five piece band who explored folk music with a rock and jazz influence. They enjoyed significant commercial success and toured extensively, finally splitting in 1973.
Jansch would continue as a solo artist after a break of several years, and continued to tour.
With interest in Pentangle continuing, Jansch would play with a version of the band from the 1980s to the 1990s while continuing his solo career, the original five members finally re-uniting in 2008.
The band continued to work together, and played at Glastonbury Festival and the Cambridge Folk festival, and were working in new material in 2011.
A concert marking Jansch's 60th birthday was held at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London featured Johnny Marr, Bernard Butler and members of highly-regarded contemporary acts My Bloody Valentine and Mazzy Star, as well as Ralph McTell, another veteran from the 60s folk scene.
A 2005 tour had to be postponed after he recovered from heart surgery, but he resumed his live schedule soon after and performed at events like the Edinburgh Festival and the Green Man Festival, as well as solo shows in the USA, Canada and mainland Europe.
His most recent solo album, The Black Swan, was released in 2006, and featured contributions from Beth Orton and Devendra Banhart.
His concert schedule continued until curtailed by illness, with solo shows in Edinburgh during the festival in 2008 and a tour with Pentangle the same year, including a Glasgow date at the Royal Concert Hall, which they had played that January during the Celtic Connections festival.
A solo concert that had been scheduled for Edinburgh during the festival in August 2011 had to be cancelled on account of his deteriorating health.
via
RIP BERT!
Thanks for all the music you gave us!
thanks to Helen for the hint
The origins of Occupy Wall Street explained
...We are not just inspired by what happened in the Arab Spring recently, we are students of the Situationist movement. Those are the people who gave birth to what many people think was the first global revolution back in 1968 when some uprisings in Paris suddenly inspired uprisings all over the world. All of a sudden universities and cities were exploding. This was done by a small group of people, the Situationists, who were like the philosophical backbone of the movement. One of the key guys was Guy Debord, who wrote The Society of The Spectacle. The idea is that if you have a very powerful meme — a very powerful idea — and the moment is ripe, then that is enough to ignite a revolution. This is the background that we come out of.
1968 was more of a cultural kind of revolution. This time I think it’s much more serious. We’re in an economic crisis, an ecological crisis, living in a sort of apocalyptic world, and the young people realize they don’t really have a viable future to look forward to. This movement that’s beginning now could well be the second global revolution that we’ve been dreaming about for the last half a century
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