Cabaret Voltaire: Johnny YesNo revisited

The 1982 short feature – arguably the first, if not the last, instance of Sheffield film noir – is one of the great visual evocations of the UK’s post-industrial dysphoria, as poignant as Derek Jarman’s The Last of England and a good deal less trying. But while the action of Jarman’s apocalyptic masterpiece centered on London, Johnny YesNo is all about the North. Filmed largely in the Steel City – with a few external scenes captured in Manchester – its ambiguous but grimly compelling narrative follows our eponymous anti-hero through a neon-lashed nightmare world of sex, drugs and existential crisis.
The film’s broodingly psychotic, morally compromised atmosphere is beautifully echoed and enhanced by its soundtrack, written and performed by Cabaret Voltaire. Care used portions of their The Voice of America LP in his rough-cut, before meeting Stephen Mallinder at an advance screening of Apocalypse Now and inviting the Cabs to create an original score. Impressed by Care’s imagery, Mallinder and Richard H. Kirk set about doing just that, and the results count among the most thrilling and prescient work of their career, bridging the paranoid bricolage of their early records and the increasingly minimalist, dancefloor-conscious rhythms they would come to favour in their next discrete stage of evolution.
But Cabaret Voltaire’s involvement in Johnny YesNo extended beyond their role as soundtrackers: they released the film on their own VHS label, Double Vision, a short-lived but seminal hub of guerilla film-making and mixed media mischief. While the OST album has remained available over the years, the film has never been re-released, or made it onto DVD. Until now.
Richard H. Kirk remixed the film’s soundtrack for a putative Mute reissue, and contacted Peter Care to ask if he’d like to create some new visual material to accompany it. Care, now based in Los Angeles and a successful director whose credits include videos for the likes of REM and Bruce Springsteen as well as numerous high-profile ad campaigns, decided that he would create an all-new version of Johnny YesNo – this time set in the Californian underworld.
You can judge for yourself whether the new Johnny YesNo matches the squalid power of the original when Mute release the Johnny YesNo Redux box set on November 14, a package which includes both films plus Kirk’s sensitively but assertively remixed score, and much bonus material besides. FACT spoke briefly on the phone to both Kirk and Care to find out more about Johnny YesNo and the conditions that gave to rise it, and to discuss their decision to re-make it...

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Occupy Wall Street: An Early Assessment

I stumbled on the initial Occupy Wall Street protests by accident back on its first day of September 17th walking through the financial district in lower Manhattan. While the group seemed quite inchoate and far smaller than the 20,000 thousand or so initially advertised, I’d been intrigued by the solidarity they had expressed with protest movements in Spain or even revolutionary episodes such as the pivotal events in Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the early days of the Arab Awakening. I overheard that day some bemused onlookers who may have been low-level financial sector workers mockingly saying--‘so, this is it?’—but could not help suspecting I would be hearing more about Occupy Wall Street in coming weeks. Indeed, I’d long suspected the financial crisis, policy foibles, chronic unemployment, and general corruption of our politics would sooner or later fuel a measure of social unrest in this country as it has elsewhere. We are not immune to a deadening of hope fused with deep-seated suspicion of having been swindled via policy decisions resulting from a politics that is largely broken and denies a sense of genuine progress and possibility. Almost immediately after espying this nascent protest movement I left for a three week business trip to Asia before returning to New York only yesterday, where incidentally, I was asked on several occasions overseas about the growing movement.
From afar in East Asia, I noticed Occupy Wall Street has done several things right, some a result of sheer luck (read: police over-reactions), others manifesting a measure of tactical skill. A couple of the initial pepper spray incidents went viral on YouTube, one showing very young women screaming hysterically while penned—or is the term for this ‘kettled’?—by bright orange police mesh. Here the ‘luck’ of brute force helped create outsize publicity by a media that had mostly ignored the going-ons up to that point. After all, it cannot help looking like a failure of our society when generally hapless young women are being sprayed in or near their faces by male police officers twice their age simply about behavior surrounding access to public places. These could be our own daughters, after all, and it offends basic sensibility (see the footage here). Another key moment in the growing tide of the movement was the incident of mass arrests in and around the Brooklyn Bridge (again, footage available here for those who are curious), partly a result of the confusion among some of the protesters (to be sure, perhaps a convenient confusion) about whether or not they had been granted access to the vehicular lanes rather than merely the pedestrian pathway on the bridge. Regardless of the merits, mass arrests on the order of some 700 or so individuals on an iconic New York landmark will engender healthy international headlines, boosting the nascent protest movement’s profile very significantly, with this event likely having constituted the break-out...

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Gregory Djerejian @'The Belgravia Dispatch'

Herman Cain: Yes, Wall St. Protesters Just Jealous

Glenn Greenwald: The Awlaki memo and Marty Lederman

Burroughs on writing and art

One Judge Who Is Leading the Charge Against Secret Orders

Secret Orders Target Jacob Appelbaum's Email

Image: Jacob with his State of Sabotage passport by exiledsurfer

...It isn't clear whether Google fought the order or turned over documents

STOP THE PRESS!!!

Well...duh!

blakehounshell Blake Hounshell

Look at this video: These guys are getting U.S. taxpayer money. youtube.com/watch?v=Ps0cZE…!

Some Cops Furious NYPD Officer Flashed Peace Sign In Photo With Occupy Wall Street Protester

via photon frequency's facebook
The above picture, featured on the Facebook profile of someone named "Photon Frequency", is presented as an example of how police and protesters really can get along: "Much of the NYPD are really on our side. We need to stay away from negative media influence and stay supportive and respectful of their difficult job. Many of the officers I spoke to are supportive of this movement and gratefully acknowledged the peaceful efforts of the protesters." However, don't tell that to any of the cops over at Thee Rant police forum—they're pretty darn annoyed at the cop for posing with these "miscreants."
Thee Rant is the internet forum for retired and current members of the NYPD, and they seem to heartily disapprove of officers engaging with protesters in any manner other than from an authoritarian position. User 10 08 wrote, "there are only 2 types of reactions you give these people. #1 - NOTHING #2 - ARREST." BNDB agrees in a long message:

Exactly right! When we do anything else other than the above, we undermine the mission we have as police officers to be proffesional and maintain a STRONG AUTHORITATIVE presence... Act professional at all times!
Dont show any signs of weakness, by doing that, we raise the threat level for all other officers!
Even if we agree with these trust-fund punks, as Police Officers, it is not our job to appease and empathise with them, it is our job to make sure we, and all other officers GO HOME SAFELY!
These punks we stand with, laugh with now, ten minutes later will be throwing their piss and shyte at us, calling us pigs and climbing the barriers to try to fight us...DON'T FORGET THAT!
These trust fund bytches are NOT OUR FRIENDS! They want to see us hurt, either physically or on the job. They want to see us indicted for doing our job. They want to see us lose our jobs, our means for support to our families, they want to see our lives ruined...THEY ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS!
If you really feel that strongly about them, that you empathize with them, then maybe you should think about resigning your position as a New York City Police Officer.

Not everyone is ready to damn the office-in-question: some hope-against-hope that maybe it's all a big misunderstanding! User bxnarcorgr asks, "Could it be he was bored and in a moment of stupidity, he flashed the peace sign more out of sarcasm than out of sympathy for the cause?" Murray Da COP said, "Maybe the cop is putting in his order for coffee or something. Yea TWO sugars please!"
If this is their reaction to a little peace sign, we can't wait to see what they think about the protester who allegedly was caught on camera defecating on a cop car.
Ben Yakas @'gothamist'

Wall Street, Heal Thyself

'Fox News lies!'

Fox News correspondent Geraldo Rivera attempted to report from the Occupy Wall Street protests in Lower Manhattan today but was forced to abort the broadcast after a throng of demonstrators led a rally of anti-Fox jeers.

♪♫ Tom Morello (The Nightwatchman) - This Land Is Your Land (Live @OccupyLA)

Dale Carnegie's self-help bible gets a new life for the digital age

Dale Carnegie in 1955. His advice was based on being positive and cheerful. Photograph: AP
The grandfather of all self-help books, which spawned an industry devoted to self-improvement, is being updated for the age of Facebook and Twitter.
Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People was first published in 1936. Its updated version provides an unlikely transplant of 1930s precepts to the modern age of social media and the internet.
Three-quarters of a century after the original, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age has hit the shelves. Out goes much of the old advice on how to impress and befriend people with face-to-face interaction or letters. Instead there is advice on how bloggers should interact with their readers and a caution about how celebrities mishandle their public wrongdoings.
The original book was based on a series of lectures given by Carnegie, who had risen from an impoverished childhood in Missouri to become one of the most famous public speakers in the world.
Carnegie's appeal was his relentlessly positive attitude and belief that cheerfully showing respect and interest in other people would reap dividends. His book was a sensation and has remained on the bestseller lists, notching up an estimated 15m sales worldwide. But how does it cope with being translated into the digital world?
Badly, according to some reviewers. The New York Times was scathing. "Were Carnegie alive to read this grievous book, he would clutch his chest … smile wanly for a few minutes (he didn't like to make others feel bad), then keel over into his cornflakes," wrote Dwight Garner. He slammed the use of hard-to-penetrate corporate language, adding: "So let me conclude with the good news. His original book, unmolested, can still be found on bookstore shelves."
That sentiment chimes with many social media and PR experts. Though the world that Carnegie wrote for has changed beyond all recognition, his essential message remains relevant. "It works because he is talking about basic human characteristics: don't lie, be forthright and pleasant. Facebook and Twitter have speeded up communication but they have not completely changed it," said Ed Zitron, of Manhattan-based TriplePoint PR, which specialises in digital media.
Carnegie taught very simple rules of interaction, such as try to use someone's name when talking to them or first meeting them. Listen to what they have to say and let other people do a lot of the talking when discussing your ideas. Be enthusiastic and never let an opportunity to make a new friend pass by as you never know when you might need them.
The book was aimed originally at the emerging middle classes of the 1930s and 1940s. But many experts say it is as relevant today, even though social networking rather than a handshake might be the more common way to make new contacts.
"It is all alive and well. It is still with us today," said Marc Hoag, chief executive of Venturocket, a job search website.
He has little time for those who use the informal style of Facebook and Twitter for their communications. It might be OK to use abbreviations and poor spellings in messages between friends, but it is still not acceptable in formal communication.
"Sometimes when I get job applications it blows my mind. There are simple punctuation errors. There is still a place to be prim and proper," Hoag said.
But there are areas where, clearly, the rules have changed. Carnegie placed a huge stress on verbal interaction and smiling. But, said Zitron: "People don't follow people on Twitter because they are nice. They follow people because they have an authority on something."
Paul Harris @'The Guardian'

Here’s To The Crazy One

Lawrence Lessig: #OccupyWallSt, Then #OccupyKSt, Then #OccupyMainSt