Monday, 10 October 2011

Sex Slavery

The Little ISP That Stood Up to the Government

A Protest’s Ink-Stained Fingers

richardengelnbc Richard Engel

Latest Egypt figures. 25 killed. 272 injured last night

A firsthand account: Marching from Shubra to deaths at Maspiro

The Future of Money

Via

My philosophy?

Drink it...end of fugn arguement!
Image

Top boy: stories of Hackney's young drug dealers

RIP Peter Przygodda (1941 - 2011)

Peter Przygodda, the renowned editor who worked with Wim Wenders, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, Volker Schlöndorff, Hans W Geissendörfer, Reinhard Hauff, Klaus Lemke, Peter Handke and Romuald Karmakar, has died at the age of 70. He was, as Ekkehard Knörer writes in die taz, the most important editor — a term he preferred over another commonly used in Germany, "Cutter" — of the New German Cinema of the 70s and early 80s.
Though he'd originally intended to become an architect, Przygodda founded a small theater with Rolf Zacher and shot his first short film in 1969, Der Besuch auf dem Lande (The Visit to the Country), with Zacher taking on the lead role. Later that same year, he began working with Wenders on Summer in the City, striking up a friendship and professional partnership that would see them all the way through Palermo Shooting in 2008. Przygodda won the German Film Prize (Gold) for his work on Wenders's The Wrong Movement (1975) and The American Friend (1977). Having edited nearly 100 films over four decades, he became, as Oliver Baumgarten puts it in Schnitt, a master of the "invisible" cut.
Przygodda also worked for many years with Irmin Schmidt of the legendary Krautrock group Can and, in 1971/72, shot the concert film with the straightforward title, Can.Viewing (7'16"). The Cine-Fils interview with English subtitles.
David Hudson @'Notebook'

If you’re not scared, you’ve not been properly briefed

gcluley Graham Cluley

There are NO free iPads / iPhones in memory of Steve Jobs bit.ly/n0INb9 Scams spreading quickly on Facebook

Girlz With Gunz #158 (Nikita)

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...

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...