Sunday, 4 December 2011

A disabled writer's book unfolds a tap at a time

Writer Peter Winkler works on his computer in his North Hollywood home. Winker, 55, has limited movement because of rheumatoid arthritis and suffers from other ailments. To write his biography of actor Dennis Hopper, he tapped out each letter using a long, red plastic chopstick. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times / November 2, 2011)

Peter Winkler, his body trapped by rheumatoid arthritis, wrote the first biography of Dennis Hopper to come out after the actor's death. Little did his agent know that he had to punch out the manuscript one letter at a time, using a red plastic chopstick...
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Lawmakers propose SOPA alternative: Fight online pirates ‘like WikiLeaks’

Fighting the Unauthorized Trade of Digital Goods While Protecting Internet Security, Commerce and Speech
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Drug study secrecy puts lives at risk

RIAA: Piracy is 'Under Control' But Wait – 'Rampant Theft' Continues

Swiss Govt: Downloading Movies and Music Will Stay Legal

Police Officers Find That Dissent on Drug Laws May Come With a Price

Border Patrol agents pursue smugglers one moment and sit around in boredom the next. It was during one of the lulls that Bryan Gonzalez, a young agent, made some comments to a colleague that cost him his career.
Stationed in Deming, N.M., Mr. Gonzalez was in his green-and-white Border Patrol vehicle just a few feet from the international boundary when he pulled up next to a fellow agent to chat about the frustrations of the job. If marijuana were legalized, Mr. Gonzalez acknowledges saying, the drug-related violence across the border in Mexico would cease. He then brought up an organization called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition that favors ending the war on drugs.
Those remarks, along with others expressing sympathy for illegal immigrants from Mexico, were passed along to the Border Patrol headquarters in Washington. After an investigation, a termination letter arrived that said Mr. Gonzalez held “personal views that were contrary to core characteristics of Border Patrol Agents, which are patriotism, dedication and esprit de corps.”
After his dismissal, Mr. Gonzalez joined a group even more exclusive than the Border Patrol: law enforcement officials who have lost their jobs for questioning the war on drugs and are fighting back in the courts...

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Marc Lacey @'NY Times'

Lizardoid Charles Johnson
I'll always remember where I was when I first saw Mark Block taking a ragged hit off a cigarette in a Herman Cain political ad. #cainwreck

Cain Will Suspend His Presidential Campaign

Republican candidate Herman Cain said that he was suspending his bid for the Republican presidential nomination to avoid news coverage that is hurtful to his family. Mr. Cain’s announcement came five days after an Atlanta-area woman claimed she and Mr. Cain had an affair for more than a decade, a claim that followed several allegations of sexual harassment against the Georgia businessman. Mr. Cain, whose wife stood behind him on the stage, made the announcement before several hundred supporters gathered at what was to have been the opening of his national campaign headquarters.Mr. Cain had surged in polls until news surfaced in late October that he had been accused of sexual harassment by two women during his time as president of the National Restaurant Association in the 1990s
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Er - wasn't it his fucking around that actually hurt his family?

Bob Ostertag - 'Say No More' Volumes 1 - 4

I began the Say No More project by asking each player to record solo improvisations, separately, with no communication with each other nor instruction from me. I then took the resulting tapes and, using a digital editing system, broke the solos into fragments and assembled a "band" piece by piece from the splinters. The resulting tape became the first Say No More cd (1993), including the compositions Say No More and Tongue-Tied. This is probably the first group in the history of music to release a cd without having played a note together, or even met.
I then created a highly unorthodox score of these compositions I had created on the computer using the solo improvisations as sources. I gave both the parts and the computer-generated tape back to the musicians, instructing them to learn their parts. The result was Say No More as a performance ensemble, and the Say No More in Person cd, recorded in October 1993 at ORF-Vienna. It features the compositions from the first cd, but in their transformed, concert rendition.
- Bob Ostertag
With Joey Baron (percussion), Mark Dresser (bass), Gerry Hemingway (percussion) and Phil Minton (voice). Assembled on computer from fragments of solo improvisations.
Vols 1-2
Vols 3-4

State of Surveillance - The Data

Einstürzende Neubauten, Wire, Caspar Brötzmann Massaker - Live in Berlin 12/03/2011
Videostream

Jack Kerouac (November 1942)

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(Thanx!)

♪♫ Damo Suzuki and The Holy Soul with Gareth Liddiard (Live Sept 2011)

Damo Suzuki (from Can) and The Holy Soul with Gareth Liddiard (from The Drones) and Cec Condon (The Mess Hall, Machete Moon) dropping a 42 minute jam at Goodgod Small club on Saturday the 17th of September 2011. Sorry it is so dark that it is often hard to make people out but the sound came out well. An mp3 can be downloaded at http://www.mediafire.com/?2yjad1q11xyjasn
(Thanx Reinhard!)