Thursday, 26 January 2012

anonops AnonOps
ALERT: #ACTA Will Be Signed by EU & US tomorrow - EXPECT US!

One dead man (RIP Sleazy) and a bunch of pricks...

MegaUpload’s New Lawyer Makes a Strong Defense

Until 2009, the human clitoris was an absolute mystery

...still is to most men is it not?

Picturing Nick Drake back on tour

Engulfed … Laura Barton listens to the Nick Drake track. Photograph: Michael Burdett

One summer evening in the late 1970s, Michael Burdett was scavenging through a skip behind Island Records HQ in London. He was a teenager, employed as a postboy at the label, and had been given permission to hunt through all the discarded demos for tapes he could record over in the studio he was setting up at home.
An object caught his eye. "A scruffy little tape," he recalls. "On the front, in felt tip, it said 'Nick Drake' and on the back 'Cello Song'. And at the bottom were the words 'With Love' and two kisses. I knew Nick's material; he'd been dead five years. I couldn't let it go to the dump. So I took it and kept it."
Burdett didn't listen to the tape for 20 years. By then, he was a composer, writing music for adverts and TV acts such as Mr Blobby, but had taken himself off to Wales to record his own album. One day, struggling with a piano piece, he decided to distract himself by playing some of the many unlistened-to tapes he had acquired over the years. The first was that recording of Cello Song, a work that had appeared on Nick Drake's debut album, 1969's Five Leaves Left. But it did not sound like the version Burdett was familiar with. "I remember it distinctly: windows open, sound of the river coming in. As the guitar started I thought, 'That sounds different.' Then the percussion began and sounded busier. And then two cellos came in, and they played a flourish I didn't recognise. Nick started humming, and I realised I was listening to something different, something I suspected nobody had heard for a good 30 years."
The album version, produced by Joe Boyd, features Clare Lowther on cello, Danny Thompson on bass and Rocky Dzidzornu on congas, as well as Drake's distinctive guitar-playing and exquisite voice. It is at once melancholy and sublime, in its essence everything that would bring Drake acclaim and adoration in the years following his death in 1974, aged just 26.
Burdett tracked down Cally Callomon, manager of Nick Drake's estate. He played him and Robert Kirby (Drake's friend and regular strings player) the lost recording. "They thought it was a beautiful version," says Burdett, "but we were none the wiser as to where it might've come from. Though it turned out not to be Nick's handwriting."
Burdett was unsure what to do. "Copyright laws mean it's not my place to broadcast or release it," he explains. Another decade passed and, reading of Kirby's death, Burdett thought again of Cello Song. He also happened to watch Werner Herzog's 2005 film Grizzly Man, and was struck by a scene in which Herzog sits with headphones on, listening to the sound of a man being eaten by a bear. His thoughts led to the unheard Drake recording and suddenly he knew what he wanted to do: photograph people listening to it.
"For the next year and a half," he says, "I kept the camera and the recording with me wherever I went. I approached people at random and ended up photographing tattooists, homeless people, florists, mountaineers, City workers, people aged two to 96." Of the 200 people he asked, 167 agreed. "I think that is the beautiful thing about all this," he smiles. "It's not just about Nick Drake – half the people had never heard of him."
He calls his collection of photographs the Strange Face Project, a nod to the song's opening line: "Strange face/ With your eyes/ So pale and sincere." It was also a reference to the peculiar intensity that played across subjects' faces as they listened. "With four minutes 22 seconds to photograph someone," says Burdett, "I invariably found that the images were telling."
We sit in Burdett's car and look through the photographs, about to go on show at the Idea Generation gallery in London. There are famous subjects: Tom Stoppard, Noel Fielding, Billy Bragg; as well as a car park attendant at Southampton airport, a climber on a mountaintop in the north-west highlands of Scotland, and a man fishing for grayling on the River Itchen in Hampshire. At the end of the recording, Burdett would ask each person what they thought. The comic Robin Ince told him: "Listening to Nick Drake always makes me nostalgic for things that didn't actually happen to me, like standing in a wheat field in Cambridge, which I've never done."
I am listener 167 in the project. I have always regarded Drake's music as an otherworldly thing, swallow-tailed and windhovered. This version of Cello Song is a more earthly creature: richer, busier, warmer than the one I am familiar with, and in many ways more engaged with its era. It appears more psychedelic, with shades of the Beatles' Within You Without You. As I listened to the track, I stared at the ground, oblivious to the traffic, the cold wind, the snap of Burdett's camera. It is an entrancing work and, like all of Drake's material, engulfs the listener. Once it is over, I am startled – it feels less as if a song has stopped playing than as if it has been spirited away. I stand in the street, suddenly aware of the roar of the day.
Laura Barton @'The Guardian'

Strange Face: Adventures with a Lost Nick Drake Recording

♪♫ Wilco - Dawned On Me

'Dawned On Me' from Wilco's Grammy-nominated new record 'The Whole Love'. This collaboration with King Features presents the first hand-drawn Popeye cartoon in more than 30 years. Directed by Darren Romanelli.

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Psych Explorations of the Future Heart

Happy (?) Invasion Day

The weather is not looking kind to the traditional Australia Day celebration of a barbecue and beers and a day off work with your mates. Several outdoor events that were planned for our region have already been cancelled.
But as another Australia Day/Invasion Day rolls around I wonder (again) about the suitability of having January 26 as our national day of celebration.
It is the day that celebrates and commemorates the landing of the First Fleet; the day that Captain Arthur Phillip planted the English flag in the beach at Sydney Cove and declared it a colony of the British Empire.
By definition it is a divisive date as it fails to recognise that Aboriginal people had been living on this land for 40,000 years (or more) before that flag was planted.
And by being divisive rather than inclusive, it is hard for me to get excited by our national holiday. Surely January 1, 1901, the day that recognises the Federation of six separate colonies into the nation of Australia is a more appropriate date to commemorate as 'Australia Day'?
The argument against it seems to be that we'd lose a public holiday. Well what about we just add another one on May 27, the day day all Australians were recognised as citizens? Or Bradman's birthday? Any other day will do...
It may seem trivial or tokenistic to some, but as Janelle Saffin pointed out when I spoke to her about her role in the panel on Constitutional Recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, symbolism is important. It affects how we see ourselves and how we feel about ourselves.
It will now come down to the argy bargy of backroom politics to determine exactly how a referendum will be put to ensure that it will be supported by the majority of Australians.
...Aunty Bertha Kapeen also talks about the importance of the 1967 referendum on the self-esteem of Aboriginal people.
It's time we grew up as a nation and acknowledged our history. A few symbolic changes are not going to hurt anyone and might actually make us feel better about ourselves as a nation.
Via
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