Friday, 6 April 2012
Macro Photos of Dandelion Water Droplets
Via
Sharon Johnstone
Jim Marshall RIP
Marshall was born in Kensington, west London, to Beatrice and Jim Marshall. Jim Sr owned a fish and chip shop in Southall. Tuberculosis of the bones caused his son to be encased in a plaster cast from his ankles to his armpits during most of his school years. From the age of 13, he took a series of jobs, from builder's merchant to shoe salesman to baker in a biscuit factory. Medically unfit for military service in the second world war, he taught himself about engineering from books, and in 1946 became a toolmaker at Heston Aircraft, where he stayed for three years.
Meanwhile, he had successfully auditioned to sing with an orchestra at a Southall dance hall, earning 10 shillings (50p) a night. He then joined a seven-piece band, and when the drummer was called up for national service, Marshall took over. His idol was the big band drummer Gene Krupa, and after taking lessons he started to teach himself at the end of the 1940s. Marshall recalled that "I taught Mitch Mitchell who joined Jimi Hendrix, Micky Burt of Chas and Dave, Mick Waller with Little Richard and Micky Underwood who played with Ritchie Blackmore."
Marshall saved enough money to start his own business, building loudspeaker cabinets for musicians. He found an especially keen market among bass players who were fed up with being blotted out by noisy lead guitarists and were looking for some powerful amplification of their own. But after a year of this, he changed tack and opened his own music store in Hanwell, west London, initially specialising in selling drumkits.
"Then the drummers brought their groups in, including Pete Townshend, and said why don't you stock guitars and amplifiers, which I knew nothing about."
Apart from Townshend, his guitar-playing customers included Blackmore, soon to find fame with Deep Purple, and the renowned session player Big Jim Sullivan. They told Marshall that they wanted amplifiers with a different sound from the then-popular Fender models, which had a clean but non-raunchy tone. Marshall teamed up with his shop repairman, Ken Bran, and the EMI technician Dudley Craven, and they produced their first amplifier in September 1962. According to Marshall, it was the sixth prototype that gave birth to the powerful and throaty "Marshall sound".
Demand for Marshall amplifiers and matching loudspeaker cabinets steadily increased, and in 1964 the first full-scale factory opened in Hayes, with a staff of 16 making 20 amplifiers a week. The following year Marshall signed a global distribution agreement with the instrument suppliers Rose Morris, though he later felt his progress had been hampered by their uncompetitive pricing policies.
However, top musicians were clamouring for Marshall's amplifiers and their hard-driving sound, including Eric Clapton – for whom Marshall created the "Bluesbreaker" amp-and-speakers combo – and Townshend and John Entwistle of the Who, whose lust for more volume led to the creation of Marshall's classic 100-watt amplifier. It was at Townshend's request that Marshall developed the stackable loudspeaker cabinets, or "stacks", that became a familiar part of the stage scenery for countless bands. Meanwhile, Hendrix bought a package of equipment, plus technical maintenance, from Marshall.
Almost everybody who rocked over the next 40 years would use Marshall equipment, from Jeff Beck, the Small Faces and Guns N' Roses to Pink Floyd, Elton John, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, U2, Metallica and Nirvana. In 2003 he was appointed OBE for his services to music and charity. He is survived by his children, Terry and Victoria, and his stepchildren, Paul and Dawn.
• James Charles Marshall, amplifier manufacturer, born 29 July 1923; died 5 April 2012
Adam Sweeting @'The Guardian'
Thursday, 5 April 2012
Howard Zinn on Democracy and Civil Disobedience
The Trial of the AVCO Plowshares can be purchased for educational and community use. Please send an email inquiry to global@globalvillagevideo.com. Sliding scale rates available.
The Howard Zinn video shown here is free for distribution and embed on web sites. DVD copies available: please send an email to info@beyondnuclear.org
Via
Black Cab's Fourth
A home made clip combining a remix of the 2009 Black Cab single Sexy Polizei with a montage of heats and finals of the women's 200m event of the 1976 Montreal Games. This is for our first Pozible campaign to crowd-source funding to mix and release our forthcoming double album due out sometime late 2012.
Info
ABC National interview about Project Prevention http://bit.ly/HjBEHV Another really bad idea to be imported to Australia?
OH FFS!!! Can we please sterilise the policy makers and the politicians who implement them instead?
*Think of the children*
Alan McGee: Kurt Cobain RIP
"I remember coming back from the States the week before Nevermind came out with a CD from Geffen for me and Bobby Gillespie. We both found it mind-blowing as a collection of songs. In these pre-packaged pop times, I find the thought of somebody these days having the balls to sign a Kurt Cobain almost impossible. I watched the Brits and apart from Noel Gallagher it was just pop as in out and out corporate pop music.
Cobain was obsessed by William Burroughs, one of the great thinkers of recent times. In the book The Journals Cobain reveals that he wanted Burroughs to appear in the video for the lead song off Heart Shaped Box. The Journals sketch the evolution of the video's symbol-laden, elliptically autobiographical narrative.
At first, it was to star William Burroughs, who Cobain evidently revered as a long-lived defier of convention and for his aleatoric compositional technique, morbid mythology, and sardonic W.C. Fieldsian cynicism. Here was the first scene, expressing Cobain's sense of himself as repository of Burroughs' artistic spirit: "William and I sitting across from one another at a table (black and white) lots of blinding sun from the windows behind us holding hands staring into each others eyes. He gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of me. Medical footage of sperm flowing through penis. A ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters my body"."
Via Huffington Post UK
Cobain was obsessed by William Burroughs, one of the great thinkers of recent times. In the book The Journals Cobain reveals that he wanted Burroughs to appear in the video for the lead song off Heart Shaped Box. The Journals sketch the evolution of the video's symbol-laden, elliptically autobiographical narrative.
At first, it was to star William Burroughs, who Cobain evidently revered as a long-lived defier of convention and for his aleatoric compositional technique, morbid mythology, and sardonic W.C. Fieldsian cynicism. Here was the first scene, expressing Cobain's sense of himself as repository of Burroughs' artistic spirit: "William and I sitting across from one another at a table (black and white) lots of blinding sun from the windows behind us holding hands staring into each others eyes. He gropes me from behind and falls dead on top of me. Medical footage of sperm flowing through penis. A ghost vapor comes out of his chest and groin area and enters my body"."
Via Huffington Post UK
John Cooper Clarke - 'Evidently Chickentown' (Northcote Social Club 4th Apr 2012)
'I'm not allowed to do it on English television...not since the last time when the Beep Operator sued for repetitive strain injury'
(Thanx Carbie!)
(Thanx Carbie!)
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