Youth of Colour: Watched and Shot

Trayvon Martin and Mumia Abu-Jamal. One is dead. One languished on death row for thirty years. They are separated in age by a generation, separated by different locations and different life-histories, but their stories of being under surveillance, watched and shot, intersect strikingly with each other, and with many other people.

Both Trayvon and Mumia will be represented by scores of activists converging on Washington, D.C., on April 24, in an “Occupy the Justice Department” event, which joins the “Occupy” movement to the resistance movement against the criminalization of youth of color.
Trayvon and Mumia have been respective catalysts for national consciousness about police violence, prosecutorial misconduct, and also the dramatic seven-fold increase, since the 1970s, of the U.S. prison population to over 2.4 million people, more than than sixty percent of whom are people of color.
The accelerated criminalization of people of color and the poor not only feeds the prisons, it fattens a government and corporate apparatus that grows top-heavy with the wealth concentrated in the economic portfolios of the top “one percent.” As University of California sociologist, Loïc Wacquant, observes in his book, Punishing the Poor, the rise of the prisons marks a new penal state, where an ethos of surveillance and practices by police and courts “replaces the social state; . . . undermining its educational and assistance missions by devouring their budgets and stealing their staff.”
Trayvon and Mumia are just two Americans among many others, particularly youth of color, and many dissenters, who have been under surveillance and face its deadly effects. We Are All Suspects Now is the title of a book by ColorLines executive editor, Tram Nguyen, writing of immigrant communities after 9/11 and the problems faced by ever larger numbers of us in today’s surveillance state. Just in the last two months, a litany of names of dead youth now haunt us, all slain in conflict with police: Ramarley Graham, Justin Sipp, Kendrec McDade, Dante Price, Rekia Boyd, Kenneth Smith, Shaima Alawadi, Ervin Jefferson. Still fresh are the memories of other people of color similarly lost: Amadou Diallo, Vincent Chin, Michael Cho, Sean Bell, Anthony Biaz, Oscar Grant, Fong Lee, Tyisha Miller, Matthew Shepard, James Byrd, Mark Duggan, Eleanor Bumpurs, and more...
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PARP!

'scuse me'

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Alex Trocchi: A Primer

Alexander Trocchi was a “junkie, visionary, pimp, beat, literary outlaw, pornographer, philosopher, pig farmer, underground organiser and antique book dealer” — but he was also a writer.
He argued that “art and life are no longer divided”, and because of this integral inter-relationship, I’ll begin with a brief biographical overview of his literary life. This will give a context for the three different examples of Trocchi’s writing that I’ll go on to introduce: Young Adam, Cain’s Book, and sigma: A Tactical Blueprint.
Trocchi was born in Scotland in 1925, and he read English and Philosophy at Glasgow University. However, his interests and ambitions were international and he left Scotland for post-war Paris in 1951. The rejuvenated City of Light was the epicentre of 1950’s existentialism, Trocchi’s profound philosophical passion, and Paris proved highly productive: Trocchi founded and edited the pioneering journal Merlin which published a plethora of writers and philosophers, including Beckett, Genet, Camus and Sartre. He also joined the Lettrist International, later the Situationist International, which positioned Guy Debord as Captain at the ideological helm.
Paris enabled Trocchi to turn his hand to writing dirty books, or “d.b.’s” as they were known, and he prolifically penned many of these for the notorious Olympia Press, whose experimental catalogue also published William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. Olympia Press also published Trocchi’s novel Young Adam (1954), which he had begun some years earlier in Glasgow, and in Rimbaudean style, Trocchi became acquainted with Parisian paradis artificial; he experimented with numerous narcotics, which lead to his life-long addiction to heroin.
The demise of Merlin in 1956 prompted Trocchi to relocate to the U.S.A. He wintered in Venice West with the beat beachfront creative community, before moving to New York City and working as a scow captain, which is conveyed in Cain’s Book (1960). The charge of supplying narcotics to a minor, which Trocchi vehemently denied, forced him to escape over the border into Canada in disguise, where Leonard Cohen, then a largely unknown poet, housed Trocchi until he was able to safely take a boat back to Britain; Cohen later called Trocchi “the contemporary Christ”.
In the U.K. in 1962, Trocchi furthered his riotous reputation as a subversive and international writer at the Edinburgh Writer’s Conference by clashing spectacularly with Hugh MacDiarmid, Scotland’s chief promoter of a distinctly nationalist tradition in Scottish literature, who dismissed Trocchi, along with fellow-attendees William Burroughs and Ian Hamilton Finlay, as “cosmopolitan scum”.
Trocchi had publicly provoked this dismissal - in an earlier panel discussion at the festival he had described Scotland, and Scottish literature, as “stale-porridge, bible-class nonsense”.
Having departed from Scotland more than ten years before, he was clearly glad of it...

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Gill Tasker @'Lit Reactor'

Images: Kiki Picasso's illustrations for the 1999 French edition of 'Cain's Book'

Gill Tasker is a PhD student at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, researching the life and writing of Alexander Trocchi

Cosmonaut, rebel and man: Sally Child remembers writer Alexander Trocchi

Junk Male

My how the times have changed...I remember after I first read Cain's Book in about 1975 going to the main reference library in Glasgow and there was not one mention of Trocchi to be found in the public search there. Now you can do PHD's on him???
Still not forgiven btw the 'supposed' friend who nicked my original Frances Lengel 1954 Olympia copy of 'Young Adam' but...
For more about Trocchi on 'Exile' go HERE

Paul Cadden: Drawings

I think the creation of Art need not lead to alienation and can indeed be highly satisfying; one pours one's subjectivity into an object and one can even gain enjoyment from the fact that another in turn gains enjoyment from this. Although the drawings and paintings I make are based upon photographs, videos stills etc , the idea is to go beyond  the  photograph. The photo is used to create a subtler and much more complex focus on the subject depicted, The virtual image becomes the living image, an intensification of the normal. These objects and scenes in my drawings are meticulously detailed to create the illusion of a new reality not seen in in the original photo. The Hyperrealist style focuses much more on its emphasis on detail and the subjects depicted. Hyperreal paintings and sculptures are not strict interpretations of photographs, nor are they literal illustrations of a particular scene or subject. Instead, they utilise additional, often subtle, pictorial elements to create the illusion of a reality which in fact either does not exist or cannot be seen by the human eye. Furthermore, they may incorporate emotional, social, cultural and political thematic elements as an extension of the painted visual illusion; a distinct departure from the older and considerably more literal school of Photorealism.
http://paulcadden.com/
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Radiohead 'Lotus Flower' (Austin City Limits - behind the scenes)

(Thanx Stan!)

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Tim Burgess's golden rules of rock’n’roll excess

"I remember sniffing petrol as a kid, and getting high off glue remover. I did magic mushrooms, I did ecstasy. Drugs were always part of my life, and I had a great time on them, to be honest. Onetime in America, we discovered the process of blowing cocaine upeach other's arses. The nerve endings there are much more receptive. It was an intimate activity, sure, but then being in a band is an intimate thing. Why did we do it? Well, DVDs and playing cards will only take you so far on a 28-date tour of America. It seemed like the right thing to do at the time."

Near death, explained

The History of File-Sharing

Dan Bull: Sharing Is Caring

Yesterday a young lad asked me, “Dan Bull in the charts? Is this a ‘fuck off’ to the record industry then?”
Good question, I thought. What do I really want to say to the entertainment industry?
When I released my first album “Safe” in 2009, I sent it to record companies and radio stations but they ignored it. When I telephoned Q magazine with a story, they told me they couldn’t write about it because they only feature artists with record deals.
In frustration at the glass ceiling that independent artists face, I started to publish protest songs on YouTube. To my surprise, they got much more coverage. I was excited, but thought “What if the labels see my tracks? They’ll never sign me now!”.
At that point, I realised something; if they didn’t want me, then the feeling was mutual. I didn’t need a record label telling me what to do, how to do it, and then keeping 80% of the takings for the privilege. I had the internet and I had my brain.
By embracing the free flow of information the internet allows, through filesharing and social media, I’ve found a worldwide fanbase without leaving the house. I’ve collaborated with artists across the globe without ever meeting them, and I can chat to my supporters whilst lying in bed eating pizza.
None of that would have been possible without file-sharing. If I followed the copyright law that lobbyists like the RIAA and the BPI insist is in the interest of artists like me, I would have no musical career. If pro-filesharing sites like TorrentFreak and The Pirate Bay didn’t share my work with you, you wouldn’t be reading this. I owe a debt of gratitude to every person that has ripped, burned, copied and shared anything I’ve done.
Sites such as The Pirate Bay do more to help unsigned artists than industry lobbyists ever have. Projects like The Promo Bay, which devotes The Pirate Bay’s home page, free of charge, to any musician who applies, creates overnight success stories.
The Pirate Bay stands defiantly in the face of corporate bullies who tout such nonsensical non-sequiters as “if you copy files, artists don’t get money, and if artists don’t get any money, they will stop making art.” This is an insult to the millions of dedicated amateur artists around the world.
What’s funny is that I’d have more respect for major labels if they just admitted what we already know – their bottom line is nothing but profit. There’s nothing wrong with that; there’s no need to hide it. But there is a need to play fair.
Entertainment lobbyists want to have their cake and eat it – they accumulated massive wealth through exploiting a free market when the means to distribute recorded art was scarce. This scarcity no longer exists – the market has moved on; and now they’re fighting to enforce artificial measures which will recreate those fleeting economic and technological conditions which allowed them to flourish.
Art has always been about sharing, adapting, and re-interpreting what you experience. Our children deserve to grow up in a world where they can enjoy this freedom without the fear that a pack of corporate lawyers will circle in and extradite them overseas.
People born in the late 80s have now lived more of their lives in the 21st century than the 20th century. A new generation has arrived for whom sharing information online is as easy and reflexive as breathing.
This generation isn’t going away; it’s growing larger all the time and to them, defunct business models developed by greying monopolists are utterly irrelevant. But these kids aren’t freeloaders or criminal masterminds, they are normal, decent people. When they hear a song or see a video that they like, they’ll post it to Facebook; they’ll Tweet it. They might remix it, or poke fun at it. This very behaviour which big entertainment claims to be the death knell of creativity, is the same behaviour that I believe will make my single a success.
“Sharing Is Caring” is a satire on this age of instant communication. It’s about what happens when things go wrong, and whether we are using the power of online communication to its full potential. Hidden somewhere in the track you can hear me urinating on a printout of the Digital Economy Act.
There are three main versions of the song – each about a different social network (Facebook, Twitter and Google+). There’s also a dubstep remix by Benny Aves and a reggae-tinged reworking by Animal Circus. I’ve also provided instrumentals and acapellas for you to remix and re-imagine at will.
I invite you to download “Sharing Is Caring” for free. If you like it, and want to support the campaign, you can choose to buy it. Each version you buy will count as a sale towards the charts. There are ten versions in all, meaning a single person can create ten sales towards the charts.
The singles charts are worthless as an indicator of quality, and artists needn’t strive for the validation of reaching them. However, by taking a free song by an unsigned artist to the echelons normally reserved for the industry elite, I want to smash the glass ceiling and show that there is another way of doing things. We don’t need the protection of ACTA, CISPA or any other acronym. As long as our internet is free, creativity will thrive.
And so, to answer the original question – I’m not shouting “fuck off” to the entertainment industry.
I’m saying “excuse me, but I think you’re in my seat”.
Links to the torrent or paid version of “Sharing Is Caring” are available here. 
@'TorrentFreak'

Evol

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DJ JetSet - Fifty minutes of Marko Fürstenberg (the netlabel years)

Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Option23 Marko Fürstenberg
Gegenströmung Marko Fürstenberg
Sol (Marko Fürstenberg Rmx) L.O.D.
Long Loco Out Thrill (Surphase Remix) Selffish
Südschleuse Surphase & Rktic
Eissequenzer Marko Fuerstenberg
Busch Marko Fuerstenberg
Porn Infection (Remix) Marko Fürstenberg
Chasm 2 (Surphase Remix) Danny Kreutzfeldt
Trockendock Surphase & Rktic
Kampftruppe Marko Fuerstenberg
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Cory Doctorow: There is a war coming...