Wednesday, 10 October 2012

Katarina Samutsevich, member of Russian punk rock band Pussy Riot, has been freed from prison following appeal. Sentences upheld for remaining members

From 1691

The Athenian Mercury, number 23, 1691
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Eye Of The Sparrow: A Bad Lip Reading of the First 2012 Presidential Debate

Directed by Roger Corman, written by Jack Nicholson, and shot on location in and around Los Angeles, including on top of Kirkwood in Laurel Canyon, Hollywood Hills, and near Big Sur, California in 1967. Peter Fonda stars as a young television commercial director, Paul Groves.
Info

Captain Beefheart: American Bandstand Phone Interview June 18, 1966

Bonus:

From Ed 'Stewpot' Stewart's autobiography

"I met my wife when she was 13, in 1970…" P.146 (He was 34 at this point)
"I arrived (at her parents) at 7pm and was greeted at the door by what I can only describe as a 13 year old apparition! She was simply stunning." (P147)
"…(the following year, so 14 now) I travelled to Italy to see her. I had just split from Eve Graham of The New Seekers and so, as the song goes, I was "Free Again"! P153 He marries the poor girl when she is 17. Elsewhere -
"We played a charity football match at a girls' school in Lingfield. After the match we visited some of the boarders, who were mostly epileptic. The pupils had just reached puberty and the girls wouldn't let us out of the dormitory. We had to be rescued by the staff!" (P 177)
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The shits just keep on coming...

For people that aren't already Ballard junkies – those who have only read one novel, who have tried and failed to get on with his work and those who are thinking of reading Ballard for the first time, for example – will Extreme Metaphors peak their interest on any measurable scale, or make Ballard's novels more accessible or enjoyable when they do get around to it?
SS: I believe so. There’s a sense, especially in the 70s conversations, that Ballard used the interview situation as a kind of laboratory. He presented real-world case studies (say, video recorders becoming popular in the 70s); ran tests on them – that is, extrapolated extreme near-future scenarios (say, an imagined dystopia of disembodied virtual sex inspired by reading reports of people watching porno films on VCRs); and published the results in his writing (his savage, gory 1977 short story ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ follows precisely that VCR/sex/dystopia line of thought). Probably my favourite interview in the book is one from 1974 where he runs rings around the interviewer, Carol Orr, dazzling her with all manner of near-future situations as he works through the themes of his then-unpublished novel, Concrete Island. If you didn’t understand Concrete Island, the Orr conversation will probably enlighten you. We avoided including too much discussion of Empire of the Sun, because Ballard even bored himself after talking about it for the umpteenth time. After Spielberg filmed Empire, it seemed that’s all anyone wanted to ask him about and I’ve read interviews where you can sense his frustration with it. Instead, we tried to get at least one sustained mention of each of his novels in the book, so you’ll find talk of such works as the much-maligned Hello America and the misunderstood Rushing to Paradise.