Sunday, 7 July 2013

The Rock ’n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero

I asked if he ever talked about it. Jason shook his head no. Did they find out anyway? “Always.”

How NSA surveillance destroys privacy and undermines our sovereignty

[...] The largest black chamber ever constructed is being built now, in Utah. Called the Intelligence Community Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative Data Center, its storage capacity is estimated to exceed a yottabyte, the largest unit of data that computer scientists have. That’s around half a sextillion (500,000,000,000,000,000,000) pages of text, more than enough to store everything that’s ever been written, as well as every email and phone call to be made in the coming century. Australia is building its own sister system at HMAS Harman just outside Canberra, partly to accommodate the data that will flow to us from Utah. The question now is: what will these black chambers be filled with? And how?

♪♫ Underground in Africa

Deep spiritual jazz produced under the heat of the Apartheid regime in South Africa by independent label owner Rashid Vally.
Info
(Thanx Stan!)

Arthur Buxton: Paris Vogue Covers 1981-2011

Visualising Colour Trends

'Pine is a finely crafted typeface meant to embody the strength and elegance of nature," explains Petts, a student of the Multimedia Design program at the University of Wisconsin-Stout. "Laser cut from wood, each character has rich physicality while maintaining graphic sophistication.'
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DH & WSB

Photo by Bobby Grossman

♪♫ Andrew Weatherall - deathmetaldiscoclub #020 Mix

(Click on arrow at right to download)
Tracklist:
1) Joe's Bakery - Mamba Gascoine
2) Femi vs KCRW - Eh Oh (Garth's Fiya Dubb)
3) Emiliana Torrini - Speed of Dark (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
4) Kalidasa - Waiting Game (Craig Bratley Remix)
5) Craig Bratley - Obsession (Andrew Weatherall Remix)
6) Out Cold - All I Want (Ewan Pearson Remix)
7) Avanti - Cabezaurio
8) Duncan Gray - Peach
9) The Cosmologist - Keep It Up (The Cosmologist 2013 Soul Reconstruction)
10) The Asphodells - Skwatch (Black Merlin's Reel To Reel Remix)
Via

Mont de Marsan Festival Flyer (1977)

Via
I remember reading various accounts of this in the old UK music inkies back in the day. Allan Jones's report in MM was particularly hilarious.

♪♫ The Shangri-Las - Give Him A Great Big Kiss

on Shivaree in 1965

Saturday, 6 July 2013

The Bored Guy

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Bye Bye, Blixa (Big Day Out 1996)

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With

Without

The Young-Girl and the Selfie

[...] In this light, the selfie isn’t about empowerment. But it also isn’t not about empowerment. Empowerment, or lack thereof, is not part of the picture. Neither is narcissism, as either a personal or a cultural moral failure. And the selfie isn’t about the male gaze. The selfie, in the end is about the gendered labour of young girls under capitalism. Do we honestly think that by ceasing to take and post selfies, the bodies of young women would cease to be spectacles? Teenage girls are Young-Girls, are spectacles, are narcissists, are consumers because those are the very criterion which must be met to be a young woman and also a part of society. That their bodies are commodities enters them into economies of attention, and that is where the disgust with selfies comes from. In an economy of attention, it is a disaster for men that girls take up physical space and document it, and that this documentation takes up page hits and retweets that could go to ‘more important’ things. And so the Young-Girl must be punished, with a disgust reserved for the purely trivial. To paraphrase that beloved of Young-Girl films, Ever After — itself paraphrasing Thomas More’s Utopia — what are we to make of the selfie but that we first create teenage girls and then punish them?

(Thanx Ken!)

Organic graffiti by Aliça Bryson-Haynes using flour, paprika etc

I had a nice chat with Aliça y/day as she was making these down the local park. Will go back and photo their degradation over the coming days
http://www.alicabrysonhaynes.com/

Students question the NSA at recruiting session (and it doesn't quite go the way the NSA wanted)

The NSA Comes Recruiting

The Murdoch tapes: News Corp culture and the phone hacking scandal

News Corporation executive chairman Rupert Murdoch has been secretly recorded regretting the assistance given to authorities who were investigating allegations of phone hacking and corruption at his newspapers.
In a 45-minute recording of a speech to staff at his British newspaper The Sun made by a reporter in attendance and subsequently leaked to the press, the News Corporation boss also described payments to police and public officials as part of “the culture of Fleet Street”.
Of the police investigation, Murdoch added:

I mean, it’s a disgrace. Here we are, two years later, and the cops are totally incompetent.

In a statement, News Corporation said: “Mr Murdoch never knew of payments made by Sun staff to police before News Corporation disclosed that to UK Authorities. Furthermore, he never said he knew of payments. It’s absolutely false to suggest otherwise.”