Serge Gainsbourg 2008 exhibition - Paris

Go to 'The Weaklings' here and let Dennis Cooper take you through the exhibition dedicated to Serge Gainsbourg.
Please note that this exhibition has been extended until March 15th.

Sarah Palin's ongoing ariel wolf slaughter

Pete Doherty faces eviction

Pete Doherty pictured yesterday in Paris is facing eviction from his country pad following the broadcast of the MTV 24 Hours show. The Babyshambles frontman faces the threat of being turfed-out, due to the state he has let the house get in, reports The Sun. "We've had a few problems. It's high time Mr Doherty found somewhere else to live," the newspaper quotes The Earl Of Cardigan saying.

Skip McDonald & Adrian Sherwood discuss the last Little Axe album 'Bought For A Dollar, Sold For A Dime'

There She Blows – Have The La's Ruined Lithuania's Eurovision Chances?

"Though nothing's been officially confirmed yet, news reaches us from NME's Eastern European division that Lithuania is currently in the midst of a musical crisis involving this year's Eurovision Song Contest entrant and… The La's.

As is customary for most, if not all, Eurovision-participating countries (I don't know, I keep well away from this stuff usually), Lithuania is in the process of choosing its song and performer for the competition via a public TV vote. What makes this year's competition noteworthy is the song by Deivis – a catchy little number called 'Lietuva'. Impressively, the tune scored maximum points in the quarter final heats earlier this month, making it the hot-favourite to go on and be the country's official entry.
Even better than that, though, is that it appears to have been stolen hook, line and sinker from The La's 'There She Goes'. Weirdly, nobody seemed to notice this until it had been performed in front of millions of people on TV. From what we can tell from these news reports (both written in Lithuanian), after 'Leituva' was performed, various viewers alerted Eurovision organisers that the song was just a tiny bit similar to 'There She Goes'. Annoyingly, most of the subsequent reports seem to credit Sixpence None The Richer with the song (in actual fact they butchered it), rather than elusive La's mainman Lee Mavers. It seems an investigation into the similarities is being carried out by some Eurovision suits, and Deivis is waiting to find out if he's been kicked out of the competition or not.

All of which is loads more entertaining than getting Andrew Lloyd Webber involved (as we have here in the UK) has been. Have a listen to 'Lietuva' for yourself. I quite like it actually. It's even got a key change before the end. Didn't think of that, did ya Mavers?"

By Matt Wilkinson Posted on 28/01/09 at 03:32:10 pm @ NME.com

BONUS:Three different versions of The La's 'There She Goes' as produced by
Steve Lillywhite, Mike Hedges & John Leckie.

The Situationist International - On the passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

WARNING: CONTAINS CLAPTRAP FROM MALCOLM MCLAREN.

The Bureau of Public Secrets

Several documents on Guy Debord's films have recently been added at the Bureau of Public Secrets website:
Technical Notes on Debord's First Three Films
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/technotes.htm
Letter about Debord's Film "On the Passage of a Few Persons..."
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/passage-letter.htm
Original Announcement of Debord's Film "The Society of the Spectacle"
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/spectacle-announcement.htm
The Use of Stolen Films
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/stolen-films.htm
The Themes of Debord's Film "In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni"
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum-themes.htm
Instructions to the "In girum" Sound Engineer
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/ingirum-soundtrack.htm
Debord Chronology
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/chronology.htm
Debord Filmography
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/filmography.htm
Texts Relating to Debord's Films
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/bibliography.htm

* * *
See also Guy Debord's "COMPLETE CINEMATIC WORKS", translated and edited by Ken Knabb and published by AK Press, which includes the scripts to all six of Debord's films plus 62 illustrations and extensive annotations
http://www.bopsecrets.org/cat.htm
For online excerpts from the filmscripts, along with the latest information on the films themselves, see
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord.films/index.htm
Knabb's translation of Debord's "The Society of the Spectacle" is online at http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/debord/index.htm
The Situationist International Anthology is online at
http://www.bopsecrets.org/SI/index.htm

Thanx to Ken Knabb for all the links.

Too True

(Photo by TimN)

5 Most Obnoxious Front Men of All Time are...
1 Chris Bailey
2 Chris Bailey
3 Chris Bailey
4 Kate Cerebrano (sic) from I'm Talking ( but she's a religious nutter and can't help it)
5 Courtney Love ( but Kurt had just died)
Great gig though..god bless Ed Kuepper
Big Ern xxx
Melbourne Australia

A comment left at 'That Striped Sunlight Sound' here.

Throbbing Gristle - Discipline

Throbbing Gristle to play Coachella!!!

TG: Cosey, Chris, Sleazy & Gen.

Demonoid down again

Full story here.
UPDATE: BACK AGAIN.

John Coltrane - My Favourite Things (Live Germany 1961)

Debord Game Guy

Guy Debord 1951

You can read about Guy Debord and his 'Game of War' board game here.

'The Society of The Spectacle' here.

Thrillbillies indeed - a vertical backflip on a Big Wheel plastic toy trike!!!

Via 'Boingboing'

New album from Pete Doherty 'Grace/Wasteland' due on March 24

Full details and 'Last of the English Roses' mp3 available at 'Micropsia' here.
You can also download his diaries here and don't forget his sage advice here.

Grace/Wasteland
Set for release March 2009
1. Arcadie
2. Last of the English Roses
3. 1939 Returning
4. A Little Death Around the Eyes
5. Salome
6. Through the Looking Glass
7. Sweet By and By
8. Palace of Bone
9. Sheepskin Tearaway
10. Broken Love Song
11. New Love Grows on Trees
12. Lady, Don’t Fall Backwards
(13. B-Side I Am The Rain)

UPDATE: Three tracks from the album are available to download from 'Our Iron Lung' blog here.

Piece

(Photo of Piece by Dennis Brown - November 2007)

The post the other day of the complete recordings of Turkey Bones & The Wild Dogs was inspired by recently meeting a bloke who it turned out was from Perth in Scotland.
When I was told this I casually mentioned that the only people I knew from that part of the world were the members of Turkey Bones (Scotty-vocals, Arab-bass, Herman-drums and Piece- guitar).
Dennis then mentioned that the last time he had been back home he had run into Piece at a Rezillos gig and you can see the resulting photo above.
I was trying to think when I first met Piece and it must have been 1977 or 78. From memory I seem to recall that he was a gas fitter and the house that I was living in at the time needed some work done.
At the time I was living right beside Alexandra Palace in North London and was hanging with a bunch of crazy guys who were mostly from Scotland and Liverpool who were all living in Muswell Hill.
I remember that Piece was sharing a house with Nik (from Alien Sex Fiend) and Razzle who would go on to drum with Hanoi Rocks before being killed when he was in a car that was being driven by Motley Crue's singer Vince Neill crashed.

TBC

Epic driving fail

John Martyn & Danny Thompson - Couldn't Love You More (OGWT 1977)

John Martyn - I'd Rather Be The Devil (OGWT 1973)

John Martyn & Danny Thompson - Big Muff

John Martyn - Small Hours (Live 1978)

John Martyn - Bless The Weather (Live 1978)

John Martyn - 1948 - 2009 R.I.P.

John Martyn passed away yesterday apparently from pneumonia.
Story from the 'BBC' here.
More John Martyn here and here and this will give you one of his best songs.

".....was just in the kitchen at lunchtime eating a sandwich with ben, when the news came on radio 4 that john martyn had died today....now this couldn't truly be said to be "shocking" news, in the true sense of the word, but still, what a sad day....i remember the first night i met ben, over in the student union building, and we had a few drinks in the bar and then went back to his student bedroom....and of course the first thing i did was to rifle through his record collection, and discovered that we had precisely TWO records in common (vic godard, and the durutti column)....at which point he pulled out an album i had never even heard OF, let alone heard, and it was john martyn's solid air.....ben had only arrived in hull earlier that afternoon, same as me, but he'd already re-arranged his room to suit his preferences....the desk, that item you might imagine being central to a student's bedroom, if not very existence, he had stashed away safely out of sight on top of the wardrobe, and in its place now stood an old, battered trunk with a record deck on top, and to either side a huge pair of speakers, the like of which i hadn't seen before....on went solid air, and it filled the room, and that was that.....the first record we listened to together, cheers to you john martyn, bless you and the weather....xx"

(Tracey Thorn)

Turkey Bones & The Wild Dogs

"GOLDFISH/ZOOLOGY"
1983 Anagram Records
ana 10

"PURPLE NOISE SANDWICH"
RAYMOND/AIRCRAFT CARRIER/HELICOPTER MAN
1984 McKechnie Gramophone Records
MAC 1/12

"NO WAY BEFORE THE WEEKEND"
FEEL THE PURPLE HILLS/PLANE CRASH/SNAKE/CHEROKEE NATION/SHAKE/MOTORBIKE
1985 ace records
Ned 13

Bart Simpson a scientologist?

Story from 'The Huffingfton Post' here.

44 degrees yesterday 44 today 43 tomorrow - too hot!!!

UPDATE: Was just walking home with son # 2 and we came across a bat that was on its back in the middle of the road. A stick was got and it was put in a quiet place after it was given a bit of a cooling down with water.
My Bindi Irwin moment (apologies Bella!)

Lykke Li - I'm Good, I'm Gone

Joe Henry - God Only Knows (Live Paradiso Amsterdam 12/02/08)

The Beach Boys - Wouldn't It Be Nice

Obama: U.S. not your enemy

President Obama in his first formal interview since coming to power with the Dubai based Al-Arabiya Network.
Story from 'Politico' here.

Interesting comments from 'FP' here.

British OiNK users sentenced to community service

Story from 'Pitchfork' here.

EPIC fail!

From Failblog via 'I Am Fuel You Are Friends'

The Folk Implosion - Natural One

Two songs by Lou Barlow

Lou Barlow

'Easy'
The Folk Implosion

Said I wouldn't do it, leave it alone
Tried to ditch it, followed me right back home
After a while I don't resist
I'm alive with a purpose
My way down looking for it
That's what I'm afraid of

When I finally hold it, arrive on the scene
The doors are open I can hardly breathe
And like every guilty feeling
I've forgotten before
Three hours later, I'm hungry for more
That's what I'm afraid of
I don't have the will to change
Not when it's so easy, to be easy

Resistance is low when I'm feeling bored
What I thought was fun isn't fun anymore
Gravity pulls neither wrong or right
The moon is full and we're out of our heads
Let's do it again and feel allright
The fight is over for now
The fight is over

'Too Pure'
Sebadoh

Is something missing in my touch, a tension tugging at my smile?
If there's a right thing to say, I'm sure I missed it by a mile
Swallowed in some detail, heavy in my blood
I wanna hold you close, but I can't lift my arms up
Is there a reason for this distance?
More than the drug that floats my days
A nervous bug in my system, it keeps me edgy and ashamed
I've got a saint, never ever will forgive
That never understood me but still tells me how to live
It fits when I stretch and I stretch because I can
I stretch until I'm sore and then I open up for more
I do it out of habit, not addiction
And if I give it up, clean out my blood
Will I still feel bored and disconnected?
If I do it all for love, will I ever give enough?
'cause you can never be too pure or too connected
You can never be too pure or too connected
You can never be too pure

'Trout Mask Replica' amongst albums in the White House record collection

Story from 'Rolling Stone' here.

I is seriously shocked!

Leonard Cohen - The Future (Live 'Later with Jools Holland')

Review: Leonard Cohen 'A Day On The Green' Coldstream 24/01/09

(Photo by Simone Maynard.)

Michelle Griffin
'The Sunday Age'

January 25, 2009

Leonard Cohen
Day On The Green
Rochford Winery, Coldstream

LEONARD Cohen is like a horse whisperer, only for women. Even at 74, the dapper rogue could provoke sighs from women in the audience at Rochford Winery last night with his courtly songs of sex and regret. When he growled his sleazy 1988 classic I'm Your Man, women leapt from their picnic blankets to yell: "Yes, you are!"
At his first Australian concert in 24 years, Cohen seduced 7000 people — women and men — with an act polished by a year's touring and a lifetime perfecting his pitch: he charmed us, he moved us, and then he broke it to us gently. "I tried to leave you," he sang at his third and final encore.
Cohen is a funny man. The jokes may be bleak but he tells them with a rueful smile. "It's been a long time, about 15 years since I was on stage," he told the crowd. "When I was 60, a young kid with a crazy dream."
He may look frail, but Cohen put paid to his morose reputation with a vibrant set that lasted almost three hours. He certainly didn't perform like a man forced out of retirement to sing for his pension fund. Dressed like a preacher in three-piece suit, string tie and fedora, he literally skipped on and off stage between sets, swung tight-fisted like Sinatra during musical interludes, and performed a "white man dance" to whooping applause.
Cohen's baritone is, as he cheerfully admits, a rough diamond. His martini-dry vocals are complemented by a nine-piece band of accomplished musicians and singers, led by his long-time musical director, bassist Roscoe Beck. Folk classics Suzanne and Chelsea Hotel #2 were presented simply, but many highlights came from more recent songs, such as the witty Everybody Knows, soaring Anthem and wry calling card Tower of Song (featuring Cohen's one-handed synthesiser solo!)
Hallelujah came halfway through the second set. Cohen fell to his knees to wrest his best-known song back from all the artists who have covered it — Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, UK Idol's Alexandra Burke — and rediscovered its wild, black heart. Later, Cohen ceded control of lovely hymn If It Be Your Will to the angelic voices of the Webb sisters. Then he roared back into focus with the song of the night, a rocking and timely rendition of his 1992 number Democracy Is Coming to the USA.


A Thousand Kisses Deep
('A Day On The Green' - Coldstream 24th January 2009)

Bonus:
From the last time Leonard Cohen played in Melbourne nearly 25 years ago, I give you a 'new' song 'Hallelujah' as well as 'Democracy' live in Glasgow on the night Obama was elected.

It goes without saying that you should not do this

Go here to find out everything you need to know to change the message on those roadside signs.
(Via 'boingboing'.)
Very funny comments thread here.

Schoolly D - King of New York

Day of Shame, Day of Triumph (The Age 26/01/05)

Australians have a responsibility to acknowledge the first peoples of this land. It cannot be shirked, writes David Day.

For some years now, Australia Day has seen commentators berating us for not making a greater celebration of the day that marked the beginning of our nation. Other commentators berate us for celebrating the day that also marked the beginning of a tragedy for Aboriginal peoples. Both sides are right about the historical significance of January 26, 1788. It does mark the beginning both of Australia's shame and its triumph. This partly explains the muted way in which we tend to celebrate the day, for there is much to be ambivalent about.

When Captain Arthur Phillip and his officers splashed ashore at Botany Bay, they believed they were bringing civilisation to what one of the officers described as "a remote and barbarous land". But it was not an act of selfless charity. They had come to conquer. They had not come to live in an Aboriginal world but to dispossess the Aborigines of their land and compel them to live in a British world.
Phillip had been sent by the British government to take possession of the eastern half of Australia. The bold move was designed to give Britain a strategic presence in the Pacific, allowing it to challenge the tottering power of the Spanish and secure the sea route to China. Little thought was given to the incidental consequences for the Aborigines.

With the peremptory act of raising a flag at Sydney Cove and reading a proclamation, Phillip blithely made one of the greatest land grabs in history without even a token attempt to negotiate or compensate the traditional owners. Had they been invited to Phillip's ceremony, and realised its significance, the Aborigines might have made a more determined attempt to resist. In that first year, they certainly had the numbers to bring the half-starved colony to a premature end. But there was little sustained resistance, and even less after an outbreak of smallpox wiped out much of Sydney's Aboriginal population.

We continue to watch passively as Aborigines die from preventable diseases and as their societies are ravaged.

Laid waste by disease and alcohol and the disruption of their traditional living patterns over the succeeding decades, or killed outright by punitive expeditions, the Aboriginal population seemed set by 1900 to be headed for extinction. A population of a million or more had been reduced to about 60,000. In the minds of the colonists, there was a sense of sad inevitability about it all, along with a quiet sense of satisfaction that the eventual Aboriginal demise would remove any lingering feelings of uneasiness about the legitimacy of the British occupation. But the nature of our national origins clearly concerns us still.

Indeed, the shadow cast by Phillip and his officers, as they stood beneath the flag toasting the imposition of British authority, continues to darken our national life. Still unconfident in our relatively short-lived occupation of the continent, we shrink from undertaking those symbolic acts that would acknowledge the historic wrongs visited upon Aboriginal people and adequately recognise their status as first peoples. Just as in the past we took many of their children in an unsuccessful attempt to make Aborigines disappear from view, so we continue to press for them to blend into white Australia and become one people with us, thereby ceasing to pose a moral challenge to our occupation of their continent.

We continue to watch passively as Aborigines die from preventable diseases and as their societies are ravaged by the physical and psychological consequences of their historic dispossession, while comforting our consciences with the mistaken belief that they are the authors of their own misfortune. Rather than mobilising our resources to provide adequate medical, educational and housing facilities, we now compel outback Aborigines to wash their faces in return for the provision of a petrol bowser, thereby implicitly reinforcing the 18th-century view of the Aborigines as child-like savages who have to be civilised.

Of course, there is nothing to be gained by simply reproaching ourselves about the shameful acts in our past. Instead, we need to understand and acknowledge our history in all its complexity, from the grandeur to the genocide. We need also to situate our history within a wider context and understand that we are far from alone in dispossessing indigenous people of their land. Societies across the world, from Japan to Peru and Israel to Indonesia, live on land taken from indigenous inhabitants. The process of claiming and occupying those lands has helped to shape the nature of those societies, as it has shaped ours over the past two centuries. However, just because many other societies share our situation does not absolve us of our shameful neglect.

On this Australia Day, then, it is fitting that we acknowledge the historical importance of Arthur Phillip's foundational enterprise. Despite being dogged by ignorance and ill-luck, the first colonists overcame considerable obstacles to establish the beginnings of one of the great cities of the modern world and one of the most diverse and tolerant societies. But it is equally important to acknowledge the tragic outcome for Aborigines of the British invasion.

That tragedy continues, and it will persist as long as we push ahead with Phillip's original project of dispossession and refuse to recognise that we have reached an important point in the prolonged process, initiated by Cook and Phillip, of making this continent our own. After more than 200 years, and with a population of 20 million, the fear of ourselves being dispossessed has been largely allayed.

We should be confident enough now to recognise Aborigines as the first peoples of this land and to accord them the rights implicit in such status. It has proved to be a bounteous land. Its riches deserve to be shared more generously with those from whom it was taken. It is inevitable that Australians will be held to account if that responsibility continues to be shirked.

David Day is the author of Claiming a Continent: A New History of Australia.