REpost - Ornette Coleman & the Grateful Dead live 23rd February 1993 (Oakland Coliseum)

(For Stan!)
Photo above by Susana Millman
(Taken from the wonderful new book 'GratefulDead365')

Here you can get Ornette Coleman sitting in with the Grateful Dead at the 'Mardi-Gras' gig from the 23rd of February 1993 at the Oakland Colisseum.
Tracks are 'Space - The Other One - Stella Blue - Turn On Your Lovelight & Brokedown Palace'.
Again it would have been interesting to have heard them playing with each other in the seventies when both Ornette and the Dead were exploring new sonic boundaries.
Ornette's son Denardo is also sitting in on percussion in this set.

(Another gig of Ornette and the Dead playing together from later in the year can be found here.
David Murray live with the Grateful Dead at Madison Square Garden on September 22nd 1993 can be found here. Use search engine at top for much more Grateful Dead live material on this blog.)

Genesis - Supper's Ready

"There's Winston Churchill dressed in drag,

he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag"

Genesis - I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe)

"Me I'm just a lawnmower

you can tell by the way I walk"

Genesis - The Musical Box (Belgian TV - Six Hours Live)

Prog Rock Monday!!!

Don't forget tomorrow is BOOBQUAKE day

Info
HERE & HERE

It goes without saying that I shall be shaking my puppies in support!

Azwarm - A Morning's Work

(Thanx as ever!)

More

HERE

رسالة جلعاد شاليط جديد Gilad Shalit letter

Israel blasts new Shalit cartoon released by Hamas

 Mr Shalit appeared healthy in a video released in October

Breaking:

Something happening at the Iran/Iraq border?

How accurate are lie detectors?

Lie-detector tests aren't completely worthless. How's that for an endorsement?

The polygraph, the most common lie-detection instrument, works on the assumption that the body reacts involuntarily to the stress of lying. It measures reactions such as changes in skin conductance, pulse rate, blood pressure, and breathing while the subject is asked a series of questions. The questioning process can take several forms. One early version was the "relevant-irrelevant" technique, which mixed queries like "Did you murder [name of victim]?" in with stuff like "Is today Tuesday?" Lies in response to the relevant questions would supposedly make the needles jump. The problem with this approach was that in such a context even an unfounded accusatory question could be stressful, producing a false positive.

The "comparison question" technique tries to get around this problem by making all the queries accusatory. In a sex-crime investigation, for instance, a suspect might be asked embarrassing control questions such as "Have you ever committed a sexual act you were ashamed of?" along with questions pertaining more directly to the case. The idea, which has a certain devious ingenuity, is that the innocent will show a greater response to the control questions (either because they're lying or simply flustered), whereas the guilty will show a greater response to the pertinent questions (which for them are more consequential).

The "guilty knowledge" testing method tries to discover whether a subject is privy to inside info about a case — things that only someone involved would know about. For example, suspects might be shown assorted photos of guns to see how they respond to the one that happens to show the murder weapon.

Besides investigation of crimes and the like, the other big use for polygraphs is general screening by employers looking to weed out iffy job applicants or catch workers in otherwise undetected wrongdoing. Pre-employment screening is common in law enforcement: one study found nearly two-thirds of agencies administered polygraph exams to applicants and rejected about 25 percent based on polygraph results alone.

Do the tests work? Depends how you define work. Probably the most comprehensive look at polygraph accuracy is a 2003 report from the National Academy of Sciences. After examining 57 polygraph studies the NAS concluded: "In populations of examinees such as those represented in the polygraph research literature, untrained in countermeasures, specific-incident polygraph tests can discriminate lying from truth telling at rates well above chance, though well below perfection." Their analysis of the 30 most recent polygraph data sets showed an overall accuracy of 85 percent, and an analysis of seven field studies involving specific incidents showed a median accuracy of 89 percent.

For screening purposes, though, the NAS found polygraph tests had too high a margin of error to be genuinely informative. If you made your criteria loose enough to catch most of the bad guys, you were overwhelmed with false positives; if you raised the bar enough to thin out the false positives, you missed too many bad guys.

And what about those countermeasures the NAS mentioned? Yeah, that's a problem too. Because polygraph tests rely on physical reactions, if you can control or mask your reactions at key moments in the questioning, you may be able to throw off the readings enough to produce an inconclusive result. Countermeasure techniques are surprisingly simple: they include discreet physical motions like pressing your toes against the floor or biting your tongue and mental tasks like silently counting backwards from 1,000 by sevens. The goal is to increase your baseline stress level enough to hide any revealing spikes.

If polygraphs are so fallible, why use them at all? In part because testing can intimidate people into confessing, deter bad behavior, and create an impression (however misleading) of vigilance. In other words: security theater. Heeding the NAS report, in 2006 the U.S. Department of Energy stopped blanket screening of its existing and prospective employees. Polygraph tests are now saved for specified instances — say, if someone fails to report a relationship with a foreign power.

Advocates of lie-detector tests foresee the day when technological advances will improve accuracy to the point where test results could be admitted as evidence. Much attention has been paid in recent years to functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI. In its simplest form, fMRI lie detection works by scanning your brain to find out which areas are most active while you're being grilled; supposedly lying and truth-telling cause different areas to light up. No doubt due to the impracticality of using multimillion-dollar machines for everyday criminal interrogations, there haven't been many large-scale studies of fMRI accuracy. But the ones I've found show an accuracy rate of 76 to 92 percent — to be generous, about the same as you get with old-fashioned equipment at a fraction of the cost.

Cecil Adams @'The Straight Dope'

Naked Lunch in Mexico City

A man looks out from a window at the Krikas Bar in Mexico City's Roma neighborhood, Wednesday, April 14, 2010. During the 1950's this locale used to be the Bounty Bar and upstairs, famed beat writer William Burroughs shot his wife in the head by mistake during a game of William Tell gone awry. (Alexandre Meneghini, Associated Press / April 13, 2010)

Mexico City was a magnet in the 1950s for some of America's greatest Beat Generation writers — Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and others.
Many of their old haunts in Mexico's capital have now faded. But fans of the Beats can still find traces of their sojourns here — in cafes and cantinas, along boulevards and even at the site of an infamous killing.
The Beats came to Mexico City seeking a refuge from mainstream America in what they saw as a magical and alien land south of the border. They were searching for enlightenment, and sometimes fleeing criminal cases. Their stomping ground was the Roma district, a once-wealthy neighborhood of mansions that was in decline by the time Kerouac and Burroughs lived there.
In recent years, Roma has enjoyed a mild rebirth and is now filled with pretty parks, hidden cafes, galleries and upscale restaurants. But it still has a bohemian, down-at-the-heels side with working-class eateries, tortillerias, cheap hotels and repair shops. Most Beat landmarks are in Roma, within walking distance of one another.
First stop for any Beat pilgrim would be an anonymous building at Monterrey 122 on the busy corner of Chihuahua Street. It's a dingy apartment block with cheap taco and enchilada restaurants on the ground floor, but it has a notorious past: During a night of drinking in 1951, Burroughs, the Beat godfather, shot his wife dead in an upstairs flat in a game of William Tell gone awry.
Burroughs, the author of "Naked Lunch," "Junky" and "Queer," had placed a glass on Joan Vollmer's head and fired his pistol, only to hit her head by mistake. He was imprisoned for 13 days before being granted bail. He was eventually convicted of negligent homicide and given a two-year suspended sentence. He later wrote that without Vollmer's death he would never have become a writer.
The apartment where Burroughs shot Vollmer was located above the legendary Bounty bar, where expat Beat writers drank till dawn. Now the Bounty is an unassuming cantina called Krika's, where locals eat cheap meals largely unaware of what happened above their heads more than a half-century ago.
"Every now and then I see tourists standing outside looking at the building, wondering if it could really be the place where it all happened," said Huberto Suarez, owner of Krika's. "There are no statues or plaques, so I tell them that this is it."
Even more anonymous is Jose Alvarado 37, a rundown white building on a tiny side street across from the Plaza Insurgentes shopping mall and a Sears outlet. Its black metal door is uninviting and the neighboring building bears a large yellow sign that reads: "Housing yes! Evictions no!"
This was Burroughs' first address in Mexico City — Cerrada de Medellin 37 at the time — after fleeing a drug possession case in the United States. He was there when Kerouac and his buddy Neal Cassady showed up in 1950 on their famous road trip to Mexico. Cassady was characterized as Dean Moriarity in Kerouac's Beat classic "On the Road." Kerouac later penned the poem, "Cerrada de Medellin Blues."
While Kerouac was inspired by Mexico's indigenous culture and spiritual Mayan roots, Burroughs' reasons for living in Mexico City from 1949 to 1952 were more practical, at least at first: It was a place to avoid the law, live cheaply and satisfy his vices.
"I liked Mexico City from the first day of my first visit there," Burroughs wrote in the introduction to "Queer." "In 1949, it was a cheap place to live, with a large foreign colony, fabulous whorehouses and restaurants, cockfights and bullfights, and every conceivable diversion. A single man could live well there for two dollars a day."
A 10-minute walk from Cerrada de Medellin is the former site of the Beats' informal Mexico City headquarters, Orizaba 210. The original building here was demolished and replaced by a red-brick apartment block. Occasionally a lone tourist guide shows up with a handful of travelers, staring at it forlornly before pointing to the neighboring building which he says used to be its twin.
In the 1950s, Kerouac, Burroughs, Cassady, poet Gregory Corso and Ginsberg — whose poem "Howl" launched the Beat movement — all stayed at Orizaba 210. It was there in a rooftop grotto that Kerouac wrote parts of "Mexico City Blues" and his short novel "Tristessa." Heroin-haunted Burroughs wrote much of "Queer" inside its walls.
An obligatory stop on any Beat tour is Plaza Luis Cabrera, on Orizaba at Zacatecas Street, an attractive cafe-ringed plaza with trees and a fountain. In the 1950s it was a favorite hangout for Beat writers talking nirvana in a haze of marijuana, heroin and alcohol.
One night, after taking peyote with Burroughs, Kerouac ran to Plaza Luis Cabrera at midnight and lay in the grass to experience the hallucinogen, writes Jorge Garcia-Robles, who documented the two authors' time in Mexico City in his book "Burroughs y Kerouac: dos forasteros perdidos en Mexico."
Kerouac also ended up at the plaza at the end of a rain-soaked walk while high on morphine. Describing the walk in "Tristessa," he called Plaza Luis Cabrera "a magnificent fountain and pool in a green park at a round O-turn in residential splendid shape of stone and glass and old grills and scrolly worly lovely majesties."
Kerouac's surreal stroll that night started in a crime-filled downtown neighborhood, probably La Lagunilla, where he passed a street lined with hundreds of "crooking finger" whores waiting in front of their "crib cells where Big Mamacita sits." He also passed Plaza Garibaldi — the legendary home of Mexico's Mariachis — where musicians strum guitars for pesos and drunks stagger out of bars.
He continued past the Palacio de Bellas Artes — an Art Nouveau gem known for murals by Diego Rivera — and down San Juan de Letran street, now part of a thoroughfare called the Eje Central. He described walking 15 blocks down San Juan de Letran, where he let out a morphine-and-alcohol yell of "You're nuts!" to the crowd on the street. When he eventually reached Roma, he headed down the boulevard Alvaro Obregon, where the median is studded with statues and trees.
Visitors seeking to walk in Kerouac's footsteps will be relatively safe in Plaza Garibaldi, and Alvaro Obregon has bookstores and markets selling arts and crafts. On Sundays, a large street market at the corner of Cuauhtemoc Avenue sells everything from pirated movies and DVDs, to food, clothing and even guacamole made fresh from avocados on the spot. But La Lagunilla lies next to Mexico City's notorious Tepito district, and is still considered a risky place for unwary tourists.
Garcia-Robles writes that it was on the banks of the lake in massive Chapultepec Park — Mexico City's equivalent of New York's Central Park — that Kerouac suggested to Burroughs that he name his novel "Naked Lunch."
A fitting end for any Beat journey through Mexico City is the Panteon Americano cemetery in the city's north, near the Tacuba Metro station.
At the very back of the cemetery, on a rough concrete wall lined with rows of anonymous, crudely made niches, the cemetery puts the remains of people whose families didn't continue paying the rent on their graves.
Among these last resting places of the forgotten or poor, one small niche has a name inscribed on it.
It reads: "Joan Vollmer Burroughs, Loudonville, New York, 1923, Mexico D.F. Sept. 1951."
The niche is unadorned by flowers or any mementos honoring the role she played in an extraordinary moment in American literature.
The largely unvisited stone square is the only named marker to the Beats' passage through Mexico's capital — but perhaps the anti-establishment Beats would have wanted it that way. 

David W. Kook @'Chicago Tribune'

'The Stones and the true story of Exile on Main St' by Sean O'Hagen

The Stones and their entourage at Villa Nellcote, France, 1971  The Rolling Stones, Gram Parsons and Anita Pallenberg at Villa Nellcote, France, 1971. One of a series of evocative shots taken by photographer Dominique Tarle. Photograph: Dominique Tarle

  There is a great moment in Stones in Exile, a new documentary about the making of Exile on Main St in 1971, when Keith Richards defines the essential difference in temperament between Mick Jagger and himself.  "Mick needs to know what he's going to do tomorrow," says Richards, his voice slurring into a laugh. "Me, I'm just happy to wake up and see who's hanging around. Mick's rock, I'm roll."  On Exile on Main St, though, Jagger, for once, rolled with Richards. So, too, did everyone else involved, from Jimmy Miller, the producer, to Marshall Chess, the young Atlantic Records executive, to the rest of the group and their extended retinue of session players, studio technicians and hangers-on.  Once the decision had been made to record the album in the basement of Villa Nellcôte, Richards's rented house in the south of France, the working schedule was dictated by the irregular hours kept by the group's wayward guitarist, who also had a singularly dogged approach to composing songs.  "A lot of Exile was done how Keith works," confirms Charlie Watts in the documentary, "which is, play it 20 times, marinade, play it another 20 times. He knows what he likes, but he's very loose." Without a trace of irony, Watts adds, "Keith's a very bohemian and eccentric person, he really is."  Exile on Main St is so emphatically stamped with Keith Richards's rock'n'roll signature that it could just as easily have been called "Torn and Frayed" after one of the two gloriously ragged songs that he wrote the lyrics for. The title alone sums up his gypsy demeanour, his elegantly wasted look. Or they could simply have called it "Happy", after another track that was actually recorded in a single take when Richards woke up one morning – or evening – and gathered up the only other people who were awake, saxophonist Bobby Keys and producer Jimmy Miller, who was drafted in to play drums in place of the absent Watts. The whole record was, says Keys, a good ol' boy from Texas, "about as unrehearsed as a hiccup".  Perhaps because he was not the controlling presence on Exile on Main St, which has often been voted the greatest rock'n'roll record ever by music critics, it is not necessarily one of Mick Jagger's favourite Rolling Stones albums. He once described it as sounding "lousy" with "no concerted effort of intention", adding "at the time, Jimmy Miller was not functioning properly. I had to finish the whole record myself, because otherwise there were just these drunks and junkies."  Jagger may have been miffed that his vocals are sometimes swallowed up in the soupy mix but he sings with real passion throughout and seems galvanised by the raw rock'n'roll the group are making. If anyone should need a reminder that no one before or since has sounded as louche and limber, so raggedly majestic, they should watch the Stones playing "Loving Cup" live on their subsequent American tour. Footage of that performance is a highlight of the documentary, produced by the Oscar -winning film-maker John Battsek, which will be premiered at the Cannes film festival before screening on the BBC later in May.  Despite his former reservations, Jagger has gotten behind the planned reissue of the album, too, which comes in a deluxe package containing 10 previously unheard bonus tracks, some of which are alternative takes of familiar songs while others sound suspiciously like they have only recently had new vocals added. No one in the Stones' camp is coming clean as to whether this is the case or not.  For the purists among us, though, the original version of Exile on Main St, in all its ragged, full-on, rock'n'roll swagger, is all we need. "This is just a tree of life," said Tom Waits, when he selected it as one of his all-time favourite records a few years back. "This record is a watering hole." On the documentary, Caleb Followill from Kings of Leon is taken aback to discover the album was recorded in France. "I literally thought they were in Memphis, going out every night eating barbecue and partying." Which is exactly what it sounds like.  The creation of Exile on Main St, like so many early chapters in the Rolling Stones story, is shrouded in myth and blurred by conflicting anecdotal evidence. The American journalist Robert Greenfield, who was present briefly during the recording, wrote an entire book about — and named after — the album. Its subtitle is "A Season in Hell With the Rolling Stones". The book paints an often lurid portrait of Richards and his then partner, Anita Pallenberg. Greenfield places the couple at the centre of a spiral of sustained hard drug abuse and wilfully amoral behaviour. Among the rumours he airs, but does not confirm or refute, is the one about Pallenberg encouraging an employee's young daughter to inject heroin for the first time. Another has Jagger bedding Pallenberg while Richards has nodded out on heroin, thus reigniting an affair they were rumoured to have had while filming Performance under the direction of Nic Roeg in 1968.  Needless to say, the documentary, which has Jagger's controlling presence written all over it, does not dwell on such unsavoury and unsubstantiated matters. The French photographer Dominique Tarle, who chronicled the making of the album in a series of wonderfully evocative shots, and who was Greenfield's entrée into the Stones' milieu, had this to say about the book when I spoke to him in Paris last week: "I read only eight pages and I really felt sick. First of all, how can he not write about the music? And all this stuff about a season in hell with the Rolling Stones? No, no, it was anything but that. We were all young and it was a time of great freedom and energy and creativity. For me, it was a kind of rock'n'roll heaven."  Perhaps, though, it was both. Tommy Weber, who is described as "a racing driver, drug runner and adventurer" in the documentary, and as "a fabulous character straight out of F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night" by Greenfield, was one of Richards's inner circle at Nellcôte. His son, Jake, now a Hollywood actor, was just eight when he witnessed the decadence around the Rolling Stones first-hand. In Stones in Exile, he says, "There was cocaine, a lot of joints. If you're living a decadent life, there is always darkness there. But, at this point, this was the moment of grace. This was before the darkness, the sunrise before the sunset."  Bobby Keys, as ever, is more blunt. "Hell, yeah, there was some pot around, there was some whiskey bottles around, there was scantily clad women. Hell, it was rock'n'roll!"  Others experienced more mundane but no less pressing problems. Both Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman missed home and some of their own creature comforts. "I hated leaving England," Wyman reminisces. "You had to import Bird's custard, Branston pickle and piccalilli... you had to buy PG Tips and then deal with the French milk."  The Rolling Stones pitched up in the south of France in the spring of 1971 as reluctant tax exiles fleeing the Labour government's punitive 93% tax on high earners. The group had just extricated themselves, at some cost, from a misguided management deal with the infamous Allen Klein, who was still claiming he owned their publishing rights. In the public eye, though, the Stones were still the rock group that most defined the outlaw rock'n'roll lifestyle, their bad reputation built on an already colourful past that included high-profile drug busts, the death by drowning of Brian Jones, one of their founding members, the near death by overdose of Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger's former girlfriend, and the murder of a fan by Hell's Angels, who had been hired by the group's management to provide security at 1969's ill-fated Altamont festival.  Altamont was viewed by many contemporary observers as the symbolic death of the 60s dream of a burgeoning counterculture; by others as an inevitable result of the Stones' hubris and arrogance. Through it all, though, the Stones' music had echoed their turbulent lifestyle and soundtracked the tumultuous times, from the upfront sexual bravado of "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" in 1965, through the apocalyptic swirl of "Gimme Shelter" in 1969, to the swagger of "Brown Sugar" in 1971.  Sticky Fingers, the group's ninth album, nestled at the top of the British and US pop charts as the Stones, their families and extended entourage decamped to France to begin their exile. Richards sensed that the reason for their flight from Britain was not just to do with their dire financial predicament.  "There was a feeling you were being edged out of your own country by the British government," he remembers. "They couldn't ignore that we were a force to be reckoned with."  Having searched the coastline and hills around the town of Villefranche-sur-Mer for a suitable recording space, the Stones then opted to start working in the cavernous, multi-roomed basement of Nellcôte, with their mobile recording studio parked outside in the driveway. The house had once been occupied by the Nazis, and in a recent interview Richards describes working there as "like trying to make a record in the Führerbunker. It was that sort of feeling… very Germanic down there – swastikas on the staircase… Upstairs, it was fantastic. Like Versailles. But down there… it was Dante's Inferno."  In the often intense heat of the dank basement, the group struggled to get started. Musicians set up their instruments in adjoining rooms, with Bill Wyman having to play his bass in one space while his amplifiers stood in a hallway. Initially, they were hampered by guitars going out of tune due to the humidity. Basic communication, too, was a problem, with Jimmy Miller continually having to run from the mobile studio to the basement to deliver his instructions.  Then, a few weeks in, Mick Jagger announced that he was going to marry Bianca Pérez Morena de Macias, a Nicaraguan-born model, in nearby St Tropez. The international press and a clutch of the world's most famous pop stars jetted in for the very public wedding ceremony. As Jagger and his bride departed on honeymoon, the celebrations continued for a week at Villa Nellcôte. A week after they stopped, Gram Parsons, the country-rock singer who had bonded with Richards in Los Angeles a few years before over their shared love for Merle Haggard and heroin, arrived with his wife, Gretchen. The couple stayed for a month before they were diplomatically asked to leave by a Stones minion. "The atmosphere kept changing but the party kept going," says Tarle, laughing.  Interestingly, the Stones in Exile documentary does not even mention Parsons, whose closeness to Richards rattled the possessive Jagger. "Keith and Gram were intimate like brothers," says Tarle, "especially musically. The idea was floating around that Gram would produce a Gram Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones Records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Gram and Keith might even tour together to promote it. And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones. So, yes, there was tension. You could feel it and I captured it on Mick's face in some of my pictures."  The music the Stones made in Nellcôte reflected those tensions, as well as the sense of exile and uncertainty that hung heavily over the group, and the continuing encroachment of heroin on the lives of Richards and Pallenberg, and on the lives of some of those who entered their orbit. Speaking recently, Richards protested that he was not the only drug user in the group. "At the time, Mick was taking everything. Charlie was hitting the brandy like a motherfucker. The least of our concerns was what we ingested. These sorts of questions [about drugs] are predicated on what came a few years later when… I would play the game. 'Oh, you want that Keith Richards? I'll give you the baddest mother you've ever seen.'"  By October, though, heroin use seems to have been a constant in the lives of Richards and Pallenberg. "I walked into the living room one day and this guy had a big bag of smack," Pallenberg remembers, "and everything just disintegrated." Perhaps it was telling that when Richards bought himself a speedboat, he called it Mandrax.  Heroin brought with it the usual problems of supply and demand, and the usual retinue of shady characters and criminals, both local and from nearby Marseille. Villa Nellcôte was such an open house that, one day in September, burglars walked out of the front gate with nine of Richards's guitars, Bobby Keys's saxophone and Bill Wyman's bass in broad daylight while the occupants were watching television in the living room. "That's how loose and stupid it was out there," says Wyman. The crime was reputedly carried out by dealers from Marseille who were owed money by Richards. The nocturnal goings-on at Nellcôte were also starting to attract the attention of the local populace and the increasingly suspicious police force. "The music was so loud, really, really loud," Pallenberg remembers. "Sometimes I went to Villefranche during the day and you could hear the music there. And it went on all night."  Whatever the truth of the rumour about Pallenberg encouraging the teenage daughter of the resident chef to try heroin, the police eventually raided Nellcôte and, in 1973, both she and Richards were charged with possession of heroin and intent to traffic. The resulting guilty verdict meant that Richards was banned from entering France for two years, and thus the Stones could not play concerts there.  As summer turned to autumn, people started drifting away from Nellcôte and, in November 1971, Richards and Pallenberg followed suit. The album was eventually finished in Sunset Sound studios in Los Angeles. In the documentary, Jagger reveals that some of the lyrics were written at the last minute, including the album's first single, "Tumbling Dice", which was composed "after I sat down with the housekeeper and talked about gambling". The words to another gambling song, the frenetic "Casino Boogie", were created by Jagger and Richards in the cut-up mode made famous by William Burroughs, which gives a lie to the notion that the line about "kissing cunt in Cannes" refers to an episode in Jagger's notoriously promiscuous sex life.  Jagger also denied recently that "Soul Survivor" was about his relationship with Keith Richards during the making of Exile. On it, he sings the line, "You're gonna be the death of me".  In places, Exile on Main St does indeed sound, in the best possible way, like an album made by a bunch of drunks and junkies who were somehow firing on all engines. Jim Price and Bobby Keys's horns are an integral part of the dirty sound, as is Nicky Hopkins's rolling piano. Songs such as the galloping opener, "Rocks Off", surely about the effects of a heroin hit, and "All Down the Line" are messily powerful, with vocals fading in and out of focus and the group kicking up a storm underneath. "Tumbling Dice" features one of the greatest opening gear changes in rock'n'roll and a swagger that carries all before it.  In one way, the double album, housed in Robert Frank's contact sheet-style cover, is Keith Richards's swan song of sorts, a final blast of rock'n'roll energy before he descended into a protracted heroin addiction that would often make him seem – and sound – disconnected from the rest of the group during live shows. After Exile, Jagger carried the weight and, despite some great moments on subsequent albums including Goat's Head Soup and Black and Blue, the Stones would never sound so sexy, so raucous and abandoned, so low-down and dirty. Neither, though, would anyone else. By the time punk came and went and indie rock had taken hold, the mix of sexiness and sassiness that the Stones at their best epitomised had disappeared entirely from rock music. So had the kind of survival instinct that the group drew on when the going got tough.  "The Stones really felt like exiles," Richards says. "It was us against the world now. So, fuck you! That was the attitude." You can still hear it, loud and clear, on this messy, inchoate, rock'n'roll masterpiece; the Rolling Stones in excelsis.
COMING TO A RECORD SHOP NEAR YOU SOON – THE NEWLY AUTHORISED VERSION OF THE ROLLING STONES' BIBLE 
You don't remain one of the music industry's most lucrative concerns after nearly 50 years in the business by being wasteful and the Rolling Stones are rarely profligate as far as recorded material is concerned. So while a quick internet search will reveal the usual array of bootleg out-takes and alternative versions, thus far, repeated reissues of the band's back catalogue have rarely offered more than remastering existing material and adding fancy artwork.  This is one of the reasons this month's version of 1972's Exile on Main St, released on 17 May, is news and probably why it was held back from last year's unremarkable repackaging of their 70s output. Most of the fresh songs contained among its 10 extra tracks are genuinely unheard, lost-to-the-mists-of-time rarities.  There's been some tinkering, though, with Jagger finishing the lyrics and lead vocals to "Following the River", as well as adding the odd vocal flourish to other tunes. "Keith put guitar on one or two," Jagger told Rolling Stone magazine recently, although Richards himself declared: "I really wanted to leave them pretty much as they were. I didn't want to interfere with the Bible."  The impressively slouchy blues of "Plundered my Soul" has already been aired, gaining a limited release last weekend in support of international Record Store Day. "Good Time Women" is an excellent early incarnation of "Tumbling Dice" that has been knocking about online for a while, albeit in less polished form.  Like much of Exile, it dates from the sessions for 1971's Sticky Fingers, although another new track "I'm Not Signifying" originates from the notoriously drug-addled sessions at Nellcôte in the south of France.  There's a further treat included in the £99.99 deluxe box set version, something that adds to the sense that the Exile reissue is a sign that the Stones may be catching up with their peers and beginning to direct their own mythology more firmly, in the manner of, say, Bob Dylan with his recent flurry of official bootlegs and documentaries.  Among the commemorative hardback book and postcards is 10 minutes of footage from the infamous Cocksucker Blues documentary, shot on the band's particularly debauched 1972 US tour in support of Exile. Inevitably, the edit features Keith hurling a television off a hotel balcony and Mick ordering room service, rather than the infamous sex and drugs scenes that prompted the band to halt the film's full release. (The entire 93-minute version can still only be shown in the presence of the now 85-year-old director Robert Frank.)  Frank's film is named after another lost Stones track, their final single for Decca, rejected by the label because of its title. It made one brief appearance on a German compilation and hasn't been heard since. Apart from on the web, of course. [Gareth Grundy]

@'The Guardian'

'Exile On Main Street Blues'

(Unreleased track)

HERE

johannhari101 The Pope calls British memo joking about him "offensive." You know what I find offensive? RAPING CHILDREN. THOUSANDS. FOR YEARS
johannhari101 I really find it vile to suggest criticising the mass rape of the children of Catholics & Vatican cover-up is bigoted against Catholics. 

Flirt with Clegg and you will end up married to Cameron

Nick Clegg today signalled that he would speak to the Conservatives first about the formation of a minority government if Labour came third by share of the vote on 6 May, rejecting the constitutional convention that the prime minister should be allowed to try to form a government first.
The Liberal Democrat leader also made it explicit for the first time that electoral reform would be an unavoidable precondition of any coalition government as he insisted that Labour will have forfeited the right to govern if it comes third.
Labour tonight claimed Clegg had blundered by prematurely setting out new, detailed conditions on what would happen if there is no clear winner in the general election – claiming he looked arrogant and self-interested.
Lord Mandelson, Labour's election strategist, immediately warned in a campaign memo that "voters who flirt with Nick Clegg are likely to end up married to David Cameron". He said Clegg "had made clear his hostility to Labour and his preference to side with the Tories in a coalition if this arises. In other words, vote Nick and get Dave and George – not a nice prospect for people with progressive values."
The latest tracking poll from YouGov in the Sun suggests that Labour remains in third place, but the Conservatives are not drawing away from Liberal Democrats. The poll shows the Conservatives on 34 points (no change), the Liberal Democrats on 30 (up 1) and Labour on 28 (down 1).
The Lib Dems insisted that Clegg's remarks were being over-interpreted, and he was merely rejecting the constitutional assumption that the prime minister in the event of a hung parliament would always have the first opportunity to try to form a minority government.
Clegg said he would not prop up Labour if it came third in the vote yet secured the most seats. He said: "It seems to me that it's just preposterous, the idea that if a party comes third in terms of the number of votes, it still has somehow the right to carry on squatting in No 10 and continue to lay claim to having the prime minister of the country.
"What I'm saying here is pointing at a very, very irrational possible outcome of our potty electoral system, which is that a party that has spectacularly lost the election because fewer people are voting for it than any other party, could nonetheless according to constitutional tradition and convention still lay claim to providing the prime minister of the country."
With the campaign entering its final full week, Clegg may feel he needed to send out an anti-Brown message as polling suggested the Tory leader, David Cameron, was gaining traction with his warning that if voters back Clegg, they will end up with Brown in No 10.
Clegg also spoke for the first time about the possibility of sitting in cabinet with rival parties after the general election.
Liberal Democrat officials insisted their leader was not demanding Brown's head as the price of co-operating with Labour in the event of a hung parliament. But Clegg said Cameron and Brown would be vulnerable within their parties if they failed to secure an overall majority.
With characteristic frankness, the home secretary, Alan Johnson, said: "Look, it doesn't take a genius to think that if you are third in the popular vote, then … you are not best-placed to deal with it. We want to be first in the popular vote. We are going out over the next 11 days – and there are an awful lot of uncommitted voters."
Johnson said he was open to backing a more proportional voting system, closer to what Clegg wants, but another Labour electoral reformer, Peter Hain, told the Guardian that proportional systems break the link with constituencies and so make it more difficult to sack corrupt MPs.
Mandelson claimed in his campaign letter "as much as a third of the electorate are undecided. The challenges facing the country require a workhorse at the helm, not a couple of show ponies."
Liberal Democrats and Conservatives today ridiculed a request by Labour to broadcasters to focus more on policy analysis. The opposition parties claimed the appeal revealed Labour's unease at Brown's weak performances in the leadership debates.
Brown will try to cut through what he regards as the media's refusal to focus on policy by making three set-piece speeches this week on health, families and crime.
His speeches will put more emphasis on fairness and equality, rather than discussions on if it is right to withdraw £6bn from the economy this year. Appearing without a tie, and offering more pugilistic rhetoric than before, he said: "The Tory motto is not 'God helps people who help themselves', but 'God helps those whom he has already helped'."

@'The Guardian'

Star Wars Uncut "The Escape"

BEWARE!

There is a group standing for some parliamentary seats calling themselves the National Liberal Party. After doing some diggng up on them it seems that they came out of the NF and the Thirdway. They are billing themselves as Liberals but it looks as if they are quite clearly fascists. They do not represent the threat... that the BNP represent but...

Those standing are, in the following areas:

Edinburgh North & Leith - John Hein
Exeter - Chris Gale
Hackney South & Shoreditch - Ben Rae .
Thirsk & Malton - John Clark
Liverpool West Derby - Steve Radford

This could explain why the BNP are not standing in Edinburgh when they said they would !

Exile's 'Page 3 pin-up' # 1 (Marilyn Monroe)

(Thanx Tony!)

Move Underground by Nick Mamatas

Burroughs, Kerouac and Cassady Vs Cthulhu
HERE

Allan Sillitoe RIP

Author Alan Sillitoe dies in London aged 82

Alan Sillitoe was still working up until his death

The author Alan Sillitoe has died aged 82 at Charing Cross Hospital in London, his family has said.

The Nottingham-born novelist emerged in the 1950s as one of the "Angry Young Men" of British fiction.
His son David said he hoped his father would be remembered for his contribution to literature.
His novels included Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, both of which were made into films.
The two books are regarded as classic examples of kitchen sink dramas reflecting life in the mid 20th century Britain.
Mr Sillitoe left school at 14 to work in the Raleigh bicycle factory in his hometown before joining the Royal Air Force (RAF) four years later.
He worked as a wireless operator in Malaya but while in the RAF, he contracted tuberculosis and spent 16 months in hospital where he began to write novels.
The award-winning writer was married to the poet Ruth Fainlight, with whom he had two children, David and Susan.
As well as numerous novels he published several volumes of poetry, children's books and was the author of a number of stage and screen plays.
In 1995, his autobiography Life Without Armour was well received.
Last year, he appeared on the BBC's Desert Island Discs, where he said if he was castaway, his ideal companions would be a record of Le Ca Ira sung by Edith Piaf, a copy of the RAF navigation manual, The Air Publication 1234, and a communications receiver - but for receiving only.

@'BBC'

The lonliness of the long distance runner indeed and somewhat ironically on the same day as the London marathon was held!

Andrew Sullivan: You really are a complete fugn idiot!

"As a Whiggish Tory, there is nothing I'd rather see than the demise of the Labour party, the architect of the socialist state and the culture of class-hatred that I grew up in and that Thatcher alone helped partially dismantle..."

Thatcher partially dismantled class-hatred? 

You have got to be fugn kidding or living in a different universe to one that we lived in under her rule.

Caveat: I did leave the UK in 1983 after putting up with that woman's divisive politics for 4 years!

HA! - The best bar graph ever from Mr. Khan

Roots Manoeuvre: What happened when reggae and punk went head to head in the UK

It's late autumn 1977, and the Stranglers are headlining a show in the Midlands. The support comes from the roots reggae band Steel Pulse. They know what to expect from a punk crowd: gobbing, cans being thrown. Steel Pulse are barely into their first number when a huge wad of phlegm shoots from the audience and lands on the hand of bassist Ron "Stepper" McQueen. The band's nickname for McQueen was "Psycho" and they fully expected him to live up to his name. "We all stared at Ronnie and we stopped playing," remembers Steel Pulse's singer, Mykaell Riley. "So there's this silence onstage, then eventually 4,000 punks went silent." McQueen didn't react, however. Instead, Stranglers bassist, Jean-Jacques Burnel, stepped out of the wings, waded into the crowd, identified the culprit, and knocked him out cold. Then he turned to face the crowd.

"He just went, 'You fucking wankers. You love reggae,'" laughs Riley.

If 1977 was the year of the punk rock explosion, it also saw the rise of another musical movement, intimately entwined with punk - a massive eruption in British reggae, which became the black counterpart to the white heat of punk. The Clash played reggae covers and Joe Strummer recounted his experience of reggae all-nighters in White Man in Hammersmith Palais. Rastafarian DJ Don Letts played reggae discs between punk bands at the Roxy. Even Bob Marley - who was living in London at the time - recognised the developments with his 1977 song Punky Reggae Party. But while the Clash and Marley have come to symbolise the link between reggae and punk, the huge growth in homegrown reggae in the wake of punk has become one of the era's lost treasures.

White kids had listened to reggae since the original 1960s skinhead movement embraced the music, but 1977 saw a common bond spring up between the punks and the rastas. Dub producer Adrian Sherwood - a white kid from Slough who fell in love with the "crazy intros" of the records played by his black mate's sister - remembers going round to Johnny Rotten's house and hearing reggae, not Generation X. Sherwood also remembers that the path to reggae enlightenment wasn't necessarily weed: "My Mum, bless her, wasn't the best cook on earth. I'd go round my mates and have fried fish, beans and rice. It was unbelievable." More important, though, was the sense of shared purpose the fans had.

Although punk was fast and guitar-based and reggae slow and bass-heavy, the punk look (spiky hair, leather jackets and combat trousers) wasn't much different to Rastafarian chic (dreadlocks, leather jackets and combat gear). Visually and otherwise, punk and reggae audiences were seen as outcasts.

"The bond was very simple," explains Peter Harris, a British reggae guitarist who played on Punky Reggae Party. "Blacks were getting marginalised." British Irish kids - like Rotten - and black youths were forced together because of signs on pub doorways that read "No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs", which became the title of Rotten's autobiography. "The punks were the same," Harris argues. "They were seen as dregs of society. We were all anti-establishment, so there was a natural synergy between us."

Harris's father Dennis ran reggae labels with Matumbi's Dennis Bovell, a massively influential Ladbroke Grove-based Barbadian who - after inventing Lover's Rock - gave punk musicians a new sound when he produced the Slits and the Pop Group, helping them experiment with dub. Harris Jr remembers growing up in the Grove, where the Clash's Mick Jones ate breakfast at Bites cafe alongside rastas. Further bonding took place at gigs and in blues clubs like Notting Hill's House of Dread. But the punk-reggae bond went national - and attracted the interest of the big labels - when John Peel started championing both musics on the radio, playing entire sides of albums by Misty in Roots and Adrian Sherwood's Creation Rebel.

"He was great, John Peel," says Sherwood, whose reggae fandom led to him first importing Jamaican reggae records and then operating the mixing desk for innumerable reggae greats. He remembers sitting in a car in Ladbroke Grove with the Jamaican legend Prince Far-I when Peel played the first three tracks of Creation Rebel's record: "The next day I had all those wankers like [Rough Trade's] Geoff Travis ringing me going 'I love it, man.' I said 'I played it to you three weeks ago and you turned it down.'"

But suddenly Rough Trade was far from the biggest label with an interest in reggae. The majors were signing reggae bands almost as fast as punk groups. Ladbroke Grove's Aswad and Birmingham's Steel Pulse signed to Island; Virgin put out the Short Circuit compilation, which saw Steel Pulse share vinyl grooves with Penetration and Buzzcocks. But for young black people, the music went deeper than fashion.

British reggae established its own identity, independent of Jamaican reggae, when the bands started singing about their own experiences. Tunes like Tabby Cat Kelly's sublimely mournful Don't Call Us Immigrants offered the feelings of the first British-born generation of black kids: "What's a joke to you is death to me ... I'll respect your colour if you respect mine." Misty in Roots' singer Poko - who dropped his given name, Walford Tyson - remembers a shared "struggle in the music" with punk but particularly remembers the impact of reggae music on young black audiences: "It was pure emotion." Like Steel Pulse, Misty were young and angry. Poko, who was born in St Kitts, says British acts "no longer wanted to sing about love and women. We wanted to do progressive protest music." There was a lot to protest about, and top of the list was police oppression. Punks were picked on but black youths had it much, much harder. Gaylene Martin, a New Zealander who worked with reggae acts on Virgin Records, remembers attending a Peter Tosh gig at the Rainbow theatre in London with Jamaican friends: their car was followed and only the black occupants were questioned.

"I was threatened with arrest so many times it became a joke," says Peter Harris, who opened a shop in Portobello Road and was arrested entering his own premises because the police assumed he was a burglar. He ended up crashing through the showroom fighting with three policemen. "My wife said 'What are you doing with my husband? He owns the shop!'"

The excuse the police needed to target black youths was marijuana, and they used the Sus law to stop and search. The crackdown saw reggae clubs closed, and the key figures in the scene facing prosecution. Dennis Bovell was jailed for drugs offences after police raided a soundclash - where reggae sound systems would compete with exclusive mixes in front of fans, who followed sound systems like football teams. The sentence was quashed on appeal six months later.

Harris - a non-toker - admits there were times when bands were lucky not to attract the law's attention: "I was in a car once and it was so full of smoke, the driver couldn't see through the windscreen." But increasingly, long-simmering and deep-rooted tensions erupted in violence.

Harris was in Notting Hill when the area erupted in the riots of 1976, which inspired the Clash to sing that they wanted "a riot of their own" in White Riot. He remembers "an amazing sunny day. I saw policemen holding dustbins. The police got a right kicking. There were thousands of angry people who were fed up being treated like dirt." Over the next few years rioting spread across the country (Steel Pulse sang of civil unrest in Handsworth Revolution in 1978, the riots following in 1981). "There was all this going on across the country and reggae was the soundtrack," Harris says.

Punk was, too. Southall punk band the Ruts wrote their reggae-based song Jah War, which told how Misty manager Clarence Baker was knocked to the ground by the police's Special Patrol Group during anti-National Front protests in 1979 that saw a schoolteacher, Blair Peach, die as a result of police brutality. Baker was luckier, but it was close. "They coshed him," remembers Poko. "Nearly killed him, man." Jah War documented a growing sense of outrage over such events - and also repaid mates Misty for issuing the Ruts' first single In a Rut on their People Unite label, another way in which punk and reggae united. It was a confused time and Mykaell Riley remembers black skinheads, white skinheads who weren't racist and others who would say: "We like your music, it's black people we don't like." But increasingly, people realised that music itself could fuel change.

Steel Pulse wrote a song called Ku Klux Klan about the racist movement. The radio shunned it because it was provocative but the black band had an enormous impact when they donned the KKK hoods onstage. Even though the KKK was an American phenomenon, British audiences recognised the power of the imagery and would often fall silent. "It was us saying 'We're in control now and we're not afraid of you'," remembers Riley. "In terms of our punk audience that was a powerful statement."

When a group of musicians and activists started putting punk and reggae bands on together and called the gigs Rock Against Racism, "RAR" became a national movement. Bands as diverse as XTC, Aswad, Generation X, Tribesman, the Slits, Joy Division and Misty came together to oppose the rising National Front. The biggest gig, headlined by the Clash and Steel Pulse in east London's Victoria Park in 1978, was attended by 80,000 people. "The British public - certainly the youth - totally came out against the NF," says Riley. "They were turning up in massive numbers and telling them they could not make headway with this stance."

Almost three decades on, sitting in Southall's community centre - where Misty used to play before the council introduced noise restrictions - Poko laments the Southall of his youth, which resisted the NF. "We had such strength," he says. "We felt we could do anything." But he shouldn't be downhearted, because as a result of the anti-racist campaigners' efforts, the Front were finished as a mass political force and police racism was exposed.

But did reggae change perceptions of black music? In the 80s, black acts were still told to water down their sound to get hit singles, but reggae crossed over into pop with the Police and Culture Club. A more direct legacy of punk and reggae's fusion came in multiracial acts such as UB40, and the chart dominance of bands such as Madness and the Specials in the early 80s - acts now regarded not as reggae or ska bands, but great British pop groups. Of the original pioneers, only Aswad - who scored a No 1 in 1988 with Don't Turn Around - became British household names, but Misty and Steel Pulse still tour and are renowned worldwide. However, their music resonates everywhere: the sound systems laid down the roots of remix culture and the rhythms gave birth to drum'n'bass. And 1970s British reggae still sounds great today.

"The question was always: 'Is your reggae authentic?' says Mykaell Riley, who is now a lecturer at the University of Westminster. "But it was a cumulative experience of growing up in the UK in a different skin. That's what made what we did different."

Misty in Roots: Live at the Counter Eurovision (People Unite)

One of John Peel's favourite records of all time: sublime 1979 conscious reggae with a keyboard-heavy twist.

Various: Don't Call Us Immigrants (Pressure Sounds)

Superior Brit reggae compilation featuring the likes of Tabby Cat Kelly and Reggae Regular.

Linton Kwesi Johnson: Dread Beat an' Blood (Virgin)

Brutally brilliant 1978 opus in which Dennis Bovell's dub beats back the reggae poet's uncompromising raps, such as Inglan Is a Bitch.

Steel Pulse: Handsworth Revolution (Island)

The Brummies' seminal 1978 debut: heavy bass and hard-hitting lyrics.

Aswad: Aswad (Island)

Headed by one-time Double Deckers star (and now 6Music DJ) Brinsley Forde, Aswad's 1976 debut memorably documents the British black experience.

Dave Simpson @'The Guardian'

Sally Seltmann - Harmony to My Heartbeat

Céleste Boursier-Mougenot At London's Barbican (Update)

(Thanx Michael!)

Stephen Colbert On Arizona's New Police State: "No Problemo"

The Colbert Report	Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
The Word - No Problemo
www.colbertnation.com

Foreign Office apologises for Pope 'condom' memo

The Foreign Office has apologised for a "foolish" document which suggested the Pope's UK visit could be marked by the launch of "Benedict-branded" condoms.

Called "The ideal visit would see...", the paper suggested the Pope be invited to open an abortion clinic and bless a gay marriage during September's visit.
The Foreign Office stressed the paper, which resulted from a "brainstorm" on the visit, did not reflect its views.
The junior civil servant responsible had been put on other duties, it said.
Details of the document emerged after it was obtained by the Sunday Telegraph.
'Song with Queen'
The UK's ambassador to the Vatican, Francis Campbell, has met senior officials of the Holy See to express regret on behalf of the government.
Foreign Secretary David Miliband is said to have been "appalled" by its contents.

ANALYSIS Robert Pigott, BBC religious affairs correspondent It's clear that what the Foreign Office has called "this foolish document" did not reflect government policy. Its tone is clearly frivolous, and it came from junior officials. But it has, nevertheless, the potential to cause considerable damage. Whether fairly or not, it will leave some Catholics with the impression of a culture within official circles in which their Church's teaching is not taken seriously. Some will suspect prejudice against faith groups. Perhaps most damaging of all, it could leave an impression that the Pope might be regarded as a figure of fun less than five months before his visit to Britain. Apart from the pressure on the papal visit from public feeling about sex abuse, and the threat of demonstrations against the Pope, the government needs the Vatican's help in a global diplomatic effort to curb climate change and fight poverty. How serious and far-reaching the effect of the document is depends partly on how the Church itself responds.

The paper was attached as one of three "background documents" to a memo dated 5 March 2010 inviting officials in Whitehall and Downing Street to attend a meeting to discuss themes for the papal visit.
It suggested Benedict XVI could show his hard line on the sensitive issue of child abuse allegations against Roman Catholic priests by "sacking dodgy bishops" and launching a helpline for abused children.
It went on to propose the Pope could apologise for the Spanish Armada or sing a song with the Queen for charity.
It listed "positive" public figures who could be made part of the Pope's visit, including former Prime Minister Tony Blair and 2009 Britain's Got Talent runner-up Susan Boyle, and those considered "negative", such as Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney and prominent atheist Richard Dawkins.
The civil servant responsible said in a cover note: "Please protect; these should not be shared externally. The 'ideal visit' paper in particular was the product of a brainstorm which took into account even the most far-fetched of ideas."
An investigation was launched after some recipients of the memo, said to have been circulated to a restricted list, objected to its tone.
A Foreign Office spokesman said the department was "deeply sorry" for any offence the document had caused.
"This is clearly a foolish document that does not in any way reflect UK government or Foreign Office policy or views. Many of the ideas in the document are clearly ill-judged, naive and disrespectful," he said.
"The text was not cleared or shown to ministers or senior officials before circulation. As soon as senior officials became aware of the document, it was withdrawn from circulation.
"The individual responsible has been transferred to other duties. He has been told orally and in writing that this was a serious error of judgement and has accepted this view."
'Blue-skies thinking'
The Foreign Office said the memo had resulted from discussions by a group of three or four junior staff in a team working on early planning for the papal visit.
A source told the BBC News website the individual who has since been moved to other duties had called the group together for "some blue-skies creative thinking about how to make the visit a success", but their discussions had become "a joke that has gone too far".
Earlier this year the Pope announced 2010 would see the first papal visit to the UK since John Paul II's visit in 1982.
Pope Benedict XVI's visit will take place from 16 to 19 September, during which time he is expected to visit Birmingham, as part of the planned beatification of Cardinal John Newman, and Scotland.
The visit will come in the autumn of what is proving to be a difficult year for the Pope with a wave of allegations that Church authorities in Europe and North and South America failed to deal properly with priests accused of paedophilia.
The Pope himself has been accused of being part of a culture of secrecy and of not taking strong enough steps against paedophiles when he had that responsibility as a cardinal in Rome.
However, his supporters say he has been the most pro-active pope yet in confronting abuse.

@'BBC'

This is a creative brief

(Click to enlarge)

Well it didn't quite come together for the hits album but I still have my real zip copy of 'Exile On  Moan Main Street! 

@'Possibly Awesome'

Gorillaz - Superfast Jellyfish (SBTRKT Remix Instrumental)

   

Armando Iannucci: Here in Spin Alley, objectivity has elected to go on holiday

For the past couple of weeks I've been lucky enough to attend the leaders' debates courtesy of Sky News, who've plonked me in front of Adam Boulton as a quirky alternative to politicians saying that their leader proved himself better than Cicero in putting points across.

This life as an election pundit sounds glamorous, but is in fact possibly only one step up from being a sex slave. No slur on the Sky News people, who are professional and have never struck me as part of the propaganda arm of the Murdoch/ Cameron machine, but more a reflection of the experience that awaits when you step into Spin Alley, the heaving ballroom of fluster and reportage that houses a hundred journalists, a lot of body odour, and a legion of political spokespeople all calmly yet desperately trying to persuade you that "our guy may not have won, technically, but, given the level of expectation stacked against him, along with the frankly disgraceful series of inaccurate remarks made by the other two, to have then seemed not to have won such a low level of debate is so different from being last in a high-level debate, that it is, indeed, the very opposite, which is why it's a worthy achievement tantamount to victory itself".

In Spin Alley, objectivity is on holiday, and out to play come a kindergarten of political operatives spinning away. All journalists gravitate towards them, so suddenly a well-ordered room arranged in neat rows turns into a miasma of mess and three distinct clumps of suits and cameras surrounding the three spinners. This is how galaxies form in space, and the spinners are black holes of information at the centre, drawing all minds towards them and crushing them into infinitesimally thin particles devoid of form and intelligence

 The forces of spin in the room are so convulsive that they generate their own satellite spinners; last week, the shadow Home Secretary Chris Grayling was heard spinning that, in the practice debates where he was pretending to be Gordon Brown, he outclassed the real David Cameron. This week, a Labour sub-spinner spun that David Miliband would be replacing Peter Mandelson as the spinner for Gordon Brown, therefore reflecting the fact they were placing less emphasis on spin. If Dr Seuss ever wrote a stage play, it would look and sound like this.

Meantime, all the broadcast networks set up little pens inside which their reporters try to unspin what's been spun in front of them and for the benefit of live TV cameras. Walking down the row, listening to the collective chirruping, it's hard not to think that is what it would be like being locked inside a battery farm for the night.

As a "commentator", though, I have professional obligations to enter the pen, and that's when the slave auction starts. Once you make your face and voice available for anyone who's interested, you realise that a whole army of programme-makers are assessing just how interesting they think you actually are at any given moment. And so last week, seconds away from being about to speak in front of someone's live TV camera, I was pulled back and replaced by Alastair Campbell, who happened to be in the area and was clearly a more interesting catch. Having only a few seconds to compose myself I caught Campbell muttering: "If it isn't the bloke who's been making a living out of me for the past 10 years."

This is now the most dangerous moment for me. I'm standing alone in a room where everyone else has someone to talk to. It's the worst party you've ever been to, yet even worse, because there are live TV cameras happening to film you in the back of their shot as you stand through several gradations of loneliness. And then, salvation. Someone runs up and says, "Quickly, there's George Osborne. He's doing BBC. If he then walks right he's going to someone else, so that means you go left and you're on." We watch Osborne, he turns right. I dash up the stairs to the left. Meantime, Osborne does a U-turn, goes left too, we wedge each other on the stairs, his minder gives him a push, and he's on and I'm now in the back of shot desperately trying to look popular.

So what does it all mean? Have I managed to get a sense of the convulsive shifts taking place in British politics and a more intimate reading of the mind-sets of the three parties? Well, after a fashion, yes. Being a professional watcher of the debates does force you into analysing every verbal tic. Sometimes, this gets too detailed. Did David Cameron really say "I was with some of our forces in Afghanistan and I was really blown away", did Gordon Brown really refer to "guys and girls" and say "I was speaking to young people only yesterday", and did Nick Clegg actually argue that, if only we came together, we could do something different this time about the Pope?

But underneath it all, I can detect a sense in the room of where this is all heading. For me, these debates so far have been about the increasingly large question mark over David Cameron's head. Cameron is having an existential crisis. This is partly because Cameron himself has no single identity but is a composite of other people's; a bit of Blair here, a bit of Thatcher there. His "big society" idea resembles Lyndon Johnson's "great society" pitch of the early 1960s, while his "the great ignored" phrase is a reworking of Richard Nixon's "silent majority". Going into the debates as "the other bloke" seemed a good idea, but falls apart when there is indeed another bloke there too.

Nick Clegg has become the David Cameron it's actually OK to like, and David Cameron, who always thought he was the most likeable David Cameron because he was the only one, doesn't quite know how to respond. This week, his way out of the identity theft was to thieve one back and his best moments came when he tried to be the most Nick Clegg of the three. He stared down the camera, but also distanced himself from Brown and Clegg and, at one point, reworked Clegg's pitch from last week by pointing to the other two politicians squabbling and telling everyone he was the only man to do something different.

And so in Spin Alley, I could see relieved Labour spinners, happy Clegg ones, and pretty thorough but not ecstatic Cameronians. They are sitting on top of the polls, but not by much, they are possibly on course to be the biggest party, but not with a majority, and they've hit a brick wall of indifference from a lot of people. They're not despondent, but I can honestly say I haven't spoken to a Tory politico or a pro-Conservative journalist in the past week who has anything other than a settled, mildly annoyed look of forbearance behind their eyes.

They're in a place at the moment which they know is just not good enough, but which may well have to do. I came away from these debates with nothing more striking than the reflection that all the young hopefuls in the Conservative Party ranks look like first-time home-owners who've just bought a house they kind of like, but only because the previous day they excitedly rang the estate agents to be told the house they fell in love with has already gone.

@'The Independent'

Factory Floor live - Lying @ Offset Festival '09

Factory Floor Live: Beyond The Industrial Production Line

Another one bites the dust...

Nazi corporal Schaefer dies in Chile prison