Monday 21 March 2011

Flights of fancy dress: Polly Borland's portraits marry the infantile and the fetishistic

Nick Cave in a blue wig, from Polly Borland's latest series of work, 'Smudge'

In 1978, in Melbourne, Australia, photographer Polly Borland was at a party with a little-known band called The Birthday Party. Borland was getting a ribbing from a friend, but the band's guitarist, Nick Cave, stepped in to defend her.

So began a 30-year relationship between the pair which continues to this day. Borland lives with her husband, the director of The Road, John Hillcoat, in the same area of Brighton as Cave and his wife, the British model Susie Bick. Borland has photographed Cave numerous times, most recently for the cover of "Money and Run", Cave's forthcoming track with supergroup UNKLE. Now, there is Smudge, an exhibition and book featuring Cave posing in various infantile, adapted costumes, opening at Other Criteria, Damien Hirst's central London gallery on 18 March.

Borland meets me at the exhibition space. With her severe bob, large glasses and Australian accent she is easily recognised. She peppers her speech with an effusive laugh that punctuates periods of quieter thoughtfulness.

"Nick's kids are a year older than our son and I am good friends with his wife," she says. "We all hang out together. He asked me to do a shot for him and I asked him for a favour in return. He loved all the dressing up. I just think that he's never been interested in rules. Neither have I. Maybe it's an Australian thing. You get to a certain age and you think: who cares? We've got to enjoy ourselves."

Borland was born in Melbourne in 1958. She was given her first camera, a Nikkor, by her father when she was 16. She says she was studying at art school when she first encountered what went on to be her main influences: Diane Arbus, photojournalist Weegee, Larry Clark.

Shortly after leaving art school, Borland began working for newspapers and magazines. She moved to England in 1989.

Borland's portrait photography subtly undermines her subjects' stature. Given the rare opportunity to photograph the Queen and Gordon Brown, she took their pictures against sparkly backgrounds; Peter Lilley, when there was speculation in the press about his sexuality, sat in front of a glittering backdrop. "Editorial work came easily to me, but it was always a means to an end – it consumed me, it interested me, but I still found it creatively restrictive," she says.

Her artistic work tends to marry the infantile and the fetishistic. In one photographic series, 2001's The Babies, Borland explores the world of infantilism in adult men who enjoy dressing up as babies. In 2008's Bunny, produced with a tall, blonde Brighton actress-turned-model called Gwen, there is equally something stunning yet sinister: in one picture, Gwen is pictured topless, bent in half, wearing what are apparently a pair of stuffed tights which are made to resemble bunny ears (curiously, when discussing her relationship with Gwen now, Borland falls silent). "Much of my work is about love," she says. "I know that sounds naive, but it is about my relationship with people and their ability to trust me. I don't feel like I am manipulating people." She says with the adult baby work she felt like a mother figure. "The common link was that they all felt unloved as kids. I actually felt the whole thing wasn't that psychologically interesting. That's how it resonated with me. That's how they chose to rationalise it. I am a voyeur; at the same time I am willing to get stuck in too." She says she also modelled in the Bunny series, and that you can see her "if you look hard enough".

The new work – various models wearing all-in-one body stockings decorated with cheap fancy dress, their faces concealed with masks – is as much about Borland's relationship with her subjects as it is about imagery.

It all started, she says, when Hillcoat was shooting The Road in Pittsburgh. Borland was left to home-school their young son, and began shooting him and one of his schoolfriends in various costumes. She said she could not stray into the "areas she normally explores" – namely, nudity, and how it interacts with childlike behaviour.

Returning to Brighton, Borland decided to spend longer on the project. She roped in Cave, local photographer Mark Vessey and Sherald Lamden, who was then creative director of Alexander McQueen's contemporary line, McQ. "So it was that I went around to her house in Brighton," writes Cave in the introduction to Smudge's accompanying book. "We played dress up." According to him, Borland squeezed him into everything from body-stockings to rubber bathing caps and crotch-accentuating leotards.

"I thought I would marry the photos of Mark and Nick, which I did separately," she says. "I started with conventional costumes, but I felt that was a bit limited so I started developing my own costumes. Very basic. I used little bits of costume with body stockings and leotards and tights and pantyhose." She says "the ambience is different" with the different models; in many photographs, figure-hugging lycra make the models' identities unmistakeable; in others, through the use of cartoon-like costumes, male and female elide.

Despite Borland's protestations that her portraiture doesn't "stretch her", she has little idea why she is drawn to society's extremes.

"I think that anyone who is working creatively is a bit like litmus paper," she concludes. "I soak up a lot of stuff. I am hyper-sensitive and along the way I lead quite a conventional life. Maybe I am not acting out that stuff because it's in my work. It comes from existential angst. I think life's difficult."

Twenty prints from 'Smudge' will be on display and for sale at Other Criteria Gallery, New Bond St, London W1 (www.othercriteria.com) to 7 April. The accompanying book is published by Actar (£19.90)

Rob Sharp @'The Independent'

Sunday 20 March 2011

Why is US backing force in Libya but not Bahrain, Yemen?

Fear on methadone doctor shortage

THE number of Victorians dying from drug overdoses or suicide will rise if more doctors are not recruited to treat heroin addicts and tackle a crisis in the state's methadone prescribing service, drug experts warn.
An audit of the system found the number of people receiving methadone and buprenorphine has risen by 15 per cent to more than 13,000 in the past four years. In the period, the number of GPs prescribing the opiate-based heroin replacement drugs fell by the same percentage, to only 400, or about one in 10 GPs.
People in rural areas face the biggest challenge, as an estimated 20 doctors, mostly in inner Melbourne, look after 80 per cent of pharmacotherapy patients.
The Victorian Auditor-General's report, released this month, has renewed fears that patients trying to kick heroin will find it difficult to get help.
David Nolte, a pharmacist who dispenses methadone to about 100 people at his Carlton North pharmacy, said the shortage of doctors and pharmacists willing to treat drug-dependent patients was ''outrageous''.
''If people can't get to see a pharmacotherapy or a drug and alcohol doctor there is a time where they're hot to trot and they want to start on a program. If you miss that opportunity you lose it altogether and people can go back to drug-using, they can overdose or commit suicide,'' he said.
Doctors are more reluctant to take on patients with drug problems, with the Auditor-General's report showing that last year only 24 GPs carried out the training required to prescribe methadone. The state government's target was 70.
Associate Professor Paul Dietze, head of the Burnet Institute's alcohol and other drug research group, said a properly funded and managed pharmacotherapy system was cost-effective.
''It really does save the community a lot of money and a lot of heartache,'' he said. ''It fundamentally alters the way in which illicit drug markets operate and because there's going to be much less demand for drugs, there's much less crime associated with drug use.''
State government reviews of the pharmacotherapy system in 1993, 2003 and last year all recommended an overhaul of services, but the Auditor-General found little progress had been made.
Professor Dietze said the system had been heading towards crisis for several years.
''The prescribers are getting older and some of them are nearing retirement age and they're burdened with what seems to be an extraordinarily large number of clients, so we need to be responding effectively now,'' he said.
Damon Brogan, executive officer of Harm Reduction Victoria, a group supporting illicit drug users, said the worst shortages were in regional and urban growth areas, where one GP could look after up to 500 drug-dependent patients.
''If these patients aren't able to have their prescriptions and their dispensing maintained, they're going to get very, very sick. They might go back to heroin or mix other drugs with alcohol, so there would be the increased potential for both suicide and poly-drug overdose,'' Mr Brogan said.
Harry Hemley, president of the Victorian branch of the Australian Medical Association, a GP in Northcote, believed many doctors were reluctant to prescribe methadone because drug-dependent patients could be disruptive and aggressive.
Professor Dietze called for New South Wales-style public clinics where patients could access methadone for up to a year. Once stabilised, they are seen by GPs privately.
A spokeswoman for Mary Wooldridge, the minister responsible for drug and alcohol policy, said the Coalition's drug strategy would improve access to pharmacotherapy but gave no detail on how this would be achieved.
Jill Stark @'The Age'

Trees and birds

Rap News 7: #Revolution!

The Alejandro Escovedo Band warms up before a show

Listen Closely: Broadcastr Brings You An Audio Guide To The Whole Wide World

Why We Could All Use a Heavy Dose of Techno-optimism

BorowitzReport Andy Borowitz

BREAKING: Pentagon Finds Traces of LSD in Office of Mission Naming #OperationWTF #Libya

WTF??? (talking of deluded)

Sarah Palin Says She Would’ve Won in 2008 If She Had Been Top of Ticket

(Transcript)

Postquake rebuilding faces supply challenges

Erosie VS Graphic Surgery

Radiation dose chart

(Click to enlarge)

@'xkcd'

Damon Albarn Prepares New Elizabethan Opera

Anyone who still thought that former Blur frontman Damon Albarn was just a showboating mockney popinjay - and bumptious to boot - is probably going to have to give in to the overwhelming body of evidence to the contrary, if not now, then soon.
Just look at his workload in the past 10 years: the final Blur album, three Gorillaz albums, a solo album of home demos, countless excursions across Africa, bringing the best talent back to perform with UK musicians in his Africa Express concerts, an opera based on the Chinese legends of a monkey god, a triumphant Blur reunion tour and Glastonbury headline slot, a Blur 7" single, a Gorillaz tour and Glastonbury headline slot, a fourth Gorillaz album (coming next month) and now another entire opera.
In the same space of time, Oasis have effectively made and toured four albums, and then split up, and then reformed without Noel. On, and Liam went to see the Spongebob Squarepants movie.
Damon's new opera, Doctor Dee, is set to premiere in June, at Manchester's International Festival, before moving down to London's Coliseum next year, as part of the city's Cultural Olympiad.
The production is based on the life of John Dee, who was Queen Elizabeth I's scientific advisor, specializing in medicine, and his reputation as an alchemist, astrologer, and spy. Which makes it a kind of cross between Harry Potter and James Bond, in ruffs, and set to music. Amazing.
Having originally started the project with comic book sage Alan Moore (he wrote, among other things, Watchmen, From Hell and V for Vendetta), Damon went on to finish it alone, and plans to take a major role in the production too. It will be directed by Rufus Norris, the Tony-nominated director who revived Don Giovanni for the English National Opera last year, and brought Les Liaisons Dangereuses to Broadway in 2008.
Manchester International Festival director Alex Poots told BBC News: "It will be a big, spectacular show. I know that Damon's passionate about it and he's already written some incredibly beautiful songs, some anthemic songs."
And that's on top of the beautiful and anthemic songs he wrote when he was 'just' a pop star.
@'BBC America'

Banned plants

What's growing in your garden? The (Australian) Federal Government wants to expand the list of prohibited plants listed in the Drug Act to include among others all Angel's Trumpets, many common cacti and many native and exotic wattles. Is this necessary to fight drug trafficking and manufacture? Or will these laws make criminals out of nurseries, gardeners and botanic collectors?
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Listen @'ABC'

DISCUSSION PAPER (Implementation of model schedules for Commonwealth serious drug offences)

Police support for protesters is growing as government cuts start to bite

A deepening antipathy for the government's public spending cuts has been revealed as the head of the police union said officers patrolling next weekend's demonstrations against austerity measures would have "a lot of sympathy" with the protesters.
Emphasising the growing opposition to the speed and breadth of the cuts programme, the chairman of the Police Federation, Paul McKeever, said that officers on duty at Saturday's March for an Alternative in central London would be feeling a sense of solidarity as they policed the event, which is being organised by the Trades Union Congress (TUC).
"The great irony is that officers policing marches like the TUC are actually facing greater detriment than many of those protesting against the cuts," said McKeever, whose union represents 140,000 rank-and-file police officers.
"We're not members of the TUC and have to be careful about having too close an association, though there will be a lot of sympathy towards those marching."
The march, due to be held in London's Hyde Park, looks set to be the largest rally to date against the coalition government's policies, with organisers hoping for more than 100,000 people to attend.
Along with the unions and other campaigning bodies, a plethora of other protest groups has sprung up as the strength of feeling grows against a package of issues as diverse as tuition fee rises, the scrapping of the education maintenance allowance, bankers' bonuses, tax evasion by big business, library closures and arts and public spending cuts.
One peace activist, and veteran of the anti-war marches in 2003, told the Observer: "We will get a lot of first-time protesters on Saturday because people are getting more confident that protest is for them. It's not for a bunch of anarchists, it's families, students, old people, maybe now even the odd police officer, who don't want to put up with cuts and unfairness in Britain any more."
Groups are using technology and social media to share expertise and information as well as co-ordinate and manage direct action more efficiently. The day is expected to see traditional protests take place at the same time, with sit-ins at high street shops and banks and occupations of public buildings and universities.
In the past five months, the protest group UK Uncut has staged a steady campaign of sit-ins against tax dodging that have forced the temporary closure of branches of Barclays, Vodaphone, Boots, British Home Stores and Topshop up and down the country.
"26 March is going to be a really important day," said Anna Walker of UK Uncut. "We had the student protests and we have seen the growth of UK Uncut, but this is the first time we are going to have people from all over the UK together whose lives are being turned upside down by these cuts. It is going to be the start of something powerful."
Scotland Yard has already suggested that "troublemakers" could attempt to hijack the protest. The Met was criticised for its tactics at student tuition fee protests last year, when dozens of people were arrested during violent outbreaks. This time, members the of human rights organisation Liberty will act as independent observers.
McKeever suggested that, far from being hostile to the protesters, many police officers would share the frustrations of the day. He said that a massive march of police officers themselves could not be ruled out if the home secretary, Theresa May, pushes forward with government plans to cut back on police pay and perks.
More than 20,000 police officers marched through London in 2008 in protest about their pay, the biggest demonstration in police history.
"We had 23,000 officers on the streets on a point of principle. Imagine how many might be involved with the level of feeling at the moment. Nothing is ruled out," said McKeever.
He also warned that attempts by the government to force through changes in pay and conditions might lead to legal action. "We are exploring every avenue to make sure officers are treated fairly.
"The first duty of any government is the protection of its citizens. Yet it is being vindictive against a police service it seems to hold in very low regard.
"Mervyn King has said that it's not those in the public sector who are to blame for the crisis, but it doesn't feel like that in the police service."
He added: "They don't seem to be so accusatory towards those where the blame actually lies. There seems to be a dislike of policing with this present government – the so-called party of law and order is dead, it's buried, it's gone."
Mark Townsend and Tracy McVeigh @'The Guardian'
(GB2011)

U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Resigns Following WikiLeak Flap

Blame the Defense Department for WikiLeaks

Japan’s Nuclear Disaster Caps Decades of Faked Safety Reports, Accidents

The unfolding disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant follows decades of falsified safety reports, fatal accidents and underestimated earthquake risk in Japan’s atomic power industry.
The destruction caused by last week’s 9.0 earthquake and tsunami comes less than four years after a 6.8 quake shut the world’s biggest atomic plant, also run by Tokyo Electric Power Co. In 2002 and 2007, revelations the utility had faked repair records forced the resignation of the company’s chairman and president, and a three-week shutdown of all 17 of its reactors.
With almost no oil or gas reserves of its own, nuclear power has been a national priority for Japan since the end of World War II, a conflict the country fought partly to secure oil supplies. Japan has 54 operating nuclear reactors -- more than any other country except the U.S. and France -- to power its industries, pitting economic demands against safety concerns in the world’s most earthquake-prone country.
Nuclear engineers and academics who have worked in Japan’s atomic power industry spoke in interviews of a history of accidents, faked reports and inaction by a succession of Liberal Democratic Party governments that ran Japan for nearly all of the postwar period.
Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a seismology professor at Kobe University, has said Japan’s history of nuclear accidents stems from an overconfidence in plant engineering. In 2006, he resigned from a government panel on reactor safety, saying the review process was rigged and “unscientific.”
Nuclear Earthquake
In an interview in 2007 after Tokyo Electric’s Kashiwazaki nuclear plant was struck by an earthquake, Ishibashi said fundamental improvements were needed in engineering standards for atomic power stations, without which Japan could suffer a catastrophic disaster.
“We didn’t learn anything,” Ishibashi said in a phone interview this week. “Nuclear power is national policy and there’s a real reluctance to scrutinize it.”
To be sure, Japan’s record isn’t the worst. The International Atomic Energy Agency rates nuclear accidents on a scale of zero to seven, with Chernobyl in the former Soviet Union rated seven, the most dangerous. Fukushima, where the steel vessels at the heart of the reactors have so far not ruptured, is currently a class five, the same category as the 1979 partial reactor meltdown at Three Mile Island in the U.S...

Continue reading

Jason Clenfield @'Bloomberg'

Julian Assange's Lawyer - Rob Stary slams the Australian Government

Signalling dissent

With a tin can, some copper wire and a few dollars’ worth of nuts, bolts and other hardware, a do-it-yourselfer can build a makeshift directional antenna. A mobile phone, souped-up with such an antenna, can talk to a network tower that is dozens of kilometres beyond its normal range (about 5km, or 3 miles). As Gregory Rehm, the author of an online assembly guide for such things, puts it, homemade antennae are “as cool as the other side of the pillow on a hot night”. Of late, however, such antennae have proved much more than simply cool.
According to Jeff Moss, a communications adviser to America’s Department of Homeland Security, their existence has recently been valuable to the operation of several groups of revolutionaries in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere. To get round government shutdowns of internet and mobile-phone networks, resourceful dissidents have used such makeshift antennae to link their computers and handsets to more orthodox transmission equipment in neighbouring countries.
Technologies that transmit data under the noses of repressive authorities in this way are spreading like wildfire among pro-democracy groups, says Mr Moss. For example, after Egypt switched off its internet in January some activists brought laptops to places like Tahrir Square in Cairo to collect, via short-range wireless links, demonstrators’ video recordings and other electronic messages. These activists then broadcast the material to the outside world using range-extending antennae...

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@'The Economist'

GregMitch Greg Mitchell

Bombing Libya on 8th anniversary of Iraq war: From Shock and Awe to Shock and Aw, Shit.

Europe Pressure, Arab Support Helped Turn U.S.

Glance of assets massing for Libya military action

Expert: Safe injection site improves 'public order' (Video)

Japan Is In Our Hearts

Via
(Thanx Audiozobe!)

Law proposal claims Sturt's Desert Pea as dangerous as marijuana

First Navy video of Tomahawk missile launch from USS Barry

♪♫ The Waterboys - Whole of the Moon

♪♫ Neil Young - Shock & Awe

GreatDismal William Gibson

Operation Screaming Fist vs Operation Odyssey Dawn? Brutally effective in inverse proportion to sounding like high-end toilet paper?

The last recording by journalist Mohammad Nabbous, who was killed in Benghazi yesterday amidst a firefight:

Mohammad Nabbous, face of citizen journalism in Libya, is killed

Cameron says British forces are in action over Libya

British forces are in action over Libya, Prime Minister David Cameron has said.

A British submarine has fired a number of Tomahawk missiles at Libyan air defence targets, the Ministry of Defence added.
Mr Cameron said the action was "legal, necessary and right" and he praised the British forces involved as "the bravest of the brave".
France, US, Canada and Italy are also involved in the military action.
US officials said it was a "carefully coordinated" joint operation known as Odyssey Dawn.
French planes destroyed Libyan vehicles earlier on Saturday, and US media say the US has fired missiles at Libya from a warship.
'Appalling brutality' Defence sources told the BBC Britain had launched a number of missiles from Trafalgar class submarines in the Mediterranean, aimed at Libyan air defence targets including radar and surface-to-air missile weapons.
Libyan state TV reported that what it called the "crusader enemy" had bombed civilian areas of Tripoli, as well as fuel storage tanks supplying the western city of Misrata.
After hosting a meeting of the government's emergency management committee Cobra in Downing Street, Mr Cameron said: "British forces are in action over Libya. They are part of an international coalition to enforce the will of the United Nations.
"We have all seen the appalling brutality meted out by Col Gaddafi against his own people."
It was a "just cause" and in "Britain's best interests", he added.
British and US submarines fired 110 Tomahawks in total at Libyan targets.
The Chief of Defence Staff's strategic communications officer Maj Gen John Lorimer said: "This is the first stage. UK and partner forces remain engaged in ongoing operations as we seek to ensure that Col Gaddafi and his forces understand that the international community will not stand by and watch them kill civilians."
@'BBC'

U.S. Missiles Strike Libyan Air Defense Targets

American and European forces began a broad campaign of strikes against the government of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi on Saturday, unleashing warplanes and missiles in the first round of the largest international military intervention in the Arab world since the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon said.
Pentagon and NATO officials detailed a mission designed to impose a United Nations-sanctioned no-fly zone and keep Mr. Qaddafi from using airpower against beleaguered rebel forces in the east. While the overall effort was portrayed as mostly being led by France and Britain, the Pentagon said that American forces dominated an effort to knock out Libya’s air-defense systems.
In a briefing Saturday afternoon, Vice Adm. William Gortney told reporters that about 110 Tomahawk missiles, fired from American warships and submarines and one British submarine struck 20 air-defense targets around Tripoli, the capital, and the western city of Misurata. He said the strikes were against longer-range air defense missiles as well as early warning radar sites and main command-and-control communication centers.
President Obama, speaking during a visit to Brazil, reiterated promises that no American ground forces would be used. “I am deeply aware of the risks of any military action, no matter what limits we place on it,” he said. “I want the American people to know that the use of force is not our first choice, and it’s not a choice that I make lightly. But we can’t stand idly by when a tyrant tells his people that there will be no mercy.”
The campaign began soon after the close of a summit meeting in Paris, where leaders, reacting to news that Mr. Qaddafi’s forces were attacking the rebel capital city of Benghazi with artillery and ground troops despite international demands for a cease-fire, said they had no choice but to act to defend Libyan civilians and opposition forces.
“Our assessment is that the aggressive actions by Qaddafi forces continue in many places around the country,” Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said after the meeting in Paris concluded. “We saw it over the last 24 hours, and we’ve seen no real effort on the part of the Qaddafi forces to abide by a cease-fire despite the rhetoric.”
In Benghazi, a rebel fighter, speaking over the phone, described a procession of tanks as well as rooftop snipers fighting for pro-Qaddafi forces in the west of the city. And a steady stream of vehicles, some bearing rebel flags, was seen pouring out of Benghazi toward the rebel-held city of Bayda, where crowds were cheering the news that French airplanes were flying over the area. That news came even before the Paris summit meeting adjourned, with President Nicolas Sarkozy announcing that French warplanes had begun reconnaissance missions around Benghazi, and the French military saying that a Rafale jet fighter had destroyed a government tank near there.
Even though the leaders at the Paris summit meeting were united in supporting military action, there were signs of disagreement over how it would proceed...