Thursday, 9 June 2011
Jimi Hendrix (phonebook portrait)
Taking an ordinary phone book, Alex Queral carves a face into this object of so many faceless names. With the book, a very sharp X-ACTO® knife, a little pot of acrylic medium to set detail areas and a great deal of talent, Queral literally peels away the pages like the skin of an onion to reveal the portrait within. Once the carving is complete, he will often apply a black wash to enhance the features and then seal the entire book with acrylic to preserve the work. However, he never loses the line registration; and the book remains quite pliable
Alex Queral
Ian Dury on Charlie Gillett's Honky Tonk (1977)
I'm sure all fans of the late Charlie Gillett and Ian Dury will enjoy this programmme on Radio London from 1977 - not sure of the exact date recorded just as New Boots & Panties was being released. Dury engages us with some poetry and an eclectic choice of records and some entertaining banter between the two.Wikipedia says of Dury-
"Dury was born in north-west London at his parents' home at 43 Weald Rise, Harrow Weald, Harrow (although he often pretended, and indeed all but one of his obituaries in the national press stated, that he was born in Upminster, Havering). His father, William, was a bus driver and former boxer, while his mother Margaret (known as Peggy) was a health visitor, the daughter of a Cornish doctor, and granddaughter of an Irish landowner.
William Dury trained with Rolls-Royce to be a chauffeur, and was then absent for long periods, so Peggy Dury took Ian to stay with her parents in Cornwall. After the Second World War, the family moved to Switzerland, where his father chauffeured for a millionaire and the Western European Union. In 1946 Peggy brought Ian back to England and they stayed with her sister, Mary, a physician in Cranham, a small village bordering Upminster. Although he saw his father on visits, they never lived together again.
At the age of seven, he contracted polio; very likely, he believed, from a swimming pool at Southend on Sea during the 1949 polio epidemic. After six weeks in a full plaster cast in Truro hospital, he was moved to Black Notley Hospital, Braintree, Essex, where he spent a year and a half before going to Chailey Heritage Craft School, East Sussex, in 1951. Chailey was a school and hospital for disabled children, and believed in toughening them up, contributing to the observant and determined person Dury became. Chailey taught trades such as cobbling and printing, but Dury's mother wanted him to be more academic, so his aunt Moll arranged for him to enter the Royal Grammar School, High Wycombe which he attended until the age of 16 when he left to study painting at Walthamstow Art College, having gained GCE 'O' Levels in English Language, English Literature and Art.
From 1964 he studied art at the Royal College of Art under British artist Peter Blake, and in 1967 took part in a group exhibition, Fantasy and Figuration, alongside Pat Douthwaite, Herbert Kitchen and Stass Paraskos at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London.[6] When asked why he did not pursue a career in art, he said, "I got good enough [at art] to realise I wasn't going to be very good."[citation needed] From 1967 he taught art at various colleges in the south of England.
Dury married his first wife, Betty Rathmell, in 1967 and they had two children, Jemima and the recording artist Baxter Dury. Dury divorced Rathmell in 1985, but remained on good terms."
Download @'Boot Sale Sounds'
More Ian Dury on the radio
Bill Laswell Interview
Bill Laswell: Well yeah, you have to be, right? Or else you wouldn’t continue. I think it’s not just recorded sound but sound in general. Everything you hear is part of a kind of a cacophony of different orchestrations, whether it’s noise or nature. All of this gets synthesized into music, and I think it’s all relevant. It’s how you put things together. I don’t have a particular philosophy and pretty much what I say will change daily, but I am of course motivated by sound and especially extremes of sound, whether it’s low-end or a symphony or space and silence, it’s all motivating, and if that’s what you choose to do with yourself you need to immerse yourself in it one hundred percent and when you do that you find it all comes to you naturally and it’s still a motivation.
PM: What is your philosophy on making a record and what is your goal?
BL: Well, the philosophy is not to have a philosophy, and the goal is to get a good result that at least you feel good about that you’re not second-guessing – which I’m not too good at – or with the hope maybe that other people also relate and get something positive out of it.
PM: I’ve read that you don’t like to spend too much time on something, that you like to get the sound that you’re going for then move forward.
BL: Pretty much. If I don’t get what I think is valuable I’ll probably wait or move on and come back to something else. I don’t beat away at something for long periods of time. It’s usually if it’s not sitting right, if it doesn’t feel right, I’ll move on to some other area and then come back. I don’t like that idea of getting stuck in one place.
PM: What in your life first attracted you to dub music?
BL: Well I guess it came from the idea of rhythm section coming first because I had experience dealing with repetition and bass and drums. Earlier on when I started it was not that different – it was sort of R&B and sort of country music and blues and minimal rock stuff. I didn’t really come out of rock and rock & roll, I came more from rhythm & blues earlier on and blues and country music. So I related to the minimalism, the simplicity of the rhythms – bass and drums – to start with. When I first heard reggae I didn’t really think about it here or there. It wasn’t that important to me, even though it was at that moment – I think around the time that Bob Marley was just starting and everyone was jumping on that – it wasn’t that interesting to me, but when I started to hear dub I became interested in all of the music coming out of Jamaica and I sort of went backwards. I started with dub records and I would buy anything that didn’t have vocals, or even didn’t have horns. I was kind of just turning on the rhythm. And then later on, through that, I went and worked backwards and discovered all the great artists there with vocals...
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Phil Moffa @'Glasschord'
Pentagon Deputy: Your Future Wars Will Be Long Ones
It’s an article of faith inside the Pentagon, the military and on Capitol Hill that the country is sick of ground wars that span decades, even as the Afghanistan war shows signs of lasting until 2017. The outgoing defense secretary, Robert Gates, recently told West Point cadets that the next likely conflicts will be fought on or under the seas, in the skies, and in space. But don’t think that means short conflicts. Gates’ deputy, William Lynn, thinks the “increasing duration of warfare” is a feature, not a bug.
There’s no going back to the era of the first Iraq war, with its “decisive victory,” its coordinated phases between air and land campaigns, and its “clear transitions between conflict and post-conflict,” Lynn told the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ second Global Security Forum on Wednesday morning.
“Our current reality” for the foreseeable future, Lynn said, is one in which adversaries leverage “asymmetries,” like attacking U.S. computer networks, launching missiles or building cheap homemade bombs, to keep a conflict going.
Preparing for the long wars of the future will have “important implications” for structuring the size and composition of the military, especially the reserves, Lynn said, where important post-conflict expertise like civil affairs still largely reside. That point is somewhat crosswise with the advice of defense analysts who want to reduce the size of the Army and Marines in order to save cash and preserve sea, air and space programs.
Lynn didn’t mention it, but there’s also a point here about U.S. strategy. The U.S. has a recent track record of launching wars without knowing how to end them. Anyone who thinks only a ground war can be a protracted one need only look at Libya, a (mostly) air-sea campaign that was supposed to last weeks now in its third month, with no end in sight. Welcome to your next wars.
Spencer Ackerman @'Wired'
Nik Cohn: Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night (1976)
Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent in watching this new generation. Moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from disco to disco, an explorer out of my depth, I have tried to learn the patterns, the old/new tribal rites. In the present article, I have focused on one club and one tight-knit group which seem to sum up the experience as a whole. Artist James McMullan also spent many hours observing this development, but his paintings, reproduced here, are less specific; although they deal with the same locations and group, they are generalized images of these Saturday night rituals.
Everything described in this article is factual and was either witnessed by me or told to me directly by the people involved. Only the names of the main characters have been changed.
From the June 7, 1976 issue of New York Magazine
Within the closed circuits of rock & roll fashion, it is assumed that New York means Manhattan. The center is everything, all the rest irrelevant. If the other boroughs exist at all, it is merely as a camp joke—Bronx-Brooklyn-Queens, monstrous urban limbo, filled with everyone who is no one.In reality, however, almost the reverse is true. While Manhattan remains firmly rooted in the sixties, still caught up in faction and fad and the dreary games of decadence, a whole new generation has been growing up around it, virtually unrecognized. Kids of sixteen to twenty, full of energy, urgency, hunger. All the things, in fact, that the Manhattan circuit, in its smugness, has lost.
They are not so chic, these kids. They don’t haunt press receptions or opening nights; they don’t pose as street punks in the style of Bruce Springsteen, or prate of rock & Rimbaud. Indeed, the cults of recent years seem to have passed them by entirely. They know nothing of flower power or meditation, pansexuality, or mind expansion. No waterbeds or Moroccan cushions, no hand-thrown pottery, for them. No hep jargon either, and no Pepsi revolutions. In many cases, they genuinely can’t remember who Bob Dylan was, let alone Ken Kesey or Timothy Leary. Haight Ashbury, Woodstock, Altamont—all of them draw a blank. Instead, this generation’s real roots lie further back, in the fifties, the golden age of Saturday nights.
The cause of this reversion is not hard to spot. The sixties, unlike previous decades, seemed full of teenage money. No recession, no sense of danger. The young could run free, indulge themselves in whatever treats they wished. But now there is shortage once more, just as there was in the fifties. Attrition, continual pressure. So the new generation takes few risks. It goes through high school, obedient; graduates, looks for a job, saves and plans. Endures. And once a week, on Saturday night, its one great moment of release, it explodes.
Vincent was the very best dancer in Bay Ridge—the ultimate Face. He owned fourteen floral shirts, five suits, eight pairs of shoes, three overcoats, and had appeared on American Bandstand. Sometimes music people came out from Manhattan to watch him, and one man who owned a club on the East Side had even offered him a contract. A hundred dollars a week. Just to dance.
Everybody knew him. When Saturday night came round and he walked into 2001 Odyssey, all the other Faces automatically fell back before him, cleared a space for him to float in, right at the very center of the dance floor. Gracious as a medieval seigneur accepting tributes, Vincent waved and nodded at random. Then his face grew stern, his body turned to the music. Solemn, he danced, and all the Faces followed.
In this sphere his rule was absolute. Only one thing bothered him, and that was the passing of time. Already he was eighteen, almost eighteen and a half. Soon enough he would be nineteen, twenty. Then this golden age would pass. By natural law someone new would arise to replace him. Then everything would be over.
The knowledge nagged him, poisoned his pleasure. One night in January, right in the middle of the Bus Stop, he suddenly broke off, stalked from the floor without a word, and went outside into the cold darkness, to be alone.
He slouched against a wall. He stuck his hands deep into his overcoat pockets. He sucked on an unlit cigarette. A few minutes passed. Then he was approached by a man in a tweed suit, a journalist from Manhattan.
They stood close together, side by side. The man in the tweed suit looked at Vincent, and Vincent stared at the ground or at the tips of his platform shoes. “What’s wrong?” said the man in the suit, at last...
HIV patient Timothy Brown is the boy who lived
Today, almost 20 years after he became infected, Brown is, essentially, cured.
Brown, now 45, is known in medical-journal circles as "The Berlin Patient," a moniker assigned him by a February 2009 case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
In a "Brief Report," oncologist Gero Huetter and his colleagues at Berlin's University Hospital described the unique stem-cell transplant of an HIV-infected patient — Brown — who had acute myeloid leukemia, and the remarkable result: Twenty months after the procedure, the virus had not reappeared in Brown's body, even though he was no longer taking antiretroviral drugs.
The bone marrow Brown received in a time-tested treatment for leukemia had given him an extraordinary gift. It had also transferred to Brown's immune system an uncommon genetic variation — present in an estimated 10% of northern Europeans — that rendered it resistant to HIV.
It's been a winding road to medical fame, Brown said in an interview last week. Raised in Seattle, he came out as gay at 18 and soon began a restless journey across Europe. He settled briefly in Barcelona, where he believes he became infected, and finally in Berlin, where he lived for almost 20 years.
When he learned he was HIV-positive in 1995, a friend told him gravely that he probably had two years to live.
"I didn't know who to be angry at," Brown said.
Ten years later, he was alive and taking antiretroviral medications. Then, in 2006, a bout of exhaustion sent him to the doctor, who diagnosed leukemia and proposed the customary treatment: Wipe out Brown's immune system with radiation and rebuild it with the bone marrow of a healthy donor.
Here was the crucial trick: From the 230 possible matches found for Brown, Huetter deliberately picked a donor who carried genetic resistance to HIV, hoping they might lick both diseases in a single shot.
Now living in San Francisco, Brown has found himself a bit of a celebrity at AIDS functions around the city. Two weeks ago, he spoke at an event titled "Cure — Still a Four-Letter Word?" organized by the American Foundation for AIDS Research. Afterward, he says, "everybody wanted to get their picture.
taken with me."
It was as if, he said, he had become the living, breathing embodiment of hope for an end to AIDS.
For much of the AIDS pandemic's first 30 years, talk of a cure was indeed a four-letter word, widely dismissed as fanciful and detracting from the real job of prevention and treatment — and a dangerous spur to false hopes and complacency.
But as Brown's fame has grown, the "cure" word has lost its taboo.
Last week, the nation's chief scientists in the fight against HIV/AIDS — Drs. Carl W. Dieffenbach and Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — also abandoned their reluctance to talk about a cure for the pandemic that has killed nearly 30 million people.
Certainly, the treatment Brown received could not be applied to the millions of people infected with HIV — it is far too risky and expensive for that. But its results offer proof that there are ways to turbo-charge the immune system to prevent and even fight off established infection without taking a cocktail of pills everyday, the officials wrote in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Brown sustained a brain injury in a 2009 mugging in Berlin, and walks and speaks with some difficulty But he sees himself as lucky and says he's glad to be a "catalyst" to the development of a more practical AIDS cure.
"It's an incredible feeling — like a miracle," he said. "I had two lethal diseases and was able to get rid of both of them."
Melissa Healy @'LA Times'
Alexey Navalny: Russia's Julian Assange?
His public interest work, which he undertook on his blog several years ago, largely focuses on issues of transparency, corruption, and shareholder rights. (Navalny got his start as a muckraking blogger by purchasing a small number of shares in several state-owned enterprises to get an insider's view of how they operate and by exposing the fraud he discovered.) Early this year Navalny launched a new site, RosPil, designed to harness the power of the web and his devoted readers. It relies on simple crowd sourcing methods whereby registered users and a group of experts review public documents for wrongdoing and post their findings. Anyone can submit a government request for tender (a bid for services) to the site and, if it looks dubious enough, it is promoted to the main page. This has become far easier for the average citizen to do under President Medvedev who, two years ago, announced that all government requests for tender would be posted online. Once the documents have been published on RosPil, registered members evaluate the complaint and decide whether it should be pursued. If they vote yes, Navalny showcases the alleged fraud on his blog.
Two remarkable things have happened since Navalny started RosPil: after an appeal for contributions to the site in February this year, Navalny raised more than $120,000 in a week, highly unusual in Russia for a journalism website (it broke fundraising records according to Yandex, Russia's leading search engine); more remarkably yet, according to the site, RosPil has caused the annulment of about $12 million in requests for tender, as well as the resignations and public shaming of several government officials. Revelations range from the absurd (the Interior Ministry ordering a gilded bed for its suburban residence) to far more serious allegations of fraud and embezzlement...
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Adam Federman @'The Investigative Fund'
Wednesday, 8 June 2011
HUGE explosion on the Sun on June 7, 2011
The Sun let loose with an enormous explosion on the morning of June 7, 2011. The entire eruption was captured by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. The animation here is from the ultraviolet camera, colored orange to make it viewable.
Here's my blog post with details and more video: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-...
Here's my blog post with details and more video: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/07/the-sun-lets-loose-...
Recognizing the Human Potential
The finding was viewed by most in the field as an artifact and in the years that followed, researchers continued to focus on developing vaccines against HIV that specifically targeted proteins on the surface of the virus. However, HIV proved to be a moving target, avoiding vaccine-induced immune responses by rapidly mutating its surface proteins, and thereby thwarting this type of virus-specific vaccine effort...
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Are we in denial about loud music and hearing loss?
The message was one that most rock fans didn't want to hear.
They were willing to listen, however, because it came from one of their idols -- Pete Townshend.
The legendary guitarist of the Who validated the concerns of parents around the globe -- the ones who had cried out, "turn down that music or you'll hurt your ears!" -- when in 1989 he disclosed his own hearing loss, which he attributed to long exposure to loud rock 'n' roll.
Suddenly, the topic was on the table. And people started talking about it, with some embracing Townshend's advice to take the necessary steps to protect their ears at concerts.
More than 20 years later, awareness of the issue is much higher. But the problem certainly hasn't gone away. In fact, with the advent of MP3 players and their ubiquitous earbuds, it has grown significantly. It's one thing to know that loud music can damage your hearing, it's quite another to do something about it. And only a small percentage of concertgoers actually wear earplugs, despite that they are available for free (or a small donation) at most venues in the Bay Area.
"I feel rather passionately about this," says Dr. Vikram Talwar, an East Bay-based physician who has volunteered for the past 10 years at Rock Med, the Bay Area-based organization that provides free medical care at concerts. "I'm wearing ear protection all the time. It doesn't matter how good the band is -- I'm wearing ear protection."
Talwar is on eof many crusaders for this cause, handing out earplugs at shows and talking to fans about the dangers of not wearing ear protection. But his efforts routinely are rebuffed."I drum (the importance of ear protection) into everyone I know, even my close personal friends," he says. "Nobody gives a (expletive) about it. They don't think it is going to happen to them."
And, more and more frequently, it is.
Studies show hearing loss is an increasingly significant issue these days. On both ends of the age spectrum. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says hearing loss among U.S. adolescents has jumped by about 30 percent in the past 20 years. The findings were based on surveys conducted on youths ages 12-19 during 1988-1994 and again in 2005-2006. Now, says the AMA, 1 in 5 adolescents shows some signs of hearing loss.
As for seniors, AARP reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans age 70 and older have experienced mild to severe hearing loss.
And while loud music from mp3 players and earbuds and/or concert halls isn't the only factor, it is a key factor for some...
They were willing to listen, however, because it came from one of their idols -- Pete Townshend.
The legendary guitarist of the Who validated the concerns of parents around the globe -- the ones who had cried out, "turn down that music or you'll hurt your ears!" -- when in 1989 he disclosed his own hearing loss, which he attributed to long exposure to loud rock 'n' roll.
Suddenly, the topic was on the table. And people started talking about it, with some embracing Townshend's advice to take the necessary steps to protect their ears at concerts.
More than 20 years later, awareness of the issue is much higher. But the problem certainly hasn't gone away. In fact, with the advent of MP3 players and their ubiquitous earbuds, it has grown significantly. It's one thing to know that loud music can damage your hearing, it's quite another to do something about it. And only a small percentage of concertgoers actually wear earplugs, despite that they are available for free (or a small donation) at most venues in the Bay Area.
"I feel rather passionately about this," says Dr. Vikram Talwar, an East Bay-based physician who has volunteered for the past 10 years at Rock Med, the Bay Area-based organization that provides free medical care at concerts. "I'm wearing ear protection all the time. It doesn't matter how good the band is -- I'm wearing ear protection."
Talwar is on eof many crusaders for this cause, handing out earplugs at shows and talking to fans about the dangers of not wearing ear protection. But his efforts routinely are rebuffed."I drum (the importance of ear protection) into everyone I know, even my close personal friends," he says. "Nobody gives a (expletive) about it. They don't think it is going to happen to them."
And, more and more frequently, it is.
Studies show hearing loss is an increasingly significant issue these days. On both ends of the age spectrum. A recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association says hearing loss among U.S. adolescents has jumped by about 30 percent in the past 20 years. The findings were based on surveys conducted on youths ages 12-19 during 1988-1994 and again in 2005-2006. Now, says the AMA, 1 in 5 adolescents shows some signs of hearing loss.
As for seniors, AARP reports that nearly two-thirds of Americans age 70 and older have experienced mild to severe hearing loss.
And while loud music from mp3 players and earbuds and/or concert halls isn't the only factor, it is a key factor for some...
Continue reading
Jim Harrington @'Mercury News'
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