Criminal World (Thanx Ken!) UPDATE: My thanks go to Nik who SHOUTED out across the web that Bowie's head was FUCK PHOTOSHOPped on to Sable Starr's body. Got to say that the Dame wears it better in my opinion
The video, which has had more than 2m views on YouTube, shows the Russian prime minister in a courtroom cage in what seems to be a real trial. The cleverly edited video is actually the trial of the oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky, with Putin's face superimposed on Khodorkovsky's. The fake video comes weeks before Russian presidential elections in which Putin is standing. Via
Friday February 17 at 3:30pm in Somerville House 2348 - McKenzie Wark - ‘A Minimum of Serious Seduction: The Legend of the The Situationist Ιnternational’. Free and Open to All! “As the newspaper editor says in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, ‘when legend becomes fact, print the legend’. The Situationist International - big Film Fans among other things - certainly lived by this principle. As Henri Lefebvre would note about their MO, they occupied the terrain of resonant symbols as a way of confronting the more mundane communications of what they would dub ‘the Society of the Spectacle’. In this presentation, I will look at a range of strategies they adopted, particularly in the early years of the SI” -- Ken Wark on his upcoming lecture. TOTALITY FOR KIDS S.I. FILMS
May I once again draw your attention to the transcript of 'Scotland's Secret Shame' from BBC's Panorama back in 2005. It was actually produced by my 'brother-in-law' and I am sure that if he was to do a follow up now absolutely NOTHING will have changed!
Brion Gysin (1916 -- 1986) was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in England.
He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs. With the engineer Ian Sommerville he invented the Dreamachine, a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with the eyes closed.
It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by the cursive Japanese "gras" script and Arabic writing. Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected."
In 1934, he moved to Paris to study La Civilisation Française, an open course given at the Sorbonne where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began frequenting Valentine Hugo, Leonor Fini, Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Dora Maar. A year later, he had his first exhibition at the Galerie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp, Hans Bellmer, Victor Brauner, Giorgio de Chirico, Dalí, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Man Ray and Yves Tanguy.
On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by André Breton who ordered the poet Paul Éluard to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests the arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world.
In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin opened a restaurant called "The 1001 Nights", with his friend Mohamed Hamri, who was the cook. Gysin hired the Master Musicians of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters. The musicians performed there for an international clientèle that included Burroughs. Losing the business in 1958, the restaurant closed permanently and Gysin returned to live in Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9 rue Gît-le-Coeur that would become famous as the Beat Hotel.
Working on a drawing, he discovered a Dada technique by accident. This initially evolved from some discussions with Burroughs about techniques of writing and from the 'tape to the wall' approach Burroughs used for writing/editing "Naked Lunch." Gysin, always intent on turning painter's techniques directly into writing, brought the "cut-up" technique into being and this experiment dramatically changed the landscape of American literature.
With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with the eyes closed", the flicker device uses alpha waves in the 8-16 Hz range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers.
In Later years...
He also worked extensively with noted jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy.
He recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring himself singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Don Cherry, Elli Medeiros, Steve Lacy, Lizzy Mercier Descloux and more.
As a joke, Gysin contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas; it was unintentionally included for publication, becoming famous under the name Alice B. Toklas brownies.
A heavily edited version of his novel, The Last Museum, was published posthumously in 1986.
Made an American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1985, Gysin died a year later of lung cancer. An obituary by Robert Palmer published in The New York Times fittingly described him as a man who "threw off the sort of ideas that ordinary artists would parlay into a lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as a locomotive throws off sparks"
The Ache is the first in-house release from our newest crew member Natasha Kmeto, showcasing a bold and frankly amazing new direction for the accomplished artist. After several years of creating progressively more advanced music, Natasha has arrived to deliver what is easily her best work to date, an ambitious foray into beats, bass, exotic samples, analog synths, and immaculately crafted textures, with her voice covering the entire affair like hot butter. The feel is hardly cluttered, though, and could possibly be our cleanest and most R’n’B inflected release to date, a shining example of what she’s got us calling “futuristic soul.” In contrast to some of our other material, The Ache is a lot like something you might hear on the radio, except about a dozen steps ahead, exactly where the music on the radio should be.
Credits
Released 14 February 2012 All original tracks written, produced and recorded by Natasha Kmeto in Portland, OR. Mixed and mastered by Chris Green Album art by Alex Kmeto Photo by Carly Birkey Catalog Number GEM011 www.natashakmeto.com www.droppinggems.com (Thanx Audiozobe!)
Dory Previn, the US singer and composer who collaborated with former husband Andre on two Oscar-nominated songs, has died in Massachusetts at the age of 86.
Born Dorothy Veronica Langan in 1925, she began as a lyricist before finding success as a solo artist in the 1970s.
She married Andre Previn in 1959 and worked with him on the theme to 1967's Valley of the Dolls.
After he left her for Mia Farrow, she recorded such albums as On My Way to Where and Mythical Kings and Iguanas.
According to the New York Times, her difficult childhood, divorce from Previn and bouts of mental illness informed her music.
The six albums she released in the 1970s were confessional and confrontational.
Beware Of Young Girls, a track from On My Way To Where, directly addressed Mia Farrow's role in the break-up of her marriage.
"Beware of young girls, who come to the door, wistful and pale, of twenty and four," she sang.
"She was my friend. She was invited to my house," the lyrics continued. "She admired my wedding ring".
Her death on Tuesday at her Southfield farm was confirmed by husband Joby Baker, a Canadian actor she married in 1984. Soul-bearing
Dory was born in New Jersey in the 1920s and, after school, attended the American Academy of Dramatic Arts.
She worked as an actress and a dancer until she began writing songs and landed a job at film studio MGM, where she was assigned to work with Andre Previn.
They married in 1959 and were nominated for their first Oscar two years later, for the song Faraway Part of Town, which featured in the film Pepe, starring Mexican comedian Cantinflas.
The pair were nominated again two years later, this time for Second Chance from the Robert Mitchum film Two for the Seesaw.
Outside of cinema, the pair wrote independently for the likes of Doris Day and Jack Jones, while Sammy Davis Junior and Frank Sinatra recorded some of their soundtrack work.
In 1965, Dory Previn suffered a nervous breakdown and was briefly institutionalised, but she continued to work.
This period produced one of her most successful works - the soundtrack to kitsch classic Valley Of The Dolls. The album spent six months in the charts, and the theme song was a top 10 hit for Dionne Warwick.
Following her divorce, in 1970, Previn received a third Oscar nomination for Come Saturday Morning, a song she co-wrote for Alan J Pakula's debut feature Pookie.
Award success came at last in 1983, when she received an Emmy for co-writing the theme song to TV show Two Of A Kind.
Jarvis Cocker is among the modern musicians who have taken inspiration from Previn's soul-baring lyrics.
The Pulp frontman mentioned her in his 2011 book Mother, Brother, Lover and chose her song Lady With the Braid as one of his Desert Island Discs in 2005.
@'BBC'
'Jamdown' takes you on a journey back to 1980, straight into the heart of the Jamaican reggae scene, following legendary reggae artists Toots Hibbert and The Congos. The film shot in 1980 had a limited release in France and therefore remained undiscovered by the rest of the world. Since its initial release almost 30 years ago, 'Jamdown' has become what reggae footage collectors often refer to as ''The holy grail of reggae films'' due to its rarity and difficulty in finding an original copy of the film. The film contains some of the only known early footage of The Congos, performing tracks from their legendary Heart Of The Congos LP which was produced by Lee Perry at the Black Ark studios at the height of their career. Jamdown contains some of the most electrifying live reggae footage to have ever been captured on film, making it a highly enjoyable performance for all reggae fans.
'If we could sniff or swallow something that would, for five or six hours each day, abolish our solitude as individuals, atone us with our fellows in a glowing exaltation of affection and make life in all its aspects seem not only worth living, but divinely beautiful and significant, and if this heavenly, world-transfiguring drug were of such a kind that we could wake up next morning with a clear head and an undamaged constitution - then, it seems to me, all our problems (and not merely the one small problem of discovering a novel pleasure) would be wholly solved and earth would become paradise.'
The Egyptian revolution on the 25th of January 2011 was unlike any other revolution in history because of the role of social media. Several blogs, Storify entries, web pages, channels on YouTube where created to document the revolution. Several books were even published documenting the 18 days. All of these contributions were made by the public, not historians, utilizing the tools of web 2.0. As a result of all these contributions we have an enormous digital content including thousands of posts, tweets, images, videos and sound files narrating and documenting the revolution. Unfortunately, at the first anniversary of this revolution over 10%
of this digital content is already gone.
Websites like Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Storify, 1000Memories, Blogger and IAmJan25 have allowed the public to document the events of the revolution in real-time. Storify, for example, allows the user to create a timed organized collection of tweets, links, images, posts, map locations or videos to create a story. 1000Memories on the other hand allows the user to keep the memory of a loved one after he/she has passed away by creating collections about them including photos, notes, testimonials, videos and other mementos. Iamjan25 is a website dedicated mainly as a hub for all the videos and images about the Egyptian revolution sent to the website administrators.
It is fascinating to read the amalgamated stories assembled from the tweets, Facebook posts, links, images, videos, map-taggings, etc. from the authors who were experiencing and documenting these events as they occurred. These social media contributions could give a great insight of what happened in the revolution and feed the curiosity of the readers by making them relive those moments with the authors.
Even in the period when the Internet and cellular services were shut down people still took photos and videos which they later posted in the social networks. You can often find videos and images documenting the same incident from multiple angles which reminded me of the movie "Vantage Point"... MORE
Via Kocaeli Gazetesi, Mynet Haber and Haber 27 comes the sad news of the murder on Monday afternoon (13 February 2012) of Melda Yuksel in Kocaeli, Turkey.
As I understand it, Melda - a 26-year old transgender woman - met her younger brother Murat at a building site to ask his advice on some construction work she had commissioned. It seems that a conversation after the site meeting somehow escalated into an argument between the two about sexual orientation/gender identity, during which Mr Yuksel pulled out a gun and shot Melda five times. She died of her injuries at the scene of the shooting.
Neighbours reported hearing gunfire and officers from the County Police Department were on the scene within minutes, where Mr Yuksel was taken into custody with the gun still in his possession. The police investigation continues.
As regular readers of this blog will know, I believe that murders like this are part of a larger pattern of violence and discrimination against TS/TG people in Turkey and it's disheartening to have to repeat myself yet again:
TS/TG people are human, just like cis people. We have the same civil liberties and human rights as cis people. We're just another face in the crowd, someone you pass on the street every day. And yet, time and again, we are subjected to bigotry and violence simply because we exist. But being TS/TG is not some "lifestyle choice"; it isn't something we can leave at home when we go out into the world each day. And neither is it anything for cis people to react to, not with fear, not with hatred - and especially not with violence.
Transphobia is everywhere and it's way past time that cis people understood this and began to act accordingly, to show us the same respect that they automatically demand for themselves.
The answer is in their hands, not ours.
Cis people, you have to stop the transphobic violence, and you have to stop it now.
I extend my condolences to Melda's loved ones on their sad loss of yet another victim in the apparently endless undeclared war on transgender women in Turkey.
Via Kocaeli Gazetesi, Mynet Haber and Haber 27 comes the sad news of the murder on Monday afternoon (13 February 2012) of Melda Yuksel in Kocaeli, Turkey.
