Moving at the sound of speed

(Image via 'Mogodonia')

The Atrocity Exhibition

Lots of interesting Ballard links at 'Boingboing' here.

BALLARDIAN.COM

J.G. Ballard on 'Empire of the Sun'

(Christian Bale in Spielberg's adaption of 'Empire of the Sun.)

By JG Ballard

Memories have huge staying power, but like dreams, they thrive in the dark, surviving for decades in the deep waters of our minds like shipwrecks on the sea bed. Hauling them into the daylight can be risky. Within a few hours, a precious trophy of childhood or a first romance can crumble into rust.

I knew that something similar might happen when I began to write Empire of the Sun, a novel about my life as a boy in Shanghai during the second world war, and in the civilian camp at Lunghua, where I was interned with my parents. Coming to England after the war, and trying to cope with its grey, unhappy people, I hoarded my memories of Shanghai, a city that soon seemed as remote and glamorous as ancient Rome. Its magic never faded, whereas I forgot Cambridge within five minutes of leaving that academic theme park, and never wanted to go back. The only people I remembered were the dissecting room cadavers.

During the 1960s, the Shanghai of my childhood seemed a portent of the media cities of the future, dominated by advertising and mass circulation newspapers and swept by unpredictable violence. But how could I raise this Titanic of memories? Brought up from the sea bed, the golden memory hoard could turn out to be dross. Besides, there are things that the novel can't easily handle. I could manage my changing relations with my parents, my 13-year-old's infatuation with the war, and the sudden irruption into our lives of American air power. But how do you convey the casual surrealism of war, the deep silence of abandoned villages and paddy fields, the strange normality of a dead Japanese soldier lying by the road like an unwanted piece of luggage?

I waited 40 years before giving it a go, one of the longest periods a professional writer has put off describing the most formative events in his life. Twenty years to forget, and then 20 years to remember. There was always the possibility that my memories of the war concealed a deeper stratum of unease that I preferred not to face. But at least my three children had grown up, and as I wrote the book I would never have to think of them sharing the war with my younger self.

In fact, I found it difficult to begin the novel, until it occurred to me to drop my parents from the story. We had lived together in a small room for nearly three years, eating our boiled rice and sweet potatoes from the same card table, sleeping within an arm's reach of each other, an exhilarating experience for me after the formality of our prewar home, where my parents were busy with their expat social life and I was brought up by Chinese servants who never looked at me and never spoke to me.

But I needed to move my parents out of the story, just as they had moved out of my life in Lunghua even though we were sharing the same room. They had no control over their teenage son, were unable to feed or clothe him or pull those little levers of promise and affection with which parents negotiate domestic life with their children. My real existence took place in the camp, wheedling dog-eared copies of Popular Mechanics and Reader's Digest from the American merchant seamen in the men's dormitory, hunting down every rumour in the air, waiting for the food cart and the next B-29 bombing raid. My mind was expanding to fill the possibilities of the war, something I needed to do on my own. Once I separated Jim from his parents the novel unrolled itself at my feet like a bullet-ridden carpet.

Even then, I had to leave out many things that belong in a memoir rather than a novel. Lunghua camp, with its 2,000 internees, was a grimy bidonville, a slum township where, as in all slums, the teenage boys ran wild. There were unwatched screwdrivers or penknives to be snaffled, heroic arguments with a bored clergyman about the existence of God, buckets of night soil to be hoisted from the G-block septic tank and poured into the tomato and cucumber beds that were supposed to keep us alive when the Japanese could no longer feed us. In a bombed-out building I found a broken Chinese bayonet, sharpened the stump of blade and used it to prise away the bricks of the kitchen coal store, filling a sack with precious coke that would briefly break the chill of our unheated concrete building. My father said nothing, feeding the coke into a miniature brazier as he rehearsed his lecture on science and the idea of God. I ran off, and nagged the off-duty Japanese guards in their bungalows until they let me wear their kendo armour, laughing as they thumped me around the head with their wooden swords.

In 1984 the novel was published, a caravel of memories raised from the deep. Enough of it was based on fact to convince me that what had seemed a dream-like pageant was a negotiated truth. Curiously, my original memories of Shanghai still seemed intact, and even survived a return trip to Shanghai, where I found our house in Amherst Avenue and our room in Lunghua camp - now a boarding school - virtually unchanged.

Then, in 1987, like a jumbo jet crash-landing in a suburban park, a Hollywood film company came down from the sky. It disgorged an army of actors, makeup artists, set designers, costume specialists, cinematographers and a director, Steven Spielberg, all of whom had strong ideas of their own about wartime Shanghai. After 40 years my memories had shaped themselves into a novel, but only three years later they were mutating again.

Hazy figures now had names and personalities, smiles and glances that I had seen in a dozen other films: John Malkovich, Nigel Havers, Miranda Richardson. With them was a brilliant child actor, Christian Bale, who uncannily resembled my younger self. He came up to me on the set and said: "Hello, Mr Ballard. I'm you." He was followed by an attractive young couple, Emily Richard and Rupert Frazer, who added: "And we're your mum and dad."

Coincidences were building strange bridges. Thanks to the film studios in Shepperton, many of my neighbours worked as extras, and now called out: "Mr Ballard, we're going to Lunghua together." Had some deep-cover assignment led me to Shepperton in 1960, knowing that one day I would write a novel about Shanghai, and that part of it would be filmed in Shepperton?

Spielberg, an intelligent and thoughtful man, generously gave me a small role as a guest at the opening fancy-dress party. Warners had rented three houses in Sunningdale to stand in for our Shanghai home. When I arrived at the location I found an armada of buses, vans and coaches that filled entire fields and resembled the evacuation of London. Bizarrely, it also reminded me of the day we were bussed into Lunghua from our assembly point at the American club near the Great Western Road. I can still see the huge crowd of Brits, many of the women in fur coats, sitting with their suitcases around the swimming pool, as if waiting for the water to part and lead them to safety.

The Sunningdale house where the fancy-dress party was filmed closely resembled our Amherst Avenue home, but this at least was no coincidence. The expat British architects in the 1930s who specialised in stockbroker's Tudor took the Surrey golf course mansions as their model. Past and present were coming full circle. The Warners props department filled the house with period fittings - deco screens and lamps, copies of Time and Life, white telephones and radios the size of sideboards. In the drive outside the front door, uniformed Chinese chauffeurs stood beside authentic Buicks and Packards. A 12-year-old boy ran through the costumed guests, a model aircraft in one hand, racing across the lawn into a dream.

Surprisingly, it was the film premiere in Hollywood, the fount of most of our planet's fantasies, that brought everything down to earth. A wonderful night for any novelist, and a reminder of the limits of the printed word. Sitting with the sober British contingent, surrounded by everyone from Dolly Parton to Sean Connery, I thought Spielberg's film would be drowned by the shimmer of mink and the diamond glitter. But once the curtains parted the audience was gripped. Chevy Chase, sitting next to me, seemed to think he was watching a newsreel, crying: "Oh, oh . . . !" and leaping out of his seat as if ready to rush the screen in defence of young Bale.

I was deeply moved by the film but, like every novelist, couldn't help feeling that my memories had been hijacked by someone else's. As the battle of Britain fighter ace Douglas Bader said when introduced to the cast of Reach for the Sky: "But they're actors."

Actors of another kind play out our memories, performing on a stage inside our heads whenever we think of childhood, our first day at school, courtship and marriage. The longer we live - and it's now 60 years since I reluctantly walked out of Lunghua camp - the more our repertory company emerges from the shadows and moves to the front of the stage. Spielberg's film seems more truthful as the years pass. Christian Bale and John Malkovich join hands by the footlights with my real parents and my younger self, with the Japanese soldiers and American pilots, as a boy runs forever across a peaceful lawn towards the coming war. But perhaps, in the end, it's all only a movie.

(From 'Micropesia' here.)

REPOST - 'Crash' Directed by Harley Cokliss 1971 (Starring JG Ballard & Gabrielle Drake)

From: Ballardian:The World Of J.G. Ballard.

NARRATOR: In slow motion, the test cars moved towards each other on collision courses, unwinding behind them the coils that ran to the metering devices by the impact zone. As they collided the debris of wings and fender floated into the air. The cars rocked against each as they continued on their disintegrating courses. In the passenger seats the plastic models transcribed graceful arcs into the buckling roofs and windshields. Here and there a passing fender severed a torso. The air behind the cars was a carnival of arms and legs.

J.G. BALLARD: I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in the motor car. It sums up everything: the elements of speed, drama, aggression, the junction of advertising and consumer goods with the technological landscape. The sense of violence and desire, power and energy; the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signalled landscape.

We spend a substantial part of our lives in the motor car, and the experience of driving condenses many of the experiences of being a human being in the 1970s, the marriage of the physical aspects of ourselves with the imaginative and technological aspects of our lives. I think the 20th century reaches its highest expression on the highway. Everything is there: the speed and violence of our age; the strange love affair with the machine, with its own death.

The styling of motor cars, and of the American motor car in particular, has always struck me as incredibly important, bringing together all sorts of visual and psychological factors. As an engineering structure, the car is totally uninteresting to me. I’m interested in the exact way in which it brings together the visual codes for expressing our ordinary perceptions about reality — for example, that the future is something with a fin on it — and the whole system of expectations contained in the design of the car, expectations about our freedom to move through time and space, about the identities of our own bodies, our own musculatures, the complex relationships between ourselves and the world of objects around us. These highly potent visual codes can be seen repeatedly in every aspect of the 20th century landscape. What do they mean? Have we reached a point now in the 70s where we only make sense in terms of these huge technological systems? I think so myself, and that it is the vital job of the writer to try to analyse and understand the huge significance of this metallised dream.

I’m interested in the automobile as a narrative structure, as a scenario that describes our real lives and our real fantasies. If every member of the human race were to vanish overnight, I think it would be possible to reconstitute almost every element of human psychology from the design of a vehicle like this. As a writer I feel I must try to understand the real meaning of a lot of commonplace but tremendously complicated events. I’ve always been fascinated by the complexity of movement when a woman gets out of a car.

NARRATOR: Her ungainly transit across the passenger seat through the nearside door. The overlay of her knees with the metal door flank. The conjunction of the aluminized gutter trim with the volumes of her thighs. The crushing of her left breast by the door frame, and its self extension as she continued to rise. The movement of her left hand across the chromium trim of the right headlamp assembly. Her movements distorted in the projecting carapace of the bonnet. The jut and rake of her pubis as she sits in the driver’s seat. The soft pressure of her thighs against the rim of the steering wheel.

J.G. BALLARD: The close relationship between our own bodies and the body of the motor car is obvious. American automobile stylists have been exploring for years the relationship between sexuality and the motor car body, the primitive algebra of recognition which we use in our perception of all organic forms. If the man in the motor car is the key image of the 20th century, then the automobile crash is the most significant trauma. The car crash is the most dramatic event in most people’s lives, apart from their own deaths, and in many cases the two will coincide.

Are we just victims in a totally meaningless tragedy, or does it in fact take place with our unconscious, and even conscious, connivance? Each year hundreds of thousands of people are killed in car crashes all over the world. Millions are injured. Are these arranged deaths arranged by the colliding forces of the technological landscape, by our own unconscious fantasies about power and aggression, our obsessions with consumer goods and desires, the overlaying fictions that are more and more taking the place of reality? It’s always struck me that people’s attitudes towards the car crash are very confused, that they assume an attitude that in fact is very different from their real response. If we really feared the car crash, none of us would ever be able to drive a car.

J.G. Ballard in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

I know that my own attitudes to the crashed car are just as confused. The distorted geometry of this tremendously stylised object: let’s face it, the most powerful symbol of our civilisation. It seems to pull at all sorts of concealed triggers in the mind: the postures of people in crashed vehicles; deformed manufacturer’s styling devices (crashed General Motors cars look very different from crashed Fords); the stylisation of the instrument panel, which after all is the model for our own wounds. Driving around, each of us knows what is literally the shape of our own death.

NARRATOR: Regaining consciousness, she stared at the blood on her legs. The heavy liquid pulled at her skirt. The bruise under her left breast reached behind her sternum, seizing like a hand at her heart. She sat up, lifting herself from the broken steering wheel, uncertain for a moment whether the car windshield had been fractured. Against her forehead the strands of blood formed a torn veil. Above her knees, her hand moved towards the door lever. As she watched, the door opened and she fell out. Lifting herself, she held tightly to the car, feeling the pressure of the door slip against her hand. Turning, she stared at the waiting figure of the man she knew to be Dr Tallis.

J.G. BALLARD: I remember seeing some films on television of test crashes a few years ago. They were using American cars of the late 50s, a period I suppose when the American dream, and American confidence, were at their highest point. Metering coils trailed out of the windows and they had dummies sitting in them. They were beautifully filmed. They filmed them beautifully because they wanted to know what was happening. They weren’t interested in the aesthetics of the thing. These cars were in head-on collisions, right-angled collisions and sideswipes. And ploughing into other structures like utility poles. One could see four feet of metal suddenly become one foot. Filmed in slow motion, these crashes had a beautiful stylised grace. The power and weight of these cars gave them an immense classical dignity. It was like some strange technological ballet.

I remember looking at these films and thinking about the strange psychological dimensions they seemed to touch. They seemed to say something about the way everything becomes more and more stylised, more and more cut off from ordinary feeling. It seems to me that we have to regard everything in the world around us as fiction, as if we were living in an enormous novel, and that the kind of distinction that Freud made about the inner world of the mind, between, say, what dreams appeared to be and what they really meant, now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. All the structures in it, flyovers and motorways, office blocks and factories, are all part of this enormous novel.

Take a structure like a multi-storey car park, one of the most mysterious buildings ever built. Is it a model for some strange psychological state, some kind of vision glimpsed within its bizarre geometry? What effect does using these buildings have on us? Are the real myths of this century being written in terms of these huge unnoticed structures?

More exactly, I think that new emotions and new feelings are being created, that modern technology is beginning to reach into our dreams and change our whole way of looking at things, and perceiving reality, that more and more it is drawing us away from contemplating ourselves to contemplating its world.

J.G. Ballard 1971.

Gabrielle Drake in ‘Crash!’ (1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

NB: Gabrielle Drake is Nick Drake's sister.
More Ballard here.

Bonus:
'Warm Leatherette' by The Normal.
Inspired by Ballard's 'Crash' this was by Daniel Miller and was the first release from Mute Records.

J.G. Ballard RIP

J.G. Ballard
1930-2009
James Graham Ballard has passed away after a long illness.
Obituary at the 'BBC' here.

The novelist JG Ballard, who conjured up a bleak vision of modern life in a series of powerful novels and short stories published over more than 50 years, died today after a long battle with cancer.

His agent, Margaret Hanbury, said tonight that it was "with great sadness" that the 78-year-old author had passed away yesterday morning after several years of ill health.

Hanbury, who worked with Ballard for more than 25 years, said he was a "brilliant, powerful" novelist. "JG Ballard has been a giant on the world literary scene for more than 50 years. Following his early novels of the 60s and 70s, his work then reached a wider audience with the publication of Empire of the Sun in 1984 which won several prizes and was made in to a film by Steven Spielberg.

"His acute and visionary observation of contemporary life was distilled into a number of brilliant, powerful novels which have been published all over the world and saw Ballard gain cult status."

Inspired by the popular science fiction magazines he came across while stationed in Canada with the RAF, Ballard began publishing short stories evoking fractured landscapes full of wrecked machinery, deserted beaches and desolate buildings.

Novels of disaster and experimentation, including 1962's The Drowned World and 1973's Crash, later made into a film by David Cronenberg, garnered him a growing reputation as an anti-establishment avant garde writer. Crash, in which a couple become sexually aroused through car crashes, was written as a motorway extension was being built past the end of his street in Shepperton, west London.

In 1984, Ballard reached a new level of public recognition with Empire of the Sun, a straightforwardly realist novelisation of his detention as a teenager in a Japanese camp for civilians in Shanghai.

It had taken him 40 years to prepare himself to tackle this formative period of his life – "20 years to forget, and then 20 years to remember," as he later put it. The novel follows a young English boy who, like many of Ballard's narrators, shares the author's name, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai. Separated from his parents, Jim at first survives on abandoned packets of food in the deserted mansions of the international settlement, before being picked up by the Japanese and interned in the Lunghua Civilian Assembly Centre, where he relishes his unaccustomed freedom amid hunger, disease and death.

Ballard said of his childhood: "I have – I won't say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp. I remember a lot of the casual brutality and beatings-up that went on, but at the same time we children were playing a hundred and one games all the time!"

Born in Shanghai in 1930, Ballard came to England with his parents after the war, where he became a boarder at the Leys school in Cambridge; stepping, as he put it, "out of one institution, into another." After studying medicine at Cambridge, which he dismissed as an "academic theme park", he studied English at the University of London, before taking on a succession of jobs and writing short fiction in his spare time.

His first published story, a tale of singing plants called Prima Belladonna, appeared in the magazine Science Fantasy in 1956, the same year as an exhibition at the Whitechapel gallery which marked the birth of pop art. In this and the work of the surrealists such as Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dali and Paul Delvaux he found the inspiration for what he later called a "fiction for the present day".

The young science fiction author "wasn't interested in the far future, spaceships and all that", he explained; rather he was interested in "the evolving world, the world of hidden persuaders, of the communications landscape developing, of mass tourism, of the vast conformist suburbs dominated by television – that was a form of science fiction, and it was already here".

The sudden death of his wife while on holiday in 1964 left him to bring up three children single-handedly, but the domesticity of his life in Shepperton let Ballard's imagination break free, with his work moving towards an unsettling experimental realism which pushed at the boundaries of 60s Britain.

His later work continued to subject modern life to its own extremes, with a sinister corporate dystopia in 2000's Super Cannes, a middle-class revolution in 2003's Millennium People and a descent into consumerist fascism in 2006's Kingdom Come. But the label of science fiction writer still stuck, much to Ballard's irritation, partly as a way of "defusing the threat". "By calling a novel like Crash science fiction, you isolate the book and you don't think about what it is," he explained.

He kept the literary world at arm's length, and refused a CBE in 2003, pouring scorn on the honours system as a "Ruritanian charade that helps to prop up our top-heavy monarchy".

He is survived by three children, James, Fay and Beatrice.

(The Guardian)

An excellent site devoted to Ballard that I had not come cross before here.
(With thanx to 'The New Disease' for pointing me in this direction)

New Wilco album tracklist

Wilco The Song
Deeper Down
One Wing
Bull Black Nova
You And I
You Never Know
Country Disappeared
Solitaire
I'll Fight
Sunny Feeling
Everlasting

IMPORTANT MESSAGE:

VALE
THERE IS AN EMAIL IN YR INFORESEARCH INBOX OR COULD YOU PLEASE GET IN TOUCH THRU COMMENTS
THANX
M

The truth?

Unfortunate comic book sound effects

Via 'this isn't happiness' here.

Smoking

Then & now

Mickey Rourke & Kim Basinger
From 'Snuh'

Pirate Bay founders found guilty

Peter Sunde, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm and Carl Lundström were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison despite doing a public service and payment of a fine of 30 million SEK (app. $3,620,000 USD), after a trial of 9 days. The defendants will appeal against the verdict.
Story at 'The Guardian' here.
More at 'Torrent Freak' here.

Ian Tomlinson death due to internal bleeding

Ian Tomlinson, 47, was struck and pushed over by a police officer during G20 protests on 1 April in Londom. Now a fresh post-mortem examination has found he died of abdominal bleeding, not a heart attack, as first thought.
Full story from the 'BBC' here.

Teabagger's manifesto

Via 'The New Disease' here.

David Sylvian - Red Guitar

New David Sylvian album 'Manafon' due soon

From David Sylvian’s label Samadhi Sound we hear about an upcoming release from David Sylvian titled Manafon. According to the release, this album is a “powerfully bold, uncompromising work.” The sessions for this album were apparently recorded in December, 2007 and included Evan Parker, John Tilbury, Keith Rowe, Christian Fennesz, Otomo Yoshihide, and others.

This is now my most eagerly awaited new release.
Well that and Sunn O)))'s 'Monoliths & Dimensions'.

Rock Magic: William S. Burroughs & Jimmy Page (Crawdaddy June 1975)

"...I felt that these considerations could form the basis of my talk with Jimmy Page, which I hoped would not take the form of an interview. There is something just basically wrong about the whole interview format. Someone sticks a mike in your face and says, "Mr. Page, would you care to talk about your interest in occult practices? Would you describe yourself as a believer in this sort of thing?" Even an intelligent mike-in-the-face question tends to evoke a guarded mike-in-the-face answer. As soon as Jimmy Page walked into my loft downtown, I saw that it wasn't going to be that way.
We started talking over a cup of tea and found we have friends in common: the real estate agent who negotiated Jimmy Page's purchase of the Aleister Crowley house on Loch Ness, John Michel, the flying saucer and pyramid expert. Donald Camel, who worked on Performance; Kenneth Anger, and the Jaggers, Mick and Chris. The subject of magic came up in connection with Aleister Crowley and Kenneth Anger' film Lucifer Rising, for which Jimmy Page did the sound track.
Since the word "magic" tends to cause confused thinking, I would like to say exactly what I mean by "magic" and the magical interpretation of so - called reality. The underlying assumption of magic is the assertion of will as the primary moving force in this universe -- the deep conviction that nothing happens unless somebody or some being wills it to happen. To me this has always seemed self -- evident. A chair does not move unless someone moves it. Neither does your physical body, which is composed of much the same materials, move unless you will it to move. Walking across the room is a magical operation. From the viewpoint of magic, no death, no illness, no misfortune, accident, war, or riot is accidental. There are no accidents in the world of magic. And will is another word for animate energy. Rock stars are juggling fissionable material that could blow up at any time . . . "The soccer scores are coming in from the Capital ... one must pretend an interest," drawled the dandified Commandante, safe in the pages of my book, and as another rock star said to me, " You sit on your ass writing -- I could be torn to pieces by my fans, like Orpheus."

Full article here.

I (heart) you all

Patriot

WSB

"Thanks for a nation of finks. Yes, thanks for all the memories-- all right let's see your arms!"

William S. Burroughs & David Bowie: (The Rolling Stone Interview February 1974)

Beat Godfather Meets Glitter Mainman
Rolling Stone
February 28, 1974
by Craig Copetas

"....Burroughs: Politics of sound.

Bowie: Yes. We have kind of got that now. It has very loosely shaped itself into the politics of sound. The fact that you can now subdivide rock into different categories was something that you couldn't do ten years ago. But now I can reel off at least ten sounds that represent a kind of person rather than a type of music. The critics like being critics, and most of them wish they were rock-and-roll stars. But when they classify they are talking about people not music. It's a whole political thing.

Burroughs: Like infrasound, the sound below the level of hearing. Below 16 MHz. Turned up full blast it can knock down walls for 30 miles. You can walk into the French patent office and buy the patent for 40p. The machine itself can be made very cheaply from things you could find in a junk yard.

Bowie: Like black noise. I wonder if there is a sound that can put things back together? There was a band experimenting with stuff like that; they reckon they could make a whole audience shake.

Burroughs: They have riot-control noise based on these soundwaves now. But you could have music with infrasound, you wouldn't necessarily have to kill the audience.

Bowie: Just maim them.

Burroughs: The weapon of the Wild Boys is a Bowie knife, an 18-inch bowie knife, did you know that?

Bowie: An 18-inch bowie knife.... you don't do things by halves, do you? No, I didn't know that was their weapon. The name Bowie just appealed to me when I was younger. I was into a kind of heavy philosophy thing when I was 16 years old, and I wanted a truism about cutting through the lies and all that.

Burroughs: Well, it cuts both ways, you know, double-edged on the end.

Bowie: I didn't see it cutting both ways till now."

The full interview via 'Teenage Wildlife'
here.

True

I myself play a very mean mp3 player/turntable/CD player etc etc.

Brought to light

Another policeman has been suspended after hitting a woman with his baton at a recent protest in London.
Story and video at the 'BBC' here.

Respect

On 19th April 1989 (the following Wednesday of the disaster), a European Cup semi final between AC Milan and Real Madrid was played. The referee blew his whistle 6 minutes into the game to stop play and hold a minute's silence for those who lost their lives tragically at Hillsborough. About 20 seconds into the silence the Milan fans on the Curva Sud began to sing Liverpool's anthem "You'll Never Walk Alone" as a tribute to those who died. This is a gesture that Liverpool fans will never forget and there is great respect between Liverpool and AC Milan since that night.

It was 20 years ago today (3:06PM)

It is 20 years today since 96 Liverpool fans were crushed to death at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield

'BBC' audio archive & slideshow here.
Full story here.

Report of the memorial service at Anfield from the 'BBC' here.
Mike Bracken on the ongoing fight for recognition of what really happened from 'The Guardian' here.
The Hillsborough Justice Campaign here.

The former editor of The Sun, Kelvin MacKenzie, has reportedly claimed that the newspaper's allegations about Liverpool supporters at Hillsborough was "the truth". The Sun famously claimed that Liverpool fans had caused the tragedy (which resulted in the loss of 96 lives) by drunkenly storming the gates, and also alleged that fans urinated on the bodies of the dead and pickpocketed them.
Then-editor MacKenzie made a grovelling apology the next day, but The Sun is still boycotted by many Liverpool fans because of those horrendous accusations. The paper then issued a formal apology in 2004, saying they were "truly sorry" for making "the most terrible mistake in history." However, in a stunning display of insensitivity, MacKenzie has now apparently told a business lunch in Newcastle that he was forced to apologise by owner Rupert Murdoch and he still stands by his allegations.
"I went on the World at One the next day and apologised. I only did that because Rupert Murdoch told me to," he said, according to the Liverpool Echo. "I wasn't sorry then and I'm not sorry now because we told the truth. There was a surge of Liverpool fans who had been drinking and that is what caused the disaster." All The Sun's allegations were disproved by the Justice Taylor inquiry into the tragedy.

There is only one word for this man but I won't print it here.

The youngest person to die that day was Steven Gerrard's 10 year old cousin.

Playing For Change - Stand By Me

http://playingforchange.com - From the award-winning documentary, "Playing For Change: Peace Through Music", comes the first of many "songs around the world".

Nothing to say...

PLEASE JUST GO & WATCH

THIS.

Magnificent!

(Thanx again to the 'hangover helper'.)

Lars von Trier - Antichrist (trailer)

Bowie and Bill: The Interview

Material - Don't Lose Control (12"Mix)

Recently the A side was posted here.
Out of the ether here is the 'B' side.

The Beat - I Confess

Great interview with Dave Wakeling from 'Popdose' here.

The 10 most played songs in the UK

1. Procol Harum - A Whiter Shade Of Pale

2. Queen - Bohemian Rhapsody

3. Everly Brothers - All I Have To Do Is Dream

4. Wet Wet Wet - Love Is All Around

5. Bryan Adams - (Everything I Do) I Do It For You

6. Robbie Williams - Angels

7. Elvis Presley - All Shook Up

8. Abba - Dancing Queen

9. Perry Como - Magic Moments

10. Bing Crosby - White Christmas

These are the most played songs in public places over the last 75 years according to the 'BBC' here.

Apart from the Everly Brothers I HATE every last one of the songs on the list!
For a list of the biggest selling artists of all time go here.

Bukkakeski

This is a Russian ad for MILK!!?
From 'AnimalNY' here.

Phil Spector guilty of murder

Phil Spector arriving at court to hear the verdict.

Full story from 'The Guardian' here and the 'BBC' here.

Coloured crayons as pixel art

The art of Christan Faur here.
Via 'drawn' here.

Don't you wish that YOU had been there?

Four nights of the best the post punk world had to offer in 1979 in the bowels of the London YMCA in Tottenham Court Road. Never had been there for a gig before nor again. It was a great place to watch bands though.
The unannounced band on the first night was Echo and the Bunnymen, still with 'Echo' (their drum machine). It was one of the first gigs that they and The Teardrop Explodes had played in London. I got given a mixing desk tape of both band's performance, very unfortunately long since gone.
Joy Division? Well another powerful performance, they truly were an amazing live band and while the records are brilliant, live it was something else, obviously without any of Martin Hannett's studio trickery.
Rema Rema were enjoyable, with Marco Pirroni on guitar and I fell in love with Max the drummer (who later released the single 'I Confess' as Dorothy on Industrial Records).
Cabaret Voltaire's performance can be heard on their 'Live At The YMCA' album. Though to be honest it doesn't give justice to their sound as it was recorded on a boogie box.
What can you say about Throbbing Gristle? Well again the performance has been released (as part of the TG24 box set) but unfortunately it omits the dubbed/fucked up version of the Village People's 'YMCA' that led into their performance and featured some amusing dance poses by Genesis.
Of the other bands that played Scritti Politti were as usual superb, so different to the entity that they became, this was spikey/angular music influenced by the spaces of dub. Lastly Mark Perry from the Good Missionaries really pissed me off by smashing his guitar at the end of their set. 'We Destroy All Rock'nRoll'? Nah, just an empty cliche Mark!
The promoters 'Final Solution' (!) went on to become the promoters of choice in London for that whole post punk crew and as I sold tickets from record shops that I worked at it meant that I could get into all the gigs free!
The NME/Rough Trade cassette C81, described by Simon Reynolds as 'post punk's swan song' can be found at my other blog here.

Bonus audio:
Joy Division Live at the YMCA 2 August 1979.
"Intro-Dead Souls-Disorder-Wilderness-Auto Suggestion-Transmission-Day of the Lords-She's Lost Control-Shadowplay-Atrocity Exhibition-Insight-Outro"

Dot Allison - Morning Sun (Live)

If anyone has the Death of Vegas remix of 'Message Personnel' could they get in touch.

A Certain Ratio - Shack Up

Girlz With Gunz # 30

Dianna Rigg

Stoner

Fiscal 'teabagging' indeed!

For those unaware what the term 'teabagging' means.
Click here.

God's Army! What became of Luther & Johnny Htoo?

A frightening yet fascinating 17 minute film 'Twin Crusade' shot in 2000, can be watched
here.

Where are they now?
Luther Htoo and his twin brother Johnny were the boy leaders of God's Army, a Karen militant group in Burma. Only nine years old at the time they founded the group, the boys would eventually surrender to Thai authorities in 2001 after the Burmese army had all but destroyed the operational strength of their outfit.
Much of the publicity surrounding the God's Army was a product of its young leadership. The group became famous after a picture (see right) of the two brothers was published in newspapers around the world. Luther is widely regarded as more vocal and gregarious then his twin, but it is possible that this information was simply extrapolated from this famous image.
According to sources within the tribe, in 1997 a local pastor (the Karen believe in a blend of Christianity and animism) brought the two boys to a military commander, saying they had been touched by God and they could bring salvation to the Karen who had been fighting against the Burmese government for nearly 50 years. The story continues that the two brothers then led a successful military operation against the Burmese army, despite overwhelming odds.
The story of the brother's prowess soon spread to the rest of the tribe, and men flocked to join the God's Army from other Karen militant outfits. Rumors spread that the boys had magical powers and were immune to bullets. At peak strength, the boys reportedly commanded 500 militants.
Despite this, the God's Army soon found itself the target of a renewed Burmese crackdown, and by 2001, the boys' supporters had been whittled down to about 20 fighters. Exhausted, the two brothers crossed the Thai-Burmese border and surrendered to Thai authorities in late January of that year. Johnny and Luther were 13 years old at the time.
The Thai government re-settled Johnny and Luther in a Karen refugee camp where they were re-united with their mother. Despite efforts to bring the Htoo's to the United States, the family continues to reside in this camp.
In July 2006, Johnny reportedly left the camp to return to Burma where he promptly surrendered to Burmese authorities. It is unknown why Johnny left the camp, and by all accounts, Luther remains in Thailand.
Some have speculated that Johnny and Luther were nothing more then figureheads for the God's Army. Thai military officials have commented that the boys were a front for older militants in an effort to raise morale and attract fighters. While this theory certainly seems plausible, and a great deal of information surrounding the Htoo brothers is clearly myth, Johnny and Luther are still widely considered the youngest military commanders in history.

(WikiAnswers)

Happy birthday Moira!!!

Not bad...after missing your last 30 birthdays, I am a day ahead of you now too and therefore behind!!!
Hey there is always next year!
Have a wee toetap on me.
Love
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The Threshold HouseBoys Choir - A Time of Happening

Filmed at the GinJae (vegetarian) Festival held in Bangkok Thailand.
This was Peter 'Sleazy' Christopherson's first musical venture since the untimely death of his Coil partner John Balance.

This video is incredibly hypnotic and is the first part of the Threshold HouseBoys Choir CD/DVD release 'Form Grows Rampant'.
All voices are from indigenous sources, completely re-styled, re-tuned and re-arranged.
The sound & vision on this release work perfectly together.
Would you expect anything else from someone who was part of the Hipgnosis design group for so long?

Sleazy is probably packing his bags at his compound in Thailand at this present time to go and 'wreck some civilisation' in America as Throbbing Gristle are about to perform there for the first time since 1981.

Boy am I jealous of the people going this time around, though I was lucky enough to have witnessed numerous performances by TG in London in the seventies and (very) early eighties.

(Use the search engine to the right as there is more TG scattered throughout this blog!)

Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine*

This painting 'Christ of the St. John of the Cross' by Salvador Dali hangs in

Kelvingrove Art Gallery in Glasgow.
It was bought in 1951 for £8,200 although Dali initially asked the Glasgow Corporation for £12,000 for the painting. Unusually, Dali also signed away the copyright of the image.
The purchase proved controversial coming as it did just seven years after the end of the Second World War, with many suggesting the funds would be better spent elsewhere.
The Spanish government is said to have recently offered £80 million for the painting, an offer allegedly turned down.
In 1961 a visitor to the museum threw a brick at the painting seriously damaging it. His reason being that he objected to the fact that the viewer is looking down on Christ.
Kelvingrove Gallery is now the most popular free visitor attraction in Scotland and the 14th most popular major gallery in the world.

Growing up in Glasgow I used to wag, sorry (been in Australia so long) skive school (a lot) and take myself off to the gallery and I could (and did) spend hours just looking at this picture.
I really am not a fan of the majority of Dali's paintings but there is something about this picture that intrigues me.
When/If I ever work out what it is - I shall let you know I promise.

* Patti Smith