Amazing documentary about old school billboard painters.
Monday, 24 May 2010
Pot bust turns into yardwork
Like the old song goes, one of these things is not like the other...However, remind a police officer in Corpus Christi, Texas of those famed Cookie Monster lyrics and they're likely to give you an annoyed look.
That's because a recently discovered cache of plants, initially pegged by officials speaking to local news as "one of the largest marijuana plant seizures in the police department's history," turned out to be a relatively common prairie flower of little significance.
Continue reading
@'Raw Story' Sunday, 23 May 2010
Review: Otis Redding - Live On Sunset Strip
Pop quiz: How many No. 1 hits did Rock and Roll Hall of Fame member Otis Redding score before his death in 1967 in a plane crash?
Answer: None.
The R&B and soul great’s only chart-topping hit was “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” which was recorded less than three weeks before his death and released shortly after. And it’s the one song that casual Redding fans might wonder why it doesn’t appear on the new “Otis Redding: Live on the Sunset Strip” album being released Tuesday.
That's because the two-CD set was recorded at the Whisky A Go Go in West Hollywood in April 1966, well before he laid down the track for “Dock of the Bay.” At the time of these fiery performances, Redding’s star was streaking across the pop stratosphere thanks to a rapidly expanding catalog of soon to be classic songs he’d written and recorded including “These Arms of Mine,” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (To Stop Now),” “Mr. Pitiful,” “I Can’t Turn You Loose” and perhaps the only one on which he just might have been upstaged by another artist’s rendition, “Respect.”
Aretha Franklin’s version, however, was a little over a year away when Redding and his explosive 10-piece band powered through these shows, and you can practically feel the sweat in the room that night.
“Picture a calliope, spouting blasts of sound, and imagine a steam generator in the innards of the calliope, frantically driving the whole mechanism, and you have a fair vision of the 10-piece band led by Otis Redding, which opened at the Whisky A Go Go Thursday night with their massive Southern-style rhythm and blues sound,” Los Angeles Times staffer Pete Johnson wrote at the time in an article that’s reproduced in the 15-page CD booklet.
What’s great about the new Stax/Concord release is that it presents the complete three final sets from Redding’s four-day stint at the Whisky, which came right on the heels of his appearance at the Hollywood Bowl.
In 1968, some of the tracks surfaced on “Otis Redding In Person at the Whisky A Go Go.” In 1982, more of the Whisky performances were released, then in 1993 a CD, “Good To Me: Recorded Live At the Whisky, Vol. 2,” expanded on the previous LP. This is the first time the complete sets have been released in the chronological order in which they were performed.
There can’t be two fans any happier about this set than Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, and not just because both were dyed-in-the-wool R&B and soul music fans. But because Redding’s recording of their “Satisfaction” was his latest hit when these shows took place, the song turns up no less than five times over the course of the three sets captured here.
He also detoured briefly from his own songbook to cover the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” and James Brown’s “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” but it’s the made-in-Memphis stuff that is the heart and soul of these shows.
Redding’s opening act was the Rising Sons, an L.A. band featuring soon-to-be-celebrated players including Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder.
“After performing our act we couldn’t wait to get offstage to watch all the things the musician did,” Mahal recalls in the liner notes. “For a bunch of young guys in the business to just be around someone who had a national vibe like that, who put everything out on stage and wasn’t stuck up, that was totally fabulous.”
Another fascinating musicological tidbit in Ashley Kahn’s lively essay: “According to Redding’s manager, Phil Walden, Dylan offered Redding a listen to his recent recording ‘Just Like a Woman’ that evening with the hope that he’d cover it. Though Redding was open to performing the work of younger songwriters — besides ‘Satisfaction,’ the Beatles’ ‘Day Tripper’ was in his repertoire — he apparently thought Dylan’s song was too wordy.”
When you hear how much mileage he gets by bending the single word “time” in “I’ve Been Loving You,” almost to the breaking point, it’s easy to understand how quantity of words was simply irrelevant in Redding’s world. All he needed was one good, meaty one.
Do we still have a right to strike?
The union Unite has won its appeal against an injunction preventing members of British Airways cabin crew from going on strike.
But Unite is angry that BA won the injunction in the first place, after the High Court initially ruled that the union had not correctly followed rules about contacting its members with strike result details.
"It strikes at the heart of the democratic right to strike in a properly conducted ballot by bringing technical difficulties," Unite joint leader Derek Simpson said.
Unite says the decision was made because it had not told its members that 11 ballot papers had been spoilt in its latest vote on industrial action in February.
It calls it a "minor technicality" after 81% (7,482) of its members who had voted supported strike action.
Unite's other joint leader Tony Woodley said the case was about "stopping an effective trade union being effective in support of their members".
Mr Simpson added: "I don't blame British Airways - the law is wrong."
This is not the first time BA had won an injunction stopping Unite members from walking out.
In December, a judge ruled that the union had wrongly included staff taking redundancy in an earlier strike ballot, and that decision was not overturned.
In April, Network Rail was granted an injunction after it alleged discrepancies in the RMT's ballot for industrial action.
So is Mr Woodley right to question whether we still have the right to take industrial action?
"I don't think it does cut into our fundamental right to strike because the issues around these have been procedural issues, to do with the ballot, rather than the right to strike itself," says Andy Cook, chief executive of the specialist employee relations advisers Marshall-James.
While Roger Seifert, professor of industrial relations at Wolverhampton Business School, says: "It's not a challenge to the fundamental right to strike but he's right in the sense this is a challenge to the ability to carry out a lawful ballot."
Current legislation says unions do not have to get everything spot on but have to make a genuine effort to show that they have balloted properly, Prof Seifert explains.
A High Court injunction stopped RMT workers going on strike in April
"The recent cases have looked at what it reasonably means to get it right," he says.
"The judiciary is beginning to interpret the law much more strictly."
And why are judges getting more "pernickety" as he puts it?
"Judges tend to 'go with the flow' if you like. If the atmosphere is 'We're in recession, these are tough times', maybe they think companies can't allow strikes to happen."
But it seems that there is some disagreement among judges about how they interpret the law.
The panel that overturned the injunction was divided. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Judge, and Lady Justice Smith upheld Unite's appeal. The Master of the Rolls, Lord Neuberger, rejected it.
Even Mr Justice McCombe, the judge who granted the injunction, appeared to be in two minds.
He said in his ruling: "At present I am inclined to think that the union may well have failed to put in place an adequately analysed system calculated to ensure that all reasonable steps were taken to communicate with relevant members as soon as reasonably practicable the relevant items of statutory information.
"The point to my mind is an arguable one."
Andy Cook, who was head of human resources at Gate Gourmet when it was involved in airport strikes in 2005, says the recent spate of industrial disputes ending up in the courts is a sign of "employers growing increasingly frustrated with negotiations and looking at different ways to wield power in different situations".
He cites the Network Rail case as "an attempt by an employer to take the wind out of a union's sails" which, for the time being at least, has been successful.
"We haven't seen any notification of any new strike dates," he says. "The challenge has successfully managed to avert strike action."
But it's not just employers taking unions to court. There is a history of unions seeking legal action as well, Mr Andy Cook Chief executive, Marshall-James
In 2008, the pilots' union Balpa tried to take BA to court to stop the Open Skies agreement, he says, while Unite also tried to get an injunction to stop BA making changes in the first place.
And in November last year the Communication Workers Union had been due to go to the High Court seeking an injunction preventing the Royal Mail from using temporary workers while its members went on strike. The union later called off the legal action.
"Where strikes have been called and there really is no other way to resolve it both sides look to try and take legal action," Mr Cook says.
So what does all this mean for the future of industrial relations in the UK?
"I think employers will look at it and use the courts more. It's a sad reflection on industrial relations," according to Mr Cook.
Prof Seifert agrees: "It's irresponsible of employers to keep seeking injunctions and irresponsible of judges to keep granting them.
"Disputes should be resolved between the two parties involved."
Jamaica police in 'druglord' plea
Jamaican police have urged residents in parts of the capital Kingston to take down barricades set up to stop them from searching for an alleged druglord.
The government said last week it would extradite Christopher "Dudus" Coke to the US. According to the police, criminal gangs have begun stockpiling weapons to prevent his arrest.
And his supporters have apparently blockaded the part of Kingston where he lives to stop him being arrested.
But some residents claim that the barricades are intended to protect their neighbourhood from police violence.
Police officials say they have no desire to engage in armed conflict, and will exercise restraint when they serve the arrest warrant.
Most wanted
Mr Coke, 41, is accused of being the leader of the notorious Shower Posse, which US authorities say operates an international drugs and guns network.
 Some residents have protested in defence of Mr Coke |
Mr Coke is thought to be hiding in Tivoli Gardens, one of Kingston's poorest districts, which police say is controlled by his supporters.
The BBC's Nick Davis in Kingston says they are believed to be heavily armed and ready to defend the man they call "the president".
Thousands of residents have protested against the deicision to deport him.
Change of heart
Jamaican Prime Minister Bruce Golding said earlier this week that he was prepared to send Mr Coke to the US to face charges of drug and gun trafficking.
The decision reversed nine months of opposition to his extradition.
Mr Golding had argued that the evidence against Mr Coke was obtained illegally by intercepting mobile telephone calls.
But he changed his mind in the face of growing public discontent, and questions about his possible ties to Mr Coke.
He apologised to the nation and admitted he had mishandled the case.
Tivoli Gardens is in Mr Golding's constituency.
The US and UK have warned travellers about possible violence and disorder in Kingston because of the situation.
Saturday, 22 May 2010
The Pop Group Reform. New album, live gigs...
British experimental post-punk band The Pop Group—inactive for roughly 30 years—is reuniting, frontman Mark Stewart tells The A.V. Club. The band, last heard on 1980's For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, plans to release a new album called (The Alternate) and play some live dates. There's no word yet on which members are part of the reunion or where and when any live dates will happen, though the album is tentatively scheduled for September.
For a brief period in the late '70s, The Pop Band (SIC - Mona) honed a confrontational type of post-punk built on a dissonant mix of punk, dub, funk, and noise. It was a sound that poet Allen Ginsberg allegedly once described as "Armageddon"—and, unsurprisingly, it proved unsustainable. Not long after For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder?, The Pop Group disbanded. Stewart went on to have the most celebrated career of his bandmates, both as a solo artist and as frontman for Mark Stewart & The Maffia, releasing albums that influenced artists like Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails, Sonic Youth, Massive Attack, Tricky, Chris Connelly, and others.
The press release Stewart sent to The A.V. Club says the reunion is "in honor of 'The New Banalists,'" which is apparently a new umbrella concept for The Pop Group. Its manifesto: "Deny the politics of envy. Taste is a form of personal censorship. Technique is the refuge of the insecure. We are The New Banalists." Maybe they could tour with Throbbing Gristle?
Kyle Ryan @'AV Club'
I think you will have to look to ATP for further tour info...
But this news was alluded to about 6 months ago here at 'Exile' when I heard this (almost from the horse's mouth) but I was sworn to secrecy at the time!
Bhangra flashmob taking 'save Asian Network' call to BBC Broadcasting House
A Bhangra flashmob in support of the BBC Radio Asian Network will descend on Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London. Photograph: Graeme Robertson
A campaign to save the UK's leading Asian music station will be stepped up tomorrow when hundreds of supporters are expected to descend on BBC headquarters for the UK's first Bhangra flashmob.
Organisers say the event, to be held outside Broadcasting House in Portland Place, London, is the start of a new wave of protests designed to persuade the BBC to drop plans to scrap the Asian Network.
It comes as the consultation period on the BBC's Strategy Review, which in February proposed axing digital radio stations BBC 6 Music and the Asian Network, is due to conclude on Tuesday.
"The Bhangra music flashmob is a fun way of making two serious points," said organiser Sunny Hundal. "First to show that a lot of people are angry about the BBC's decision to close down the Asian Network, and secondly, that it directly affects the vitality of fusion Asian music created in the UK."
More than 100 prominent British Asians – including writer Meera Syal, Olympic boxer Amir Khan and Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty – signed up to the campaign to save the station after the review by director general, Mark Thompson.
A letter to the BBC Trust chairman, Sir Michael Lyons, also signed by Bend It Like Beckham director Gurinder Chadha, England cricketer Vikram Solanki and singers Jay Sean and MIA , expressed profound shock at the closure decision.
Hundal, the editor of political blog Liberal Conspiracy, said the protest was the next stage in the campaign. "Asian Network reaches nearly a quarter of all British Asians every week and many of those listeners will be abandoned by this move," he added.
Protesters are asking the Equality and Human Rights Commission to investigate if closure could mean Asian licence fee payers will lose out.
"The BBC has to do an equality assessment as part of this process to see how this decision will affect Asian listeners," said Hundal. "We would like the EHRC to look at the BBC's proposals to ensure that Asian licence fee payers are not losing out."
The decision to close 6Music led to an outcry, with almost 180,000 people joining the campaign to save the station. 6Music's audience rose by 50% in the latest Rajar figures, following the announcement.
Announcing closure of the Asian Network in March, the BBC said the station's output was expensive in terms of cost per listener – it cost a total of £12.1m in 2008-09 – and its output was "inconsistent".
An interim report is expected within two months of consultations closing. If it decides to press ahead with closure, the BBC would carry out an equality assessment.
"In the summer, when we plan to publish our provisional conclusions, we are aiming to say publicly whether or not the specific 6Music/Asian Network proposals appear to be compatible with the overall strategy that we are setting for the BBC," said a BBC Trust spokeswoman.
There has been a high profile campaign in support of 6Music and Hundal said supporters of the Asian Network were keen to make their voices heard.
"We've been slightly disappointed that senior BBC executives have focused their concerns on 6Music listeners but largely ignored Asian Network listeners, who are affected much more," he said.
In one of the more unusual campaign events, musician Ranvir Singh Verma is planning to walk backwards from London to Birmingham.
He will set off on the 120-mile walk after the flashmob protest and says he came up with the idea after reading about Lotan Baba, the "rolling saint" who has rolled his body more than 18,000 miles across India for unity and peace.
"His belief in penance is what encouraged me to devise this challenge," said Verma. "There are also many Native American communities that have one member that does everything backwards, including riding a horse. This acts as a reminder of the stupidity of humanity and the need to address our actions from time to time."
Matthew Taylor @'The Guardian'
Karen Cooper Complex - Shinjuku Birdwalk (1981)
The Karen Cooper Complex was "a band that played loosely structured, improvisational rock that was more "Bitches Brew" than Grateful Dead"
-Bill Altice
Texas schools to get controversial syllabus
Education officials in the US state of Texas have adopted new guidelines to the school curriculum which critics say will politicise teaching.
The changes include teaching that the United Nations could be a threat to American freedom, and that the Founding Fathers may not have intended a complete separation of church and state.
Critics say the changes are ideological and distort history, but proponents argue they are redressing a long-standing liberal bias in education.
Analysts say Texas, with five million schoolchildren, wields substantial influence on school curriculums across the US.
The BBC's Rajesh Mirchandani in Los Angeles says publishers of texbooks used nationally often print what Texas wants to teach.
Students in Texas will now be taught the benefits of US free-market economics and how government taxation can harm economic progress.
They will study how American ideals benefit the world bu organisations like the UN could be a threat to personal freedom.
And Thomas Jefferson has been dropped from a list of enlightenment thinkers in the world-history curriculum, despite being one of the Founding Fathers who is credited with developing the idea that church and state should be separate.
The doctrine has become a cornerstone of US government, but some religious groups and some members of the Texas Education Board disagree, our correspondent says.
The board, which is dominated by Christian conservatives, voted nine-to-five in favour of adopting the new curriculum for both primary and secondary schools.
But during the discussions some of the most controversial ideas were dropped - including a proposal to refer to the slave trade as the "Atlantic triangular trade".
Opponents of the changes worry that textbooks sold in other states will be written to comply with the new Texas standards, meaning that the alterations could have an impact on curriculums nationwide.
Bejebus - what is yr fugn problem America?
Well your religious seige mentality would be a good place to start with...
Well your religious seige mentality would be a good place to start with...
The Man Who Stole the World; The Story of Celluloid Records
- Screenplay by: Kim White
- Directed by: Kim White
- Produced by: Kerstin Mueller
- 2011?
The story of Celluloid Records will explore the dichotomy between philanthropist, arriviste, and con-artiste. This is the story of an enigmatic character whose career in the music industry has spanned nearly half a century. We begin in Paris of the 60's and the start of the Free Jazz movement (Albert Alyer, Archie Shepp, Don Cherry, Sonny Sharrock) and follow his musical journey thru late 70's London Experimental and Dark Wave (Gong,Throbbing Gristle, Soft Cell, Cabaret Voltaire) early 80's New York No Wave (Massacre, Golden Palominos, Alan Vega, James Chance), The Bronx and the home of Hip Hop (Time Zone with Afrika Bambaataa, Grandmixer DST, B-Side with Fab 5 Freddy, The Last Poets, Futura 2000 with The Clash), the popularization of "World Music" (Fela Kuti, Ginger Baker, Toure Kunda, Manu Dibango and even Lambada) Defacto in-house producer Bill Laswell and Jean Karakos helped define a generation whose influence is still felt today. Eventually we will end up in the present day, checking in on the artists, musicians, the highly collectible back catalogue and the man behind it all, Jean Karakos; a man who has survived multiple death threats, lawsuits, and bankruptcies while always managing to move forward. We will explore what drives him. Where is he now? How is he living? What does his future hold? We will tell this story through interviews with artists, friends and Karakos himself. I see this story as sort of a successor to “F is For Fake”and the story of Elmyr deHory as told by Clifford Irving and Orson Welles. There are so many characters involved, both colorful and unscrupulous, that anything can happen once the interviews begin to unfold.(Thanx SilentWatcher!)
The OxyContin Express
Bloody Hell!
In this Peabody Award-winning edition of Vanguard, correspondent Mariana van Zeller travels to South Florida--the "Colombia of prescription drugs"--to expose a bustling pill pipeline that stretches from the beaches of Ft. Lauderdale to the rolling hills of Appalachia. "The OxyContin Express" features intimate access with pill addicts, prisoners and law enforcement as each struggles with a lethal national epidemic.
Keeper of Secrets
In a very short time, Julian Assange has become one of the most intriguing people in the world. The mysterious Australian founder of the whistleblower website WikiLeaks is as elusive as the public servants, spooks and - he assures me - cabinet ministers who regularly drop their bombshells from the anonymity of his cyberspace bolt-hole.
Of no fixed address, or time zone, Assange has never publicly admitted he is the brains behind the website that has so radically rewritten the rules in the information era. (He acknowledges registering a website, Leaks.org, in 1999, but denies ever having done anything with it.) He has never even admitted his age - although this is not so hard to work out from the parts of his life that journalists have so far been able to piece together.
''Are you 38?'' I ask. He gives an unintelligible response. So that's a yes? ''Something like that.''
Far more tantalising, however, is what he says are some very, very big leaks to come - apparently within weeks. ''Right now we are sitting on history-making stuff,'' he says.
Wikileaks appeared on the internet three years ago. It acts as an electronic dead drop for highly sensitive, or secret information: the pure stuff, in other words, published straight from the secret files to the world. No filters, no rewriting, no spin. Created by an online network of dissidents, journalists, academics, technology experts and mathematicians from various countries, all with similar political views and values apparently, the website also uses technology that makes the original sources of the leaks untraceable.
In April, the website released graphic, classified video footage of an American helicopter gunship firing on - and killing - Iraqis in a Baghdad street in 2007, apparently in cold blood. The de-encrypted video, which WikiLeaks released on its own sites, as well as on YouTube, caused an international uproar.
The Baghdad video has been WikiLeaks' biggest coup to date, although an extraordinary number of unauthorised documents - more than 1 million - have found their way to the website. These include a previously secret 110-page draft report by the international investigators Kroll, revealing allegations of huge corruption in Kenya involving the family of former Kenyan leader Daniel arap Moi; the US government's classified manual of standard operating procedures for Camp Delta, at Guantanamo Bay, which revealed that it was policy to hide some prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross; the classified US intelligence report on how to marginalise WikiLeaks; the secret Church Of Scientology manuals; an internal report by the global oil trader Trafigura about dumping toxic waste in the Ivory Coast; a classified US profile of the former Icelandic ambassador to the United States in which the ambassador is praised for helping quell publicity about the CIA's activities involving rendition flights; and the emails leaked from the embattled Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia in Britain, last November, which triggered the so-called ''Climategate'' scandal.
That is one leak that might have bemused conservatives convinced that WikiLeaks is run by ultra-lefties. In the blogosphere, meanwhile, conspiracy theories abound that WikiLeaks is a CIA cyber-ops plot.
Two years ago, a Swiss Bank in Zurich, Julius Baer, succeeded in temporarily closing down the website with a US District Court injunction after WikiLeaks published documents detailing how the bankers hid their wealthy clients' funds in offshore trusts (the banned documents reappeared on WikiLeaks ''mirror'' sites in places such as Belgium and Britain).
The Australian government, too, has made noises about going after WikiLeaks, after the Australian Communications and Media Authority's secret blacklist of banned websites (websites which may be blocked for all Australians if the Rudd government goes ahead with its proposed internet censorship regime), turned up on the website last year. The communications regulator further expanded the blacklist to include several pages on WikiLeaks, whose crime was publishing a leaked document containing Denmark's site of banned websites.
To say that the list of rattled people in high places around the world is growing because of Wikileaks is an understatement. The fact that the website has no headquarters, also means the conventional retaliatory measures - phones tapped, a raid by the authorities - are impossible.
Intense interest in Julian Assange started well before the Baghdad video was released, and viewed 4.8 million times in the first week. The former teenage hacker from Melbourne, whose mystique as an internet subversive, a resourceful loner with no fixed address, travelling constantly between countries with laptop and backpack, constitutes what you might call Assange's romantic appeal. But then there is the flip side: a man who believes in extreme transparency, but evades and obfuscates when it comes to talking about himself in the rare interviews that he gives - which are hardly ever face to face.
The secretiveness extends to those close to him. One woman who speaks to me on the condition of total anonymity, lived in the same share house in Melbourne as Assange, for a few months in early 2007, when WikiLeaks was in its incubation period. The house was the central hub, and it was inhabited by computer geeks.
There were beds everywhere, she says. There was even a bed in the kitchen. This woman slept on a mattress in Assange's room, and says she would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night to find him still glued to his computer. He frequently forgets to eat or sleep, wrote mathematical formulas all over the walls and the doors, and used only red light bulbs in his room - on the basis that early man, if waking suddenly, would see only the gentle light of the campfire, and fall asleep again. He also went through a period of frustration that the human body has to be fed several times a day and experimented with eating just one meal every two days, in order to be more efficient.
''He was always extremely focused,'' she says.
WE MEET in early May, the day after Assange slips back into Melbourne, his home town. He arrived on a flight from Europe, via the United States. Or so I understand from the person acting as our go-between. The same contact provides a Melbourne address, and instructions: ''Don't call a cab, find one on the street; turn off your mobile phone before you catch the cab and preferably, remove the batteries.''
Sitting outside at the rear of the address, I suspect that at the last minute, Assange won't turn up - though not because of the cold. After all, it's well known that he has been spending a lot of time in Iceland lately, advising the Icelandic government on new laws to strengthen freedom of expression and protections for sources and whistleblowers.
Last year, WikiLeaks released a confidential document showing that the major Icelandic bank, Kaupthing, had loaned billions of euros to its major shareholders shortly before the great, global financial meltdown (the website also released the legal threat sent to them by the bank's lawyers).
Suddenly, he is here - a tall, thin, pale figure with that remarkable white hair, looking very tired, and wearing creased, student-style, dark clothes and boots, and backpack.
As we shake hands, he inclines his head slightly in a courtly, old-world manner, at odds with his youthful, student-traveller looks. When I remark that there's a lot to ask him, he replies: ''That's all right - I'm not going to answer half of it.''
Is Assange his real name? Yes, he replies, then says it's the name in his passport. ''What's in a name?'' he then adds mysteriously, casting doubt on his first answer.
(At the time of writing, his passport status was apparently back to normal after immigration officials at Melbourne Airport said that his passport was going to be cancelled on the grounds that it was too tatty).
''It has been in a couple of rivers,'' Assange allows, of the state of his passport. The first time, as he recalls, in December, 2006, when he was crossing a swollen river during heavy rain, in southern Tasmania, and was swept out to sea. He swam back in. ''My conclusion from that experience is that the universe doesn't give a damn about you, so it's a good thing you do.''
Why did he have his passport with him? He had everything he needed for three weeks of survival, he replies. He needed his passport for ID when he flew to Tasmania.
Doesn't he have a driver's licence? ''No comment.'' How true is the image of him as the enigmatic founder of WikiLeaks, constantly on the move, with no real place to call home? Is this really how he lives his life?
''Do I live my life as an enigmatic man?''
No - is it true you're constantly on the move?
''Pretty much true.''
Does he have one base he'd call home?
''I have four bases where I would go if I was sick, which is how I think about where home is.''
He has spent the best part of the past six months in Iceland, he says. And the next six months? ''It depends on which area of the world I'm needed most. We're an international organisation. We deal with international problems,'' he replies.
Assange mentions four bases, but names only two. The one in Iceland, another in Kenya, where he has spent a lot of time, on and off, for the past couple of years. The Kroll report, released on WikiLeaks, reportedly swung the Kenyan presidential election in 2007.
When he's in the country, Assange lives in a compound in Nairobi with other foreigners, mainly members of non-governmental agencies such as Medecins Sans Frontieres. He originally went to Kenya in 2007 to give a lecture on WikiLeaks, when it was up and running.
''And ended up staying there,'' I suggest encouragingly.
''Mmmm.''
As a result of liking the place or …
''Well, it has got extraordinary opportunities for reforms. It had a revolution in the '70s. It has only been a democracy since 2004 … I was introduced to senior people in journalism, in human rights very quickly.''
He has travelled to Siberia. Is there a third base there? ''No comment. I wish. The bear steak is good.''
Why did he go to Georgia?
''How do you know about that?''
I read it somewhere, I reply. It was a rumour. ''Ah, a rumour,'' he says. But he did go there? ''It's better that I don't comment on that, because Georgia is not such a big place.''
Living permanently in a state of exile, means that a person might always have the sharp eye of the outsider, I suggest.
''The sense of perspective that interaction with multiple cultures gives you, I find to be extremely valuable, because it allows you to see the structure of a country with greater clarity, and gives you a sense of mental independence,'' replies Assange.
''You're not swept up in the trivialities of a nation. You can concentrate on the serious matters. Australia is a bit of a political wasteland. That's OK, as long as people recognise that. As long as people recognise that Australia is a suburb of a country called Anglo-Saxon.''
Could he ever live in one place again? A brief silence. ''I don't think so,'' he says finally.
When he isn't being deliberately obscure, and even when he is, Assange has the measured tones of an academic, sometimes sounding, once we're deep in conversation, as if he's giving a lecture. He talks with conviction, with sincerity, without bravado, and wears his ''fame'' lightly.
''I don't see myself as a computer guru,'' he remarks at one point. "I live a broad intellectual life. I'm good at a lot of things, except for spelling.''
It may be unfair to suggest that he likes the dramatic possibilities of his role. Then again, there's no doubting those dramatic possibilities.
At one point, thinking about some of the material leaked on WikiLeaks, I ask him how he defines national security.
''We don't,'' he says crisply. ''We're not interested in that. We're interested in justice. We are a super-national organisation. So we're not interested in national security.''
How does he justify keeping his own life as private as possible, considering that he believes in extreme transparency?
''I don't justify it,'' he says, with just a hint of mischievousness. ''No one has sent us any official documents that were not published previously on me. Should they do so, and they meet our editorial criteria, we will publish them.''
IN 1997, a remarkable book was released about the exploits of an extraordinary group of young Melbourne hackers. It was written by Melbourne academic Suelette Dreyfus, with, says Assange, research assistance from him.
In the book, Underground, all the hackers had monikers. Assange is said to be the character Mendax.
In the book Mendax/Assange was an unusually intelligent child, who never knew his father. His mother, an artist and activist, left home, in Queensland, aged 17, after selling her paintings for enough money to buy a motorbike. In Sydney, she joined the counterculture community, and fell in love with a young man she met at an anti-Vietnam War demonstration - who fathered Mendax. Within a year of his birth, the relationship was over. When Mendax was two, his mother married a fellow artist and actor-director, and the trio travelled from town to town as an on-the-road theatre family. But soon after Mendax turned nine, the couple separated and divorced.
Mendax's mother then started a relationship with a man who Mendax considered to be ''a violent psychopath'', a man with five different identities, who'd fabricated his entire background, including the country of his birth. They eventually fled, and began a life on the run, eventually ending up on the outskirts of Melbourne.
Assange will neither confirm nor deny that he's Mendax. But in an extraordinary slip recently, on SBS's Dateline program, whose reporter, Mark Davis tracked him down in Norway earlier this year (the program screened last Sunday), Assange said that this man ''seemed to be the son of Anne Hamilton-Byrne of the Anne Hamilton-Byrne cult in Australia, and we kept getting tracked down''.
Byrne was the leader of a cult, The Family, discovered in the Dandenong Ranges in the early 1980s. There were 14 children in the cult, who were treated abominably, and taught that they were all Byrne's children. All of them had their hair dyed blonde (the police finally caught up with the cult in 1987).
Assange won't discuss the link with Byrne. He says only: ''My mother was never in a cult. I was never in a cult.''
My question about his own white hair goes nowhere. However, Assange told me when we first talked (we have several conversations), that his hair went white at 15.
''I was very blond until 12-ish, until puberty. I built a cathode ray tube at 15, at school, and connected it backwards. The Geiger counter went 1000, 2000, 3000, 40,000. That was about the time. Also I had some head scans, because I had something like viral encephalitis. It was very mild. I just lost feeling in one cheek. Earlier on, at nine, I'd had head X-rays because I'd headbutted a giant earth ball.''
In yet another intriguing twist, when I ask Assange about a civil rights organisation he helped run in Melbourne, in the early 1990s, and which raised allegations about child neglect in the social welfare system - during Jeff Kennett's time as premier - he says he was particularly concerned with one case. With extreme reluctance, he eventually explains that he knew people whose children had been abused.
He won't talk about this in more detail either. But at a different point in the conversation he says that in the mid-1990s, he got involved helping the Victorian police track down paedophiles. ''That was just consulting on a couple of things,'' he says.
Mendax had lived in a dozen different places in different states, by the time he was 15. Assange mentions that he went to 36 different schools, including correspondence. ''How we know, is that I added them up for my sentencing hearing,'' says Assange. The story gets complicated.
In 1989, computers at NASA, the US space agency, were attacked. The word ''WANK'' appeared in huge letters across the monitor (an acronym for Worms against Nuclear Killers). The culprits have never been found.
But in 1991, Assange, still a teenager, and a key member of a hacker group called the International Subversives, was arrested and charged with more than 30 computer hacking offences. He and others, it was alleged, had hacked the systems of the Australian National University, RMIT, Telecom, and had even monitored the Australian Federal Police investigation into their activities. He eventually pleaded guilty to 24 charges and was placed on a good behaviour bond, and ordered to pay $2100. In Underground, Mendax devises a program called Sycophant, allowing the International Subversives to infiltrate computers at the Pentagon, National Security Agency, Motorola and NASA, among other organisations.
Mendax left home at 17, married his 16-year-old girlfriend, and a year later they had a son. Assange has a son at university.
Mendax's wife left him just after his 20th birthday, leaving him devastated.
Assange, like Mendax, suffered a breakdown and was briefly hospitalised after being charged by police.
He does agree that he had a spell of depression after his relationship broke up. I use the word marriage.
''Are you going to write that I've been married?'' he asks.
It was written about him, I reply - although it was Mendax who was married.
''That may not be true, so you shouldn't write it,'' says Assange.
I ask whether the mother of his son, was his wife. ''Maybe. Maybe not,'' he says, adding, ''I won't speak about my adult personal life.''
Is he currently married? ''No comment.''
His sense of humour flashes when I ask how living rough in the hills and fields outside Melbourne, after he was charged by police with computer crimes, affected him - and the way he thought about life.
''I thought I should buy shares in the internet,'' he quips.
Perhaps he did. Assange isn't paid a salary by WikiLeaks. He has investments, which he won't discuss. But during the 1990s he worked in computer security in Australia and overseas, devised software programs - in 1997 he co-invented ''Rubberhose deniable encryption'', which he describes as a cryptographic system made for human rights workers wanting to protect sensitive data in the field - and also became a central figure in the free software movement.
The whole point of free software, he comments, is to ''liberate it in all senses …'' He adds, ''It' s part of the intellectual heritage of man. True intellectual heritage can't be bound up in intellectual property.''
Did being arrested, and later on finding himself in a courtroom, push him into a completely different reality that he had never thought about - and in a direction that eventually saw him start thinking along the lines of a website like WikiLeaks, that would take on the world?
''That [experience] showed me how the justice system and bureaucracy worked, and did not work; what its abilities were and what its limitations were,'' he replies. ''And justice wasn't something that came out of the justice system. Justice was something that you bring to the justice system. And if you're lucky, or skilled, and you're in a country that isn't too corrupt, you can do that.''
In another life, Assange might have been a mathematician. He spent four years studying maths, mostly at Melbourne University - with stints at the Australian National University in Canberra - but never graduated, disenchanted, he says, with how many of his fellow students were conducting research for the US defence system.
''There are key cases which are just really f---ing obnoxious,'' he says. According to Assange, the US Defence Advance Research Project Agency was funding research that involved optimising the efficiency of a military bulldozer called the Grizzly Plough, which was used in the Iraqi desert during Operation Desert Storm during the 1991 Gulf War.
''It has a problem in that it gets damaged [from] the sand rolling up in front. The application of this bulldozer is to move at 60 kilometres an hour, sweeping barbed wire and so on before it, and get the sand and put it in the trenches where the [Iraqi] troops are, and bury them all alive and then roll over the top. So that's what Melbourne University's applied maths department was doing - studying how to improve the efficiency of the Grizzly Plough. This is beyond the pale.
''The final nail in the coffin was that I went to the hundredth anniversary of physics at the ANU. There were some 1500 visitors there - four Nobel prize winners - and every goddamn one of them was carting around, on their backs, a backpack given to them by the Defence Science Technology Organisation. At least it was an Australian defence science organisation.''
Assange says he did a lot of soul searching before he finally quit his studies in 2007.
He had already started working with other people on a model of WikiLeaks by early 2006. There were people at the physics conference, he goes on, who were career physicists, ''and there was just something about their attire, and the way they moved their bodies, and of course the bags on their backs didn't help much either. I couldn't respect them as men.''
His university experience didn't define his cynicism, though. Assange says that he's extremely cynical anyway.
''I painted every corner, floor, wall and ceiling in the 'room' I was in, black, until there was only one corner left. I mean intellectually,'' he adds. ''To me, it was the forced move [in chess], when you have to do something or you'll lose the game.''
So WikiLeaks was his forced move?
''That's the way it feels to me, yes.''
So who leaks to Wikileaks?
Assange says that intelligence agencies will never confirm or deny that they ''post'' documents, even when some of those documents display the letterhead of the intelligence organisation involved.
''I love classification labels, because if it says Top Secret on the front, I think 'this is probably an interesting document,' and legitimate,'' he says. ''There's a glut of information of low quality in the world. So information that has been restricted and suppressed - it's interesting that people have [spent] economic effort to restrict and suppress it - so info which has extra restrictions on it, usually has an extra ability to induce reforms if it's released.
''Intelligence organisations nearly always put what section it's from, and the classification label. Sometimes they'll use code words in the classification. They'll even classify the classification.''
It's curious, surely, given the Pentagon's anger over the leaking of the Baghdad video, that Assange hasn't been asked to come into some office, somewhere, and have a chat. He returned to Australia via the US with no trouble, I point out.
''I believe that there's an understanding that we have a lot of support within these organisations, and interference with us runs the risk of being exposed internally, and would likely be exposed by us,'' he replies.
It's also curious that he hasn't been approached to work for any of the security agencies for ''the greater good''.
WikiLeaks is for the greater good, he says.
THE individual who sent WikiLeaks the Baghdad video remains invisible. WikiLeaks released two versions of the video - a longer version, and a shorter one - which has also caused much controversy. Twenty minutes was said to be missing from the longer version. It was like that when they received the footage, says Assange, and they were very careful to make as few edits as possible to the 18-minute version they released.
''In particular the first 11 minutes is one continuous take. And then there's only cuts for time, and only about three cuts. The first 13 minutes is when all the action happens.''
Why did WikiLeaks put a copyright symbol on the footage they released?
''We didn't have time to sort out copyright - about how all that should be managed,'' he replies.
''We had some ideas, but we were quite concerned about people taking material and misrepresenting it.''
As the list of rattled people in high places gets longer, Assange and his team have become used to an increased level of interest from the authorities - and security services, leaked documents from some of those services notwithstanding.
There are other security concerns as well. Two human rights lawyers who had been helping WikiLeaks were shot dead in their car on a Nairobi street last year. Assange himself has written an online article about increased surveillance activities, ''most of which appears to be the results of US 'interests' ''.
In an email he sent out to journalists earlier this year, Assange wrote: ''We have had to spread assets, encrypt everything and move telecommunications and people around the world to activate protective laws in different national jurisdictions.''
In 2008, Islamic militants threatened WikiLeaks after the website ''mirrored'' a video of Dutch parliamentarian Geert Wilders' controversial view of Islam in his 17-minute film, Fitna. A trailer of the film had been uploaded to several video-sharing sites, including YouTube, causing fury in Muslim nations. Pakistan's government ordered the nation's internet service provider to block YouTube's sites, which caused YouTube to be blocked in other countries as well. YouTube removed the trailer and access was restored.
Another website that hosted the trailer also removed it, saying the lives of its staff had been put at risk. WikiLeaks then mirrored the video, and got so much traffic that the site had to be temporarily taken off line.
''We republished the material because it had been censored because of the threat of violence. Then we received threats of violence [via] emails,'' says Assange.
''We didn't believe them to be credible threats in the sense that we have good physical security in the sense of our internet infrastructure, secret locations and our personnel. That technology is geared at dealing with spy agencies. Islamic militants don't have the capacity to get past those defences.''
He adds that his team has also received threats from US military militants - ''I deliberately use that word'' - which they had not found credible either. ''I did not feel that it was possible for them to carry out the threats.''
WikiLeaks, he maintains, has released more classified documents than the rest of the world press combined. "That shows you the parlous state of the rest of the media. How is it that a team of five people [WikiLeaks is run by five full-time ''staffers'' and almost 1000 volunteers] has managed to release to the public more suppressed information, at that level, than the rest of the world press combined? It's disgraceful.
''They don't want to give [out] any information unless it's going to sell more newspapers. The result is the public record is denied primary sources.''
He would like to see all media develop their own forms of WikiLeaks. That would point his own website out of business, I point out.
''We have a proposal to [an American foundation] for a grant to do just that,'' he replies.
Niki Barrowclough @'The Age'
Friday, 21 May 2010
I love TedTalks...(and so should you)
Carolyn out there in the netosphere has come up with a list of talks that she thinks are of particular interest.
Do yourself a favour and check them out
Thursday, 20 May 2010
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