Indigenous - Broken Lands
22 minutes ago
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Selling Music Through Packaging
A short piece on how the limited edition art pieces for the new Matthew Dear album Black City were made by artisan sculptors. Designed by Boym Partners, the MDBC Totem were cast in bonded aluminum with a hand-finished gun metal patina.
Each totem is inscribed with a short code that allows the owner to access/download the album from matthewdear.com. You get the album and the you get the art without the media getting in the way.
The song is "Monkey" taken from the upcoming album Black City.
(P.S. Sesame Street deserves some credit for the video inspiration: youtube.com/watch?v=8bzq81Und4M )
Each totem is inscribed with a short code that allows the owner to access/download the album from matthewdear.com. You get the album and the you get the art without the media getting in the way.
The song is "Monkey" taken from the upcoming album Black City.
(P.S. Sesame Street deserves some credit for the video inspiration: youtube.com/watch?v=8bzq81Und4M )
WikiLeaks Posts Mysterious ‘Insurance’ File
In the wake of strong U.S. government statements condemning WikiLeaks’ recent publishing of 77,000 Afghan War documents, the secret-spilling site has posted a mysterious encrypted file labeled “insurance.”
The huge file, posted on the Afghan War page at the WikiLeaks site, is 1.4 GB and is encrypted with AES256. The file’s size dwarfs the size of all the other files on the page combined. The file has also been posted on a torrent download site.
WikiLeaks, on Sunday, posted several files containing the 77,000 Afghan war documents in a single “dump” file and in several other files containing versions of the documents in various searchable formats.
Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the new file added days later may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization’s founder, Julian Assange. In either scenario, WikiLeaks volunteers, under a prearranged agreement with Assange, could send out a password or passphrase to allow anyone who has downloaded the file to open it.
It’s not known what the file contains but it could include the balance of data that U.S. Army intelligence analyst Bradley Manning claimed to have leaked to Assange before he was arrested in May.
In chats with former hacker Adrian Lamo, Manning disclosed that he had provided Assange with a different war log cache than the one that WikiLeaks already published. This one was said to contain 500,000 events from the Iraq War between 2004 and 2009. WikiLeaks has never commented on whether it received that cache.
Additionally, Manning said he sent Assange video showing a deadly 2009 U.S. firefight near the Garani village in Afghanistan that local authorities say killed 100 civilians, most of them children, as well as 260,000 U.S. State Department cables.
Manning never mentioned leaking the Afghan War log to WikiLeaks in his chats with Lamo, but Defense Department officials told The Wall Street Journal that investigators had found evidence on Manning’s Army computer that tied him to that leak.
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen strongly condemned WikiLeaks’ publication of the Afghan War log at a Pentagon press briefing on Thursday.
Gates said the leak was “potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, our allies and our Afghan partners” and said that “tactics, techniques and procedures will become known to our adversaries” as a result.
Mullen was even more direct and said that WikiLeaks “might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier” or an Afghan informant who aided the United States.
Several media outlets have found the names of Afghan informants in the documents WikiLeaks published, as well as information identifying their location in some instances. A Taliban spokesman told Britain’s Channel 4 news that the group was sifting through the WikiLeaks documents to get the names of suspected informants and would punish anyone found to have collaborated with the United States and its allies.
Wired.com has sent a message to WikiLeaks inquiring about the file.
Kim Zetter @'Wired'
Let Them Eat Cake
When country music star Keith Urban married actress Nicole Kidman in 2006, their wedding cost $250,000. This large sum hardly counts as a celebrity wedding. When mega-millionaire real estate mogul Donald Trump married model Melania Knauss, the wedding bill was $1,000,000.
The marriages of Madonna and film director Guy Ritchie, Tiger Woods and Elin Nordegren, and Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones pushed up the cost of celebrity marriages to $1.5 million.
Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes upped the ante to $2,000,000.
Now comes the politicians’s daughter as celebrity. According to news reports, Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to investment banker Mark Mezvinsky on July 31 is costing papa Bill $3,000,000. According to the London Daily Mail, the total price tag will be about $5,000,000. The additional $2,000,000 apparently is being laid off on US Taxpayers as Secret Service costs for protecting former president Clinton and foreign heads of state, such as the presidents of France and Italy and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who are among the 500 invited guests along with Barbara Streisand, Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, Ted Turner, and Clinton friend and donor Denise Rich, wife of the Clinton-pardoned felon.
Before we attend to the poor political judgment of such an extravagant affair during times of economic distress, let us wonder aloud where a poor boy who became governor of Arkansas and president of the United States got such a fortune that he can blow $3,000,000 on a wedding.
The American people did not take up a collection to reward him for his service to them.
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
Where did the money come from? Who was he really serving during his eight years in office?
How did Tony Blair and his wife, Cherrie, end up with an annual income of ten million pounds (approximately $15 million dollars) as soon as he left office? Who was Blair really serving?
These are not polite questions, and they are infrequently asked.
While Chelsea’s wedding guests eat a $11,000 wedding cake and admire $250,000 floral displays, Lisa Roberts in Ohio is struggling to raise contributions for her food pantry in order to feed 3,000 local people, whose financial independence was destroyed by investment bankers, job offshoring, and unaffordable wars. The Americans dependent on Lisa Roberts’ food pantry are living out of vans and cars. Those with a house roof still over their heads are packed in as many as 14 per household according to the Chillicothe Gazette in Ohio.
The Chilicothe Gazette reports that Lisa Roberts’ food pantry has “had to cut back to half rations per person in order to have something for everyone who needed it.”
Theresa DePugh stepped up to the challenge and had the starving Ohioans write messages on their food pantry paper plates to President Obama, who has just obtained another $33 billion to squander on a pointless war in Afghanistan that serves no purpose whatsoever except the enrichment of the military/security complex and its shareholders.
The Guardian (UK) reports that according to US government reports, one million American children go to bed hungry, while the Obama regime squanders hundreds of billions of dollars killing women and children in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
The Guardian’s reporting relies on a US government report from the US Department of Agriculture, which concludes that 50 million people in the US--one in six of the population--were unable to afford to buy sufficient food to stay healthy in 2008.
US Department of Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that he expected the number of hungry Americans to worsen when the survey for 2010 is released.
Today in the American Superpower, one of every six Americans is living on food stamps.
The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.
The Great American Superpower, which is wasting trillions of dollars in pursuit of world hegemony, has 22% of its population unemployed and almost 17% of its population dependent on welfare in order to stay alive.
The world has not witnessed such total failure of government since the final days of the Roman Empire. A handful of American oligarchs are becoming mega-billionaires while the rest of the country goes down the drain.
And the American sheeple remain acquiescent.
Paul Craig Roberts @'Counterpunch'
Booker-longlisted novel The Slap is 'most divisive in years'
But while some readers including, evidently, the Booker judges speak excitedly of the Australian author's bravery in tackling uncomfortable truths, others criticise the word-of-mouth hit as "offensive" and say it is full of "unbelievable misogyny". The Slap is turning out to be the most divisive Booker novel in years.
Although reviews from newspaper critics have been positive – "riveting from beginning to end," said the Guardian ; "Tom Wolfe meets Philip Roth," said the Los Angeles Times – readers posting reviews online have far more mixed opinions.
"Dull, boring and offensive," wrote one Amazon reviewer. Another criticised its "constant obsession with bodily functions, sex, and the f-word"; another wrote that "it had no heart, such terrible cynicism … I feel soiled after reading it".
The writer India Knight said she hated the book. "The whole novel has this ludicrous, comedy-macho sensibility – you get the feeling that if he'd been forced to read 'literary' fiction, Raoul Moat would have gulped it down in one sitting," said Knight.
"It's also unbelievably misogynistic, and I say that as someone who loves Flashman and Philip Roth ... There is no joy, no love, no hope, no beauty, just these hideous people beating each other up, either physically or emotionally."
The Slap is a bestseller in Australia, and UK sales are already rumoured to be colossal.
A publishing insider said the novel had sold 23,000 copies even before the Booker announcement, an almost unheard-of figure for new literary fiction from a relatively unknown author. The novel also won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize.
Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of the Bookseller, said that there "hasn't been a divisive book on taste grounds" in the Booker lineup for years.
The last time readers were really split over titles selected by judges was in 2003, when Martin Amis's Yellow Dog and Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time were both longlisted for the award and DBC Pierre's Vernon God Little went on to win it.
The former poet laureate Andrew Motion, who is chairing this year's Booker panel, defended The Slap, saying "quite unusually for a Booker book, the copy I read already had international bestseller written across it, which means that not everyone thinks it's a hateful misogynistic book".
He also took issue with Knight's comment that the novel was loveless, suggesting instead that "it's curdled love ... It's more complicated than being hate-filled. It's full of love that's gone wrong".
However, he admitted that he could "see why people might think it is misogynistic, in that the whole story is triggered by an act of male violence".
Alison Flood @'The Guardian'
Don't forget...
THE POP GROUP - SUMMER 2010
MARK STEWART – VOCALS
GARETH SAGER – GUITAR / PIANO / SAXOPHONE
BRUCE SMITH – DRUMS
DAN CASTIS – BASS
9TH SEPTEMBER
ITALY. BOLOGNA, LOCOMOTIV CLUB
10TH SEPTEMBER
ITALY, TURIN. SPAZIO 211 CLUB
11TH SEPTEMBER
UK, LONDON, THE GARAGE
12TH SEPTEMBER
UK, LONDON, THE GARAGE
Swans - My Father Will Guide Me Up a Rope to the Sky
After years of pursuing Angels of Light and recording and producing a diverse roster of artists for his Young God label, Michael Gira has decided to reconvene his legendary group Swans. As he says: “THIS IS NOT A REUNION. It’s not some dumb-ass nostalgia act. It is not repeating the past. After 5 Angels Of Light albums, I needed a way to move FORWARD, in a new direction, and it just so happens that revivifying the idea of Swans is allowing me to do that. “
The core group constituting Swans for this phase is Michael Gira / guitar / voice / mendicant friar act (original swans); Norman Westberg – guitar (original swans); Christoph Hahn – guitar (mid period swans and most angels); Phil Puleo – drums, percussion, dulcimer etc (final swans tour and most angels); Chris Pravdica – bass and gadgets (flux information sciences / services/ gunga din); Thor Harris - drums, percussion, vibes, dulcimer, curios, keys (angels, now also with Shearwater)…
This highly anticipated album is as powerful and diverse as anything Gira’s done, in Swans or otherwise. It opens with the epic, soul-crushing (bone crushing?) No Words/No Thoughts, but quickly veers to more pastoral terrain, then on to ever-ascending mono-tonal grooves, a filmic-folk idyll featuring Devendra Banhart on lead vocal that abruptly shifts to cataclysm, then on to more airplane-taking-off ascensions, art songs, and more lethal sonic pummeling. In short, this is the new SWANS album, a significant advance from where Swans left off and as challenging and emotionally demanding as ever...
This highly anticipated album is as powerful and diverse as anything Gira’s done, in Swans or otherwise. It opens with the epic, soul-crushing (bone crushing?) No Words/No Thoughts, but quickly veers to more pastoral terrain, then on to ever-ascending mono-tonal grooves, a filmic-folk idyll featuring Devendra Banhart on lead vocal that abruptly shifts to cataclysm, then on to more airplane-taking-off ascensions, art songs, and more lethal sonic pummeling. In short, this is the new SWANS album, a significant advance from where Swans left off and as challenging and emotionally demanding as ever...
Continue reading
The original art for the album is by Beatrice Pediconi http://www.beatricepediconi.com
Free Video Downloader
Freemake Video Downloader is a free program that enables downloading videos from YouTube, Google, Facebook, Dailymotion, Metacafe, Break, Megavideo, Photobucket, 18+ and other websites. You can save videos in the original format (FLV, MP4, 3GP), convert them to AVI, or download MP3 from video clips. HD video downloading is also available. Download this freeware from freemake.com
Look we're not racists
The Tea Party will gather all nine of their black friends for a rally to show off their "diversity" denying any connection to the recent issues involving the NAACP.
MORE @'TPM'
MORE @'TPM'
New Partnerships
There are several marvellous things to note about this latest bombardment from cyberspace. One, when new media challenges old media, it is still possible for the latter to outshine the former.
Get on to the Afghan War Diary web pages on Wikileaks and you will be suitably fazed. How to get something useful out of these bald listings without investing inordinate time?
Here is just one little alphabetical segment from the section ‘browse by category': checkpoint run (37) close air support (95) convoy (53) cordon/search (80) counter insurgency (8) counter mortar fire (41) counter mortar patrol (7) counter narcotic (6) counter terrorism (1) criminal activity (27) defecting (5) deliberate attack (69) demonstration (237) detain (185) detained (683) detainee release (60) detainee transfer (517) direct fire (16293) downed aircraft (13) drug operation (6) drug vehicle (2) elicitation (1) enemy action (13) equipment failure (81) erw recovered (24) erw/turn-in (58) escalation of force (2271) evidence turn-in/received (50) extortion (5) finance (3)…etc.
Sixteen thousand-odd files on ‘direct fire' may sound promising but go there and you will be stumped at the bald statistical nature of the tabulation. There may have been no casualties at all but the listing is there anyway. Wikileaks was being precise when it called its latest offering a Dump: 90,000 plus reports indiscriminately dumped there, getting something cogent out of it is your headache. Even if there is a reading guide to help you decipher some 400 abbreviations and military acronyms.
Transforming information
So Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, was doing us a favour when he decided to make the documents available to three newspapers first. They rose to the challenge quite magnificently. Here is what The Guardian did with thousands of files under seven IED categories: it created an interactive map. It took every roadside bomb planted and IED attacks by the Taliban between 2004 and 2009, with full details and processed the data: “16,000 improvised explosive devices are recorded in the Afghanistan war logs, rising from 308 in 2004 to 7,155 in 2009. Press start on the map below, or drag the date along the bar, to see where and who they hit over these five years.”
The scroll on the map takes you rapidly through every single day of those years with dark green red and blue markers lighting up to indicate the fatalities. Red for civilians is a constant, with overall fatalities rising from 122 in 2004 to 793 till the timeline ends at January 1, 2010. Imaging the data processing it took to build that interactive map.
The New York Times focused less on raw data and more on analysis, while also presenting a selection of despatches for its readers to browse. The journalism applied to the dump, came from old media. Without it, the war reports revealed would have had more symbolic than real value. And as American commentators pointed out, overall there was little new in the core revelations of the war logs.
The real significance of the Afghan war diaries lies in what Wikileaks represents as a movement, as an evolution in journalism. One analyst has called it the emergence of open source journalism. Julian Assange makes it possible for anybody anywhere in the world to submit secret documents for publication. Since it went online more than three years ago, the site has published an extensive catalogue of secret material, ranging from the Standard Operating Procedures at Camp Delta, in Guantánamo Bay, and the “Climategate” e-mails from the University of East Anglia, in England, to the contents of Sarah Palin's private Yahoo account! Its most stunning scoop was the online posting of a video which showed airborne Americans in Iraq killing civilians including two Reuters journalists, in 2007.
“Make a submission,” it says at the top of the site, and Assange explains in a video and elsewhere that Wikileaks provides something entirely new. It provides a secure, military grade protection programme for whistleblowers which has enabled the safe transmission of important evidence to the public. So far, not one amongst the thousands of submissions in the public interest has been compromised or its author disclosed.
Secondly, it is a movement. On every single page of the war documents on the website is a link which says “Help us extend and defend this work.” It asks for financial, legal and technical support. It has hundreds of volunteers across the world. Assange has a manic belief in his cause and he drives it, attracting whistleblowers everywhere.
Present everywhere
Significant point number three: what we have here is a stateless news organization. Its Twitter profile lists Wikileak's location as “everywhere”. The New Yorker profile of Assange which appeared in June this year describes how Wikileaks maintains its content on more than 20 servers around the world and on hundreds of domain names. You can't take it down, somebody said, without dismantling the entire Internet.
When the website put its war logs into the public domain the president of the United States took to a mike to express his concern. That does not happen very often after a journalistic scoop. But the US response that the leaks will harm national security (and endanger lives) cuts no ice with Wikileaks. Why would a stateless organisation feel any commitment to the US national security?
But the newspapers which relayed its revelations to the world are not stateless, and The New York Times said it had taken care not to publish information that would harm national security interests. It removed from the documents it published the names or precise identifying information of sources, the names of buildings under surveillance, prisoners, kidnap victims, times required for various tactical military reactions and radio frequencies or phone numbers used in insurgent communications.
This new level of partnership between old and new media promises to make the future of both journalism and whistle blowing quite fascinating. And while Wikileaks is not in India yet, given the vulnerability of our whistleblowers, it needs to be.
Sevanti Ninan @'The Hindu
Saturday, 31 July 2010
DJ Dex - Summer 2010: The Roundtrip Mix
undergroundres UR061's (DJ Dex aka Nomadico) Summer 2010: The Roundtrip Mix is now available for direct download at www.ur061.com !!!
Original visual by David Lynch
Directed by Eno
Produced by Jean-Luca Della Montagna
Editing by Philippe Gariépy
Effects by Antonin Brault Guilleaume
via kfmw
Fans hit out at increased kit changes by clubs
Fans groups have hit out at the increased number of Premier League clubs who are launching a new home shirt every season.
In 2000, the Premier League charter pledged that replica strips would be released every two seasons to save fans digging into their pockets too often. But 18 clubs issued a new home shirt last season and all 20 Premier League clubs are doing the same this term.
Tottenham have launched three new kits every year for six seasons in a row.
The north London club have also decided that a different sponsor will adorn their home, second and third kits for Cup games this season, meaning there will be six shirts on offer, costing £45 each on the club's website.
Arsenal and Liverpool are the only teams who are releasing a new kit this season, who did not do so last term.
While Premier League clubs are within their rights to release a new home kit every season, the extent of the current situation is in stark contrast to recommendations made by the Football Task Force, chaired by former MP David Mellor, which were included in the 2000 Premier League charter to give fans a fairer deal.
The group's suggestions, which also included issues around ticket pricing, encouraged clubs to ensure a two-year gap between new replica shirts, which led to clubs releasing home and away shirts in alternate years.
"This gives the shirt more longevity in comparison to releasing one every season and our fans better value for money," a Liverpool spokesman told BBC Sport.
According to Premier League rules clubs must "allow for market research to be undertaken with regard to the frequency of strip changes and to its design".
They must also "identify the intervals at which strip changes are intended to take place and the date of the next intended change" and each club's customer charter must be available to the public, outlining its policy with regard to ticketing and merchandise.
But Tottenham Supporters Trust chairman Bernie Kingsley said his group had not been consulted, while Football Supporters Federation chairman Malcolm Clarke labelled the club's decision to offer six new shirts as "frankly ridiculous".
Kingsley told BBC Sport: "The club do talk to us but any decisions that might affect their income revenue they don't generally consult us.
"Last season we said that we didn't like the yellow stripe on the home shirt and asked if it could be changed, but the club said if they changed it based on what the fans said they would be considered a laughing stock."
Kingsley said the request had been based on a similar discussion between fans of the Dutch club Feyenoord where supporters' requests were granted.
Birmingham City have also just launched a new kit for the coming season where fans chose the design from four on offer.
A Tottenham spokesman denied Kingsley's claims and told BBC Sport: "Our aim going forward was to continue to meet demand for greater variety and choice in all of the merchandise ranges that we offer, including replica kit.
 Birmingham's Cameron Jerome (left) in a kit chosen by fans |
Clarke said: "I think Spurs' actions are frankly ridiculous. Given the price of watching football in London you have to be very rich to be a Spurs fan already. If you're paying for six shirts that would be about £250."
Kingsley added: "It is down to the individual whether to buy them or not but in the current financial climate I think the club should be more sensitive.
"The club will argue that by issuing new kits it provides more revenue streams in which to buy new players and some supporters will go along with that, but it's just another example of football ceasing to be a sport and more a business."
Manchester United and Manchester City are another two clubs who have both released new home and away shirts for the coming season having done the same thing last term.
Allan Galley, chairman of the Manchester City Supporters Club said: "People do want to wear them as a way of relating to the club, but I think it's unfair to bring them out every season at £45 each.
"It's not a popular policy. Young children like to wear them too, but it's not as if they are particularly cheap for them either."
But Mark Longden of the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association said: "If you are daft enough to buy a new football shirt every season then that is up to you.
"You don't have to buy them, the only thing that concerns me is the ticket prices and the club have not put them up this season, so it doesn't directly affect me."
Former sports minister Kate Hoey, who was in government when the Football Task Force was active, said the issue was more relevant for people who could not afford to go to football matches but added that parents had to take a firm stand against persuasive children.
"The Premier League clubs are a law unto themselves and if people keep buying them then they will keep selling them," she told BBC Sport.
"I don't take the line where children come home and say, 'everybody else has got a shirt why can't I have one?' I was brought up in an era where I was told by my parents, 'we can't afford it, sorry'."
Alistair Magowan @'BBC'
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