An excerpt from draft 5 of "NOVA EXPRESS"
A film by Andre Perkowski
Based on the writings of William S. Burroughs
Readings by Phil Proctor, Anne Waldeman and William S. Burroughs
(Thanx Robin!)
charlesdavis84 WikiLeaks kills _another_ 3 Afghan civilians -- http://bit.ly/9jmfNU -- Oh wait, it was the US military. Never mind, nothing to see here.
Ray Winstone talks about being hit by lightening as a child in UNKLE's stunning new video. Director John Hillcoat, the man behind ‘The Road’, gives his take on UNKLE track ‘The Answer’ with this promo
Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap has been on Australian bestseller lists since its publication in 2008
The 13 novels being considered for this year's Man Booker prize are selling better than any other longlist since 2001.
Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap is most popular longlisted book, selling more than 5,000 in the first week of August, according to Nielsen BookScan figures.
It sold more than three times as well as Emma Donoghue's Room (1,422 copies).
The Booker shortlist will be announced on 7 September, with the winner crowned on 12 October.
"The selection committee of the Booker Prize has deliberately tried to select more commercially feasible titles in the list, and it's reflected in the sales," said Andre Breedt, research and development analyst at Nielsen BookScan.
In The Slap, the pivotal moment takes place at a Melbourne barbecue, where one of the guests hits a three-year-old child who is not his own.
The story is narrated by eight characters, all of whom were guests at the barbecue.
The book's recurring themes of sex, infidelity, racism, domestic violence and alcoholism have split critics.
Neill Denny, editor-in-chief of The Bookseller, told The Guardian that there "hasn't been a divisive book on taste grounds" in the Booker line-up for years.
One early blog review described it as "a satanic version of Neighbours".
The Slap won the Commonwealth Writers' Prize 2009 and was the fourth biggest-selling title by an Australian author that year.
Other books on the Booker longlist include David Mitchell's The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, Paul Murray's Skippy Dies, Rose Tremain's Trespass, Peter Carey's Parrot and Olivier in America and Tom McCarthy's C.
The longlisted books sold 10,597 copies last week - up 47% on the same period in 2009 and an increase of 246% on the 2008 longlist.
The Bookseller points out that this year's sales are at their strongest point since 2001's 24-book longlist, which included Ian McEwan's Atonement and Philip Pullman's The Amber Spyglass.
The winner of the 2010 Booker Prize will receive £50,000, while the five runners-up will each receive £2,500 each.
Hilary Mantel won last year's Man Booker for her historical novel Wolf Hall.
deviatarReading the Washington Post, NY Times and The Economist were grounds govt lawyer cites for excluding juror in Khadr case #Gitmoless than a minute ago via web
Iranian TV has aired what it says is a confession by a woman under threat of being stoned to death.
In the broadcast, Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani admits to murder and denounces her lawyer, who fled the country after authorities tried to arrest him.
Ms Ashtiani's case prompted international outrage when she was initially sentenced to death by stoning for adultery.
Her death sentence was then temporarily halted by the authorities.
With the broadcast, the Iranian authorities have confronted head-on the enormous embarrassment they clearly feel over this case.
The confession was aired on one of the main channels of state TV.
There was no mention of the stoning sentence and the focus was moved away from the allegation of adultery, to a claim that she was complicit in a plot to murder her husband.
In the televised confession she admitted her part in the murder, despite earlier telling western media that she had been acquitted of the charge.
Ms Ashtiani also criticised her lawyer, Mohammed Mostafaie, for interfering in her case.
Mr Mostafaie has now sought asylum in Norway.
Another of Ms Ashtiani's lawyers has said that she was tortured for two days in prison to force her to make her confession.
Human rights activists fear that she is now in danger of imminent execution.
The Obama administration's Feed the Future initiative promises a second Green Revolution that will feed a planet of nine billion people by doubling crop yields by 2050. But considering that we produce enough food to feed the planet today and a billion people still go hungry, are yields really the problem? And if they are, are providing Green Revolution technologies like hybrid and genetically engineered seeds, chemical fertilizer and pesticides to subsistence farmers the best way to achieve them? I visited subsistence farmers in Mexico to find out.The homes of campesinos, peasant farmers, in the rural areas surrounding Cuquio, Mexico (about an hour from Guadalajara) no longer have dirt floors. The Mexican government initiated a program to replace them with cement floors in 2008 and now most homes sport a plaque celebrating their new piso firmes. Electricity came about 20 years ago. For many, running water and bathroom facilities are modern conveniences they do not yet have. The government has recently distributed composting toilets to many, but not all, families.
One of the tiny adobe homes is decorated by flowers growing in upside-down Coca-Cola bottles turned into flower pots. Another is located next to a fencepost sporting an empty bag of Monsanto corn seeds -- seeds presumably planted in the adjoining cornfield, or milpa. This little corner of the world and the people who live here seem to be forgotten by everyone except for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and multinational agribusiness corporations like Monsanto and DuPont.
The campesinos here are easy prey for savvy, first-world corporate marketers. Many have only a sixth-grade education, and they know how to grow their traditional milpas of intercropped corn, beans and squash because they learned the techniques practiced by generations before them, often first handling a horse and plow at the tender age of 6. They know their lives are hard and that some years they don't produce enough food to eat. Moreover, they are desperate to give their children better lives through education, but subsistence farming does not come with a salary and many cannot afford the fees, supplies or uniforms required by schools. Several express regret (or even despair) that their children had to drop out of school to work at the local shoe factory for 500 pesos per week -- about $1.05 per hour with current exchange rates. A new technology that could provide enough food and perhaps some income would be welcome.
Further depressing news from the "World of Managers" with deliberate sales of highly toxic chemicals to countries that require food sustainability, and not the ongoing problems associated with poisonous chemical usage. That these "intelligent managers" and shareholders condone and profit from the misery they produce is a blight on Western society. Once again the prevailing cheers of profits before people, deafen the less fortunate in cycles of starvation, pollution and toxic lifestyles, for a few dollars more. With these chemical substances banned by Western society for agricultural use, the continued production and sale to other countries, despite all available knowledge of their toxicity, surely ranks as a crime against humanity. How can this "World of Managers" and shareholders blithely add to the misery of so many people/, when the effects of their products are so widely, scientifically known?
Tracklist:
1. Demdike Stare – Rain And Shame
2. Demdike Stare – Matilda’s Dream
3. Guru Guru – Atommolch
4. Demdike Stare – Caged In Stammheim
5. Keith Hudson – Satan Side
6. Unknown – Unknown Thai track
7. Elias Rahbani – La Dance De Nadia
8. Robert Hood – Grace Under Fire ( Nightime Mix )
9. Demdike Stare – The Stars Are Moving
10. Carl Craig – Darkness
Ninety percent of the more than 5,000 varieties of berries and fruit seed at the Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry seed bank in Leningrad, Russia are found in no other seed bank or plant research center in the world. During WWII, with Leningrad under siege, twelve scientists protecting the seed bank's valuable specimens starved to death, unwilling to eat the rare seeds.
What makes a few hundred thousand plant seeds worth dying for? The carefully tended seed collection at VRI -- one of the oldest seed banks in the world -- preserves rare genetic traits that could one day help farmers save entire nations from famine.
Yet today, part of Vavilov's priceless repository is in danger of being lost forever. The seed bank's research station at Pavlovsk, home to thousands of rare plant varieties, is facing destruction by one of the most banal evils imaginable: a housing development. A group of Russian real estate developers plans to bulldoze the historic agricultural research center -- and its fields of rare berry bushes and fruit trees -- to build the Russian equivalent of a subdivision of McMansions.
TAKE ACTION: SAVE THE SEED BANK FROM DESTRUCTION!
The Crop Diversity Crisis
Modern industrialized agriculture has encouraged the standardization of crop seeds. Most of the world now depends on fewer than 150 species of plants for food, and 90% of the crop varieties grown just 100 years ago are no longer commercially produced, leaving most of humanity dependent on just a few varieties of vital food crops like corn, wheat or apples.
This lack of crop diversity makes the food plants most people depend on for survival highly vulnerable to the effects of climate change, disease and insect pests. With an artificially limited gene pool, most conventional food crops cannot evolve new defenses quickly from one generation to the next to deal with a changing environment. And planting the same variety of a plant from one field to the next makes it easy for plant diseases to spread. A new virus or fungus might wipe out not just one farmer's field, but an entire state's crop.
But older, heirloom varieties of food plants often carry genes that can help plants withstand drought, flooding and pestilence. And that is why seed banks like the one at Pavlovsk are so vitally important -- by preserving a wide variety of plants and seeds, seed banks preserve genetic traits that one day might save entire plant species from extinction.
Save the Seed Bank
If the Russian real estate developers have their way, the Pavlovsk agricultural research station might be destroyed in just a few months. The Global Crop Diversity Trust and botanists around the world are petitioning the Russian government to save Pavlovsk's seeds.
The director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Dr. Cary Fowler, is encouraging anyone who would like the Russian government to stop the destruction of this historic seed bank to join a Twitter campaign to convince Russia's President, Dmitry Medvedev, (@kremlinrussia_e)to intervene.
More than a trillion dollars has been appropriated since September 11, 2001 for U.S. military operations in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. This makes the “war on terrorism” the most costly of any military engagement in U.S. history in absolute terms or, if correcting for inflation, the second most expensive U.S. military action after World War II.
A newly updated report from the Congressional Research Service estimated the financial costs of major U.S. wars from the American Revolution ($2.4 billion in FY 2011 dollars) to World War I ($334 billion) to World War II ($4.1 trillion) to the second Iraq war ($784 billion) and the war in Afghanistan ($321 billion). CRS provided its estimates in current year dollars (i.e. the year they were spent) and in constant year dollars (adjusted for inflation), and as a percentage of gross domestic product. Many caveats apply to these figures, which are spelled out in the CRS report.
In constant dollars, World War II is still the most expensive of all U.S. wars, having consumed a massive 35.8% of GDP at its height and having cost $4.1 trillion in FY2011 dollars. See “Costs of Major U.S. Wars,” June 29, 2010.
Travelling solo is a state of mind, says Jenny Diski, photographed above in Tsavo national park, Kenya Photograph: Frederic Courbet/Panos Pictures
It's really simple: the great thing about travelling alone is that there is no one else with you. No one whose wishes and needs you have to consider when you want to spend the day at your hotel in bed reading excursion brochures or gloomy Thomas Bernhard. You want to stay in bed? You stay in bed. You want to lie at the edge of an ocean and let the surf play with your feet? You do that. You want to see the sights? Really? Do you really? Well, if you must, you can.
You travel alone, you do exactly as you want. This surely needs no further explanation. But, of course, I'm from what Margaret Thatcher (that well-known communitarian) called the Me generation. Being with other people on holiday makes me anxious. Are they comfortable, happy, restless, resentful, bored? On the whole, togetherness requires compromise and why would you want to compromise (more than already required by the location and budget) while travelling, as well as in your real, everyday life?
Nevertheless, I know that there are those who find the word "alone" distressing. That scene in Les Enfants du Paradis where the insufferable toddler enters the theatre box, in which the gloriously tragic Arletty watches her secret love on stage, and pipes: "Vous êtes toute seule, madame?" makes being toute seule a lifelong terrifying prospect. Well then, try "solo".
The difference between travelling solo and travelling alone is a state of mind. I've been travelling alone for decades, long before I could call myself a "travel writer" – not that I do call myself a travel writer. But the word could is essential here. It's true that, for different reasons in different places, people can be curious, suspicious even, of a woman (young, middle-aged or old) travelling alone. Yet tell them you're a writer and not only is everything explicable but people will stay and talk to you, telling you sometimes wonderful stories about their lives. Use the writer excuse with a different look on your face, and people will understandingly leave you alone.
In those circumstances where you might feel awkward – eating alone in a restaurant full of holiday couples and families, lizarding on a beach hoping for perfect peace, ordering a drink at a bar in a small town – only think of yourself as a writer on an assignment and the unease falls away. You are, after all, doing what a writer does: looking, thinking, playing with characters or ideas, and idling. Once you've explained yourself to yourself it does wonders for not worrying about what other people think. It makes all social unwillingness acceptable. You can talk, not talk; join, not join; everything's covered for other people and for you. You're travelling solo, not alone.
I've chilled out in the Caribbean, encircled America by train, cargo-shipped across the Atlantic and explored the Antarctic peninsula, all solo and at ease, using my laptop as a flag of peace and quiet. Even before I really did write travel stuff, I went to Greek islands in that blissful condition of being alone but free to talk to people if I wanted, by using the journalism excuse.
There are other ways to travel solo without raising eyebrows, as I did when I went with my three-year-old to Lake Como and was stared at with deep suspicion and disapproval by the other, mostly elderly, Italian guests in the hotel. Eventually, I made it a point to "find" myself sitting in the foyer next to the crossest-looking elderly lady and explained how sad and yet comforting it was to return here where my late husband and I had enjoyed such happy holidays. She broke into a relieved smile to discover I was a virtuous widow and not a disreputable single mother, as I was, and passed the news around, so that the rest of the vacation allowed me to "mourn" while basking in benevolent glances.
As a young woman in Greece, I found a polite but very firm "no, thank you" was sufficient to send young Greek men, who were both practical and fatalistic, off to try their luck elsewhere.
There are limits to easing your way alone in the world. None of these strategies would have worked in the train I took in my late teens from Rome to Assisi. It was full and I had no seat booked, so I spent the journey standing in the corridor in a tube-like crush with what seemed like an entire brigade of the Italian army. This was awkward and uncomfortable.
For several hours the young men, every one of them, stared unblinking at me with that deadly gaze poised between loathing and lust, until the train reached Assisi, where I fought my way through hands, mouths and groins to the exit. I hadn't thought of the journalism justification at that stage, but it really wouldn't have helped.
A linguistic mystery has arisen surrounding symbol-inscribed stones in Scotland that predate the formation of the country itself.
The stones are believed to have been carved by members of an ancient people known as the Picts, who thrived in what is now Scotland from the 4th to the 9th Centuries.
These symbols, researchers say, are probably "words" rather than images.
But their conclusions have raised criticism from some linguists.
The research team, led by Professor Rob Lee from Exeter University in the UK, examined symbols on more than 200 carved stones.
They used a mathematical method to quantify patterns contained within the symbols, in an effort to find out if they conveyed meaning.
Professor Lee described the basis of this method.
"It I told you the first letter of a word in English was 'Q' and asked you to predict the next letter, you would probably say 'U' and you would probably be right," he explained.
"But if I told you the first letter was 'T' you would probably take many more guesses to get it right - that's a measure of uncertainty."
Using the symbols, or characters, from the stones, Professor Lee and his colleagues measured this feature of so-called "character to character uncertainty".
They concluded that the Pictish carvings were "symbolic markings that communicated information" - that these were words rather than pictures.
Professor Lee first published these conclusions in April of this year. But a recent article by French linguist Arnaud Fournet opened up the mystery once again.
Mr Fournet said that, by examining Pictish carvings as if they were "linear symbols", and by applying the rules of written language to them, the scientists could have produced biased results.
He commented to BBC News: "It looks like their method is transforming two-dimensional glyphs into a one-dimensional string of symbols.
"The carvings must have some kind of purpose- some kind of meanings, but... it's very difficult to determine if their conclusion is contained in the raw data or if it's an artefact of their method."
Mr Fournet also suggested that the researchers' methods should be tested and verified for other ancient symbols.
"The line between writing and drawing is not as clear-cut as categorised in the paper," Mr Fournet wrote in his article. "On the whole the conclusion remains pending."
But Professor Lee says that his most recent analysis of the symbols, which has yet to be published, has reinforced his original conclusions.
He also stressed he did not claim that the carvings were a full and detailed record of the Pictish language.
"The symbols themselves are a very constrained vocabulary," he said. "But that doesn't mean that Pictish had such a constrained vocabulary."
He said the carvings might convey the same sort of meaning as a list, perhaps of significant names, which would explain the limited number of words used.
"It's like finding a menu for a restaurant [written in English], and that being your sole repository of the English language.
Phelps "Catfish" Collins, the legendary funk guitarist who played with James Brown and Parliament/Funkadelic, died Friday in Cincinnati after a battle with cancer. He was 66. "My world will never be the same without him," said his brother Bootsy Collins in a statement. "Be happy for him, he certainly is now and always has been the happiest young fellow I ever met on this planet."
Growing up in Cincinnati, Catfish inspired Bootsy to outfit an old guitar with bass strings, helping to define Bootsy’s signature funk sound. Catfish also introduced his brother to the music of Indiana blues guitarist Lonnie Mack. The siblings first played together in the Pacemakers, a funk act, in 1968. One year later, James Brown recruited them to join the original lineup of the J.B.'s, Brown's touring band. Catfish's clean, funky strumming was integral to Brown classics like "Super Bad," "Get Up," "Soul Power," and "Give It Up." "It was like playing a big school with James [as the teacher], like psychotic bump school, only deeper," Bootsy told Rolling Stone in 1978.
When the original J.B.'s split from Brown in 1971, the Collins brothers joined Parliament-Funkadelic, playing on albums like 1972's classic America Eats Its Young. (Catfish also played in Bootsy's side project, Bootsy's Rubber Band.) In 1983, Catfish split from Funkadelic, remaining mostly quiet until 2007, when he contributed guitar to the Superbad soundtrack.
Collins' death comes just one month after fellow Parliament-Funkadelic guitarist Garry Shider passed away from cancer at 56.
Radiohead front-man Thom Yorke played a surprise gig at the Big Chill festival, and during his set, the man performed a brand new Radiohead tune called “Give Up The Ghost”. This wasn’t, however, the first time Yorke has played “Give Up The Ghost”. via prettymuchamazing
I've just found a wonderful, very funny documentary made in 1973 about a group of British Hells Angels.
It's about their daily life and culminates in them going on a weekend mini-break on a derelict barge in the pouring rain near Aylesbury.
They're obviously not very nice people (especially as they tend to go on about Nazis). And the film has a disapproving commentary that talks about their "psychotic tendencies" and their "empty daily existence". But as you watch the film you begin to realise that the director (or possibly the editor) was making a completely different film.
It uses the Hells Angels as a comic and exaggerated parody of the emptiness of the daily life for everyone in Britain.
The film is full of wonderful moments. The lead character - Mad John - goes round to see his wife, but completely ignores her because he finds a letter to him from the fountainhead of Angeldom - the California Angels chapter.
His wife stomps off leaving Mad John with his suitcase of memorabilia. Inside the suitcase is a magazine called "Big Chopper" and a real chopper. He sits with his only real friend - his alsatian dog called Hitler.
And the Hells Angels' holiday ends with all them all sitting together on the barge in the rain watching Dr Who on television drinking cans of lager.
Not much change there then.
Here are the stars of the film:
"Mad John" the Vice President of the Chapter. He was named "Mad John" by "Buttons" who was the first official Hells Angel's leader in Britain. (You can see Buttons' legendary autobiography - Buttons, The Making of a President - briefly in Mad John's suitcase.)
Karl - the Sergeant at Arms of the Chapter. He has been cross-eyed ever since his eyes were knocked out of their sockets in a fight.
Mad John's dog called Hitler plus a great carpet and some fantastic wallpaper.
And Angel member Mick's mum who comes round to lend them a portable TV for the weekend.
She is asked what she thinks about her son being a Hells Angel - and she gives one of the best quotes I have ever heard. It is brilliantly comic.
charlesdavis84 
-- Oh wait, it was the US military. Never mind, nothing to see here.
exilestreet @Hyperdub received a DMCA notice at my blog for linking to this mix http://bit.ly/cIjgLU that you tweeted. Do the IFPI really act on yr say?
Hyperdub @exilestreet owt to do with us.
SageFrancisSFR If the artist has to wear multiple hats in order to survive but the middlemen refuse to work extra angles then #KillEmAllAndLetGodSortEmOut
"Mad John" the Vice President of the Chapter. He was named "Mad John" by "Buttons" who was the first official Hells Angel's leader in Britain. (You can see Buttons' legendary autobiography - Buttons, The Making of a President - briefly in Mad John's suitcase.)
Karl - the Sergeant at Arms of the Chapter. He has been cross-eyed ever since his eyes were knocked out of their sockets in a fight.
Mad John's dog called Hitler plus a great carpet and some fantastic wallpaper.
And Angel member Mick's mum who comes round to lend them a portable TV for the weekend. 
