FICTIVE FRIDAYS : #19
3 hours ago
Saturday, 12 March 2011
Kate Bush Reworks Old Songs for New Album
It isn't very often that influential art-pop siren Kate Bush puts out a new LP; her last one, Aerial, came out six years ago. But lo and behold, Bush has announced that a new record is on the way: Director's Cut is coming out May 16 via Kate's own Fish People label, in conjunction with EMI.
Although Director's Cut is a new release, it's not entirely comprised of new material, per se. The record features Bush re-recording elements of songs from two of her previous solo albums, 1989's The Sensual World and 1993's The Red Shoes, while "keeping the best musical performances of each song," according to a press release.
The record will be released digitally, on CD in a case-bound book, as part of a three-CD package that will include Director's Cut, The Sensual World, and the remastered The Red Shoes in a case-bound book, and a double vinyl edition. A reworked take on The Sensual World's "Deeper Understanding" will be released in April. The press release also notes that "Kate is currently working on new material although no release date has been set for this.
Steve Riley And The Mamou Playboys - Tiny Desk Concert 3/7/11
"Lyons Point"
"Valse de Chagrin/Waltz of Sorrow"
"Grand Isle"
"Honest Papas Love Their Mamas Better"
This Mardi Gras will be a bittersweet celebration for Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys. For 23 years, accordionist Steve Riley has been making music with his friend and fiddler, David Greely, but this Mardi Gras will be their last together. Greely is leaving the Mamou Playboys to save his ears; the loud volume of dancehall shows has been harmful to his hearing, and his doctor has told him that he needs to stop. So this Tiny Desk Concert is one of his last shows with the Grammy-nominated Cajun band.
Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys make sweet Cajun music together: music steeped in the French heritage of southwestern Louisiana and driven by accordion and fiddle. It's sweetly melodic, danceable music with origins in French-Canadian history that dates back to the 1760s — think of it as their country music. Over the last 23 years, there have been 11 Mamou Playboys records; the latest, Grand Isle, is self-released. In the album's title track, Greely finds more that's bittersweet to sing about: Grand Isle is not only the place he loved most as a child, but it's also a place hit hard by the gulf oil disaster last spring.
Come Mardi Gras this week, the band will play its last dancehall together. During this visit to NPR, Greely joked about putting together an acoustic tour of office spaces. If such a thing would keep this great team together, I'd say it's not a bad idea. (Bob Boilen - npr)
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bengoldacre ben goldacre
"Supermoon caused earthquake" - total, utter, stupid, offensive made-up bollocks in the Daily Mail http://post.ly/1jWNa
Friday, 11 March 2011
The eBook User’s Bill of Rights
The eBook User’s Bill of Rights
Every eBook user should have the following rights:
* the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
* the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
* the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
* the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks
I believe in the free market of information and ideas.
I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.
Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.
I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.
I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.
These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.
To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
@ Librarian In Black
(GB2011) Energy policy role at No 10 for former BP man
Downing Street is set to appoint former BP employee Ben Moxham to head up its energy and environment policy, as one of nine new policy advisers due to beef up No 10.
Moxham is currently employed at the Riverstone private equity group run by former BP boss Lord John Browne, which specialises in oil and renewable energy investment.
The 31-year-old has been put forward on a shortlist of one to David Cameron and Nick Clegg for approval, having been vetted by an impartial civil service appointment process. The two party leaders will meet six civil service candidates and three private sector recruits, of which Moxham is one, in the final round of the process to bring nine extra policy experts into government. All will be appointed as civil servants in order not to breach Cameron's stipulation on the number of political appointees.
The new advisers are intended to bulk up the No 10 policy unit. Cameron had said he wanted his tenure as prime minister to be hands-off but recent fiascos over the attempted sell-off of forests and the concern about the NHS convinced him to reinforce his policy specialists at the heart of government. The new recruits will "man-mark" their respective ministries and draw up policies for the second half of the current parliament, when the coalition agreement will have run out of specific policy road.
Downing Street is happy with Moxham's shortlisting by the civil service, pointing to his experience heading up the alternative energy department at BP under Browne. The government regards its energy policy increasingly to be the implementation of the kind of renewables agenda Moxham took charge of when at BP.
Moxham was a founding member of the team of BP Alternative Energy as its director of policy, looking after BP's interests in renewables, gas power, and carbon capture and storage.
While Moxham will have been key in helping BP move "beyond petroleum", as its strapline became, there were some concerns among environmental campaigners that BP's alternative energy department was ill-fated. The unit run by Moxham was shut down in June 2009.
Allegra Stratton @'The Guardian'
David Simon, Creator of The Wire, Speaks on Felicia "Snoop" Pearson's Arrest
Beyond that, I am waiting to see whether the charges against Felicia relate to heroin or marijuana. Obviously, the former would be, to my mind, a far more serious matter. And further, I am waiting to see if the charges or statement of facts offered by the government reflect any involvement with acts of violence, which would of course be of much greater concern..."
Continue reading
Swans last night at The Forum
(Photos:TimN)
So damn good that I have to go and see them again tonight over at The East Brunswick Hotel!
ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
Caring what Amnesty International says about detainee abuse is so 2005 http://is.gd/Vnarnu
Thursday, 10 March 2011
IBM Centennial Film: They Were There - People who changed the way the world works
A film by Errol Morris
Music by Phillip Glass
Dalai Lama calls for greater freedom in China
The Dalai Lama has called on China's leaders to show greater transparency, in a speech marking the anniversary of the 1959 Tibetan uprising.
The exiled Tibetan spiritual leader said China needed to show freedom of expression and freedom of the press to earn the world's respect and trust.The Dalai Lama also said he would begin the process of devolving authority to an elected leader.
He was speaking at Dharamsala, the Indian town that has become his base.
"China, with the world's largest population, is an emerging world power and I admire the economic development it has made," he said.
"It also has huge potential to contribute to human progress and world peace. But to do that, China must earn the international community's respect and trust. In order to earn such respect China's leaders must develop greater transparency, their actions corresponding to their words. To ensure this, freedom of expression and freedom of the press are essential."
The Dalai Lama said he would begin the process of devolving authority at a session of the Tibetan parliament-in-exile that begins on 14 March.
"As early as the 1960s, I have repeatedly stressed that Tibetans need a leader, elected freely by the Tibetan people, to whom I can devolve power. Now, we have clearly reached the time to put this into effect," he said.
The Dalai Lama, who heads Tibet's exiled government, has lived in Dharamsala since fleeing across the Himalayas following the failed 1959 uprising against Chinese rule.He has said he does not want independence for Tibet, only meaningful autonomy.
The Dalai Lama is routinely vilified by the Chinese authorities.
In the run up to the anniversary, police in the Indian capital Delhi detained more than 30 Tibetan exiles protesting outside the Chinese embassy on Wednesday.
The protesters wore yellow T-shirts and waved red and blue Tibetan flags, chanting "Free Tibet" and "We want freedom".
Chinese officials have recently announced travel restrictions to Tibet ahead of the third anniversary of riots there.
In March 2008, Tibet witnessed a wave of violent anti-China protests - the worst unrest there for 20 years.
Beijing blamed the unrest on followers of the Dalai Lama, who it said were seeking to separate Tibet from China.
China responded to the unrest with a massive military crackdown.
Many Tibetans have complained about the growing domination of China's majority Han population in Tibet and accuse the government of trying to dilute their culture.
@'BBC'
John Pilger: How The So-Called Guardians Of Free Speech Are Silencing The Messenger
As the United States and Britain look for an excuse to invade another oil-rich Arab country, the hypocrisy is familiar. Colonel Gaddafi is “delusional” and “blood-drenched” while the authors of an invasion that killed a million Iraqis, who have kidnapped and tortured in our name, are entirely sane, never blood-drenched and once again the arbiters of “stability”.
But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other”. Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy”. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.
The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia’s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.
Should Assange’s current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange’s “guilt”. Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as Sweden’s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.
These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be considered “highly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial”. A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties between the Swedish prime minister Frederic Reinheldt, and the Republican right in the US. “Reinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends,” he said. Reinhaldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange’s extradition to the US from Sweden are dire.
The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is currently preferred. On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Stephen Spielberg’s Dream Works was to make “an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men” out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. “No idea,” was the puzzling reply of the Guardian’s “investigations editor”. The Guardian paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks -- not Leigh or Harding -- are responsible for what the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, calls “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”.
The Guardian has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian’s self-regarding book, Assange’s extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an “unusual Australian” with a “frizzy-haired” mother, gratuitously abused as “callous” and a “damaged personality” that was “on the autistic spectrum”. How will Speilberg deal with this childish character assassination? e
On the BBC’s Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange had complained of a “Jewish conspiracy”, which follows a torrent of internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as “completely false, in spirit and word”.
It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and state of siege of Julian Assange, who in one form or another is paying for tearing aside the façade of rapacious power. The canker here is not the far right but the paper-thin liberalism of those who guard the limits of free speech. The New York Times has distinguished itself by spinning and censoring the WikiLeaks material. “We are taking all [the] cables to the administration,” said Bill Keller, the editor, “They’ve convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise.” In an article by Keller, Assange is personally abused. At the Columbia School of Journalism on 3 February, Keller said, in effect, that the public could not be trusted with the release of further cables. This might cause a “cacophony”. The gatekeeper has spoken.
The heroic Bradley Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Julian Assange will “end up being tortured in a high security American prison” are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?
Via
But something has changed. Reality is no longer what the powerful say it is. Of all the spectacular revolts across the world, the most exciting is the insurrection of knowledge sparked by WikiLeaks. This is not a new idea. In 1792, the revolutionary Tom Paine warned his readers in England that their government believed that “people must be hoodwinked and held in superstitious ignorance by some bugbear or other”. Paine’s The Rights of Man was considered such a threat to elite control that a secret grand jury was ordered to charge him with “a dangerous and treasonable conspiracy”. Wisely, he sought refuge in France.
The ordeal and courage of Tom Paine is cited by the Sydney Peace Foundation in its award of Australia’s human rights Gold Medal to Julian Assange. Like Paine, Assange is a maverick who serves no system and is threatened by a secret grand jury, a malicious device long abandoned in England but not in the United States. If extradited to the US, he is likely to disappear into the Kafkaesque world that produced the Guantanamo Bay nightmare and now accuses Bradley Manning, WikiLeaks’ alleged whistleblower, of a capital crime.
Should Assange’s current British appeal fail against his extradition to Sweden, he will probably, once charged, be denied bail and held incommunicado until his trial in secret. The case against him has already been dismissed by a senior prosecutor in Stockholm and given new life only when a right-wing politician, Claes Borgstrom, intervened and made public statements about Assange’s “guilt”. Borgstrom, a lawyer, now represents the two women involved. His law partner is Thomas Bodstrom, who as Sweden’s minister for justice in 2001, was implicated in the handover of two innocent Egyptian refugees to a CIA kidnap squad at Stockholm airport. Sweden later awarded them damages for their torture.
These facts were documented in an Australian parliamentary briefing in Canberra on 2 March. Outlining an epic miscarriage of justice threatening Assange, the enquiry heard expert evidence that, under international standards of justice, the behavior of certain officials in Sweden would be considered “highly improper and reprehensible [and] preclude a fair trial”. A former senior Australian diplomat, Tony Kevin, described the close ties between the Swedish prime minister Frederic Reinheldt, and the Republican right in the US. “Reinfeldt and [George W] Bush are friends,” he said. Reinhaldt has attacked Assange publicly and hired Karl Rove, the former Bush crony, to advise him. The implications for Assange’s extradition to the US from Sweden are dire.
The Australian enquiry was ignored in the UK, where black farce is currently preferred. On 3 March, the Guardian announced that Stephen Spielberg’s Dream Works was to make “an investigative thriller in the mould of All the President’s Men” out of its book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy. I asked David Leigh, who wrote the book with Luke Harding, how much Spielberg had paid the Guardian for the screen rights and what he expected to make personally. “No idea,” was the puzzling reply of the Guardian’s “investigations editor”. The Guardian paid WikiLeaks nothing for its treasure trove of leaks. Assange and WikiLeaks -- not Leigh or Harding -- are responsible for what the Guardian’s editor, Alan Rusbridger, calls “one of the greatest journalistic scoops of the last 30 years”.
The Guardian has made clear it has no further use for Assange. He is a loose cannon who did not fit Guardianworld, who proved a tough, unclubbable negotiator. And brave. In the Guardian’s self-regarding book, Assange’s extraordinary bravery is excised. He becomes a figure of petty bemusement, an “unusual Australian” with a “frizzy-haired” mother, gratuitously abused as “callous” and a “damaged personality” that was “on the autistic spectrum”. How will Speilberg deal with this childish character assassination? e
On the BBC’s Panorama, Leigh indulged hearsay about Assange not caring about the lives of those named in the leaks. As for the claim that Assange had complained of a “Jewish conspiracy”, which follows a torrent of internet nonsense that he is an evil agent of Mossad, Assange rejected this as “completely false, in spirit and word”.
It is difficult to describe, let alone imagine, the sense of isolation and state of siege of Julian Assange, who in one form or another is paying for tearing aside the façade of rapacious power. The canker here is not the far right but the paper-thin liberalism of those who guard the limits of free speech. The New York Times has distinguished itself by spinning and censoring the WikiLeaks material. “We are taking all [the] cables to the administration,” said Bill Keller, the editor, “They’ve convinced us that redacting certain information would be wise.” In an article by Keller, Assange is personally abused. At the Columbia School of Journalism on 3 February, Keller said, in effect, that the public could not be trusted with the release of further cables. This might cause a “cacophony”. The gatekeeper has spoken.
The heroic Bradley Manning is kept naked under lights and cameras 24 hours a day. Greg Barns, director of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, says the fears that Julian Assange will “end up being tortured in a high security American prison” are justified. Who will share responsibility for such a crime?
Via
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