Via
Thursday, 15 September 2011
DUBTechformation I ·When HE-MAN Smoked a Joint!
Live in Mi casa, Recorded con Pioner Vinyl of 1981 And Laptop.
Buenos Aires Argentina
Sonic Youth - Old Greek Theatre, Melbourne (20th January 1989)
Info
Date:
Friday, January 20th, 1989
City:
Melbourne, Australia
Venue:
Old Greek Theatre
Setlist:
Brother James
The Wonder
Hyperstation
Teenage Riot
Hey Joni
The Sprawl
'Cross the Breeze
Eric's Trip
Candle
Kissability
I Love Her All The Time
Eliminator Jr
Silver Rocket
I have a few cassettes I recorded of Sonic Youth live dating as far back as Am*dam in 1985. Most of them have been in storage for quite a while and will probably be there a while longer...it's a very long story *yawn*
However, while searching tonight for some other things I found this tape I recorded back on my birthday in 1989.
Bearing in mind that it was recorded on a Walkman that was very much on its last legs and the fact that I was probably on my last legs of the night too, what you hear is what you get!
40 minutes of a rather enjoyable night (from what I can remember *ahem*)
An interesting little side note is that Spaceboy's mum was selling rather tasty home made SY tee shirts from a stall at the back of one of the greatest venues that Melbourne ever had that night with her then partner...I remember speaking to her back then but it would be another 18 years before we met up in a different time and place...
PS: Where the fuck have ALL those years gone?FLAC
mp3
Leonard Cohen - 4 New Songs
Leonard Cohen - Melbourne 5/02/09
(Photo by TimN)
Feels So Good
The Darkness
Born In Chains
Lullaby
Via
Michele Bachmann HPV row prompts fears for vaccine programme in US
The controversy was ignited by Republican presidential hopeful Michele Bachmann, who claimed that the vaccine against human papillomavirus, which can cause cervical cancer, was a "very dangerous drug" that could lead to "mental retardation".
That claim immediately drew a barrage of criticism from the medical profession and even from Bachmann sympathisers on the right, forcing her to backtrack slightly. She told a conservative talkshow: "I have no idea. I am not a doctor, I'm not a scientist, I'm not a physician. All I was doing is reporting what this woman told me at the debate."
But doctors and scientists say that her remarks risk further reducing the already low take-up rates for the vaccine, as more parents will be convinced to reject the vaccine for their daughters.
Professor Gregory Zimet, co-leader of the cancer control programme at Indiana University, said of Bachmann's comments: "People will say there's no evidence for it and that is true, there is no evidence. But I would go further: Bachmann is absolutely wrong."
He added: "Part of the issue will be how long the discussion is prominent in the news. If this is brought up every time the Republican candidates have a debate, if misinformation is repeatedly expressed and covered nationally, it can have a negative effect."
The uptake of the vaccine has already suffered a major backlash in the US in response to what some critics viewed as an overly aggressive marketing strategy and anxiety from the religious right that the vaccine would promote sexual promiscuity among young girls.
The American Academy of Pediatrics, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American Academy of Family Physicians all recommend that girls receive the HPV vaccine at the of age 11 or 12, before they begin having sex.
According to the CDC, around 49% of girls aged 13 to 17 received one dose of the vaccine in 2010, but only 32% received all three doses.
"From the public health point of view that is inadequate," said Zimet. "When you have a vaccine that likely prevents around 70% of cervical cancers, but fewer than half of girls are receiving all three doses, the ultimate effect is dampened."
In the US, around 6m people a year become infected with HPV, and some 4000 women die of cervical cancer each year.
Bachmann had focused on the HPV virus to attack her rival in the Republican nomination race, Texas governor Rick Perry, over his decision to issue an executive order requiring girls in the state to have HPV vaccines. She also suggested that he may have made the order in return for political donations from Merck, the manufacturer of the Gardasil, the vaccine used in the US.
Both allegations drew political blood, and Perry found himself on the back foot before the otherwise largely supportive Tea Party audience suspicious of "big government" intrusion on individual liberties.
But Bachmann appears to have badly overplayed her hand by then telling NBC television: "I will tell you that I had a mother last night come up to me here in Tampa, Florida, after the debate. She told me that her little daughter took that vaccine, that injection, and she suffered from mental retardation thereafter," said Bachmann. "It can have very dangerous side effects."
Ed Rollins, Bachmann's former campaign manager, criticised her comments: "She made a mistake. The quicker she admits she made a mistake and moves on, the better she is," he said in an interview on MSNBC.
"Ms Bachmann's an emotional person who basically has great feeling for people. I think that's what she was trying to project. Obviously it would have been better if she had stayed on the issue," he said.
"I think the bottom line here is she has made what was a very positive debate and made the issue about Perry to where it's now an issue about her, and she needs to move on.''
Although offering the vaccine at such an early age is sometimes controversial, its effectiveness and safety have not been a political issue in the US.
Dr Marion Burton, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, hit back at Bachmann.
"The American Academy of Pediatrics would like to correct false statements made in the Republican presidential campaign that HPV vaccine is dangerous and can cause mental retardation. There is absolutely no scientific validity to this statement. Since the vaccine has been introduced, more than 35m doses have been administered, and it has an excellent safety record," Burton said.
The Institute of Medicine, which advises the government, last month found the HPV vaccine to be safe.
But while there is absolutely no evidence to suggest that the vaccine is dangerous, there are some questions over the efficacy of Gardasil, the version of the vaccine used in the US.
Clinical trials show that Gardasil is highly effective against two strains of the HPV virus that together account for around 70% of cervical cancers. The vaccine works best in young people who have never had an HPV infection.
In countries with popular cervical cancer screening programmes, vaccination with Gardasil can reduce the number of abnormal smear test results by around 20%.
"That means sparing women from the psychological trauma and gynaecological procedures that arise from an abnormal result," said Anne Szarewski, a cervical cancer expert at the medical charity Cancer Research UK.
But questions remain over the value of Gardasil in preventing cases of actual cervical cancer where cervical screening programmes are widely subscribed to, said Diane Harper, a Professor of Medicine at the University of Missouri in Kansas City, who led the clinical trials of Gardasil and its main competitor, Cevarix, manufactured by GSK.
Smear test programmes that look for precancerous changes to cells in the cervix caused by the virus have reduced the incidence of cervical cancer in the US to around eight in 100,000 women.
"The very best you could achieve with Gardasil alone would be 14 cases per 100,000 women. So in an overall population, Gardasil is never going to prevent more cervical cancers than you are already preventing with a screening programme," Harper told the Guardian.
Another concern centres on how long the vaccine lasts. If a woman who received the jab was protected for only five years, any infection and resulting cancer would only be delayed until the immunity wore off.
Gardasil targets two strains of the HPV vaccine, while Cevarix is designed to protect against five strains. Mathematical models of Cevarix suggest the vaccine should protect against the virus for 30 years.
Bachmann's claims also drew criticism on the right.
Yuval Levin, a former domestic policy advisor to George Bush's administration and former chief of staff of the President's Council on Bioethics, called Bachmann's assertions "preposterously ill-informed" and "profoundly irresponsible".
"Baseless assertions to the contrary about various vaccines have for years been piling needless guilt upon the parents of children with autism and other disorders, and driving other parents away from vaccinating their children against diseases that could do them great harm. A presidential candidate should not be engaging in such harmful nonsense," he said in the conservative National Review Online.
Even the popular rightwing radio talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, said that Bachmann "may have jumped the shark" – an idiom generally used to mean having gone too far – by linking the HPV vaccine to mental retardation.
Limbaugh said that Bachmann appeared undercut her initial success in wounding Perry over the HPV issue by shifting the focus to her own credibility with her claims about the vaccine's safety.
"She scored the points and should have left it there," said Limbaugh.
Chris McGreal and Ian Sample @'The Guardian'
CNN/Tea Party Debate Fact Check
Breaking: Suicide bomber kills 15 in attack on Pakistan funeral - AP. More details soon...
Enter the grinderman
Cave emerged in 1973 with The Boys Next Door, later known as The Birthday Party, a hugely influential goth rock collective from Melbourne that disbanded in 1983. In 1984, he founded the even more profoundly influential group, Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds, with whom he released the seminal albums Henry's Dream, Murder Ballads and The Boatman's Call. The Bad Seeds toured and recorded continuously until 2006, before entering the chrysalis to re-emerge as the mangy, snarling critical darlings, Grinderman.
Over the years, Cave has stretched his dark fingers into all manner of art forms, from writing (The Death of Bunny Munro), to screenwriting (The Proposition), acting (Ghosts...of the Civil Dead) to soundtrack composition (The Road). Along the way, various pieces of short film have been created in his name or with his involvement, from music clips to documentaries to narrative fiction.
Join us for a trawl through Nick Cave's shorts, including the 1979 clip for 'Shiver' by The Boys Next Door and a host of others, footage of Cave reading from The Death of Bunny Munro and a documentary piece in which Cave's friends discuss 'Do You Love Me' and 'Red Right Hand'. Should be a grim and dramatic evening.
Red Hot Shorts' Nick Cave spotlight is on Friday 23 September at 7.30pm.
@'acmi'
FBI Teaches Agents: ‘Mainstream’ Muslims Are ‘Violent, Radical’
At the Bureau’s training ground in Quantico, Virginia, agents are shown a chart contending that the more “devout” a Muslim, the more likely he is to be “violent.” Those destructive tendencies cannot be reversed, an FBI instructional presentation adds: “Any war against non-believers is justified” under Muslim law; a “moderating process cannot happen if the Koran continues to be regarded as the unalterable word of Allah.”
These are excerpts from dozens of pages of recent FBI training material on Islam that Danger Room has acquired. In them, the Constitutionally protected religious faith of millions of Americans is portrayed as an indicator of terrorist activity.
“There may not be a ‘radical’ threat as much as it is simply a normal assertion of the orthodox ideology,” one FBI presentation notes. “The strategic themes animating these Islamic values are not fringe; they are main stream.”
The FBI isn’t just treading on thin legal ice by portraying ordinary, observant Americans as terrorists-in-waiting, former counterterrorism agents say. It’s also playing into al-Qaida’s hands.
Focusing on the religious behavior of American citizens instead of proven indicators of criminal activity like stockpiling guns or using shady financing makes it more likely that the FBI will miss the real warning signs of terrorism. And depicting Islam as inseparable from political violence is exactly the narrative al-Qaida spins — as is the related idea that America and Islam are necessarily in conflict. That’s why FBI whistleblowers provided Danger Room with these materials.
Over the past few years, American Muslim civil rights groups have raised alarm about increased FBI and police presence in Islamic community centers and mosques, fearing that their lawful behavior is being targeted under the broad brush of counterterrorism. The documents may help explain the heavy scrutiny...
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The Whole World Is Watching
Early in 2010, The Guardian reported plans by the British Police and Home Office for a remarkable new venture in domestic surveillance. Unmanned aerial drones, now used for tracking insurgents in Pakistan and Afghanistan, are to be adapted (unarmed, one hopes) to monitor Britain’s civil population. An initial aim of the project is crowd control during the 2012 London Olympics. Thereafter, these high-tech surveillance engines are to become a permanent feature of state security and law enforcement—much to the distress of civil libertarians and privacy advocates, who immediately objected to the plans. But no one can say this is especially new. With an estimated 1.7 million video cameras deployed on the ground, George Orwell’s homeland can probably already claim world leadership in state-sponsored monitoring of its population. And the intensification of all forms of institutional tracking of individuals isn’t restricted to Britain—it is occurring the world over. All told, the United States has probably contributed more to these trends than any other country as both the creator and exporter of different means of government and corporate surveillance. The sheer variety of forms implicated in this monitoring is striking. They include real-time recording of consumers’ buying habits and finances; tracking of travelers’ movements by air, train, and road; monitoring of private citizens’ telecommunications; and the mass harvesting of tidbits of personal data from social sites like Facebook.
The seemingly relentless pace of innovation in surveillance cannot be ascribed to any one interest, policy, organizational purpose, or political mood. Instead, it suffuses all manner of relations between institutions and individuals, from the allocation of welfare-state benefits to the pursuit of suspected terrorists.
The result has been change in the very texture of everyday life. Being “alone” is not what it used to be. Our whereabouts, our financial transactions, our uses of the World Wide Web, and countless other data routinely register in the automated consciousness of corporate and state bureaucracies. More importantly, the results of such monitoring in turn shape the treatment we receive from these organizations—sometimes in ways that we know, and often in ways we hardly imagine...
The seemingly relentless pace of innovation in surveillance cannot be ascribed to any one interest, policy, organizational purpose, or political mood. Instead, it suffuses all manner of relations between institutions and individuals, from the allocation of welfare-state benefits to the pursuit of suspected terrorists.
The result has been change in the very texture of everyday life. Being “alone” is not what it used to be. Our whereabouts, our financial transactions, our uses of the World Wide Web, and countless other data routinely register in the automated consciousness of corporate and state bureaucracies. More importantly, the results of such monitoring in turn shape the treatment we receive from these organizations—sometimes in ways that we know, and often in ways we hardly imagine...
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James B. Rule @'Democracy'
Organ music 'instils religious feelings'
Many churches and cathedrals have organ pipes that are so long they emit infrasound which at a frequency lower than 20 Hertz is largely inaudible to the human ear.
But in a controlled experiment in which infrasound was pumped into a concert hall, UK scientists found they could instil strange feelings in the audience at will.
These included an extreme sense of sorrow, coldness, anxiety and even shivers down the spine.
Sound 'gun'
Infrasound has become the subject of intense study in recent years. Researchers have found that some animals, such as elephants, can communicate with low-frequency calls.
Infrasound can be detected at volcanoes and may provide a way to predict eruptions.
And recent work by some of the scientists involved in this latest study found that hauntings - the feeling that something or someone else unseen is in a room or building - may also be explained by the presence of infrasound.
To test the impact on an audience of extreme bass notes from an organ pipe, researchers constructed a seven-metre-long "infrasonic cannon" which they placed at the back of the Purcell Room, a concert hall in South London.
They then invited 750 people to report their feelings after listening to pieces of contemporary music intermittently laced sound from the cannon, played a 17 Hz at levels of 6-8 decibels.
Feel the bass
The results showed that odd sensations in the audience increased by an average of 22% when the extreme bass was present.
"It has been suggested that because some organ pipes in churches and cathedrals produce infrasound this could lead to people having weird experiences which they attribute to God," said Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist from University of Hertfordshire.
"Some of the experiences in our audience included 'shivering on my wrist', 'an odd feeling in my stomach', 'increased heart rate', 'feeling very anxious', and 'a sudden memory of emotional loss'.
"This was an experiment done under controlled conditions and it shows infrasound does have an impact, and that has implications... in a religious context and some of the unusual experiences people may be having in certain churches."
Sarah Angliss, an engineer and composer in charge of the project, added: "Organ players have been adding infrasound to the mix for 500 years so maybe we're not the first generation to be 'addicted to bass'."
Details of the organ infrasound study are being presented to the British Association's annual science festival, which this year is in Salford, Greater Manchester.
Jonathan Amos @'BBC'
Humans and Neanderthals had sex, but not very often
The discovery was a vindication for some and a surprise to others. For decades, palaeontologists had fought over different visions of the rise of early humans. Some championed the “Out of Africa” model, which says that all of us descend from a small group of ancestors who came out of Africa, swept the world, and replaced every other group of early humans. The most extreme versions of this model said that these groups never had sex, or at least, never bred successfully. The alternative – the multiregional model – envisages these prehistoric groups as part of a single population that met and mated extensively.
To an extent, these are caricatured versions of the two models, and there are subtler variants of each. Still, early evidence seemed to support the extreme Out of Africa version. When scientists sequenced the mitochondrial genome of Neanderthals (a small secondary set of genes set apart from the main pack), they found no evidence that any of these sequences had invaded the modern human genome. The conclusion: Neanderthals and humans never bred.
The full Neanderthal genome disproved that idea, but it also shifted the question from whether humans had sex with Neanderthals to just how much sex they had. As I mentioned in New Scientist earlier this year, modern humans were spreading into areas where Neanderthals existed. “It doesn’t necessarily take a lot of sex for genes from a resident population to infiltrate the genomes of colonisers. When an incoming group mates with an established one, the genes they pick up quickly rise to prominence as their population grows.”
Now, Mathias Currat from the University of Geneva and Laurent Excoffier from the University of Berne have weighed into the debate. They simulated the spread of modern humans from Africa and their encounters with Neanderthals throughout Europe and Asia, to work out the levels of sex that would have transferred Neanderthal genes to modern genomes at their current level.
The duo concluded that sex between the two groups was somewhat of a fringe activity. Fewer than 2 percent of the possible sexual encounters at the time happened between a human and a Neanderthal and produced a fertile, healthy hybrid child. That’s a conservative estimate – the true odds might have been even lower. “Such interbreedings were strongly prevented or very rarely successful,” says Excoffier...
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Ed Yong @'Discover'
Frida
I used to think I was the strangest person in the world, but then I thought, there are so many people in the world; there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true, I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.Via
- Frida Kahlo
Drop Out Orchestra - Mix Session September 2011
01. Gredit - Ben E Slow
02. Lou Teti - Shake (Drop Out Orchestra Reload)
03. Honom - Bedcat
04. Rambla Boys - Cocomero
05. Lou Teti - Love It (Dublin Aunts Rework)
06. Mary Mary - Shackles (Praise You) Drop Out Orchestra Rework
07. Drop Out Orchestra - Ego (Black Strobe Remix)
08. Tronik Youth - Toke-Yo
09. Katzuma - Life In The City
10. Dub On Film (Drop Out Orchestra Rework)
11. Ajello ft Hard Ton - Chocolate Black Leather (Tempelhof Remix)
12. Fabmayday - Disco Verme (Drop Out Orchestra Remix)
13. 3io - Born Slippy
02. Lou Teti - Shake (Drop Out Orchestra Reload)
03. Honom - Bedcat
04. Rambla Boys - Cocomero
05. Lou Teti - Love It (Dublin Aunts Rework)
06. Mary Mary - Shackles (Praise You) Drop Out Orchestra Rework
07. Drop Out Orchestra - Ego (Black Strobe Remix)
08. Tronik Youth - Toke-Yo
09. Katzuma - Life In The City
10. Dub On Film (Drop Out Orchestra Rework)
11. Ajello ft Hard Ton - Chocolate Black Leather (Tempelhof Remix)
12. Fabmayday - Disco Verme (Drop Out Orchestra Remix)
13. 3io - Born Slippy
Botulism Turning Up In King County Heroin
“In late August, a King County woman with a history of ‘black tar’ heroin injection arrived at a hospital with slurred speech, double vision and drooping eyelids, according to a statement issued Wednesday by Seattle & King County Public Health. About a week later, a man with a similar history of injection drug use was admitted with similar symptoms.
“Both saw their conditions worsen and were admitted to an intensive care unit. Botulism – a life-threatening but rare illness caused by a toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum bacteria – is strongly suspected in both cases, and testing to confirm the diagnosis is pending at a state laboratory.”
“Both saw their conditions worsen and were admitted to an intensive care unit. Botulism – a life-threatening but rare illness caused by a toxin produced by Clostridium botulinum bacteria – is strongly suspected in both cases, and testing to confirm the diagnosis is pending at a state laboratory.”
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Wednesday, 14 September 2011
All Hail jail to star tale
Courtin-Wilson, a young Melbourne filmmaker, who has won accolades with the documentaries Chasing Buddha and Bastardy, met Jones while working with Plan B, a Melbourne theatre group founded to help rehabilitate former prisoners through performance.
Hail tells the story of a prisoner who is released from a Melbourne jail and tries to return to a normal domestic and working life. It is based on the experiences of former prisoners like Jones, who allowed a film crew into the flat he shares with his girlfriend Leanne to film his family and former criminal associates.
Jones explained in Venice that he had already been in Cannes with Courtin-Wilson's short film, Cicada. Strangely enough he had dreamt he was coming to Venice this year - just like with Cannes in 2009.
Jones said he planned to marry his girlfriend soon "so the festival is like a honeymoon in advance".
Jones explained his first crime was being born. "After my mother and father separated, my mother became seriously ill and I was raised in a boys' home," he said. "So at the age of 12, I was exposed to all the things that happen in the criminal world."
Empire magazine film critic Damon Wise described Jones' performance as "brilliant in the moments when you really got inside his mind and he was articulating his rage. When his eyes glazed over and he was in the zone it was really frightening".
Helen Barlow @'The West Australian'
Venice Press Conference
The Responsive Eye | USA, MoMA, 1965
The Responsive Eye, MoMA Catalogue (1965) [PDF, 80mb]
In 1965, an exhibition called The Responsive Eye, created by William C. Seitz was held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The works shown were wide ranging, encompassing the minimalism of Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, the smooth plasticity of Alexander Liberman, the collaborative efforts of the Anonima group, alongside the well-known Victor Vasarely, Richard Anuszkiewicz, and Bridget Riley. The exhibition focused on the perceptual aspects of art, which result both from the illusion of movement and the interaction of color relationships. The exhibition was enormously popular with the general public, though less so with the critics. Critics dismissed op art as portraying nothing more than trompe l'oeil, or tricks that fool the eye. Regardless, op art's popularity with the public increased, and op art images were used in a number of commercial contexts. Bridget Riley tried to sue an American company, without success, for using one of her paintings as the basis of a fabric design.
The Op Art movement got a new lease of life in the first decade of the twenty-first century as new forms started once again emerging. In 2005, Indian artist, Devajyoti Ray started a new genre of art called Pseudorealism. Though the concept and the name of the movement was brought from the film-world, much of Pseudorealism depends on the intuitive use of colours and understanding the relationships between them. -- Wiki
Via
Thursday September 15 is R U OK? Day.
Every day, 8 Australians take their own lives; that’s more than 2,100 a year.
According to Lifeline, for each person that dies in this way, another 30 attempt to end their life. R U OK? Day aims to inspire all Australians to help reduce our suicide rate by reaching out and making contact with others. Connect with someone you care about, and help stop little problems turning into big ones.
Staying connected with others is crucial to our general health and wellbeing. Feeling isolated or hopeless can contribute to depression and other mental illnesses, which can ultimately result in suicide. Regular, meaningful conversations can protect those we know and love.
Tomorrow, R U OK? want everyone across the country, from all backgrounds and walks of life, to ask family, friends and colleagues: “Are you OK?”.
It’s so simple. In the time it takes to have a coffee, you can start a conversation that could change a life. Visit the R U OK? Day website | Twitter | Facebook and join in tomorrow.
If you read no further than this and know you’ll join in tomorrow, that’s wonderful. Thank you! But if you have a few more minutes we’d like to tell you a little more about R U OK?Day and why it’s so important...
(BIG thanx Stan for the heads up!)
Collateral Damage: Robin Rimbaud
Robin Rimbaud aka Scanner hails the new community spirit of social networking sites that encourage direct communications between artists and listeners.
When British pop singer John Miles trilled, “Music was my first love and it will be my last/Music of the future and music of the past”, he could well have been celebrating the role music still plays in many of our lives today, despite the transformative impact digital technologies have had upon the means of both listening and production.The conversation regarding the digital economy of music tends to bypass many of the more constructive aspects that have been born from this radical reworking of the traditional models. The fiery debates continue to burn, so let’s sidestep those for a moment, look forwards not backwards, and explore the possibilities of engaging with these systems – colluding rather than quarrelling.
I have been professionally engaged in producing and performing music for the last 20 years, though my enthusiasm for all types of music stems from a much earlier age, having been exposed to both John Cage and Suzi Quatro at the very same time: one at school, one at home – no prizes for guessing which one had more influence upon me. (I don’t live on Devil Gate Drive.) Very early on, I was conscious that music has always centred on a social engagement, commonly in performance, and quite unlike the solitary pursuits of writers or visual artists, working independently in their studios to create unique objects.
However, there has always remained a distance between listeners and the musicians themselves, often maintained via bombastic management companies and unresponsive record labels. But nowadays artists can mediate the experience themselves using networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Ping and (in dwindling cases) MySpace. Social networking has erased some of these boundaries controlled by the music industry, enabling fans, consumers and the artists themselves to develop an emotional relationship.
It’s impossible to underestimate the value and impact of this direct line of communication, and personally I’ve felt more of a connection than ever with people who follow my work, or those with whom I’ve collaborated or respected. Indeed, countless times I’ve written ‘fan’ emails to musicians I’ve heard on The Wire Tapper CDs, for example, and receiving a personal response still gives me a thrill. Which is why I still try to respond to every email I receive, whether it’s from commissioners of new work or a curious student asking a technical question, or a request for yet another signed photo (but that’s inevitably my mum asking for those)...
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E-petitions: MPs to debate riots and Hillsborough
MPs are to debate two e-petitions which have gathered the support of more than 100,000 people.
The first debate, on 13 October, will consider calls to remove benefits from people found guilty of taking part in this summer's riots.The second debate, four days later, is on a petition demanding the full release of documents relating to the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster.
The government introduced the e-petitions website this summer.
Any petitions gaining the support of more than 100,000 people can be considered for a full debate, if an MP suggests it to the backbench business committee, which controls about 35 days a year of parliamentary time.
At Tuesday's committee meeting, Conservative MP Gavin Barwell proposed a wider debate on the government's response to the riots, after a petition calling for those involved to lose entitlement to benefits gathered more than 244,000 signatures.
'Maximum disclosure' Liverpool Walton MP Steve Rotheram suggested the petition calling for the release of government papers on the 1989 Hillsborough disaster, in which 96 Liverpool Football Club fans died.
In 2009, the then Labour government set up the Hillsborough Independent Panel, whose task was to "oversee the maximum possible public disclosure of governmental and other agency documentation relating to the Hillsborough tragedy and its aftermath".
The Information Commissioner Christopher Graham ruled in July this year that some files should be released, ahead of the usual 30-year rule, following a BBC freedom of information request, which was made before the panel was established.
'Process is working' However, the government is appealing against that ruling, and has said it wants the documents to be released to the panel first rather than all at once to the public.
It is understood the panel may put forward its recommendations on which papers should be released as early as the spring of next year.
The petitioners, however, are demanding that the information given out is not pre-filtered.
A third topic considered for debate - that of a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union - was not selected by the backbench committee, which had set aside two time slots in October.
The EU referendum call had gathered 80,000 signatures on a paper petition, and more than 20,000 on an e-petition.
A spokesman for the House of Commons leader, Sir George Young, said: "We welcome the decision of the backbench business committee to propose debates in the House on the subjects of the first two eligible e-petitions through the new government website.
"This shows that the new e-petition process is working, and demonstrates that it can achieve the aim of better connecting the public with Parliament."
The government announced last week that MPs could get more time to debate issues raised on the e-petitions website.
@'BBC'
It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing.'
It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing: With an unprecedented amount of available text, our problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, parse it, organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours.
The prominent literary critic Marjorie Perloff has recently begun using the term "unoriginal genius" to describe this tendency emerging in literature. Her idea is that, because of changes brought on by technology and the Internet, our notion of the genius—a romantic, isolated figure—is outdated. An updated notion of genius would have to center around one's mastery of information and its dissemination. Perloff has coined another term, "moving information," to signify both the act of pushing language around as well as the act of being emotionally moved by that process. She posits that today's writer resembles more a programmer than a tortured genius, brilliantly conceptualizing, constructing, executing, and maintaining a writing machine.
Perloff's notion of unoriginal genius should not be seen merely as a theoretical conceit but rather as a realized writing practice, one that dates back to the early part of the 20th century, embodying an ethos in which the construction or conception of a text is as important as what the text says or does. Think, for example, of the collated, note-taking practice of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project or the mathematically driven constraint-based works by Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians.
Today technology has exacerbated these mechanistic tendencies in writing (there are, for instance, several Web-based versions of Raymond Queneau's 1961 laboriously hand-constructed Hundred Thousand Billion Poems), inciting younger writers to take their cues from the workings of technology and the Web as ways of constructing literature. As a result, writers are exploring ways of writing that have been thought, traditionally, to be outside the scope of literary practice: word processing, databasing, recycling, appropriation, intentional plagiarism, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, to name just a few...
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Kenneth Goldsmith @'The Chronicle'
DRC Music - Kinshasa One Two
An album of Congolese music entitled Kinshasa One Two by DRC Music, a collective gathered by Damon Albarn, is released digitally by Warp Records on 3rd October 2011 with a CD/vinyl release to follow on 7th November, to benefit Oxfam. PREORDER NOW - PROFITS GO TO OXFAM'S WORK IN DRC & DRC MUSICIANS
http://bleep.com/index.php?page=dynamic&module=drc_kinshasa_one_two
Kinshasa One Two was made during 5 days of sessions in Kinshasa this summer when the DRC Music collective teamed up with the best of contemporary Congolese musicians and performers. The collective comprises the eclectic production talents of: T-E-E-D (Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs), Dan The Automator, Jneiro Jarel, Richard Russell, Actress, Marc Antoine, Alwest, Remi Kabaka, Rodaidh McDonald and Kwes, with album artwork by Hardy Blechman and Aitor Throup.
http://drcmusic.org/
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