Sunday, 12 February 2012

DJ Scratchy Dog

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Jack White – Love Interruption

Jack White’s first solo-single
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Bon Iver & The Roots - Perth @ Jimmy Fallon 2/9/12

Saturday, 11 February 2012

Woody Guthrie Serenades New York City (1943)

In 1943, the modern-day troubadour and national treasure, Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie, was about to publish his now-classic, semi-fictionalized autobiography, Bound for Glory, in which he wrote vibrantly about his childhood, his love of American folk songs, and his epic travels as a freight car-hopping hobo.
While Bound for Glory would introduce Guthrie to a much broader audience than that which knew him only through his music, he was already something of an underground folk hero to what, in retrospect, feels like the early stirrings of the counterculture of the 1960s. A politically engaged — and occasionally enraged — artist, Guthrie crafted wrenching tales of loss and struggle, as well as paeans to romantic love and national pride, into some of the most enduring American music ever made. (At the time the pictures in this gallery were made, Guthrie had written and performed, but not yet published, the song that more than a few people believe should be the national anthem; namely, the simple, celebratory gem, “This Land Is Your Land.”)
Guthrie, an Oklahoma native, had a strong connection to New York City. It was where he lived at various times in the 1940s, and made his first real recordings; where he wrote “This Land Is Your Land”; where he befriended and collaborated with other politically minded artists like Pete Seeger; and where his devotees — including the likes of Bob Dylan and the great Phil Ochs — later ignited their own Guthrie-inspired folk scene.
On assignment for LIFE in 1943, photographer Eric Schaal followed Guthrie as he gave impromptu performances around New York — in bars, on the stoops of brownstones, on the subway. Engaging, charming, and at ease, the Woody Guthrie in these photos is exactly where he most liked to be: among the people, guitar in hand.
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(Thanx Tony!)

Spaceboy - This one's for you!!!

“What day is it,?" asked Pooh.
"It's today," squeaked Piglet.
"My favorite day," said Pooh.”

Now let's get out of here and get up to some mischief!!!

:)

Einstürzende Neubauten - Palast Der Republik (4/11/04)

This performance was filmed on November 4, 2004 at the Palast der Republik in Berlin, the former Parliament building and symbol of the no longer extant DDR (East Germany). Einstürzende Neubauten found the steel skeleton of the ruins of the Palast a congenial location for their architectural-musical fantasies and field studies. Accompanied by a 100 member choir, recruited from the supporters of the www.neubauten.org Internet project, they played in and with the building in their inimitable, almost literally building-collapsing fashion. Contains previously unreleased songs, band commentary and more.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Hurricane Festival (Sheessel Germany June 19th 2009)

With the magnificent Ed Kuepper on guitar!

Bonus:

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - God Is In The House

The Scale Of The Universe

Rolling Stones 'Wild Horses' Studio Playback

Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Charlie Watts, Mick Taylor and Jim Dickinson are listening to a recording of their Song Wild Horses. Taken from the documentary 'Gimme Shelter' from Charlotte Zwerin, Albert and David Maysles about the Rolling Stones and the Altamont Free Concert in 1969.
(Thanx Stan!)

Testet ölt- I (2012)

Testet ölt is an experimental rock band from Temerin (Vojvodina, Serbia), whose real psychedelic potential can be felt live since 2011. The lineup: Lenkes - guitar; Stupar - drums; Czini - keyboard.

(Thanx Ákos!)

♪♫ The Birthday Party - Fears of Gun/Dead Joe

Australia's link to secret Iraq prisons

Downer rubbishes Iraq 'black site' claims

Friday, 10 February 2012

Oops, My Facebook Friend Just Joined AQ

Erica Chenoweth: Confronting the myth of the rational insurgent

Hallelujah for Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen has a new album out: Old Ideas, his 12th, and his first in seven years. He's 77 now, and if you know Cohen you know his age will get its due in the new songs. The title, of course, has a double meaning, the second being that these songs are ideas about getting old. His life is his wellspring, and life has amounted to a long and singularly winding road for this troubadour.

Born in Montreal in 1934 of Polish and Lithuanian Jewish parents, Cohen was first a modestly successful poet. He learned guitar to pick up girls and got into songwriting partly because he was tired of being poor. His first album, Songs of Leonard Cohen, came out in 1967, when he was 32. Probably it got green-lighted in the wake of Bob Dylan's success, when Dylan had demonstrated to record executives that you could make highly personal, elusively poetic, scraggly sounding records that the public would buy. Of course, Dylan was riding a folk wave when he emerged in the early ’60s, and Cohen caught that wave too.

I'd like to compare those two, in the process of looking back over Cohen's life and songs. He and Dylan have been working for decades without any visible connection or competition. In practical terms there is no competition, because Dylan has been by far the more visible and influential artist. But if Cohen has always sung in the shadow of Dylan, in the quality of the work I suggest he has been in nobody's shadow.

A long career has done Cohen well by me, and I imagine a lot of listeners. In the ’60s and ’70s, I liked a few of his songs well enough, though I found the voice and the tunes not as striking as Dylan's brassy honk and his unforgettable melodies in the folk days. "Blowin' in the Wind," "Mister Tambourine Man," any number of Dylan songs seemed timeless, as if they'd evolved through many voices over many years. (Some, including "Blowin' in the Wind," were based on traditional tunes.)
Cohen didn't do that, probably couldn't do that. He was never the tunesmith Dylan was, and in the early years his voice actually made Dylan's sound pretty good. Cohen sang in a tenor you could call "reedy" if you wanted to be nice, "nasal" if you didn't. They're both mediocre guitar players; any number of high-school students could play rings around them. Cohen's melodies tended to start at the bottom of his range, ascend toward the top of his range—which was not very far—then descend and screw around in the lower region for the rest of the verse. His early hit "Suzanne" is a case in point...

A Brief History of Drones

'Do Not Track' Tool Promises Page Loads Up to Four Times Faster

Mind-Blowing Charts From the Senate's Income Inequality Hearing

Researchers Take Step Toward Creating "Cyborg" Insects for Surveillance

Interpol defends voluntary filter

The list, currently in use or on its way to being used by Optus, Telstra and Vodafone, has been seen by some as ineffective due to the ability of child abusers to easily circumvent it, and because it's a preventative measure, not a cure that would see creators of child-abuse material arrested.
However, in an interview with ZDNet Australia at the Kaspersky Lab Cyber Conference 2012 in Cancun, Mexico, Moran said that this criticism only really applies if the filter list is the only measure. He acknowledged its limitations, but stated that the stop page presented when access is blocked is an important tool in Interpol's arsenal against child abuse.
"What it is, essentially, is a prevention tool. Of course it's easy to go around ... but that's not the point. It's not a silver bullet ...It's like a speed camera on a road — you can slow down when you come up to the speed camera, and you can speed up when you've driven past ... but the reality is that it's reminded you that what you're doing is illegal.
"To suggest that blocking the internet or filtering ... is our only answer is wrong. It's also very important to realise that the vast majority of this 'trade' doesn't happen on the web. It happens in off-web services — IRC, newsgroups, peer to peer; I could go on and on and on. That's where we do our big work."
One of the newer tools that Interpol is using as part of this work is an emerging policing discipline that it calls victim identification.
"Material that is found on the internet is analysed in real time by analysts around the world sharing through the ICSE [International Child Sexual Exploitation] database in Interpol."
In a recent case in Massachusetts, US, an image was distributed through the ICSE database, analysed and determined to be a Dutch child, and the victim was subsequently identified. From this information, local law enforcement was able to track the perpetrator down, who was found to be running a child-care centre and abusing 84 victims in total.
"If the system didn't exist at Interpol, and if the Dutch victim-identification officer wasn't doing her job, that man would still be abusing children," Moran said.
"That type of scenario has happened many times from Australia, where material found in Australia is fed into our systems."
Moran stressed that the ability to track victims greatly assisted in leading law enforcement to the perpetrator.
"Don't forget that 86 per cent plus of child sexual abuse takes place within the home, so if you find the victim, you find the perpetrator."
Moran also addressed criticism that there is a perceived lack of transparency with the Interpol filtering list, as it is difficult to determine what destinations have made their way onto it.
"If you feel that the site has been badly blocked for whatever reason, click that link [on the stop page] and make a complaint, and it will be answered," he said.
At the moment, complaints are handled either by Interpol or via the Australian Federal Police (AFP), but Moran clarified that the AFP has the ability to veto the content of the list.
"We're not some super-national police force that makes decisions for national countries. We make the list available to the national central bureau, which is run by the AFP, and the AFP are the ones who push it on out. The AFP themselves can go through the list and verify that all of this content is justifiable."
Even if the AFP was unwilling or unable to put the resources in place to check the list, Moran said that Interpol would still open the list to scrutiny, so long as the investigating party was from a government agency or similar.
"The list is not public for a very good reason. We would welcome independent verification if somebody wants to come in and look at what we put on the list," he said.
Michael Lee @'ZDNet'

The Birthday Party - The Making of 'Mutiny'

The monarch of middlebrow

Bahrain (Then & Now)

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Five Things the Past Year Has and Hasn't Taught Us about Bahrain

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Michel Houellebecq, The Art of Fiction No. 206 (Paris Review)

“Do you like the Stooges?” Michel Houellebecq asked me on the second day of our interview. He put down his electric cigarette (it glowed red when he inhaled, producing steam instead of smoke) and rose slowly from his futon couch. “Iggy Pop wrote some songs based on my novel The Possibility of an Island,” he offered. “He told me it’s the only book he has liked in the last ten years.” France’s most famous living writer flipped open his MacBook and the gravelly voice of the punk legend filled the kitchenette, chanting: “It’s nice to be dead.”
Michel Houellebecq was born on the French island of La Réunion, near Madagascar, in 1958. As his official Web site states, his bohemian parents, an anesthesiologist and a mountain guide, “soon lost all interest in his existence.” He has no pictures of himself as a child. After a brief stay with his maternal grandparents in Algeria, he was raised from the age of six by his paternal grandmother in northern France. After a period of unemployment and depression, which led to several stays in psychiatric units, Houellebecq found a job working tech support at the French National Assembly. (The members of parliament were “very sweet,” he says.)
A poet since his university days, he wrote a well-regarded study of the American science-fiction writer H. P. Lovecraft in 1991. At the age of thirty-six, he published his first novel, Whatever (1994), about the crushingly boring lives of two computer programmers. The novel attracted a cult following and inspired a group of fans to start Perpendiculaire, a magazine based on a movement they called “depressionism.” (Houellebecq, who accepted an honorary place on the masthead, says he “didn’t really understand their theory and, frankly, didn’t care.”) His next novel, The Elementary Particles (1998), a mixture of social commentary and blunt descriptions of sex, sold three hundred thousand copies in France and made him an international star. So began the still fierce debate over whether Houellebecq should be hailed as a brilliant realist in the great tradition of Balzac or dismissed as an irresponsible nihilist. (One flummoxed New York Times reviewer called the novel “a deeply repugnant read.” Another described it as “lurch[ing] unpleasantly between the salacious and the psychotic.”) The Perpendiculaire staff was offended by what they saw as his reactionary denunciation of the sexual-liberation movement and booted him from the magazine.
Several years later, his mother, who felt she had been unfairly presented in certain autobiographical passages of the novel, published a four-hundred-page memoir. For the first and last time in his public life, Houellebecq received widespread sympathy from the French press, who were forced to concede that even the harsh portrait of the hippie mother in The Elementary Particles didn’t do justice to the self-involved character that emerged from her autobiography. During her book tour, she famously asked, “Who hasn’t called their son a sorry little prick?”...
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Bonus:

:)

♪♫ Spiritualized - I Think I'm In Love (Top Of The Pops, January 1998)

Bonus:

Soul On Fire & Sweet Talk & You Lie, You Cheat (Live on Jools 09.05.2008)

To the BBC and others: Twitter is not your competition

Santorum: Obama Has Put America On ‘The Path’ Of Executing Religious People By Decapitation

File Sharing in the Post MegaUpload Era

We are the media, and so are you

Mexican army finds 15 tons of pure methamphetamine

The Republican War on Contraception

Black Bloc

On Feb 6, America author and Occupy activist Chris Hedges wrote a piece for Truthdig.com titled “The Cancer in Occupy.” In it he criticized the violent actions of Black Bloc operatives within the movement, saying they are the greatest threat to the future of Occupy. The article has generated a heated debate online about non-violence, political strategy and protest in America, and has garnered a response by Anarchist thinker Dr. Zakk Flash.
Read both articles and weigh-in.
The Cancer in Occupy by Chris Hedges

The Black Bloc anarchists, who have been active on the streets in Oakland and other cities, are the cancer of the Occupy movement. The presence of Black Bloc anarchists—so named because they dress in black, obscure their faces, move as a unified mass, seek physical confrontations with police and destroy property—is a gift from heaven to the security and surveillance state. The Occupy encampments in various cities were shut down precisely because they were nonviolent. They were shut down because the state realized the potential of their broad appeal even to those within the systems of power. They were shut down because they articulated a truth about our economic and political system that cut across political and cultural lines. And they were shut down because they were places mothers and fathers with strollers felt safe

Hedging Our Bets on the Black Bloc by Dr. Zakk Flash

Chris Hedges has written some of the most insightful analysis of the U.S. war machine in recent years. His 2009 book “The Empire of Illusion” was an exploration of how exhibition has eclipsed truth and meaningful connection in American society. His acknowledgment of the ease in which one can buy into such spectacles is a small part of why it was so odd to read his article on Truthdig attacking both anarchists and black bloc tactics entitled “The Cancer in Occupy.”

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