Tuesday 10 March 2009

We have a winner! Екатерина Булгакова

Twenty-six year-old Ekaterina Bulgakova (95-69-97) lives by one credo: "Movement -- that's the essence of life!"


She wins a weeklong holiday in the socialist paradise of Cuba.
My choice came third.

50 Years!

Monday 9 March 2009

The weekend New York came to Glasgow (1977)

Aaagh memories!
What a double bill and the Friday night had been The Ramones supported by Talking Heads at Strathclyde University!
Only The Ramones had played in the UK previously!
(I think I may have written about these gigs here before but what can I say...?
I actually met Allan Jones from the Melody Maker that weekend, a story that he revisited in his regular column 'Stop Me If You have Heard This Before' at the back of 'Uncut', a couple of years ago.
It was very strange to be confronted with my 17 year old self especially as I was reading it with two of my kids who are older now than I was then.
I remarked that I had hardly changed - which I thought was good!
They thought that was tragic!)

The Breakfast Song


This song aired on The Mornin' Show, a local program carried by NBC affiliate WTVA in Tupelo, Mississippi.

نصرت فتح على خاں


Live in London 1988.

Ali Bongo - RIP

Story from the 'BBC' here.

Sunday 8 March 2009

Yes We Can!

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - I Am Goodbye

Nadya Suleman gives birth (Video)



William S. Burroughs - Shotgun Painting (Film)


BURROUGHS:
There is no exact process. If you want to do shotgun art, you take a piece of plywood, put a can of spracy paint in front of it, and shoot it with a shotgun or high powered rifle. The paint's under high pressure so it explodes! Throws the can 300 feed. The paint sprays in exploding color across your surface. You can have as many colors as you want. Turn it around, do it sideways, and have one color coming in from this side and this side. Of course, they hit. Mix in all kinds of unpredictable patterns. This is related to Pollack's drip canvases, although this is a rather more basically random process, there's no possibility of predicting what patterns you're going to get.


I've had some I've worked over for months. Get the original after the explosions and work it over with brushes and spray paints and silhouettes until I'm satisfied. So, there isn't any set procedure. Sometimes you get it right there and you don't touch it. The most important thing in painting is to know when to stop, when everything is finished. Doesn't mean anything in writing.

'Shotgun Painting'
film via 'Ubuweb'

William Burrough's shopping lists for sale on ebay @ $485 (US)!!!

Offered here are three pages of grocery lists with most of the items being written by William S. Burroughs. Each page is approx. 6" x 9" and has writing on both sides. Some of the writing is in an unknown hand. These pages are guaranteed to be authentic and from William Burroughs' home in Kansas with most of the lists having been handwritten by Burroughs.

Page 1: Items written by Burroughs - 1. Cat Pans. 5. Limes & lemons. 6. Dry Cat Food. 7. Canned (sic) Cat Food - Mealtime, bits of beef - salmon dinner. There are 4 items written on the back and none are by Burroughs

Page 2: Items written by Burroughs - 1. Waffles (plain buttermilk). 2. Triscuits. 3. Cat Food Canned. 4. Vodka - last but not least 5. Marshmallow for toasting over stove (?) last word is a guess - hard to read. There are 4 items written on the back - Burroughs has written "Lysol."

Page 3: Items written by Burroughs - 1. Lemons and lime. 2. Milk. 3. Bottled water. 4. Honey (crossed out). 5. Lipton tea bags (the brisk tea). There are 4 items written on the back but none are written by Burroughs.

Each page has been folded down the center. There are some stains on two of the pages.

Satisfaction is Guaranteed! Please ask any questions you may have.

(!!!)
I have in my collection a signed Burroughs screenprint done for the Island International Bookstore in Amsterdam, circa 1983 or so (No. 16 of 23.) & a signed copy of 'Cities of the Red Night' (liberated from Zurich jail - don't ask!)
Offers over a million dollars to the usual address!


The Clash - Clash City Rockers

Public Image Ltd - Public Image

The Pop Group - She Is Beyond Good & Evil

'Anger Is Holy' - Mark Stewart*

“Let fury have the hour, anger can be power, do you know that you can use it?” - Joe Strummer
“Anger is an energy.” - John Lydon
From 'nuzz prowling wolf' here.
* Mark Stewart

Saturday 7 March 2009

Cooking with Alex

(Sorry! Couldn't resist it after my previous post!)
More Alex Trocchi here.

Next when I get to my books in storage I will bring you William S. Burrough's recipe for majoun.

Cooking with Brion

"This is the food of Paradise - of Baudelaire's Artificial Paradises: It might provide entertaining refreshment for a Ladies Bridge Club or a chapter meeting of the DAR (Daughters of the American Revolution). In Morocco it is thought to be good for warding off the common cold in damp winter weather and is, indeed, more effective if taken with large quantities of hot mint tea. Euphoria and brilliant storms of laughter; ecstatic reveries and extensions of one's personality on several simultaneous planes are to be complacently expected. Almost anything Saint Theresa did, you can do better if you can bear to be ravished by an 'un évanouissment reveillé'.
Take 1 teaspoon black peppercorns, 1 whole nutmeg, 4 average sticks of cinnamon, 1 teaspoon coriander. These should all be pulverized in a mortar. About a handful each of de-stoned dates, dried figs, shelled almonds and peanuts: chop these and mix them together. A bunch of cannabis sativa can be pulverized. This along with the spices should be dusted over the mixed fruit and nuts, kneaded together. About a cup of sugar dissolved in a big pat of butter. Rolled into a cake and cut into pieces or made into balls about the size of a walnut, it should be eaten with care. Two pieces are quite sufficient.
Obtaining the cannabis may present certain difficulties, but the variety known as cannabis sativa grows as a common weed, often unrecognized, everyone in Europe, Asia and parts of Africa; besides being cultivated as a crop for the manufacture of rope. In the Americas, while often discouraged, its cousin, called cannabis indica, has been observed even in city window boxes. It should be picked and dried as soon as it has gone to seed and while the plant is still green."

REPOST - Could've been written by me


In Search of the Dark Star

I'm a music collector, of sorts. Obsessive and arrogant. With pendantry bordering on unbearableness, some might say - and some do say. I collect the likes of Coil, Sun Ra, Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Nurse With Wound, Can. Erratic, esoteric, obscure. Lately I've been into Dark Star. Not the band or the record label, but the track by the Grateful Dead. Come to think of it, I've always liked the Dead. Especially their 1969 album Live/Dead which I bought in the mid 1970s. It's got Dark Star on it. A whole vinyl album side long. It was like nothing I'd heard before. It has these weird guitar lines going on for eternity, making worm holes in the brain. I couldn't match any of them on my acoustic guitar, although I had mastered the intro of Smoke on the Water by then. But Jerry Garcia wasn't in the same league as Ritchie Blackmore - Jerry wasn't even on the same planet, judging by his freeform experimenations on the seventy or so live versions of Dark Star that I've collected so far.
From 1968 till 1974 Dark Star was the ultimate Grateful Dead song, the centre piece of their legendary marathon concerts. Although originally recorded as a 3 minute single (with lyrics by Robert Hunter) Dark Star became the vehicle for improvisations that could take up 30 minutes or more and saw Garcia soaring and ascending to unknown regions. For Garcia as a solist Dark Star became what Chasin' the Trane was for John Coltrane, or Voodoo Child for Jimi Hendrix, and Starship for both Sun Ra and the MC5. Exploration of inner and outer space. Dark Star was prototypical of the early Grateful Dead. The track contained everything Jerry and the Dead stood for. Americana, psychedelic rock, free jazz. All in one long guitar solo aided by a fearless band - and inspired, I might add, by Owsley's finest.

'Dark star crashes/pouring its light into ashes', wrote Robert Hunter, the Grateful Dead's lyricist. Cosmic hippie stuff? You bet! But although the Dead was an unashamed hippie band the musical structure of the song itself was far removed from the typical West Coast sound. Sure, in concert Dark Star was an extended jam, but compared to the jams that their peers, like Jefferson Airplane or Quicksilver Messenger Service played on stage it must be noted that Dark Star was not derived from the traditional 12 bar blues format. Where guitarists like Jorma Kaukonen and John Cipollina based their improvisations mainly on blues licks, Jerry Garcia seemed to draw from an all together different source. A source rich with all kinds of American (folk) music but transfigured and expanded by the influence of LSD. Let us not forget that Garcia and the Dead were heavilly influenced by the time when they worked as the house band for the (in)famous Acid Tests conducted by Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters. Maybe more than other musicians of his day and age Jerry Garcia's views on music in general and guitar playing in particular were dramatically altered by the use of chemicals. The blues element in the Dead sound was personified by Ron 'Pigpen' McKernan (organ, harmonica, vocals) who usually kept a low profile whenever Dark Star was played. During the 80s, when Dark Star was very rarely to be found in a Dead set, keyboardist Brent Mydland used to ruin it for me with his pseudo-jazz noodling on what sometimes sounded like a plastic honky tonk piano. The best versions of Dark Star were performed in the early 70s, like for instance the magical and rather subtle Dark Star from 1971 in Columbus, Ohio (released on Dicks' Picks Volume 2) or the mesmerizing 37 minute version performed one year later in Philadelphia (Dick's Picks Volume 36). Of course, Jerry Garcia's cryptically fluent and warmly organic playing made Dark Star into the most celebrated Grateful Dead piece. But praise should also go to Phil Lesh, whose 'lead bass' never failed to mark new routes in space for Garcia to explore.

Great versions of Dark Star are easily to be found in the extensive discography of the band. Besides Live/Dead and the two Dick's Picks, I also recommend the version from the 4 CD set Steppin' Out With The Grateful Dead, Engeland '72. Those of us who can't get enough should check out www.archive.org where a few hundred (nearly 6,500 different recordings!) concerts by the Dead can be found. It's a real treasure trove for Dead Heads with downloadable gigs (mostly lofi-ish audience recordings) and streams (excellent soundboard recordings). A very special Dark Star that I've found on archive.org is from a Hollywood Paladium gig dated september 10th, 1972, where half way through Dark Star the band is joined by David Crosby on 12-string electric guitar.

Advanced Dark Star fans should try the double CD set Grayfolded by sample-artist John Oswald. Phil Lesh invited Oswald, who is wellknown and rather infamous in the music industry for his 'Plunderphonics', to have a go at the Dead catalogue. Oswald choose Dark Star for obvious reasons. He took some 50 versions recorded between 1968 and 1992 and transformed them by way of layering and 'folding' bits and pieces, speeding up and slowing down, and turning them inside out. The results, as released on Grayfolded, are impressive yet very beautiful - even for Dead-purists.


(Written by Q-Base @ Crummy-tapes.blogspot)
Defunkt!

Grateful Dead - 'Dark Star' Musichalle Hamburg 29th April 1972

The venue

Jerry Garcia.

Today's choice in the continuing (been a while, sorry) series of all the 'Dark Stars' played on the Grateful Dead's European tour of 1972, is from Hamburg and is significant for me as it was the very first 'Dark Star' that I ever heard, having picked up the bootleg below as a 14 year old in Glasgow.

Bonus:
'Matrix' (a combination of SBD & AUD scource) of 'Dark Star-Sugar Magnolia-Caution (Do Not Stop On Tracks)- Who Do You Love'

Other Europe 72 Dark Stars:
Wembley, London - 04/08/72 here.
Bickershaw Festival - 05/07/72 here.
Rotterdam - 05/11/72 here.
(Use the search button on right to find more non Europe 72 live 'Dark Stars'.)

DANGER

William Burroughs photographed by Brion Gysin in Paris, 1959.

Distraction

Image and video hosting by TinyPic
From 'Mogodonia' here.

How to Kill The Music Industry

During The Pirate Bay trial, the music industry placed the blame for the decline in their revenues squarely on the shoulders of file-sharers. Their logic is clearly flawed, but it could sway the verdict if no alternative explanation is presented. So, if piracy isn’t to blame, then what is “actually” killing the music industry? The Pirate Bay trial has ended. The verdict is due April 17. By Jens Roland, writing at TorrentFreak.
According to Per Sundin, CEO of Universal Music, the decline in music revenues in the past eight years can be fully attributed to (read: blamed on) illegal file sharing. If this were actually true, many of us might even respect his decision to go after pirates as fiercely as the music industry is doing right now. However, the past eight years have seen a lot more changes in the landscape of home entertainment than Per Sundin would like to admit, and some of those changes have had a massive impact on music profitability - much more so than any amount of piracy.

Let us refresh our memories and take a look at what actually happened during and just before the past eight years:

1. First, the explosive rise of computer and console gaming. This competitive ‘third element’ has appeared in the entertainment landscape, beaten both music and movies to the curb and taken a huge cut out of the music industry’s revenues. Consumers don’t have infinitely-deep pockets, and billions of ‘recreation dollars’ that used to go almost exclusively to music, are now going into gaming.

2. International trade agreements have allowed consumers to buy their music across borders, rather than accepting local prices on music based on the ‘relative wealth’ of nations, rather than the actual value of the product.

3. New forms of distributable media, most notably MP3s but also CDs, have become mainstream. These new media don’t degrade over time and rarely break at all, making music rebuys a thing of the past, and allowing the second-hand market for music to thrive and expand - both of which take a cut out of the music industry’s former revenues.

4. Radical technological innovation has taken place in the field of music creation, processing, mixing, and mastering. Recording hardware, CD burners, music software, and media encoders have evolved to the point where most artists can actually afford decent-quality equipment to do their own recording and producing. Furthermore, this has fostered literally thousands of smaller, specialized studios that are challenging the ‘Big 4′ with lower prices, better terms for artists, genre-specific expertise, etc.

Successful artists can now leave the big labels and start their own recording outfits on relatively modest budgets. Naturally, superstars like The Beatles or Frank Sinatra have always had this option, but the recent technological advances have lowered the bar drastically. This development is depriving the ‘Big 4′ of many of their former cash cows, who now use the major labels for their advertising and distribution infrastructure alone.

5. The World Wide Web has become an omnipresent force in the world, allowing cheap, end-to-end distribution of digital music, increasingly cutting out the corporate music distributors, who deal in trucks and CD covers, rather than bytes and bandwidth. With iTunes leading the way (very successfully ‘competing with free’, I might add), billions of songs are now purchased digitally rather than physically, no longer necessitating the big labels’ distribution networks.

6. The total number of radio stations, music television networks and other ’streaming’ sources of music have grown exponentially, giving music fans a huge selection of free (and legal) music options. Satellite radio, DAB, and internet radio broadcasts have made it trivial for consumers to simply tune into a channel broadcasting the exact sub-genre of music that they feel like listening to (they can even have a stream created for them dynamically, e.g. on Pandora), making the “purchase” of music entirely optional for the casual listener.

7. A massive selection of entertainment alternatives (home computing, console gaming, mobile devices, etc.) have appeared in the home, effectively marginalizing music as an activity. Fifteen to 20 years ago, youths would regularly visit each other just to listen to music together; today, that is virtually unthinkable without some form of activity involved, such as playing Guitar Hero or Rock Band, or dancing at a concert.

8. And finally, the music industry itself has embraced the opportunities of digital media, at last letting consumers buy “single” tracks at a time rather than forcing entire albums full of ‘fillers’ on them. Looking at the RIAA’s own sales figures for the past 10 years, there is a “direct” correlation between the break-off in album sales and the introduction and increase in single track digital sales.

Looking at the actual numbers, it is abundantly clear that the vast majority of consumers never wanted to buy full albums in the first place, but were merely forced to by the lack of affordable single-track media. Now that the digital revolution has arrived, countless millions of 16-track album sales are being turned into 1- or 2-track sales, “decimating” the former revenues on music. THIS is the real reason the music industry is hurting.

In other words: The “it’s common sense” argument that the music industry is peddling in their attempt to tie the declining revenues to piracy simply doesn’t hold. It is not as clear-cut as the industry believes; the true reason for the decline is something they are still unwilling to face, but will have to face sooner or later:

The fact is that the music industry’s revenues have been artificially inflated for decades because of limited consumer options. The last 15 years of innovation have lifted those limitations, effectively leaving the music industry with an obsolete, defective business model of monopolized production technology, forced album bundling, and almost nonexistent competition in the realm of home entertainment.

What is happening now - the decline of music profits and the piracy witch hunt by the music industry - is merely the panicked struggle of a dying business model, a complacent industry’s refusal to accept its diminishing role in a digital world. The pirates are not the reason, and the decline is the not the disease. It is the cure.

Note: Jens Roland is a computer scientist by training, but a technology forecaster by trade. He has worked at international think tanks as a consultant and researcher in emerging technologies and has written more than 300 articles and a book on the subject.

Rip, Rig & Panic - Go, Go,Go!

This just in from Exile's Swedish correspondent

A true story.
I know these people.
Four of them went to the same high school as me. The guy standing to the right - Tommy Hagman - was in my class. Extremly funny guy. Would propably have been expelled after the first year if he had not left to form this awful, awful band. Me and my friends were hunting imports of US records and thought Tommy was crazy and this music was the most uncool thing in the universe but he was working class, from a small paper mill town along the coast, as was most danceband musicians. The scene was strictly low brow and very gay without being openly gay and these people were making ridicuolous amounts of money. When the rest of us went to university they all had their private villas and drove mercedes. The most popular dancebands had their own private jets. So just think for a moment, that you were growing up in a small paper mill town in northern Sweden, on the same latitude as northern Alaska, and you discovered that you were not that good in icehockey and did not see drinking vodka as a career, this gave you an option to travel, have sex every night in a new town, play music and earn seven figures yearly. So they do not really care if we laugh at them.
Propably still not do.
And one more thing, if you think these clothes and these haircuts are BAD you should see some pics from their very unfortunate mid 80:s Flock-of-Seagulls-new-romantics period.

Erik the Swede

Tonix website here.
(Looks like the 80's photos have been purged!)

A bad Swedish dance band joke

"Hey honey, did you find a Swedish dance band for our anniversary party?"
"I got the Schytts!"
"So you didn't find a band then?"

Free Hossein Derakhshan

More information here.
حسين درخشان

Friday 6 March 2009

Shut up weirdo!

Attention NEW YORK!

Tackhead tickets at half price from goldstar.com!
$11 plus $3.50 service charge.
See here for all the gig details.
(I am so jealous!)

Swedish dance bands of the 70's





Be very afraid!
More. So much more here (including the band with the most unfortunate name; The Schytts.)
(Again my thanks to SirMick!)
UPDATE:
Hundreds more sartorially challenged Swedish dancebands here.

Bazooka Production No. 1 (Feb 1975)

Much more art from the very wonderful "Bazooka Graphique" crew here.

I am not sure when I first came across the Bazooka art collective, sadly not as well known outside France as they should be. They did some illustrations for the NME back in 1977 and were responsible alongside Barney Bubbles for the stunning cover for Elvis Costello's 'Armed Forces' album. I have to keep sending off to France for their books (a very expensive way of getting them by the time you pay postage!) I will have to start squirreling away my pennies as there is a new book due out in June.
There was a site 'Une Regarde Moderne' that commented on the news daily in art form and from what I can gather with my (very) limited French that there were problems with the manipulation of copyrighted photos.
Pranksters! They used to do supplements for the French paper 'Liberation' and after the artwork was approved they would change it just before printing!
And to those of you who think that it is just "painting over photographs" well - you haven't a fucking clue!

Kiki Picasso - Minh

Kiki et Loulou Picasso's blog 'Underground' can be found here.
Much more art here.

Thursday 5 March 2009

Loulou Picasso - ("( ' o ' )"){pOoL!!

Loulou et Kiki Picasso's blog 'Underground' can be found here.
Much more art here.

Nerdcats

More here.
(Thanx SirMick!)

Wilco & Feist collaborate

&

Leslie Feist joins Jeff Tweedy for a duet on the next Wilco album due in June.
Story at 'Pitchfork' here.

Haqq (Truth)

Calligraphy by Fahdi (Samir Malik)

Sufi تصوّف‎


'Sufi Dancer' by Marie Taylor.

Fidel Castro's blog

Reflections by Comrade Fidel here (published in 8 languages!)

"I will never enjoy a curry again!"

Woman bites off partner's tongue!
Story from the 'BBC' here.

The Closed Zone


New animation by Yoni Goodman (Waltz With Bashir).
www.closedzone.com
(Thanx to 'the hangover-helper' for bringing this to my attention.)

Wednesday 4 March 2009

The Holy Grail is mine!!!

Been searching for this (vinyl) for years.
I once saw the CD in a shop but didn't have a CD player at the time. However as it was withdrawn by the band themselves I learnt my lesson and started buying CD's before I had a player.
Hell as a kid I was buying records before I had a record player!
Anyway a copy of this just went on sale and I bought it (allegedly one of only 500 copies made)!

Feel as tho' I have just won a competition for the first time in my life!!!