Thursday 19 November 2009
Three strikes and THEY are out!
Author and activist Cory Doctorow argues that the Internet is too central to our lives to be taken away for three accusations of copyright infringement. Along the way he proposes that turnabout is fair play, and thus Universal (for example) ought to have its access to the Net taken away if it issues three false accusations of infringement.
@'netzpolitik.org'
@'netzpolitik.org'
Obama on terror trials: KSM will die
Americans who are troubled by the decision to send alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York for trial will feel better about it when he’s put to death, President Barack Obama said Tuesday.
During a round of network television interviews conducted during Obama’s visit to China, the president was asked about those who find it offensive that Mohammed will receive all the rights normally accorded to U.S. citizens when they are charged with a crime.
“I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him,” Obama told NBC’s Chuck Todd.
When Todd asked Obama if he was interfering in the trial process by declaring that Mohammed will be executed, Obama, a former constitutional law professor, insisted that he wasn’t trying to dictate the result.
“What I said was, people will not be offended if that's the outcome. I'm not pre-judging, I'm not going to be in that courtroom, that's the job of prosecutors, the judge and the jury,” Obama said. “What I'm absolutely clear about is that I have complete confidence in the American people and our legal traditions and the prosecutors, the tough prosecutors from New York who specialize in terrorism.”
In another interview, Obama said he had not tried to tell Attorney General Eric Holder whether the case involving KSM and four other alleged 9/11 plotters should be heard in federal court or before a military tribunal.
“I said to the attorney general, make a decision based on the law,” the president told CNN’s Ed Henry. “We have set up now a military commission system that is greatly reformed and so we can try terrorists in the forum. But I also have great confidence in our Article 3 courts, the courts that have tried hundreds of terrorist suspects who are imprisoned right now in the United States.”
Obama also suggested that critics of the decision are unwisely building the alleged Al Qaeda operatives into larger-than-life figures who require the U.S. to abandon its usual legal processes.
“I think this notion that somehow we have to be fearful, that these terrorists are –possess some special powers that prevent us from presenting evidence against them, locking them up and, you know, exacting swift justice, I think that has been a fundamental mistake,” the president declared.
Coming soon...?
It's been quite some time since we've heard any news about the Neuromancer, but director Joseph Kahn is apparently still working on it. He tweeted about it over the weekend — and William Gibson tweeted back. Kahn wrote on his Twitter feed:
Epiphany. I finally figured out how to end the movie.
To which Gibson responded:
Scroll, or voiceover?
Kahn responded:
LOL. Freeze frame.
Wednesday 18 November 2009
Three early 7" from George Clinton's The Parliaments
Liberated from the now defunkt blog
'Found Sound'
(RIP)
'Found Sound'
(RIP)
Poor Willie c/w Party Boys(1958)
Lonely Island c/w (You Make Me Wanna) Cry(1959)
Heart Trouble c/w That Was My Girl(1965)
A small offering in return for my friend Yotte
X
X
X
X
X
X
Neuromancer... with Porn Star Sasha Grey as Molly
It's a play... no it's a reading... no it's... hard to tell. But on November 22, from noon to 6 pm, the New Museum in NYC is doing some sort of cool six hour Neuromancer thing that they describe thusly: "An ambitious new work by Brody Condon, Case is a contemporary adaptation of the classic cyberpunk novel Neuromancer by William Gibson. Combining Gibson’s 1980s dystopian techno-fetishism with early twentieth-century abstraction, faux 'virtual reality' scenes will unfold via moving Bauhaus-inspired sculptural props accompanied by the Gamelan ensemble Dharma Swara." Full post here
According to the io9 posting that first hipped me to the event: "Creator Brody Condon wrote to us, and said, 'The performance event... occurring at the new museum is a deadpan reading of Gibson's reading, not a theatre piece.'
The performance or reading or whatever it is also boasts Sasha Grey as Molly. Besides acting in various adult films, Grey crossed over to act in Steven Soderbergh's The Girlfriend Experience and she is part of the music group ATelicine.
@'h+'
Derrick May @ Paradiso 24-10-2009 Amsterdam
Boy, do I miss that place!
The best place for bands and the list that I saw between 1883 & 86 there would just make you jealous...so I won't!
The best place for bands and the list that I saw between 1883 & 86 there would just make you jealous...so I won't!
How Hitler and the Nazis tried to steal Christmas
Many of the changes made under Hitler, put in place to remove the influence of the Jewish-born baby Jesus, are still in use today, much to the alarm of modern Germans. The swastika-shaped baking trays and wrapping paper adorned with Nazi symbols have long gone, but traces of the Third Reich Christmas can still be found in the subtly rewritten lyrics of favourite carols.
The discoveries have been highlighted by a new exhibition at the National Socialism Documentation Centre in Cologne.
“I always thought that Unto Us a Time Has Come was a song about wandering through winter snow,” said Heidi Bertelson, 42, a lawyer who visited the exhibit told Times. “I didn’t realise that Christ had been excised.”
The Nazi version, which removed the religious references and replaced them with images of snowy fields, remains in some song books and is sung in many households.
The same goes for carols referring to Virgin Birth and lullabies that invoke the Baby Jesus.
The rewriting was supervised by the chief Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg and Heinrich Himmler led the way in de-Christing Christmas.
Their plan was to remove the emotional ties of the Church and merge Christmas into a Julfest, a celebration of winter and light which drew on pagan traditions.
“The most important celebration in the calendar did not match their racist credo so they had to push out the Christian elements,” said Judith Breuer, who helped her mother, Rita, pull together the exhibition.
Rita started trawling flea markets in the 1970s in search of her childhood Christmas and turned up boxes of Nazi-era Christmas decorations complete with swastikas and grenades.
“After the Nazis had gone you could still find textbooks on Christmas that use exactly the same phrasing,” she told The Times.
Tom Waits' Orphans Gets Expanded Vinyl Release With Bonus Tracks
when it first dropped, then you got yourself three CDs' worth of Tom Waits. That's a lot of Tom Waits! But if you decided to wait for the vinyl, then you've got an even more humongous Waits onslaught coming your way.
On December 8, Anti- will release Orphans as a limited vinyl set. You'll get all of the tracks contained on the CDs, plus six bonus tracks. That's 62 songs spread over seven LPs, all of which will be pressed on 180 gram vinyl. You'll probably want to limber up and do some stretches before you even attempt to lift this thing.
The bonus tracks include covers of Fats Waller's "Crazy 'Bout My Baby” and the Brecht/Weill song "Canon Song", as well as "Diamond in Your Mind", a track written by Waits and his wife Kathleen Brennan for Solomon Burke, and the originals "No One Can Forgive Me" and "Mathie Grove".
@'Pitchfork'
@'Pitchfork'
Free TC Electronic M30 Reverb
Free TC Electronic M30 ReverbThis really is an offer you can't refuse. Now you can have a great sounding and very easy to use TC Electronic reverb plug-in (VST and AU) for free! (value $79.) Read more about the M30 Reverb
Featuring a superb Hall algorithm, the M30 Reverb is perfectly suited to vocals but can also be used with a wide variety of instruments and audio material. It features a superb Hall algorithm which is fully editable and is a plug-in that you can use in all sorts of music production and on all types of instruments and vocals.
(Tip o'the hat to Mark S)
The knowledge: London's unlikely punk heart (podcast)
London Calling: The Guardian's Tim Jonze meets Don Letts, Jon Savage and Geoff Travis (Rough Trade) to talk about Notting Hill's punk heritage...
HERE
HERE
Mickey Hart: How can we record the cosmos?
Grateful Dead fans may remember the lyrics, "Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes." Mickey Hart, a drummer for the Dead, is still thinking about the cosmos, and he recently contacted Smithsonian Under Secretary Richard Kurin to arrange a discussion with distinguished astrophysicist Margaret Geller of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, science historian David DeVorkin and ethnomusicologist Atesh Sonneborn; I also participated. Our question: How might Hart perceive and record the "music" of the universe? Can lightwaves reaching Earth after traveling hundreds of millions of light-years speak to our creative, as well as our scientific, selves? Geller answered yes, and offered ideas for how Hart might translate what we observe into music. She suggested that a musician she knows—a person who also has superb computer skills—could help Hart convert strings of numbers representing star formation, gamma ray bursts, black hole binaries and other astrophysical phenomena into music. In an e-mail, Hart reacted to his Smithsonian visit: "Exciting....As Soupy Sales would say, 'My brains are falling out.'" Such intersections of science and the arts occur frequently at the Smithsonian. At a recent materials science workshop, Julian Raby, the director of our Freer and Sackler Galleries, described the ongoing collaborative research being conducted on ancient Chinese metalwork and ceramics by the Freer and Sackler with Chicago's Field Museum and China's Shaanxi Research Institute for Archaeology. And at the National Museum of Cambodia in Phnom Penh, Freer and Sackler conservators have created a lab to treat the museum's collection of bronzes; a U.S. exhibition of some of them is being planned. The Freer and Sackler Galleries have also partnered with our Museum Conservation Institute (MCI) to analyze the paint on sixth-century Buddhist sculptures. Currently Freer and Sackler staff are using radiography to study Japanese writing boxes. Used by aristocrats between 1392 and 1868, these intricately decorated lacquer boxes all stored calligraphy tools, but they vary in construction. Is it because of their function or their date? Radiography may help answer the question.
With the National Museum of Natural History, the Conservation Institute is also helping preserve, in their natural settings, Mongolia's deer stones—3,000-year-old plinths carved with elaborate flying "spirit deer." MCI specialists are also capturing pictorial information about these monuments with 3-D laser scanning. And Conservation Institute director Robert Koestler is helping investigate rapidly growing soil mold that threatens one of the world's great treasures—the Paleolithic cave at Lascaux, France, and its nearly 2,000 animal images painted 16,000 years ago. Science and the arts are unusual partners at most places, but not at the Smithsonian.
(Thanx BillT)
Animal Collective sample Grateful Dead on new single
Animal Collective have confirmed details of a new EP, 'Fall Be Kind' which will be released digitally on November 23.The five track EP will also be available on 12" vinyl and CD from December 14 and is the band's first new material since releasing the highly acclaimed
album 'Merriwether Post Pavilion' in January.
The track "What Would I Want? Sky" features a sample from The Grateful Dead's "Unbroken Chain" - it is the first time the 'Dead have officially licensed a sample to anothert artist.
The 'Fall Be Kind' track list is:
"Graze"
"What Would I Want? Sky"
"Bleed"
"On A Highway"
"I Think I Can"
Download new Carbon/Silicon album
Mick Jones has made the fourth album from Carbon/Silicon available as a free download via the band's website this week (November 14).The band, whom the former Clash man formed with Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Tony James are renowned for publishing their material online for free, and latest album 'The Carbon Bubble'
Download your copy of the album here:
CarbonSiliconInc.com
Tracklisting:
'Fresh Start'
'What's Up Doc?'
'Reach For The Sky'
'The Best Man'
'Unbeliebable Pain'
'Make It Alright'
'PartyWorld'
'Shadow'
'Don't Taser Me Bro!'
'That's As Good As It Gets'
'DisUnited Kingdom'
'Believe Or Leave'
Is there anyone out there with copies of the three previous albums "A.T.O.M", "Western Front" and "The Crackup Suite"? I did have them but cannot find them at present and they have been removed from the band's site. If you can help please get in contact. Thanx
Peter Schmidt: artwork for Eno's 'Before & After Science'
The four watercolours on this page were done by Peter Schmidt were originally printed as lithographs and included in the very first copies of Eno's LP "Before and After Science." Later, they were available for purchase through EG.
They're briefly described in an article in Melody Maker article from January of 1977:
This evening I visited Peter Schmidt (the painter who did the cover for Tiger Mountain and Evening Star, and with whom I published Oblique Strategies).He has just returned from a holiday in Madeira, and we look at the 12 watercolours he made there. The last three of the series are quite exceptionally beautiful - a tiny road winds down the side of an almost vertical mountain whose peak is lost in the clouds.
Peter describes his walk from the top of the mountain, and says it was frightening since there were man-sized rocks fallen on the road. We discuss the idea of fear as an aid to perception. I describe an experience I had in Scotland recently where I climbed a very steep hill at twilight - absentmindedly not paying much attention to where I was going - and came to a halt, breathless and exhausted, on a small plateau near the summit. For the first time I looked to see where I was.
The plateau was covered with dead ferns, which glowed a brilliant fiery orange in the dusk. I was tired enough not to try to reduce the experience to words and concepts, so I just stood open-mouthed for some minutes.
This was an instance of exhaustion as an aid to perception - presumably the conscious mind resigns this continual obsession with classification and the attendant reassurance at times like this, and so the quality of the experience is unfiltered.
Later in the evening we talk about the work of Die Brucke, the group of German painters active between 1905-25, who impressed us all so much in Berlin. I particularly liked Otto Mueller and Karl Schmidt-Rotluff.
Peter posed the question: "What could one do now that would have the sense of daring which those works had?" I reply that I think the answer must lie in doing things that are very quiet, which make no assault, and perhaps do not obviously trade in novelty. Like watercolours. At a time when drama is at a premium, reticence and delicacy communicate best.
Before I leave, we discuss the possibilities of marketing visual objects in the way that records are sold. We both agree that this would drastically alter the nature of contemporary painting, since it would once again put it in touch with demand on the level of a genuine response to the work itself, rather than to its "value" (be that financial or "cultural").
I walk from Peter's in Stockwell to Victoria station. It is a cold, exhilarating night. I am thinking about writing a song called "Man Making Measurements And Dancing." I can't sleep until 4.00 am because I have a flurry of ideas which won't wait their turn. It is most annoying.
See also Eno's appreciation of Peter Schmidt and more on 'Oblique Strategies' here.
Tuesday 17 November 2009
Drug clans take control in shanty town where Madrid's politicians fear to tread
Two men are asleep on a filthy mattress under the weak autumn sunshine. Another, in ragged clothes with his skin stained dark by the sun and dirt, lies motionless on the concrete strip surrounding the small church of Santo Domingo. In the dusty, rubbish-filled esplanade in front, dozens of addicts sit among the garbage, shooting up doses of heroin.On the outskirts of Spain's capital city, Madrid, one of Europe's biggest drug supermarkets thrives in a precarious settlement of some 30,000 people strung along an old cattle-herding path, the Cañada Real Galiana.
About 10,000 drug addicts come every day to this stretch of shambolic housing, where lawlessness has grown in a legal void that local politicians have failed to tackle.
Addicts stumble down the Cañada's wide main street, looking for their dose. Others, employed as look-outs and hustlers, call them in past the high metal gates of the compounds owned by the drug clans.
Thickset men sit out on fold-up picnic chairs, watching their business enter the compounds, which – in some cases – are dominated by huge houses built with money from heroin and crack cocaine. The odd police car drives past, but little disturbs the relentless business of buy and sell...
Get sick of saying it, but the answer is so obvious...you might want to listen to this!
Ketamine drug use 'harms memory'
Frequent use of ketamine - a drug which is popular with clubbers - is being linked with memory problems.The University College London team carried out a range of memory and psychological tests on 120 people.
They found frequent users performed poorly on skills such as recalling names, conversations and patterns.
Previous research has suggested the drug may cause kidney and bladder damage. Experts said users should be aware of the risks.
Ketamine - or Special K as it has been dubbed - acts as a stimulant and induces hallucinations.
It has been increasing in popularity, particularly as an alternative to ecstasy among clubbers, as the price has fallen over recent years...
The KSM Trial Will Be an Intelligence Bonanza for al Qaeda by John Yoo
'This is a prosecutorial decision as well as a national security decision," President Barack Obama said last week about the attorney general's announcement that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other al Qaeda operatives will be put on trial in New York City federal court.No, it is not. It is a presidential decision—one about the hard, ever-present trade-off between civil liberties and national security.
Trying KSM in civilian court will be an intelligence bonanza for al Qaeda and the hostile nations that will view the U.S. intelligence methods and sources that such a trial will reveal. The proceedings will tie up judges for years on issues best left to the president and Congress.
Whether a jury ultimately convicts KSM and his fellows, or sentences them to death, is beside the point. The treatment of the 9/11 attacks as a criminal matter rather than as an act of war will cripple American efforts to fight terrorism. It is in effect a declaration that this nation is no longer at war...
Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again
Ever since I started meeting jihadis, I have been struck by one thing – their Britishness. I am from the East End of London, and at some point in the past decade I became used to hearing a hoarse and angry whisper of jihadism on the streets where I live. Bearded young men stand outside the library calling for "The Rule of God" and "Death to Democracy".
In the mosques across the city, I hear a fringe of young men talk dreamily of flocking to Afghanistan to "resist". Yet this whisper never has an immigrant accent. It shares my pronunciations, my cultural references, and my national anthem. Beneath the beards and the burqas, there is an English voice.
The East End is a cramped grey maze of council estates, squashed between the glistening palaces of the City to one side and the glass towers of Docklands to the other. You can feel the financial elites staring across at each other, indifferent to this concrete lump of poverty dumped in-between by the forgotten tides of history. This place has always been the swirling first stop for immigrants to this country like my father – a place where new arrivals can huddle together as they adjust to the cold rain and lukewarm liberalism of Britain.
The Muslims who arrive here every day from Bangladesh, or India, or Somalia say they find the presence of British Islamists bizarre. They have come here to work and raise their children in stability and escape people like them. No: these Islamists are British-born. They make up 7 per cent of the British Muslim population, according to a Populous poll (with the other 93 percent of Muslims disagreeing). Ever since the 7/7 suicide bombings, carried out by young Englishmen against London, the British have been squinting at this minority of the minority and trying to figure out how we incubated a very English jihadism.
But every attempt I have made up to now to get into their heads – including talking to Islamists for weeks at their most notorious London hub, Finsbury Park mosque, immediately after 9/11 – left me feeling like a journalistic failure. These young men speak to outsiders in a dense and impenetrable code of Koranic quotes and surly jibes at both the foreign policy crimes of our Government and the freedom of women and gays. Any attempt to dig into their psychology – to ask honestly how this swirl of thoughts led them to believe suicide bombing their own city is right – is always met with a resistant sneer, and yet more opaque recitations from the Koran. Their message is simple: we don't do psychology or sociology. We do Allah, and Allah alone. Why do you have this particular reading of the Koran, when most Muslims don't? Because we are right, and they are infidel. Full stop. It was an investigatory dead end.
But then, a year ago, I began to hear about a fragile new movement that could just hold the answers we journalists have failed to find up to now. A wave of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad...
Johann Hari @'The Independent'
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