Tuesday 2 November 2010

Don't forget to keep yr eyes on...

RA 231 - Space Dimension Controller

 
The time-traveling producer brings out a funk-filled selection for the RA podcast.
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Space Dimension Controller was born sometime in the 24th century. Lucky for us, then, that he traveled back in time, crashed his Electropod and has been stuck here for just long enough to release some of the finest and funkiest electro-tinged records of 2010. (That, or he’s Jack Hamill, a young Belfast producer obsessed with hardware.) SDC’s sound may be retro-tinged, but it has excited everyone from Kyle Hall (who remixed SDC on Clone’s Royal Oak) to Josh Wink to the brains behind legendary techno label R&S.

More Israelis Die From Peanut Allergies Than Hamas Rockets

Monday 1 November 2010

The Mission is Terminated (again): Throbbing Gristle break up

This was posted at the Throbbing Gristle website. TG were always a volatile proposition, but this is still somewhat shocking, and terribly disappointing, news.
In the evening 27th October TG members and their associated managements
received two emails from Genesis P-Orridge stating he was no longer willing to perform in Throbbing Gristle and returned to his home in New York.
Cosey, Sleazy & Chris have concluded that once more, and for the time being, Throbbing Gristle has Ceased to Exist, at least as a live entity.
Therefore, and with deepest apologies, TG must cancel their scheduled performance at Archa Theatre, in Prague, Czech Republic on 30th October.
It being too short notice to offer an alternative set.
In order not to disappoint fans of the old quartet, Cosey, Peter & Chris have offered to perform live under the name X-TG at Arena Del Sole, Bologna, Italy
on 2nd November & at Casa Musica, Porto, Portugal on 5th November.
We hope fans will appreciate and enjoy this new project and the trio is looking forward to performing exciting new and radical electronic musics together.

(Thanx to Richard Metzger!)

Chris Carter chris_carter_ in departures for flight to Bologna... and X-TG first performance

Gens-Town (w/ thanx to Fred Giannelli)

♪♫ Dan Bull - WikiLeaks and the Need for Free Speech

Once upon a life: Athol Fugard

Athol Fugard doing a read-through of his play Master Harold in 1982. Photograph: Observer
It was on a winter's day in 1982 that I came to my senses and realised that I was an alcoholic. And that I was in serious trouble.
It started with breakfast at the hotel I preferred to stay at when I was in New York – the Royalton. They were good to me there, and the rooms were lovely and large. I ordered my usual breakfast: a poached egg with a double Jack Daniels, my bourbon of choice.
Whisky was my drink. If you're going to be serious about drinking – and I was a professional – you've got to go for whisky. I had acquired a taste for bourbon because it wasn't always possible to get single malts in the pubs I drank in. I was a solitary drinker, but I was very good company when I was drinking, like the millionaire in the Charlie Chaplin film City Lights. I didn't turn into a monster. I've no record at all of any violence, either by me or directed at me. And I had got to know New York City very well. I had favourite watering holes all over the city, seven or eight different bars that I knew, and where I was known; about half of them were part of a chain of Irish pubs called Blarney Stone, and they were my favourites.
The irony in all of this is that it came at a time when I was on Broadway with a big success – my latest play, Master Harold and the Boys – which was about to embark on a national tour. It still amazes me that my drinking hadn't, by this point, affected my work (Master Harold is, if I'm honest, a well-crafted play). I don't doubt that it would have eventually damaged my writing, and most probably that was just around the corner.
I know for an absolute certainty that I was on the point of losing the handful of people who were terribly important to me in my life: firstly my family – my wife Sheila and daughter Lisa – and then a few trusted friends who I was putting through hell in their concern for my future. There was no way I couldn't be aware of how profoundly unhappy it made them; how much it hurt them to see me in that condition.
I'm still surprised when I think about it now, ending up at night in the condition that I so many times did, almost out of control, that I was never mugged, or walked out into busy traffic to be hit by a bus. The previous weekend had been a disastrous trip to Chicago to audition actors. I knew that on my return I was going to have to fire the actor who currently held the part – a young man with powerful people behind him. I was having a bad time and ended up drinking very heavily, even for me.
That January morning I was eating with a friend, one of the designers working on Master Harold, someone I had known for years. As we sat together in the hotel's bar/restaurant, she suggested that it was time to take a very hard look at myself and what I was heading for, and asked me if I wanted to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I immediately backed off and said no – no-no-no, no, you just leave me alone. That was my first response, always, to anyone who wanted to help me – and still is. Eventually, she had to leave and with astonishing discretion left a little paper napkin, placed on the table next to my drink, on which she had written the telephone number of the local AA branch.
There they were, the serviette and the drink. I sat looking at those two, I can promise you, for quite a long time. Which one did I go for? I ate my poached egg. I left the Jack Daniels. And I knew, in my heart of hearts, that I was in big trouble.
Master Harold is about me as a little boy, and my father, who was an alcoholic. There's a thread running down the Fugard line of alcoholism. Thankfully I haven't passed it on to my child, a wonderful daughter who's stone-cold sober. But I had the tendency from my father, just as he had had it from his father.
There was no way of avoiding my father's drinking. He was a jazz musician with a band called the Orchestral Jazzonians in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. He had lost a leg in his childhood in an accident and was very often in hospital – it's what eventually killed him, when gangrene developed in the stump. I always had to smuggle in small bottles of brandy – that was his drink of choice – and sit at the bedside with these two little bottles in my side pockets while we waited for a moment when the eagle-eyed nurses weren't focused on us. Then I would slip them over and he would drink it under the sheets.
He was a great storyteller, and to reward me for the little favours I did for him he would re-tell potted versions of the wonderful adventure novels he had read as a boy, such as Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories or White Fang and Call of the Wild and The 39 Steps. I loved him. But it was a very conflicted love. Every boy needs a role model that he can be proud of and talk about to the other kids in the playground. But it was impossible for me, a little white boy on 1940s South Africa, to do that because he was a black man; he was a servant. That is what Master Harold is all about.
I took the napkin with me to the phone box at the back of the restaurant, called the number. Got a voice, who spoke simply: "How can we help?" I said: I think I'm in trouble with my drinking. The voice asked if I wanted to attend a meeting. I said yes. I was given the address of an episcopal church in Gramercy Park, whose monthly meeting was happening that very evening. I went along and sat quietly, at the back of the group, and I listened to people. One man came up and said: "Welcome – I see you're a stranger, a new face." I said yes. He said: "Do you want to talk about anything?" I said no.
I have survived a lot of things in the course of my 78 years, and I know I have an instinct for survival. When the meeting was over, that instinct took me back to my hotel room and not to my bar. I don't think I slept that night. I knew I had an even more painful job ahead of me the next morning. When I met my producer, before the meeting to fire the young actor, he noticed that my hand was shaking and asked why. I told him I was going to try and stop drinking. He said: "Listen, take my advice – don't stop drinking today."
But I didn't drink anything that day. I never went back to Gramercy Park – the truth is, I don't like groups too much. I'm a loner. So I white-knuckled it. I had all the horrors that go with withdrawal, but I just sweated it out by myself.
The bigger problem was that I believed that, in a certain way, alcohol was necessary for me as a writer. Not that I needed to be drunk, but I needed the stimulus and the imaginative freedom that it gave me. Night-time is when I brainstorm; last thing, when the family's asleep and I'm alone, I think about the next day's writing and plan a strategy for my assault on the blank page. And for that I needed whisky.
That was the terror I lived with – that I would not be able to write again. That little devil was on my shoulder all through the next few years. Every time I wrote something, it was whispering in my ear: "You should have a couple of drinks – it will make everything so much better." I don't know whether that's true or not, and it's too late to worry about that now. But the next play I wrote, Road to Mecca, has proved over time to be one of my most successful. Now a pot of herbal tea is just as good for me as the two double whiskies I used to have before going to bed.
It is almost 30 years since that breakfast. I don't quite know how I did it, because I'm not somebody with a lot of self-control or willpower, but I haven't had a drink since. I call it my tea-bag birthday: 18 January 1982. On that day, every year, I get a box of herbal teas from the friend who scribbled the address on that paper napkin in the bar. I've never really shared the date with anyone else. But my friend remembers, and by God so do I.

Ralph Bakshi's 'Heavy Traffic' (1973)


Download

Avoiding fatal heroin overdoses

Fatal heroin overdoses account for 300 deaths every year in Australia, but according to a visiting US addiction specialist many of these might be avoided.
Dr Sarz Maxwell advocates the wider public use of Naxolene Hydrochloride, better known as Narcan.
It is a pure opioid antagonist that reverses the effects of opiate overdose, such as heroin. Narcan is currently only administered by emergency personnel in Australia.
Dr Maxwell, the Medical Director of the Chicago Recovery Alliance, wants Australia to follow the US where injecting heroin users and their families have ready access to the treatment.
@'ABC'
Rule #1: Do NOT inject alone!!!

Flying Lotus


Israeli Police Shoot Arab Legislator in the Back - Protest Met With Rubber Bullets

Israeli police injured two Arab legislators yesterday in violent clashes provoked by Jewish rightwing extremists staging a march through the northern Arab town of Umm al-Fahm.
Haneen Zoubi, a parliament member who has become a national hate figure in Israel and received hundreds of death threats since her participation in an aid flotilla to Gaza in the summer, was among those hurt.
Ms Zoubi reported being hit in the back and neck by rubber bullets as she fled the area when police opened fire. In an interview, she said she believed she had been specifically targeted by police snipers after they identified her.
Police denied her claims, saying they had used only tear gas and stun grenades.
Some 1,500 police were reported to have faced off with hundreds of Arab and Jewish demonstrators in the town yesterday.
Shimon Koren, the northern police commander, admitted special paramilitary forces had been used against the Arab counter-demonstration, as well as an undercover unit more usually deployed at Palestinian protests in the West Bank.
An officer disguised as an Arab demonstrator, from the so-called “mistarvim unit”, was among the injured, apparently after police fired a stun grenade at him by mistake.
Ms Zoubi harshly criticised the police violence. “The police proved that they are a far more dangerous threat to me and other Arab citizens than the fascist group that came to Umm al-Fahm,” she said.
The march was organised by far-right settlers allied to Kach, a movement that demands the expulsion of Palestinians from both Israel and the occupied territories. The movement was formally outlawed in 1994, but has continued to flourish openly among some settler groups.
The organisers said they were demanding the banning of the Islamic Movement, which has its headquarters in Umm al-Fahm.
The Islamic Movement’s leader, Sheikh Raed Salah, has angered Israeli officials by heading a campaign in Jerusalem’s Old City to highlight what he says is an attempted Israeli takeover of the Haram al-Sharif compound that includes the al-Aqsa mosque.
He was also on the Mavi Marmara aid ship to Gaza in May, and claimed at the time that Israeli commandos had tried to assassinate him. Nine passengers were killed, some of them by close-range shots to their heads.
The sheikh is currently serving a three-month jail sentence over clashes with the Israeli security forces close to the al-Aqsa mosque.
Michael Ben Ari, a former Kach member and now an MP with the rightwing National Union party, who attended the march, said Israel must not be a “stupid democracy and let people who want to destroy us have a voice”.
Baruch Marzel, one of the march organisers, told Israel Radio: “If the Kach Party was outlawed, then the Islamic Movement deserves to be outlawed 1,000 times over.”
On hearing of Ms Zoubi’s injuries, he added: “It was worth going to Umm el-Fahm. She is our enemy.”
Afu Aghbaria, an Arab MP with the joint Jewish-Arab Communist party, was also hurt. He said he had been hit in the leg.
Arab leaders said the clash had been triggered by undercover police who began thowing stones from among the demonstrators -- a tactic that the unit has been caught on film using at protests in the West Bank.
Mohammed Zeidan, head of the Higher Follow-Up Committee, the main political body for Israel’s Arab citizens, who comprise a fifth of the total population, condemned the police actions.
“Racism is no longer found only in documents or on the margins, like with Marzel, but has become a phenomenon among decision-makers and carried out on the ground. What happened today in Umm al-Fahm is a menacing escalation.”
The committee demanded a state investigation into what it called “exaggerated violence” by the police.
Police said nine Arab demonstrators had been arrested for stone-throwing.
Four police officers were reported to be lightly injured. The far-right marchers were escorted away by police, unharmed.
Ms Zoubi, a first-term MP, shot to notoriety this summer after she was among the first passengers to be released following Israel’s violent takeover of the Mavi Marmara.
Ms Zoubi contradicted the Israeli account that the nine passengers had been killed by commandos defending themselves, accusing the navy of opening fire on the ship before any commandos had boarded. She also claimed several passengers had been allowed to bleed to death.
She was provided with a body guard for several weeks after receiving a spate of deaths threats and general villification in the parliament.
The Israeli police have been criticised in the past for lying about the strong-arm methods used to quell protests by the country’s Arab citizens.
A state commission of inquiry found in 2003 that the police had used live ammunition and rubber bullets, in violation of its own regulations, to suppress solidarity demonstrations inside Israel at the start of the second intifada.
Thirteen Arab citizens were killed and hundreds injured in a few days of clashes in 2000. Police had falsely claimed that the deaths had been caused by “friendly fire” from among the demonstrators.
A recently parliamentary report revealed that there were only 382 Muslims in Israel’s 21,000-strong national police force – or less than 2 per cent.
The establishment of the undercover “mistarvim” unit against the country’s Arab population caused outrage among civil rights groups when it was first revealed last year.
The far-right march in Umm al-Fahm was timed to coincide with the twentieth anniversary this week of the assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane, who founded Kach. At a commemoration service in Jerusalem on Tuesday, Rabbi Yisrael Ariel told hundreds who attended that the government was allowing the Palestinians to “establish an Ishmael state in Israel”.
Jonathon Cook @'Counterpunch'
Jay Rosen jayrosen_nyu Quoting @GregMitch: "Experts hired by CBS who said 87,000 at Beck rally find 215,000 for Jon." http://bit.ly/deS5MX Liberal bias worth 128K.