Monday 5 September 2011

On the Media: A grim reminder of Iraq tragedy from WikiLeaks

Wendy_Bacon Wendy Bacon

30 yr old ASIO files are public.That's great. But I'm not even allowed to know who spied on me 40 yrs ago. ASIO secrecy laws need reviewing

Full-Disclosure, Unredacted WikiLeaks, Security and The Guardian

Retired police official charged in Politkovskaya murder

Russia's Investigative Committee brought charges today against retired police Lt. Col. Dmitry Pavlyuchenkov in connection with the 2006 murder of renowned investigative reporter Anna Politkovskaya, and named convicted criminal Lom-Ali Gaitukayev as an organizer of the slaying.
"Russian investigators are at last making some progress in Anna Politkovskaya's murder inquiry," said CPJ Deputy Director Robert Mahoney. "They should now build on this and broaden their investigation and apprehend all those behind this murder, including the masterminds."
The Investigative Committee of the Russian Federation, the agency tasked with solving Politkovskaya's murder, said an unidentified person contracted with Gaitukayev in July 2006 to kill Politkovskaya. Gaitukayev, the committee said in a statement, formed a gang that included his nephews--brothers Rustam, Dzhabrail, and Ibragim Makhmudov--along with Pavlyuchenkov and Sergei Khadzhikurbanov, a former police officer with the Moscow Directorate for Combating Organized Crime.
The agency said that Pavlyuchenkov--then head of surveillance at Moscow's Main Internal Affairs Directorate--ordered his subordinates to follow the journalist to identify her schedule and commuting routes, and then shared the information with the other members of the gang. The colonel also passed the murder weapon from Gaitukayev to the suspected gunman, Rustam Makhmudov, the agency said. Russian authorities arrested Pavlyuchenkov on August 24.
Gaitukayev is currently serving a lengthy jail term on unrelated charges of attempted murder, according to the BBC Russian service. Rustam Makhmudov was arrested on May 31 and indicted in early June. Ibragim and Dzhabrail Makhmudov--previously arrested in connection to the Politkovskaya murder--were acquitted by a jury in February 2009. Khadzhikurbanov, who was acquitted along with the Makhmudov brothers, was arrested in April 2009 on unrelated extortion charges and is currently serving a jail term, local press reports said.
Although the Investigative Committee announced that the probe into the Politkovskaya murder was ongoing, it did not say whether investigators plan to bring charges against Gaitukayev.
Politkovskaya, a special correspondent for the Moscow-based triweekly Novaya Gazeta, was well known for her investigative reports on human rights abuses in Chechnya--stories that led to multiple threats on her life. In her seven years covering the second Chechen war, the journalist's reporting repeatedly drew the wrath of Russian authorities. She was threatened, jailed, forced into exile, and poisoned during her career, CPJ research shows. On October 7, 2006, a man in a baseball cap shot her dead in the elevator of her Moscow apartment house.
@'CPJ'

Экс-милиционера обвинили в убийстве Анны Политковской

How Tony Blair was taken into the Murdoch family fold

Tony Blair and Ruper Murdoch at an awards ceremony in 2008. Photograph: Mike Theiler/EPA
It was a relationship that began in political controversy but progressed to a secret family union: Tony Blair, it was revealed , is godfather to Rupert Murdoch's nine-year-old daughter, Grace, the second youngest of his six children.
In a culmination of 15 years of political intimacy, the former Labour prime minister was present at the star-studded baptism of the child on the banks of the Jordan, at the spot where Jesus is said to have undergone the same ceremony, according to an article in Vogue magazine.
With the Murdochs and their children dressed in white – and present at the invitation of Queen Rania of Jordan – the event was photographed in Hello! magazine, complete with an ethereal front cover image of a smiling Murdoch in an open-necked shirt.
But no mention was made of Blair's participation, which was revealed only in a rare interview by Murdoch's wife, Wendi Deng, in a forthcoming edition of Vogue.
Although she has traditionally kept a low profile, Deng's interview comes after she catapulted herself into the public spotlight by leaping from a chair to lash out at a foam-pie thrower who attempted to target Murdoch during his questioning before the Commons culture, media and sport committee in July.
In the Vogue article the former Labour leader, is described as "one of Murdoch's closest friends".
Murdoch's company, News Corporation, confirmed the longstanding link between the two men, although it is not known when Murdoch asked Blair to act as a godparent and how far this predated the actual baptism.
Grace was baptised a few weeks before Easter of 2010, and therefore shortly before the last general election.
When the Jordanian baptism was originally reported by Hello!, it noted that actors Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, both friends of the Murdochs, were godparents to Grace and her sister Chloe.
The involvement of Blair was admitted by Deng in the interview shortly before her husband flew to London to deal with the phone-hacking crisis in the wake of revelations that the News of the World had targeted the mobile phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler.
Deng, who said she was not sleeping because of the stress of dealing with the phone-hacking affair, added in the interview: "Of course, as Rupert's wife, I think it's unfair on him to be going through this. I worry about him being alone. He has no PR people advising him. He tells me not to come but I'm flying to London for the hearing. I want to be with him."
In July it was reported that Blair rang Gordon Brown to ask him to tell his friend and ally, the Labour MP Tom Watson, to lay off attacking News Corporation over the phone-hacking issue. Brown is thought to have refused the request, although neither Blair nor Brown has confirmed such a conversation took place.
A spokesman for Blair last night declined to comment on the godfather link.
Blair's wooing of Murdoch dates to 1995, when the leader of the opposition provoked a political row by accepting an invitation to address a News Corporation conference on Hayman Island, Australia, in July of that year. Labour under Neil Kinnock had previously been demonised in Murdoch's Sun, to the point where some believed the tabloid's opposition had cost the party the 1992 election.
When Blair opted to attend, he justified the decision to his spokesman, Alastair Campbell, that "not to go was to say carry on and do your worst, and we knew their worst was very bad indeed," according to his memoirs. "It seems obvious," he added in his book, A Journey. "The country's most powerful newspaper proprietor, whose publications have hitherto been rancorous in their opposition to the Labour party, invites us into the lion's den. You go, don't you?" Blair also noted that Paul Keating, then Australia PM, felt Murdoch was "a bastard, but one you could deal with".
The would-be PM's performance at the News Corp event was seen as a clear sign that Labour was becoming electable – and marked the beginning of a long, close friendship between the two men.
Labour benefited from the loyal support of Murdoch newspapers, with the Sun switching from Conservative to Labour in the run-up to the 1997 election, and the Times dropping the Conservatives in 1997 and endorsing Labour in 2001. Meanwhile, Labour placed few restrictions on the operation of either News Corp's newspapers or BSkyB, in which News Corp owned a 39.1% stake, during its time in office.
Support from the Murdoch titles intensified at the time of the Iraq war, and Murdoch and Blair were in close contact through Blair's premiership, speaking, for example, on the phone three times in the nine days before the Iraq war. Information released by No 10 under freedom of information rules also showed the pair spoke on the day the Hutton report into the death of Dr David Kelly was published.
By the end of his premiership, Blair wrote of Murdoch in his memoirs that he "came to have a grudging respect and even a liking for him". He added: "He was hard, no doubt. He was rightwing. I did not share or like his attitudes on Europe, social policy or on issues like gay rights, but there were two points of connection: he was an outsider and he had balls."
Dan Sabbagh @'The Guardian'

Looks like Cablegate2 has been out in the wild since 9 June 2010

(Click to enlarge)
See xyz-magnets.txt
HERE
And as you can see from the above the hidden file was being mentioned in chatter last December

WikiLeaks and disclosing classified information

Glenn Greenwald: The DOJ's escalating criminalization of speech

Europe’s Odd Anti-Piracy Stance: Send Money to the US!

Julian Assange won't be prosecuted in Australia

A Point of View: The revolution of capitalism

As a side-effect of the financial crisis, more and more people are starting to think Karl Marx was right. The great 19th Century German philosopher, economist and revolutionary believed that capitalism was radically unstable.
It had a built-in tendency to produce ever larger booms and busts, and over the longer term it was bound to destroy itself.
Marx welcomed capitalism's self-destruction. He was confident that a popular revolution would occur and bring a communist system into being that would be more productive and far more humane.
Marx was wrong about communism. Where he was prophetically right was in his grasp of the revolution of capitalism. It's not just capitalism's endemic instability that he understood, though in this regard he was far more perceptive than most economists in his day and ours.

Marx co-authored The Communist Manifesto with Friedrich Engels

More profoundly, Marx understood how capitalism destroys its own social base - the middle-class way of life. The Marxist terminology of bourgeois and proletarian has an archaic ring.
But when he argued that capitalism would plunge the middle classes into something like the precarious existence of the hard-pressed workers of his time, Marx anticipated a change in the way we live that we're only now struggling to cope with.
He viewed capitalism as the most revolutionary economic system in history, and there can be no doubt that it differs radically from those of previous times.
Hunter-gatherers persisted in their way of life for thousands of years, slave cultures for almost as long and feudal societies for many centuries. In contrast, capitalism transforms everything it touches.
It's not just brands that are constantly changing. Companies and industries are created and destroyed in an incessant stream of innovation, while human relationships are dissolved and reinvented in novel forms.
Capitalism has been described as a process of creative destruction, and no-one can deny that it has been prodigiously productive. Practically anyone who is alive in Britain today has a higher real income than they would have had if capitalism had never existed.
The trouble is that among the things that have been destroyed in the process is the way of life on which capitalism in the past depended...

Continue reading

John Gray @'BBC'

The Bats - Free All The Monsters

First single from The Bats new album 'Free All The Monsters' out in October on Flying Nun Records.

'Partisan Bickering' Is Not the Problem

This article by former GOP staffer Mike Lofgren has been going around lately, and if you haven’t read it yet, it’s worth reading no matter your political inclination. Not so much for any new insights but as a coherent “where things stand” piece. It’s long and covers a lot of ground, but here are two particularly important bits:

The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable “hard news” segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the “respectable” media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the “centrist cop-out.” “I joked long ago,” he says, “that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”

The problem with the debt ceiling debate was not one of “partisan bickering.” It was one of Republican obstructionism. Framing it as partisan bickering, which establishment media has a tendency to do, was negligent reporting. Every single issue ends up being described this way.

The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America’s plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction – and even less spending reduction! – than Obama’s offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society’s overclass.

This was also demonstrated by the party’s eagerness to engage in deficit spending when the spending was going to enrich defense contractors in the form of war spending during the Bush administration.
(As a side note, my hopes for a left/libertarian alliance were dashed again during the deficit ceiling debate, with libertarians typically siding with the GOP on the issue even though the Dems were only pushing to close tax loopholes. I should have expected that, because even when Republicans suggest that tax loops for the rich should be closed, the general response is usually “shut up commie.”)
My biggest point of disagreement with Lofgren is probably his take on the Democrats. I don’t think Democrats are merely spineless any more. They serve the same corporate donors that the GOP does. It’s not in their best interest to actually pass the measures they propose. You can see the same sort of behavior, occasionally, from the GOP – the bailout for example.
The bailout was and is unpopular among the conservative base, and with good reason. But except for a few token objections the GOP, for the most part, fell in line and bailed out their masters. The way the stimulus package worked out (mostly it was tax cuts) and the health care bill (Dems happily threw-out the public option without a fight) was not a fear of the GOP, it was loyalty to their donors. They made a show of trying to enact progressive legislation for their base, but their actions show who they really serve (I’ve made this case before). As Matt Taibbi wrote last month:

The Democrats aren’t failing to stand up to Republicans and failing to enact sensible reforms that benefit the middle class because they genuinely believe there’s political hay to be made moving to the right. They’re doing it because they do not represent any actual voters. I know I’ve said this before, but they are not a progressive political party, not even secretly, deep inside. They just play one on television. [...]
The Democrats, despite sitting in the White House, the most awesome repository of political power on the planet, didn’t fight at all. They made a show of a tussle for a good long time — as fixed fights go, you don’t see many that last into the 11th and 12th rounds, like this one did — but at the final hour, they let out a whimper and took a dive.
We probably need to start wondering why this keeps happening. Also, this: if the Democrats suck so bad at political combat, then how come they continue to be rewarded with such massive quantities of campaign contributions? When the final tally comes in for the 2012 presidential race, who among us wouldn’t bet that Barack Obama is going to beat his Republican opponent in the fundraising column very handily? At the very least, he won’t be out-funded, I can almost guarantee that.

That is what leads to so many of us on the left and dare I say the center feel powerless, and see the two parties as essentially being the same – not because of “partisan bickering.”
I should also note that I don’t think this is a “real” conspiracy. I very much doubt the Democrats are having meetings deciding to throw fights or even elections. I don’t think there are lobbyists calling up Obama telling him what to do. They don’t need to tell him, and congress doesn’t need to be told how to play the game.
Klint Finley @'Technoccult'

7 Must-Read Books on Music, Emotion & the Brain

Are Wikileaks and Anonymous Hackers All There Is Left We Can Rely on, with Trust in Business and Government at Rock Bottom?

Mount Kimbie - Live From Young Turks (SXSW)

New York Subway 1905

A Trip Photographed May 21, 1905, on the Interborough Subway, 14 St. to 42nd St., New York, N.Y. Transferred from 35mm print. Footage from this film is available for licensing from www.globalimageworks.com
Via

'Legal highs' prevalence makes ban policy 'ridiculous'

melissakchan Melissa Chan

Oh wait, another Tibetan monk... and another, named! Last night, read a Uighur woman's name, unredacted. Irresponsible. Inexcusable.

melissakchan Melissa Chan
Oh wait, here's the name of an LGBT activist in China who's been caught speaking with Americans.

melissakchan Melissa Chan
Oh god, just read name of Tibetan monk in China who spoke to US in Wikileaks cables. What will happen to him? #tibet

Sunday 4 September 2011

Beach Boys announce release details of lost album 'Smile'

The SMiLE Sessions Box Set (5CD+Double LP+Two 7” Singles; digital)
CD ONE
SMiLE
1. Our Prayer (1:06)
2. Gee (0:51)
3. Heroes And Villains (4:53)
4. Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock) (3:36)
5. I’m In Great Shape (0:29)
6. Barnyard (0:48)
7. My Only Sunshine (The Old Master Painter / You Are My Sunshine) (1:57)
8. Cabin Essence (3:32)
9. Wonderful (2:04)
10. Look (Song For Children) (2:31)
11. Child Is Father Of The Man (2:14)
12. Surf’s Up (4:12)
13. I Wanna Be Around / Workshop (1:23)
14. Vega-Tables (3:49)
15. Holidays (2:33)
16. Wind Chimes (3:06)
17. The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow) (2:35)
18. Love To Say Dada (2:32)
19. Good Vibrations (4:13)
Bonus Tracks
20. You’re Welcome (1:08)
21. Heroes And Villains (Stereo Mix) (4:53)
22. Heroes And Villains Sections (Stereo Mix) (7:16)
23. Vega-Tables Demo (1:46)
24. He Gives Speeches (1:14)
25. Smile Backing Vocals Montage (8:30)
26. Surf’s Up 1967 (Solo version) (4:09)
27. Psycodelic Sounds: Brian Falls Into A Piano (1:30)

CD TWO
SESSION HIGHLIGHTS
OUR PRAYER
1. Our Prayer "Dialog" (9/19/66) (3:01)
2. Our Prayer (10/4/66) (6:37)
HEROES AND VILLAINS
Heroes And Villains Session (10/20/66)
3. Heroes And Villains: Verse (Master Take) (0:57)
4. Heroes And Villains: Barnyard (Master Take) (1:12)
5. Heroes And Villains: I'm In Great Shape (10/27/66) (4:59)
6. Heroes And Villains: Intro (Early Version) circa 12/66 (0:35)
Heroes And Villains Session (1/3/67)
7. Heroes And Villains: Do A Lot (0:53)
8. Heroes And Villains: Bag Of Tricks (2:58)
9. Heroes And Villains: Mission Pak (0:55)
10. Heroes And Villains: Bridge To Indians (1:47)
11. Heroes And Villains: Part 1 Tag (1:19)
12. Heroes And Villains: Pickup To 3rd Verse (0:55)
Heroes And Villains Session (1/27/67)
13. Heroes And Villains: Children Were Raised (2:07)
14. Heroes And Villains: Part 2 (Cantina track) (1:21)
15. Heroes And Villains: Whistling Bridge (1:14)
16. Heroes And Villains: Cantina (1:36)
17. Heroes And Villains: All Day (2:19)
18. Heroes And Villains: Verse Edit Experiment (0:48)
Heroes And Villains Session (2/15/67)
19. Heroes And Villains: Prelude to Fade (3:43)
20. Heroes And Villains: Piano Theme (2:43)
Heroes And Villains Session (2/20/67)
21. Heroes And Villains: Part 2 (2:31)
22. Heroes And Villains: Part 2 (Gee) (Master Take) (2:36)
23. Heroes And Villains: Part 2 Revised (1:54)
24. Heroes And Villains: Part 2 Revised (Master Take) (0:48)
25. Heroes And Villains: Part 3 (Animals) (Master Take) (1:18)
26. Heroes And Villains: Part 4 (2:36)
27. Heroes And Villains: Part Two (Master Take) (2/27/67) (1:44)
28. Heroes And Villains: Fade (2/28/67) (6:35)
Heroes And Villains Session (3/1/67)
29. Heroes And Villains: Verse Remake (4:16)
30. Heroes And Villains: Organ Waltz / Intro (2:04)
Heroes And Villains Session (6/14/67)
31. Heroes And Villains: Chorus Vocals (0:48)
32. Heroes And Villains: Barbershop (1:50)
33. Heroes And Villains: Children Were Raised (Remake) (1:06)
34. Heroes And Villains: Children Were Raised (Master Take Overdubs Mix 1) (0:26)
35. Heroes And Villains: Children Were Raised (Master Take A Capella) (0:27)
Bonus Tracks
36. Heroes And Villains Piano Demo (incorporating “I’m In Great Shape” and “Barnyard”) Brian with Van Dyke Parks and “Humble Harve” Miller, KHJ Radio (11/4/66) (4:17)
37. Psycodelic Sounds: Brian Falls Into A Microphone (11/4/66) (1:10)
38. Psycodelic Sounds: Moaning Laughing (11/4/66) (1:09)

CD THREE
SESSION HIGHLIGHTS
DO YOU LIKE WORMS (ROLL PLYMOUTH ROCK)
Do You Like Worms Session (10/18/66)
1. Do You Like Worms: Part 1 (5:21)
2. Do You Like Worms: Part 2 (Bicycle Rider) (1:55)
3. Do You Like Worms: Part 3 (2:43)
4. Do You Like Worms: Part 4 (Bicycle Rider) (1:10)
5. Do You Like Worms: Bicycle Rider Overdubs (Heroes And Villains Part 2) (1/5/67) (0:22)
MY ONLY SUNSHINE
(THE OLD MASTER PAINTER / YOU ARE MY SUNSHINE)
6. My Only Sunshine: Parts 1 & 2 (11/14/66) (6:51)
7. My Only Sunshine: Part 2 (Master Take With Vocal Overdubs) (2/10/67) (0:45)
CABIN ESSENCE
Cabin Essence Session (10/3/66)
8. Cabin Essence: Verse (2:14)
9. Cabin Essence: Chorus (2:28)
10. Cabin Essence: Tag (2:31)
WONDERFUL
11. Wonderful (Version 1) (8/25/66) (2:59)
Wonderful (Version 2 “Rock With Me, Henry”) Session (1/9/67)
12. Wonderful (Version 2) (3:25)
13. Wonderful (Version 2 Tag) (2:54)
14. Wonderful (Version 3) (4/10/67?) (2:41)
LOOK (SONG FOR CHILDREN)
15. Look (8/12/66) (4:52)
CHILD IS FATHER OF THE MAN
16. Child Is Father Of The Man (Version 1) (10/7/66) (4:57)
17. Child Is Father Of The Man (Version 2) (10/11/66) (5:38)
SURF’S UP
18. Surf's Up: 1st Movement (11/4/66) (4:54)
19. Surf's Up: Talking Horns (11/7/66) (3:42)
20. Surf’s Up: Piano Demo (Master Take) (12/15/66) (3:52)
I WANNA BE AROUND / WORKSHOP (FRIDAY NIGHT)
21. I Wanna Be Around (11/29/66) (3:08)
VEGA-TABLES (VEGETABLES)
Vegetables Sessions (4/4/67 – 4/11/67)
22. Vegetables: Verse (Master Take Track) (4/4 – 4/11/67) (2:02)
23. Vegetables: Sleep A Lot (Chorus) (2:34)
24. Vegetables: Chorus 1 (Master Take) (1:05)
25. Vegetables: 2nd Chorus (Master Take Track And Backing Vocals) (1:03)
26. Vegetables: Insert (Part 4) (Master Take) (0:37)

CD FOUR
SESSION HIGHLIGHTS
VEGA-TABLES (VEGETABLES) (continued)
1. Vegetables: Fade (4/12/67) (5:25)
2. Vegetables: Ballad Insert (4/14/67) (1:03)
HOLIDAYS
3. Holidays (9/8/66) (7:32)
WIND CHIMES
4. Wind Chimes (Version 1) (8/3/66) (6:46)
Wind Chimes (Version 2) Session (10/5/66)
5. Wind Chimes (Version 2) (5:00)
6. Wind Chimes (Version 2 Tag) (2:51)
THE ELEMENTS: FIRE (MRS. O’LEARY’S COW)
7. The Elements (Fire) (11/28/66) (8:27)
LOVE TO SAY DADA / COOL, COOL WATER
Da Da Session (12/22/66)
8. Da Da (Taped Piano Strings) (1:00)
9. Da Da (Fender Rhodes) (1:21)
Love To Say Dada Sessions (5/16/67 - 5/18/67)
10. Love To Say Dada: Part 1 (5/16/67) (1:22)
11. Love To Say Dada: Part 2 (5/17/67) (1:57)
12. Love To Say Dada: Part 2 (Master Take) (5/17/67) (1:21)
13. Love To Say Dada: Part 2 (Second Day) (5/18/67) (2:00)
COOL, COOL WATER
14. Cool, Cool Water (Version 1) (6/7/67) (2:21)
15. Cool, Cool Water (Version 2) (10/26/67 & 10/29/67) (3:31)
SMILE ADDITIONAL SESSIONS
16. You're Welcome (12/15/66) (6:41)
17. You're With Me Tonight (6/6–6/7/67) (2:46)
18. Tune X (3/3/67–3/31/67) (2:18)
19. I Don't Know (1/12/67) (3:03)
20. Three Blind Mice (10/15/65) (2:11)
21. Teeter Totter Love (Jasper Dailey) (1/25/67 & 2/9/67) (1:49)
Bonus Tracks
22. Psycodelic Sounds - Underwater Chant (11/4/66) (1:45)
23. Hal Blaine Vega-Tables Promo Session (11/16/66) (1:28)
24. Heroes And Villains: Early Version Outtake Sections (1/67 – 2/67) (5:04)

CD FIVE
SESSION HIGHLIGHTS
GOOD VIBRATIONS SESSIONS
1. Good Vibrations: Gold Star 2/18/66 (The “Pet Sounds” Session) (7:27)
2. Good Vibrations: Gold Star 4/9/66 (6:57)
3. Good Vibrations: Western 5/4/66 (First Chorus) (2:24)
4. Good Vibrations: Western 5/4/66 (Second Chorus & Fade) (3:28)
5. Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 5/24/66 (Part 1) (1:20)
6. Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 5/24/66 (Parts 2 & 3) (1:45)
7. Good Vibrations: Sunset Sound 5/24/66 (Part 4) (0:47)
8. Good Vibrations: Western 5/27/66 (Part C) (3:32)
9. Good Vibrations: Western 5/27/66 (Chorus) (3:04)
10. Good Vibrations: Western 5/27/66 (Fade Sequence) (1:56)
11. Good Vibrations (Inspiration): Western 6/2/66 (Part 1) (2:44)
12. Good Vibrations (Inspiration): Western 6/2/66 (Part 3) (0:57)
13. Good Vibrations (Inspiration): Western 6/2/66 (Part 4) (0:49)
14. Good Vibrations: Western 6/16/66 (Part 1) (6:24)
15. Good Vibrations: Western 6/16/66 (Part 2 & Verse) (1:06)
16. Good Vibrations: Western 6/16/66 (Part 2 Continued) (5:55)
17. Good Vibrations: Western 6/18/66 (Part 1) (1:10)
18. Good Vibrations: Western 6/18/66 (Part 2) (5:03)
19. Good Vibrations (Persuasion): Western 9/1/66 (1:49)
20. Good Vibrations: Western 9/1/66 (New Bridge) (3:39)
21. Good Vibrations: Session Masters (6:13)
22. Good Vibrations: Single Version Stereo Track (3:49)
23. Good Good Good Vibrations (First Version With Overdubs) 3/66 (3:41)
24. Good Vibrations: Alternate Edit 8/24/66 (3:32)

VINYL
Double LP
Side One
Our Prayer
Gee
Heroes And Villains
Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)
I’m In Great Shape
Barnyard
My Only Sunshine (The Old Master Painter / You Are My Sunshine)
Cabin Essence
Side Two
Wonderful
Look (Song for Children)
Child Is Father Of The Man
Surf’s Up
Side Three
I Wanna Be Around / Workshop
Vega-Tables
Holidays
Wind Chimes
The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow)
Love To Say Dada
Good Vibrations
Side Four
You’re Welcome – Stereo Mix
Vega-Tables – Stereo Mix
Wind Chimes – Stereo Mix
Cabin Essence – Session Highlights and Stereo Backing Track
Surf’s Up – Session Excerpt and Stereo Mix

Two 7” singles
Heroes And Villains "Smile" single Vega-Tables single
A side: Heroes And Villains Part One A side: Vega-Tables
B side: Heroes And Villains Part Two B side: Surf's Up

The SMiLE Sessions (2LP vinyl)
Side One
1. Our Prayer
2. Gee
3. Heroes And Villains
4. Do You Like Worms (Roll Plymouth Rock)
5. I’m In Great Shape
6. Barnyard
7. My Only Sunshine (The Old Master Painter / You Are My Sunshine)
8. Cabin Essence
Side Two
1. Wonderful
2. Look (Song for Children)
3. Child Is Father Of The Man
4. Surf’s Up
Side Three
1. I Wanna Be Around / Workshop
2. Vega-Tables
3. Holidays
4. Wind Chimes
5. The Elements: Fire (Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow)
6. Love To Say Dada
7. Good Vibrations
Side Four
1. You’re Welcome – Stereo Mix
2. Vega-Tables – Stereo Mix
3. Wind Chimes – Stereo Mix
4. Cabin Essence – Session Highlights and Stereo Backing Track
5. Surf’s Up – Session Excerpt and Stereo Mix

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Cabin Essence

Wonderful

Holy shit!

BitTorrent Crushes iTunes in Apple Inspired Ads

Melinda Hughes - Proms Patois Patter

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injectingadvice Injecting Advice.com

Got the stats report for #OD11 apparently we reached 84,430 people and got 405,788 impressions. I'm proud of you all!

U.S. Appeals to Palestinians to Stall U.N. Vote on Statehood

Everything Louder Than Everything Else - Dynamic Range Mastering In 2011

In 2006 I wrote an article for Stylus Magazine about dynamic range compression, a technique applied to music in order to make it louder, and thus, the desperate hope goes, more noticable. It got a lot of attention; as well as being seemingly the first consumer-led piece about dynamic range compression (engineers and techies have been moaning about it for years) it was just about the most-read thing Stylus ever published (beyond end-of-year lists). Numerous musicians, producers, and record company people got in touch with me to say ‘thank you’ for writing it, at least one band was explicitly influenced by it when recording their next album, and Robert Christgau, self-ordained dean of American rock critics, chose to include it when compiling the 2007 Da Capo Best Music Writing anthology.
Five years on though, if I’m honest, I feel like that original article was far too long, repetitive, and rambling, and so I’ve decided to “remaster” it, as it were, trim it, shorten it, update it for 2011, and try and hammer the message home again. Dynamic range compression hasn’t gone away, and while there are plenty of records out there that still sound great, so much of the musical product we have foisted upon is so sonically subpar that people who express surprise at the continuing collapse of the record industry perpetually amaze me. So here goes.
Several months on from its release, and there are plenty of things I find unpleasant about Kanye West’s much lauded My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy: the overlong songs and overstuffed arrangements; Chris Rock’s not-offensive-enough-to-be-funny monologue about “re-upholstering” a woman’s sexual organs; the tedious, prog-like 4-minute vocoder “solo”. Not to mention Kanye’s perpetual, “Oh woe is me, I’m a poor rich man who does bad things” persona. But these all pale into insignificance next to the album’s most obnoxious feature: its horrific, distorted volume.
Because My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is loud. Really loud. If you open up an MP3 of one of its songs in an audio-editing program like Audacity, the waveform, a visual representation of the sound, looks like a brick. In fact, let me do it for you: this is 'Monster', the awesome, Nicki Minaj-starring peak of the album:

That blue space represents the sound you hear when you play the song – the vocals, beats, everything else; when it reaches the top and bottom of the grey bar it’s in that means it’s at maximum volume. The light grey space around the blue (you might have to squint; there’s not a lot of it to see) indicates points in the song where it’s not at maximum volume. As you can see, 'Monster' is at maximum volume for pretty much its entire length.
Once you’re at maximum volume, of course, there’s nowhere else for sound to go except “into the red”, which means distortion. With analogue distortion, this translates as a warm buzz that’s long been the sound of overdriven rock music. Digital distortion, unfortunately, is a very different sound; it’s usually described as “clipping” because the top of the waveform is literally flattened, as if someone had clipped the edges off with scissors.
What this brick-like waveform translates to when you actually play 'Monster' through a pair of speakers is a relentless assault where instruments and voices lack definition and start to blur together, where there’s no room for the music to breathe, no chance of a dramatic shift in volume as you surge into a chorus (remember The Pixies?), and where sound pushes into digital distortion when it tries to get any louder, because it simply has nowhere else to go.
Which may well have been Kanye’s intention, but when you consider that My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is well over an hour long, and maintains this loud, blurred approach for its entire length, it becomes difficult to listen to without your attention wandering. Possibly to the thought of where there might be some aspirin.
This extreme loudness isn’t at all uncommon; in fact it’s an epidemic, and has been for some time. Loudness is measured in decibels RMS; in 1987, Guns n’Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction was considered loud, and averaged -15dB RMS volume, meaning the average volume was 15 decibels below what’s referred to as “digital zero”, the absolute maximum loudness that can be achieved.
By 1994 the average loudness for a rock record was -12dB. Oasis’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory in 1995 hit an extraordinary -8dB, meaning it seems more than twice as loud as Appetite for Destruction if they’re played with the volume dial in the same position. The 1997 remaster of The Stooges’ Raw Power reaches an unbelievable -4dB (meaning the sound barely ever dips below “digital zero”, and therefore the threat of digital clipping and distortion), making it supposedly the loudest rock record ever...

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Nick Southall @'The Quietus'

Brain Gain

HA!

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Florida Shutting ‘Pill Mill’ Clinics

Pencil Sketches Look Like Photographic Relics

The Mind's Eye

David Hockney “draws” with images from nine cameras. Credit: David Hockney
One of your basic contentions, I say to the British artist David Hockney, is that there is always more to be seen, everywhere, all the time. "Yes," he replies emphatically. "There's a lot more to be seen." We are sitting in his spacious house in the quiet Yorkshire seaside town of Bridlington. In front of us is a novel medium, a fresh variety of moving image—a completely new way of looking at the world—that Hockney has been working on for the last couple of years.
We are watching 18 screens showing high-definition images captured by nine cameras. Each camera was set at a different angle, and many were set at different exposures. In some cases, the images were filmed a few seconds apart, so the viewer is looking, simultaneously, at two different points in time. The result is a moving collage, a sight that has never quite been seen before. But what the cameras are pointing at is so ordinary that most of us would drive past it with scarcely a glance.
At the moment, the 18 screens are showing a slow progression along a country road. We are looking at grasses, wildflowers, and plants at very close quarters and from slightly varying points of view. The nine screens on the right show, at a time delay, the images just seen on the left. The effect is a little like a medieval tapestry, or Jan van Eyck's 15th-century painting of Paradise, but also somehow new. "A lot of people who were standing in the middle of the Garden of Eden wouldn't know they were there," Hockney says.
The multiple moving images have some properties entirely different from those of a projected film. A single screen directs your attention; you look where the camera was pointed. With multiple screens, you choose where to look. And the closer you move to each high-definition image, the more you see.

"Norman said this was a 21st-century version of Dürer's [Large] Piece of Turf," Hockney says. By "Norman" he means Norman Rosenthal, the former exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy in London and one of the doyens of the international contemporary-art world. The comparison is an intriguing one. Albrecht Dürer's 1503 drawing (Das große Rasenstück in German) was a work of great originality.

Dürer used the media of the time—watercolor, pen, ink—to do something unprecedented: depict with great precision a little slice of wild, chaotic nature. He revealed what was always there but had never before been seen with such clarity. Hockney, in 2011, is doing the same job, using the tools of the moment: high-definition cameras and screens, computer software. Of course Hockney, too, is a painter—indeed, his grid of 18 flat screens, run by seven Mac Pro computers, looks much like one of his multipanel oil paintings. Except, of course, that every panel moves.
Hockney's technology assistant, Jonathan Wilkinson, explains how this 21st-century medium works. "We use nine Canon 5D Mark II cameras on a rig we've made, mounted on a vehicle—either on the boot or on the side. Those are connected to nine monitors. I set it up initially, taking instructions from David, to block it in. At that point we decide the focal length and exposure of each camera. There are motorized heads with which we can pan and tilt, once we've got going, while we're moving along. There's a remote system he can operate from the car."
Hockney compares that process to drawing. For him, drawing is not merely a matter of making lines with a tool; it's fundamentally about constructing a two-dimensional image of three-dimensional space. He argues that the same is true of putting photographic images together in a collage, and also of altering a single photograph. Hockney complains that today's media are full of badly drawn (that is, Photoshopped) photographs...

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Martin Gayford @'technology review'

4 Bombs Hovering Over Major Label Heads...

Systematically Biased Reporting

Although the spin is hard to detect for the average reader, New York Times reportage of Middle East affairs is perniciously biased. In their seminal book, Israel-Palestine on Record: How the New York Times Misreports Conflict in the Middle East, Princeton professor Richard Falk and media critic Howard Friel argue that “the Times regularly ignores or under-reports a multitude of critical legal issues pertaining to Israel’s policies, including Israel’s expropriation and settlement of Palestinian land, the two-tier system of laws based on national origin evocative of South Africa’s apartheid regime, the demolition of Palestinian homes, and use of deadly force against Palestinians.” In other words, what is not said by the New York Times may be even more important than what is said.
In June of 2010, a year and a half after the Israeli military launched what a United Nations investigation described as “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population,” the New York Times sent a photographer into Gaza to capture a slice of daily life. Ethan Bronner, the Times Jerusalem bureau chief, wrote the narrative for the photo essay entitled “Gaza, Through Fresh Eyes,” in which he gushes about “jazzy cellphone stores and pricey restaurants … endless beaches with children whooping it up … the staggering quality of the very ordinary.” Seemingly lifted from an apolitical travel magazine, Bronner’s article merely alludes to families who have been “traumatized,” and omits any mention of the UN allegations of recently committed Israeli war crimes and human rights violations. Other than an oblique reference to “destroyed buildings” and “rubble,” Bronner’s travelogue also elides the vast civilian infrastructure Israel destroyed during the onslaught, including chicken farms, a flour mill, a sewage treatment plant, a UN school, vast tracts of civilian housing, government buildings, a prison, police stations, TV stations, newspapers ... and between 600 and 700 factories, workshops and businesses. The impression left by Bronner? Gaza is an OK place; nothing remarkable to see there, least of all evidence of Israeli war crimes; move along, move along.
And yet, what is not disclosed is that Ethan Bronner is married to an Israeli citizen and has a son who is enlisted in the Israeli army. When news of these familial connections broke, Times public editor Clark Hoyt wrote an op-ed recommending that Bronner be reassigned to avoid any potential for bias. Executive editor Bill Keller refused, waiving the Times’s normally strict conflict of interest standards.
Times reporter Isabel Kershner is similarly compromised by elisions and distortions. When Kershner reported on Palestinian refugees in Syria who, in June 2011, nonviolently marched into the Golan Heights to protest, she failed to mention that the Golan Heights is Syrian territory illegally occupied by Israel. No government in the world recognizes the Golan Heights as legitimately part of the state of Israel. Kershner also omits the fact that the Palestinian refugees’ right of return to their homes is enshrined in UN resolutions and that Israel has consistently violated international law in preventing the refugees from returning to their homes. Let us also not forget that at this nonviolent protest the Israeli army killed 22 Palestinian and Syrian protesters. In addressing the apparently overwhelming violence against unarmed protesters, Kershner reports: “Israeli officials say they tried every nonlethal method of crowd control at their disposal” before they opened fire “at the feet of the protesters,” implying that the killings were unintentional, and unavoidable, and defied the laws of physics. Kershner quotes none of the protesters as to what they saw. If she had, she may have heard what activist and eyewitness Salman Fakhreddin told independent journalist Jillian Kestler-D’Amours: “Israel decided to kill people in order to frighten them because Israel is afraid of the delegitimization of the state of Israel and Israeli policy in the international community.” By now it may not be a surprise to learn that Kershner is an Israeli citizen who is married to an Israeli citizen and who spent “a couple decades in Israeli journalism and Jewish education” before joining the American paper in 2007.
In large part because of Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner’s ahistorical, context-free, reporting-in-a-vacuum, the New York Times is to blame for what Adbusters has previously called “the United States of Amnesia.” American citizens are left unaware of Israel’s current and historical violations of international law and are thus unable to question their government’s multibillion dollar military giveaways to Israel, a state that just happens to be these two reporters’ adopted home.
Matthew A. Taylor @'Adbusters'

Ry Cooder’s Elegant Indignation

I can’t write briefly about Ry Cooder, the virtuoso guitarist who has a new record, “Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down.” Admiration for his accomplishments, his singularity, and the longevity and diversity of his career intervene. For more than forty years, since Cooder released his first record, “Ry Cooder,” in 1970, he has been a musician other musicians have followed closely, and no popular musician has a broader or deeper catalog. He has played songs so simple that they are hardly songs, and songs so complex that they would tax, if not overwhelm, the capacities of most lauded guitarists. He had quit making rock ‘n’ roll records sixteen years before Rolling Stone, in 2003, named him the 8th greatest guitarist on their list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time (three of the seven ahead of him are dead guys). Even so, his influence has been felt more than his records have been heard, with perhaps one exception: the group of elderly Cuban musicians whom he assembled and recorded in 1997 and called the Buena Vista Social Club.

Cooder’s guitar playing is expressive, elegant, and rhythmically intricate. It frequently has a pressured attack that he has described as having the feel of “some kind of steam device gone out of control.” His sense of phrasing was partly imprinted in his childhood by a record of brass music made by a group of African-American men who found instruments in a field left by Civil War soldiers during a retreat, and played them according to their own inclinations. If you wonder what his sensibility sounds like when applied to rock ‘n’ roll—one version of it anyway—the most widely known example I can think of comes from the period when Cooder had been hired to augment the Rolling Stones during the recording of “Let It Bleed.” He was playing by himself in the studio, goofing around with some changes, when Mick Jagger danced over and said, How do you do that? You tune the E string down to D, place your fingers there, and pull them off quickly, that’s very good. Keith, perhaps you should see this. And before long, the Rolling Stones were collecting royalties for “Honky Tonk Women,” which sounds precisely like a Ry Cooder song and absolutely nothing like any other song ever produced by the Rolling Stones in more than forty years. According to Richards in his recent autobiography, Cooder showed him the open G tuning which became his mainstay and accounts for the full-bodied chordal declarations that characterize songs such as “Gimme Shelter,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Start Me Up,” and “Brown Sugar.” The most succinct way I can think of to describe the latticed style that Keith Richards says he has sought to achieve with Ron Wood is to say that for thirty-five years the Stones have been trying to do with four hands what Cooder can do with two...

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Alec Wilkinson @'The New Yorker'

Evgeny Morozov: Political Repression 2.0

Four Tet - FabricLive #59 Promo Mix

Four Tet's 30 minute promo mix of his FabricLive #59 'Love letter to London', out on Fabric Records September 19th 2011 (courtesy of Tailored Communication).
FabricLive #59 promo mix tracklist:
1. Four Tet - Locked
2. Floating Points - Untitled
3. Crazy Bald Heads - First Born
4. Sevi G - Beautiful Music (El-B remix)
5. Bad Bwoy Beats - Don't Go There
6. NnG - I Keep
7. Roger O'Donnell - The Truth in You (Four Tet remix)
8. Juk Juk - Winter Turn Spring
9. Michel Redolfi - Immersiens Partial
10. Daphni - Ye Ye