View the full session at http://4ad.com/sessions/010
In September of this year, St Vincent took a giant leap forward with the release of third album, Strange Mercy. This time out Annie Clark was to combine her long-celebrated musical virtuosity with ambitious songwriting that ran a gamut of emotional cadences, all the while underpinned by a colourful sense of melody.
Recording these songs live for the first time, St Vincent has performed four tracks from Strange Mercy for the tenth visual installment in the 4AD Session series. Shot at Shangri-La Studios in the heart of the Brooklyn film and photography district in Greenpoint, the session was recorded with Annie's new band, Daniel Mintseris (keys), Toko Yasuda (moog) and Matthew Johnson (drums). Given St Vincent's transgression from the underground to the pop spotlight over the course of three studio albums, it's somewhat fitting that Shangri-La host the session having initially earned its name as a secret spot known only through word of mouth.
As with all of the sessions in the series, directors Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard filmed the four tracks with a clear artistic vision. In this instance, the inspiration came from an unlikely source -- the memory of seeing a 1968 Shirley Bassey performance of 'This is My Life' on Rai Uno for Italian TV. With that reference point in mind, Annie takes centre stage against the backdrop of a projected live-feed, resplendent in glamorous eye make-up and with her always-impressive guitar work brought clearly to the fore. More interestingly still, the classic showbusiness styling of the session is held in stark contrast to the affecting and darkly-tinged emotional undertones of 'Chloe In The Afternoon' and 'Surgeon', representing perfectly the themes that run throughout Strange Mercy.
Taking Strange Mercy on the road, St Vincent finishes her current US tour this month before embarking on a European tour in November, starting on the 10th at Queen Elizabeth Hall in London.

The End of the American Era

22 year old US soldier arrested in espionage probe

A soldier stationed in Alaska was arrested Friday on suspicion of espionage, according to an Army official.
Spc. William Colton Millay, a 22-year-old military policeman from Owensboro, Ky., was taken into custody at 6:30 a.m. Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson by special agents from Army Counterintelligence and Army Criminal Investigation Command.
The FBI and Army Counterintelligence are continuing to investigate Millay, assigned to the rear detachment of the 164th Military Police Company, 793rd Military Police Battalion, 2nd Engineer Brigade. The unit, known as the Arctic Enforcers, deployed to Afghanistan in the spring without Millay.
Millay is in the custody of the Alaska Department of Corrections, where he is listed as a federal inmate at the Anchorage Correctional Complex.
A U.S. Army Alaska spokesman said he could not elaborate on whether Millay has been charged, what charges he would face or whether he faces charges outside of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.
“Today’s arrest was the result of the close working relationship between the FBI and its military partners in Alaska,” Mary Frances Rook, special agent in charge of the FBI in Alaska, said Friday. “Through this ongoing partnership, we are better able to protect our nation.”
The arrest comes as the military continues to reap fallout from the WikiLeaks case, in which former intelligence analyst Pvt. Bradley Manning is accused of leaking hundreds of thousands of documents to the anti-secrecy website.
Those documents included Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, confidential State Department cables, and a classified military video of a 2007 Apache helicopter attack in Iraq that killed a Reuters news photographer and his driver.
Manning was transferred in April to a confinement facility at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., amid claims Manning was mistreated in the brig at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va. — charges the government denies.
Joe Gould @'MilitaryTimes'

My child, the murderer

Fresh German police-malware uncovered; everything the police said in defense to date revealed as lies

Anatomy of a digital pest

King of Kings

How does it end? The dictator dies, shrivelled and demented, in his bed; he flees the rebels in a private plane; he is caught hiding in a mountain outpost, a drainage pipe, a spider hole. He is tried. He is not tried. He is dragged, bloody and dazed, through the streets, then executed. The humbling comes in myriad forms, but what is revealed is always the same: the technologies of paranoia, the stories of slaughter and fear, the vaults, the national economies employed as personal property, the crazy pets, the prostitutes, the golden fixtures.

Instinctively, when dictators are toppled, we invade their castles and expose their vanities and luxuries—Imelda’s shoes, the Shah’s jewels. We loot and desecrate, in order to cut them finally, futilely, down to size. After the fall of Baghdad, I visited the gaudiest of Saddam’s palaces, examined his tasteless art, his Cuban cigars, his private lakes with their specially bred giant fish, his self-worshipping bronze effigies. I saw thirty years’ worth of bodies in secret graves, along with those of Iraqis bound and shot just hours before liberation. In Afghanistan, Mullah Omar, a despot of simpler tastes, left behind little but plastic flowers, a few Land Cruisers with CDs of Islamic music, and an unkempt garden where he had spent hours petting his favorite cow.

During the long uprising in Libya, I toured the wreckage of Muammar Qaddafi’s forty-two years in power. There were the usual trappings of solipsistic authority—the armaments and ornaments—but above all there was a void, a sense that his mania had left room in the country for nothing else. Qaddafi was not the worst of the modern world’s dictators; the smallness of Libya’s population did not provide him with an adequate human canvas to compete with Saddam or Stalin. But few were as vain and capricious, and in recent times only Fidel Castro—who spent almost half a century as Cuba’s Jefe Máximo—reigned longer.

When is the right time to leave? Nicolae Ceausescu didn’t realize he was hated until, one night in 1989, a crowd of his citizens suddenly began jeering him; four days later, he and his wife faced a firing squad. Qaddafi, likewise, waited until it was too late, continuing to posture and give orotund speeches long after his people had rejected him. In an interview in the first weeks of the revolt, he waved away the journalist Christiane Amanpour’s suggestion that he might be unpopular. She didn’t understand Libyans, he said: “All my people love me.”

For Qaddafi, the end came in stages: first, the uprisings in the east, the successive fights along the coastal road, the bombing by NATO, the sieges of Misurata and Zawiyah; then the fall of Tripoli and, finally, the bloody endgame in the Mediterranean city of Surt, his birthplace. In the days after the rebels took over Tripoli, this August, the city was a surreal and edgy place. The rebels dramatized their triumph by removing the visible symbols of Qaddafi’s power wherever they found them. They defiled the Brother Leader’s ubiquitous portraits and put up cartoons in which he was portrayed with the body of a rat. They replaced his green flags with the pre-Qaddafi green-red-and-black. They dragged out carpets bearing his image—a common sight in official buildings—to be stomped on in doorways or ruined by traffic. At one of the many Centers for the Study and Research of the Green Book, a large pyramid of green-and-white concrete, the glass door was shattered, the interior trashed. Inside, I found a dozen copies of the Green Book—the repository of Qaddafi’s eccentric ideas—floating in a fountain.

The rebels warily took the measure of the city, investigating sealed-off areas and hunting for hidden enemies. Some were looking for the bodies of fallen friends; some wanted to punish those they believed were responsible for war crimes. As their victory became more secure, ordinary citizens began to venture out and to explore the places from which Qaddafi had ruled over them for decades.

Still, an existential unease prevailed. It was impossible to imagine life without Qaddafi. On September 1, 1969, the day that he and a group of fellow junior Army officers seized power from the Libyan monarch, King Idris, Richard Nixon was seven months into his Presidency; the Woodstock festival had taken place two weeks earlier. In Africa, despite a decade of dramatic decolonization, ten countries languished under colonial or white-minority rule. Qaddafi was just twenty-seven, charismatic and undeniably handsome. Nothing hinted at the clownish, ranting figure of later years...

Continue reading

Jon Lee Anderson @'The New Yorker'

Palestine given UNESCO membership

The United Nations' top cultural body UNESCO has voted to grant full membership to the Palestinians.
The move could boost the chances of recognition for a Palestinian state at the wider UN and will give Palestinians the right to nominate ancient cultural sites for inclusion on the world heritage register.
But the vote in Paris has angered Israel and the United States and both countries consider the peace process is now more in danger than ever.
The motion, which specifically used the name 'Palestine', was passed by a substantial majority.
The vote was greeted with loud cheers of "Long Live Palestine", as nearly two thirds of UNESCO nations defied warnings from Israel and the US to vote in support of Palestinian membership.
Fourteen members voted against the bid - among them Australia, the US and Canada - and 107 voted in favour.
More than 40 countries abstained, including Britain and Japan.
The vote will give Palestinians the right to nominate archaeological sites for the World Heritage register - among them the Dead Sea, Bethlehem's Church of the Nativity, where Jesus was supposedly born, ancient biblical sites near Hebron and Jerusalem, the ancient sea port in Gaza, and archaeological sites near Jericho and Nablus.
"The full membership will open doors for us", said Palestinian tourism minister Khouloud Daibes.
"Especially to face the deliberate destruction of the cultural heritage by the occupation, and start to preserve the Palestinian sites which are eligible to be on the world heritage list."
Palestinian leaders, including spokesman Ghassan Khattib, are now hoping the UNESCO vote will boost the bid for full membership at the UN itself.
"I think the success of the Palestinians to achieve membership in the UNESCO is important in terms of the Palestinian attempts to get recognition of Palestine as a state," he said.
"It's part of the build up in the Palestinian efforts towards achieving international recognition."
But the US has vowed to veto the bid for full UN membership and has announced it will stop financial contributions to UNESCO.
"We were to have made a $US60 million payment to UNESCO in November and we will not be making that payment," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.
The US funding makes up 22 per cent of UNESCO's budget.
Israel's ambassador to UNESCO, Nimrod Barkan, says the UNESCO vote will severely damage the prospects of Middle East peace negotiations resuming.
"We regret that the organisation of science has opted to adopt a resolution which is a resolution of science fiction," he said.
"Unfortunately, there is no Palestinian state and therefore one should not have been admitted today."
@'ABC'