Saturday 31 December 2011
Rory_Foster Rory Foster
1875: Joseph Bazalgette knighted for taking crap away from our homes. 2011: Peter Bazalgette knighted for delivering crap to our homes.
1875: Joseph Bazalgette knighted for taking crap away from our homes. 2011: Peter Bazalgette knighted for delivering crap to our homes.
New Year Honours for the great, the good – and the Tory donors
Exile's best of 2011
My top 3 albums of 2011...so fugn close but after much thought:
3/PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
2/Richmond Fontaine - The High Country
and
1/Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting
Song of the year:Atari Teenage Riot - Black Flags (feat. Boots Riley)
Best cover version of the year:
Gig of the year (local):Black Cab at Cherry
Gig of the year (international):
Free gig of the year:
'What did we just see?' moment at a live gig
Album track of the year:
12" of the year:Burial VS Massive Attack - Paradise Circus/Four Walls
The if I had the money I probably would have bought it artifact of the year goes to this.
Pygmy of the year? Well there could only be one winner...
3/PJ Harvey - Let England Shake
Wins the best production of the year too and the use of Niney The Observer's 'Blood & Fire' in 'Written On The Forehead' was simply genius...
2/Richmond Fontaine - The High Country
Willy Vlautin...read his books, hear his songs!
g and
1/Jamie Woon - Mirrorwriting
After first coming across this Burial remix of 'Wayfaring Stranger' I didn't think that Mr Woon would let me down. This album became the soundtrack to a lot of nocturnal rambles this past year...
Song of the year:
Best cover version of the year:
Gig of the year (local):
Combat Boots (live at Cherry)
Gig of the year (international):
Omar Souleyman at Nortcote Social Club
Free gig of the year:
Sun Ra Arkestra at Fed Square
'What did we just see?' moment at a live gig
Plan B performing 'Stay Too Long' at the Big Day Out
Our collective jaws dropped at the conclusion of their set that day...
Album track of the year:
David Lynch - Strange and Unproductive Thinking
12" of the year:
The if I had the money I probably would have bought it artifact of the year goes to this.
Biggest disappointment gig of the year goes to the Nick Drake tribute...gawd I was bored at this gig. So fugn polite. Am I the only person who doesn't get Robyn (I'm bonkers me I yam) Hitchcock? It was so nice to see Green Gartside on stage again tho for the first time since I caught the trio Scritti#1 (with Tom and Nial) numerous times back in the late 70's...
Biggest disappointment of the year also goes to the gigs that ill health stopped me from going to (Underground Resistance/HTRK and Black Cab at The Tote)
...and how on earth did I miss this band until this year?
Pygmy of the year? Well there could only be one winner...
This one's for you Spaceboy
XXX
Friday 30 December 2011
The Radio Luxembourg Story
A dip into the rich history of Radio Luxembourg. Often referred to, erroneously, as a pirate, 'Luxy' was thoroughly licensed from its start in the early 1930s. In the days when the BBC distanced itself from entertainment, Luxembourg rose to the challenge, beaming the UK with a first taste of commercial radio. Commercial it was too, in a 21st century brand integration way. The transmitters were seized during the War, and happy presenters were replaced by the tones of Lord Haw Haw, whose 'Germany Calling' call-sign can be impersonated by the generation which heard him, and which later saw him hanged for treason. The new Luxy flourished after the War. Having moved to its famous 208m position on the medium wave, it was embraced by a young Britain both before the 'pirate' era - and beyond, as a young UK 'independent local radio' pursued its early 'worthy' programme policy. Owing to the format gap, Luxy bounced through the seventies and only began to suffer real attrition as Radio One moved to FM; and commercial radio was freed for a more populist approach and the growing network seized Luxy revenue. The station eventually waved farewell to 208 in 1991 - and remained on satellite until its closure a year later. The station is remembered to this day for: 'the Ovaltineys' sponsored programmes; the presenters it spawned (Murray, Savile, Edmonds, Freeman); the poor reception ('the Luxembourg effect'); and for being listened to 'under the bedclothes' (unavoidable really, it only managed to occupy its frequencies in the nightime).
Via
John Cage playing amplified cacti and plant materials with a feather
John Cage performing on Nam June Paik's TV special called 'Good Morning Mr. Orwell' from 1984. In the beginning, we see that Cage is joined by Takehisa Kosugi and one other unidentified person. perhaps they were performing a composition or improvisation that they would have done during a Merce Cunningham dance. there is also a cut away to a Joseph Bueys piano performance art piece.
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(Thanx Michael!)
Linguagroover Richard Dixon
Kim Jong Un rounds off period of official mourning in North Korea and underlines change of direction with release of Morrissey covers album
HA!
Kim Jong Un rounds off period of official mourning in North Korea and underlines change of direction with release of Morrissey covers album
HA!
28c3: How governments have tried to block Tor
Download high quality version: http://bit.ly/v04Z25
Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4800.en.html
Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine: How governments have tried to block Tor
Iran blocked Tor handshakes using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in January 2011 and September 2011. Bluecoat tested out a Tor handshake filter in Syria in June 2011. China has been harvesting and blocking IP addresses for both public Tor relays and private Tor bridges for years.
Description: http://events.ccc.de/congress/2011/Fahrplan/events/4800.en.html
Jacob Appelbaum, Roger Dingledine: How governments have tried to block Tor
Iran blocked Tor handshakes using Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in January 2011 and September 2011. Bluecoat tested out a Tor handshake filter in Syria in June 2011. China has been harvesting and blocking IP addresses for both public Tor relays and private Tor bridges for years.
State of the arms race between repressive governments and anti - censorship/surveillance Tor technology (and why American companies are on the repressive governments' side)
ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
Congrats to the telecoms in having courts recognize the full-scale lawbreaking amnesty they bought from both parties http://t.co/lrp1JNs8
Congrats to the telecoms in having courts recognize the full-scale lawbreaking amnesty they bought from both parties http://t.co/lrp1JNs8
Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz
Late one June afternoon in 1903 a hush fell across an expectant audience in the Royal Institution's celebrated lecture theatre in London. Before the crowd, the physicist John Ambrose Fleming was adjusting arcane apparatus as he prepared to demonstrate an emerging technological wonder: a long-range wireless communication system developed by his boss, the Italian radio pioneer Guglielmo Marconi. The aim was to showcase publicly for the first time that Morse code messages could be sent wirelessly over long distances. Around 300 miles away, Marconi was preparing to send a signal to London from a clifftop station in Poldhu, Cornwall, UK.
Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?
It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903...
Continue reading
Paul Marks @'New Scientist'
Destroy
'...You know what anarchists have always believed.'
'Yes.'
'Tell me,' she said.
'The urge to destroy is a creative urge.'
'This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.'
- Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis (2003)
'Yes.'
'Tell me,' she said.
'The urge to destroy is a creative urge.'
'This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.'
- Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis (2003)
Is Don DeLillo really prescient?
Peace on Earth...
'I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.' - Gandhi
Occupy Facebook
“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook,” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson...
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They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson...
MORE
Thursday 29 December 2011
thiefotime Doug Weir
last night's Will Self point of view on the media landscape, well worth a listen, audio: http://t.co/Uh6u3FiV text: http://t.co/LJm41Hxs
last night's Will Self point of view on the media landscape, well worth a listen, audio: http://t.co/Uh6u3FiV text: http://t.co/LJm41Hxs
The Firm
Mickey at home with Maria and Chanelle. Photo credit: Jocelyn Bain Hogg, The Firm
UK photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg spent ten years documenting organized crime life, from the activity of British gangsters in South London to their exile in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With unprecedented access, these glaring images capture the storied villains at home, salacious private parties, unlicensed boxing matches, business talks ,and funerals of the “the old-school Godfathers of British crime” whose deaths would fracture and decentralize the social order within these underworld societies. The Firm was completed in 2001, re-visted in 2008, and is now on view at London’s Foto 8 Gallery through January 14.
“These are not the faces of criminals who hide behind the facade of respectability or the corruption of political influence. They are, in fact, the real thing, men who hold their head up when challenged, and who seek no false redemption in the face of public vilification...”
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UK photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg spent ten years documenting organized crime life, from the activity of British gangsters in South London to their exile in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With unprecedented access, these glaring images capture the storied villains at home, salacious private parties, unlicensed boxing matches, business talks ,and funerals of the “the old-school Godfathers of British crime” whose deaths would fracture and decentralize the social order within these underworld societies. The Firm was completed in 2001, re-visted in 2008, and is now on view at London’s Foto 8 Gallery through January 14.
“These are not the faces of criminals who hide behind the facade of respectability or the corruption of political influence. They are, in fact, the real thing, men who hold their head up when challenged, and who seek no false redemption in the face of public vilification...”
MORE
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