far more stylish

Cage / Ra

John Cage meets Sun Ra (1986) John Cage, voice. Sun Ra, synthesizer. side1-21:23 side2-22:19 I was unaware that such a meeting existed, it's like Plato meets Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Link courtesy of The John Cage Online Music Database

Living in 1901

Poster advertising one of the new mass-produced brands of bread. In her 1913 study of the south London poor, Round About a Pound a Week (the income of over a quarter of all families), Maud Pember Reeves wrote: Bread is their chief food. It is cheap; they like it; it comes into the house ready cooked; it is always at hand and needs no plate and spoon. Spread with a scraping of butter, jam or margarine, according to the length of purse of the mother, they never tire of it as long as they are in their ordinary state of health. It makes the sole article in the menu for two meals a day. Living in 1901...I think I'd rather have been a telephonist, then a soldier.

Well Put

"like the blair witch project if it was real and happening everywhere." http://www.livejournal.com/users/violalee/487600.html

John Kerry On Vietnam

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? I would like to say for the record, and for the men behind me who are also wearing the uniform and their medals, that my being here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry, but as one member of a group of one thousand, which in turn is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country. were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and present the same kind of testimony. I would like to talk about the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn?t realize it yet but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history?men who have returned with a sense of anger and of betrayal that no one so far has been able to grasp. We are angry because we feel we have been used in the worst fashion by the administration of this country. in 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said ?some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse,? and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country; because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dared to; because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam; because so many of these best have returned as quadriplegics and amputees?and they lie forgotten in veterans Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol?and we cannot consider our selves America?s best men when we are ashamed of and hated for what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia. in our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy. [...] http://nomayo.mu.nu/archives/New%20Soldier%20Inro.pdf Lets hope he still has this in his mind when he gets into office.

Note this

http://www.pixelperfectdigital.com/index.php

Stuff I trawled

"Each One Eat One" "i've learned more from searching through google than they could ever learn from watching me..."

Portrait of Brigadier General Archibald Campbell Douglass

"Portrait of Brigadier General Archibald Campbell Douglass" 1886 Oil on canvas, 63-3/4 x 35-3/4 inches

"Me and Rummy"

"Me and Rummy" c. 2004 Digital Photo, 480px X 360px

Partch rules

Much has been said about expressing one's own time. Nothing could be more futile or downright idiotic. The prime obligation of the artist is to transcend his age, therefor to show it in terms of the eternal mysteries." ...Harry Partch The instruments of time transcended, THE DIAMOND MARIMBA! THE CLOUD CHAMBER BOWLS! THE HARMONIC CANON II!

Its absolutely BRILLIANT

Pure brilliance: http://theforbidden-zone.com/media/tzone.shtml

The return of él!

The social anthropologist Leopoldo Concupisetti identified six essential characteristics of Englishness: snobbism, eccentricity, a love of amateurism, voluntary service, the gentlemanly code of sportsmanship and a kind of eternal boyishness. No better definition of the spirit of �l Records could be desired. Odd, then, that by and large Mike Alway's label was spurned by all but a few fanatical Japanese. Or maybe not so odd now that England is better defined by Loaded magazine than Concupisetti's charming formulae.

rising from the ashes of my ill-fated involvement with blanco y negro, el's first objective was to establish a highly individualistic reputation that would also charm potential backers into investing in our plan.

those startlingly different, deliberately obtuse first records still sound really exciting. and shp's anthemic "I, bloodbrother be" remarkably achieved "single of the week" in all four national british music papers. though even this outstanding record was ignored by a lethargic radio one to whom the single appeared both offensive and incomprehensible (a reaction that would come to be their pathetic stock response to any el record).

cherry red proved to be the only people with the courage and imagination to finance the label, though I remember taking care not to give too many of the more colourful aspects of our strategy away to their accounts department as we set out to make a mirage and an exercise in continuity that would stand or fall by virtue of its individuality. I was determined to make records that were spontaneous and imaginative with people of character and often regardless of their musical ability.

in direct contrast to the dreary mediocrity of the prevailing scene, the theme of el records would be escapism into a pop fantasy world which would always be optimism and sunshine. a world oblivious to sordid realities and pre-occupied with life's finer pursuits. so armed with a paintbrush, a map of southern spain, a bottle of chianti, a copy of "pandora & the flying dutchman" and luis bunuel's "my last breath", we set out to confuse, enchant and antagonise as many people as possible.

having been brought up on surrealist sixties fantasies like "the prisoner" "the singing ringing tree" and "the avengers", I thought, how splendid it would be to recreate this meeting of strangeness and dry humour in the context of a record label. a label that I like to imagine was being run by john steed and mrs peel (with the monkees and jackson pollock hovering somewhere in the background!) in an industry that had forgotten artistry and humour our maxim would be "replace money with imagination"

so teenybop idol of my acquaintance, simon turner became this peter pan type figure, the king of luxembourg, jessica griffin, an elegant lyricist who actually worked in the city of london, would be the would-be-goods (a kind of shangri las expelled from roedean) whilst bad dream fancy dress made a psychedelic racket that was akin to the shaggs meeting stanley kubrick over a hot madrass. entering into this spirit of play, one critic described as "pop that can spell it's name backwards".

we never feared or contemplated failure. though with every record we risked our security to progress-often adopting completely unconventional styles in complete defiance of the eighties - flirting with disaster as we tilted at windmills. [...]

http://www.cherryred.co.uk/el/elhistory.htm

And that ladies and gentlemen, is how it is DONE.

Why is this so creepy?

http://www.gtaforums.com/index.php?showtopic=144008&st=0

moons

Les us look at the word for moon in 25 languages: French: lune Spanish: luna Italian: luna Portugese: lua Rumanian: luna German: Mond Dutch: maan Swedish: mane Danish: mane Norwegian: mane Polish: ksiezyc Czech: mesic Serbo-Croatian: mesec Hungarian: hold Finnish: kuu Turkish: ay Indonesian: bulan Esperanto: luno Russian: luna Greek: fegari Arabic: qamar Hebrew: levannah Yiddish: levoneh Japanese: tsuki Swahili: mwezi

A double announcement; what does it mean?

Posted twice; teh announcement of the Hafler "do". Yes, "teh". What does this mean? That:

1. Mess will definately be there
2. They are not selling enough tickets
3. It will be priceless/unmissible/to die for
4. We should all meet up there for the do and the after party piss up
5. Mess made a messtake
6. Its a slow day for news
7. $your_reason_here

"Seven ways to slice a cause". Hmmmm sounds familiar!

Guidelines...in front of me.

When you quote from someone elses wwwriting, you should attribute it in one of three ways. You can blockquote it, enclose it in quotes, or make the quoted text italic. Or any mix of the three, depending on the context. You should always end the quoted text with an encapsulated elipsis, " [...] " followed by the URL, and more often than not, your own comment. The URL should either be explicitly written out or linked. If its a long URL, use some appropriate text , if its short, use the actual URL.

USA vs. USA vs. the World

CNN:Report: Abu Ghraib was 'Animal House' at night ABC News:Abu Ghraib Report Faults Top Officials The India Times:Abu Ghraib's teenage horror Now we say: Take a look at the chair Nick Berg sat in: ...it's Lyndie's throne: Again here the chair in Abu Ghraib I'm quite sorry to bring this macabre material up, being new here, I do know that there is great beauty in the world of man/woman that should instead be the focus, but I just thought that this information should be spread, read the reports and look at the chair! Who's is being fooled here?- the power of our world is in flux- shall we embrace the obvious?

The Great War

iRock in Iran

Queen album brings rock to Iran

Rock band Queen, fronted by gay icon Freddie Mercury, has become the first rock act to receive an official seal of approval in Iran.

Western music is strictly censored in the Islamic republic, where homosexuality is considered a crime.

But an album of Queen's greatest hits was released in Iran on Monday.

Mercury, who died in 1991, was proud of his Iranian ancestry, and illegal bootleg albums and singles made Queen one of the most popular bands in Iran.

Lyrics explained

The album contains hits such as Bohemian Rhapsody, The Miracle and I Want to Break Free, but reportedly omits a number of Queen's love songs.

The cassette, costing less than $1 (55 pence), comes complete with translated lyrics and an explanatory leaflet.

It tells Queen fans that Bohemian Rhapsody is about a young man who has accidentally killed someone and, like Faust, sold his soul to the devil.

On the night before his execution he calls God in Arabic, "Bismillah", and so regains his soul from Satan. [...]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/music/3593532.stm

Like I keep saying, you cant make stuff like this up!

Satie Cage Cage Satie

Cage's Place In the Reception of Satie A paper by Matthew Shlomowitz. It is possible that Vexations might never have been performed if it had not been for John Cage. For the reader unfamiliar with this piano piece by Erik Satie, Vexations, composed in 1893, is a "short" piano piece that is to be played 840 times in succession. A performance takes on average around 18 hours. Before Cage discovered the piece in 1949, few knew that it existed. This claim is easily supported: the first two biographies on Satie (by Templier,1932; Meyers, 1948) make no mention of it, not even in the "catalogue of works" of Meyers?s book. Soon after he discovered the score, Cage had it printed in Contrepoints. Furthermore, and of even more significance, in New York in 1963, Cage organized the work?s premier performance, seventy years after it was composed! (1) Vexations is now one of Satie?s most famous pieces. It has been performed many times all over the world; equally, a literature on it has developed. Testimony to this development, is that even the shortest articles about Satie in music dictionaries make mention of it [...] http://www.af.lu.se/~fogwall/article8.html