Sunday 16 November 2008

Vale James Crumley


Only just discovered that James Crumley died back in September.
Obituary from 'The Guardian' here.

Shepard Fairey's 'STOP THE H8!' Poster for LA Rally

Spiritualized - Life Is A Problem!


As we count down the days to Spiritualized being back in Australia, here is a new song of theirs.
Possibly entitled 'Life Is A Problem'.
This version was recorded in Malmo, Sweden on the 4th of November 2008.

Saturday 15 November 2008

Neil Young on how to save a major automobile company

Story from 'The Huffington Post' here.

Friday 14 November 2008

What if the Matrix was run on Windows

Bill Ayers calls Obama a 'family - friend' in updated book

Story from 'The Huffington Post' here.

"You don't need a Weatherman to tell you which way the wind blows."
- Bob Dylan

And Sarah Palin's favourite number is..?..?..12


Author Lionel Shriver on Sarah Palin.
From 'The Daily Telegraph' here.

Triple M's The Spoonman on Clean Feed

Last night Triple M in Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane broadcast a show looking at the Govenment's plans for filtering content on the internet.
You can listen to it here.

'UNIDAD' by Rafael Lopez

Mike Hart

Patrick Michael Hart, best known as Mike Hart, was one of London's most popular and experienced booksellers and will be fondly remembered by not just many customers, but also a score of authors, publishers and sales reps. Born in Glasgow in 1948, the son of a general practitioner he attended Glasgow School of Art locally, and later moved down to London where he studied at North London Polytechnic. A great enthusiast of all forms of modern literature and music, he was also a keen book collector who inevitably found his way into second-hand dealing in North London, and championed poetry, beat literature, small presses and crime fiction.

He joined the staff of Camden Town's now legendary independent Compendium Bookshop in the early 1980's and remained there until it's sad closure almost twenty years later. A familiar, avuncular and friendly presence usually at the front of the shop saw him for years provide advice, friendship and much-needed support for Scottish literature, independent publishers and alternative presses, and he ran the poetry, music and literature sections of Compendium with a relaxed attitude to commerce but an acute appreciation of the timelessness of good writing. Here, he established lasting friendships with many writers from the onset of their careers, organising readings and events and was himself a regular presence at book events throughout London and not just at Compendium.

When Compendium closed, I was pleased to be able to offer him a position at Murder One, where many of his previous customers gladly followed him and he made a new set of friends amongst the crime and mystery community and colleagues. He was here two years until generalised cancer was detected in the summer of 2002 and he returned to his native Glasgow where the end came mercifully quickly and he died in his sleep on 15th November with his son, brothers and sisters present.

Mike Hart was a bookseller of the old school who treasured human contact and handselling and communicated the joy of books (and his other great love, blues music) like no other. He will be sorely missed.

Maxim Jakubowski - Murder One

Mike Hart

Bohemian bookseller and champion of new fiction

Mike Hart, who has died of cancer aged 54, was a man who worked in a bookshop. He was also among the greatest influences on a generation of new British writers, more so perhaps than any literary critic or editor.

For 20 years, Mike, a stocky Glaswegian, presided over the fiction and poetry department of Compendium bookshop in Camden Town, north London, which from its opening in 1968 until its closure in 2001 was Britain's pre-eminent radical bookstore. Whether you wanted books on anarchism, drugs, poststructuralism, feminism or Buddhism, Compendium was the place to go. Under Mike's supervision, its modern fiction department was its greatest strength, and the tradition of bohemian bookselling was carried forward into the 1980s and 1990s.

When Mike took over the department in the early 1980s, British fiction was in a dismal, class-bound rut. Mike helped to change all that. His enthusiasms included then unheralded American thriller writers such as Elmore Leonard and George V Higgins; London writers from the forgotten Patrick Hamilton to the unknown Iain Sinclair. A new Scottish writer called James Kelman was also a favourite, as was the great African-American writer Chester Himes. If these writers have emerged from the margins to become major players in the literary landscape it is in no small part due to Mike's efforts.

To walk into Compendium, survey the novels on display and ask Mike's advice was to enter a new world of fiction. The shop became the haunt of an unlikely mixture of more or less literary luminaries, from Nick Cave to Ben Okri, Ivor Cutler to Kathy Acker.

Thanks to Mike, and others, Camden Town in the 1980s became a kind of counter-cultural nexus: a place where you could drift from record shop to caff to Compendium and thence to the pub. There you would find Mike at the heart of a group of autodidacts, musicians, writers, lowlifes and drunks whose house band was the Pogues and whose cultural heroes were Jim Thompson, Hank Williams, Tom Raworth and Little Willie John.

A GP's son, born in Clydebank, Glasgow, Mike was the eldest of four children. After local schools he went on to Glasgow Art School, before moving to London in the early 1970s. He did odd jobs and then took a history degree at North London Polytechnic, where he met his wife Angela. They split up in the late 1970s, but he maintained a close relationship with his son. He combined working on building sites with running a Camden Market stall, before Compendium in 1982.

As the 1980s moved into the 1990s, Camden became a magnet for the world's teenagers and Compendium underwent a facelift. Mike formalised its literary scene by initiating regular readings in the bookshop, something of an innovation at the time. Visiting Americans, from old beat heroes like Lawrence Ferlinghetti to new literary lions like Walter Mosley, read there; so too did the London writers Iain Sinclair, Martin Millar and Derek Raymond.

By the end of the 1990s, Camden Town was thoroughly commercialised, its last remaining outposts of bohemianism swamped by endless leather jacket stores, and it was with a sense of bowing to the inevitable that Compendium closed its doors.

Mike moved to the independent crime specialists Murder One. With his death, the literary world lost a sweet and genuinely unselfish man who freely gave of his vast knowledge and delighted in the achievements of those he influenced so profoundly.

He is survived by his son Stephen.

· Patrick Michael Hart, bookseller, born May 20 1948; died November 15 2002


Thursday 13 November 2008

Still as relevant now

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace

by John Perry Barlow

Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather.

We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.

Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.

You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.

You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don't exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract . This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.

Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.

We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.

We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.

Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.

Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge . Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.

In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.

You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits. We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.

In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.

Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.

These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.

We will create a civilization of the Mind in Cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

Davos, Switzerland

February 8, 1996

John Perry Barlow looks at the manifesto again in 2006 here.

'Obama Is Money' by Julian Norman

Spoof 'NY Times' announces end of war in Iraq

Story and video from ABC here.
Website here.

John 'Mitch' Mitchell July 9 1947 - November 12 2008

Details here.

Palin Offers To Help Obama (!)



"BLITZER: Because, you know, during a campaign, every presidential campaign, things are said, it's tough, as you well know, it gets sometimes pretty fierce out there. And during the campaign, you said this, you said: "This is not a man who sees America as you see it and how I see America."

And then you went on to say: "Someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

PALIN: Well, I still am concerned about that association with Bill Ayers. And if anybody still wants to talk about it, I will, because this is an unrepentant domestic terrorist who had campaigned to blow up, to destroy our Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol. That's an association that still bothers me.

And I think it's still fair to talk about it. However the campaign is over. That chapter is closed. Now is the time to move on and to, again, make sure that all of us are doing all that we can to progress this nation.

Keep us secure, get the economy back on the right track, and many of us do have some ideas on how to do that and hopefully we'll be able to put all of that wisdom and experience to good use together.

BLITZER: So looking back, you don't regret that tough language during the campaign?

PALIN: No, and I do not think that it is off-base nor mean-spirited, nor negative campaigning to call someone out on their associations and on their record. And that's why I did it.

BLITZER: I just want to sort of footnote, was that your idea or did somebody write those lines for you?

PALIN: It was a collaborative effort there in deciding how do we start bringing up some of the associations that perhaps would be impacting on an administration, on the future of America. But again, though, Wolf, knowing that it really -- at this point, I don't want to point fingers backwards and play the blame game, certainly, on anything that took place in terms of strategy or messaging in the campaign."

Rachel Maddow Wears PJ's In Solidarity With Bloggers

Planned Internet Censorship In Australia


No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia
(click on image to learn more.)

"...There are free-speech concerns.

Although the initiative is intended and marketed as a tool to help protect children from the dangers of the Internet, this paternalistic scheme raises some troubling issues that affect all Australians. As a source of daily information, the Internet increases in importance every day. Do we really want the Government of the day deciding what Australian adults can and can't see? Do we want Australia to join a censorship club in which Burma, China and North Korea are the founding members?

* The list of prohibited sites will probably be secret, so it will be hard to know what content the Government has effectively banned.
* Filtering will be compulsory in all homes, even where there are no children.
* It is unknown whether there will be any way to have content removed from the prohibited list.
* How far will the list go, now and in future? Will it filter out material on sexual health, drug use, terrorism... even breastfeeding? Euthanasia and anorexia have been touted by Government MPs as topics worthy of filtering."

More here, here and here.

Jean Seberg 1938 - 1979

Jean Seberg was born on this day in 1938

'Nevermind' now

'Now 17, Spencer Elden is a high school student, who says that "it's kind of creepy [to think] that that many people have seen me naked — I feel like I'm the world's biggest porn star."

Elden recently re-created the iconic album's cover in the same pool at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, California, where it was originally shot — only this time, he was wearing shorts. It remains unclear as to why Elden decided to shoot this new photo.

Elden's parents were paid just $200 for allowing him to be photographed back in 1991. But last year, Elden told us that being the Nirvana baby has its perks. He references it when trying to pick up ladies, he said: "I have to use stupid pickup lines like, 'You want to see my penis again?' " But it's also led to some strange encounters as well. He was once invited to swim in a rather wealthy woman's pool for the mere fact that he was the Nirvana baby.'
(MTV)

Wednesday 12 November 2008

You just don't get it do you?

Palin calls bloggers "kids in pajamas".
Story at 'The Huffington Post' here.

A radioreactive report on Syria

Story at 'FP' here.

Currently reading

YoniLab



More here.

Tuesday 11 November 2008

Obama - Clinton soap opera takes new turn

Story from 'Politico' here.

Mystery of lost US nuclear bomb

Story from the BBC here.

Bickershaw 1972


Continuing the series of 'Dark Stars' from the Grateful dead European tour of 1972.
Here is the 'Dark Star' from the (very muddy) Bickershaw Festival held on the 7th May just outside Wigan in Lancashire, England.
(Look closely at the photo above and you may be able to see Elvis Costello. Actually you can't he was in front of the left hand side speaker - stack!)
Other 'Dark Stars' here.

Eh?


Well I had a post removed by Blogger.
What post you may ask?
Answer: 'Ryan Adams - Cardinology.'

What were they (who knows who) objecting to?
What was there?
There was a link to the 'review of the reviews' from the blog 23/7.
There were a couple of pics on the post including the album cover.
(Update: Interestingly I just went to look for the album cover in Google Images and there are none there. Could that really be what they were objecting to?)
Finally there were some live versions of tracks from the album available from another site that I also linked to (bag of songs blog) and a version of 'Wharf Rat' from Ryan Adams performance with Phil Lesh and Friends' on his birthday last year.
Which are all available to download at Archive.org.
So what was objectionable?
I really would like to know so I don't do it again, but it seems to me that some - body/machine saw the post title and presumed that maybe I had put up the album.
I don't know and I really would like to.
Finally if you have a problem with a post let ME know (via the comments) and I will remove it immediately OK!

Obama and Bush meet at White House

Story at 'The Huffington Post' here.

The 11th Hour of the 11th Day of the 11th Month



In Memory of
Private ARTHUR JOHN HADDOCK

2766529, 6th Bn., Black Watch (Royal Highlanders)
who died
age 20
on 24 April 1944
Son of Robert Arthur and Catherine Haddock, of Orrell, Bootle, Lancashire.
Remembered with honour
CASSINO WAR CEMETERY

Palin Blames Bush & Republican Party For Defeat



You can see the whole video here.

Miriam Makeba 1932 - 2008

'Mama Africa' dies.
Full story here.
Mandela tribute here.

A Meeting both historic and awkward

Obama and Bush in Feb 2005
Story from the 'NY Times' here.
Obama to 'reverse Bush decisions' story here.

Monday 10 November 2008

Obama win sparks push to end racism in France

Carla Bruni - Sarkozy says: Yes We Can too...
Story from 'The Washington Post' here.

'Buon Compleanno' Senor Morricone

Ennio Morricone was born on this day in 1928.

Via Chicago

Leonard Cohen - my love letter to the USA


"I'm sentimental if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can't stand the scene.
And I'm neither left or right
I'm just staying home tonight,
getting lost in that hopeless little screen.
But I'm stubborn as those garbage bags
that Time cannot decay,
I'm junk but I'm still holding up
this little wild bouquet:

This is my love letter to the U.S.A."

Leonard Cohen introducing 'Democracy' at the Clyde Auditorium, Glasgow, November 5 2008.

Sunday 9 November 2008

'Morning in Obamerica' by Ishmael Reed

The Promised Land?
Article from counterpoint.org here.

Obama's inauguration concert line - up?


The other day I thought that the line-up could be Bruce Springsteen and Wilco. Well this just in...

'The remaining members of the Grateful Dead are rumored to play one of President-elect Barack Obama’s upcoming inauguration parties on January 20. In an interview with The Daily News, Bob Weir mentioned that he has been told to “keep January 20 free.”

Though no official word has been made, The Dead are a likely choice for the first Democratic president since 2001. Last February, Weir, Phil Lesh and Mickey Hart reunited for an Obama benefit on the eve of the California primary and, last month, the trio recruited Bill Kreutzmann for another benefit in State College, PA. Lesh, in particular, has been a vocal supporter of the President-elect, while Weir has served on HeadCount’s board of directors since 2004. Weir, Hart and Kreutzmann anchored an all-star band at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s inauguration party in 2007.'
From Relix
and
'The New York Daily News reported today that rockers such as Bruce Springsteen and surviving members of the Grateful Dead could very well be performing at Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration event on the 20th of January. The event is expected to draw an enormous amount of people…some 1.5 million are expected to turn out.

Can anyone picture Bruce jamming with the Dead? Well, he did play with a Grateful Dead cover band (Solar Circus) on August 10th, 1995, which was the day after the passing of legendary member Jerry Garcia.'
http://theboss.today.com

I still think that Wilco may get a nod coming from Chicago and apparently Beyonce has offered her services and that would probably bring Jay Z to the party.
There is a great reference to 'getting the dirt off your shoulder' here.

Apart from Jay-Z what music does Obama listen to?
From 'Rolling Stone' here and
according to his Facebook profile:
Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Stevie Wonder,
Johann Sebastian Bach (cello suites), and The Fugees.



Barack Obama by Zina Saunders