Monday 7 April 2014

An alleged Dept. of Immigration Policy Adviser uses social media

...All employees will need to make these judgements for themselves. Before posting material on matters of public policy, ask yourself whether a Prime Minister, from either political party, having read the material, would feel confident that any advice from you was impartial and balanced.
(Click to enlarge) 
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Previous employment?

Redface has another big day at the ballpark in Cleveland


360° Video using 6 GoPro Cameras: spherical panorama timelapse


HA!

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(Thanx Robin!)

Love

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Leunig

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Nick Drake & Beverley Martyn - Reckless Jane


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So much for free speech

Australian Border Protection forces Facebook content removal through Twitter

Free speech, but only for Abbott elite

Celt Islam - The Dervish Lodge Mix

Info

Manifesto of the BLACK THORN LEAGUE

We are all very anxious

Throbbing Gristle - Live @Rafters Club Manchester (4 December 1980)

More photographs by Peter Bargh HERE
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This was a good night. The Psychic Youth Rally with Cabaret Voltaire playing too, but I do remember that it seemed weird seeing TG in such a large venue

Sunday 6 April 2014

'Get your arse out'


Only by turning the tables on sexual aggression can we see how bad it is



Artwork by child in Immigration detention in Australia (2014)

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Nine Inch Nails - Live @Austin City Limits


All Time LowSanctified
Came Back Haunted
Copy of A
The Frail/The Wretched
The Big Come Down
In This Twilight
While I'm Still Here
Hurt
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Youn Sun Nah - Enter Sandman


YES...the Metallica song, but the Korean singer makes it a completely different music... gorgeous!

Climate change will 'lead to battles for food', says head of World Bank

So now you know...


Stewart Baker VS Jacob Appelbaum

HERE
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The Unlimited Dream Company


The Unlimited Dream Company, written, edited & directed by Sam Scoggins. 16mm, 24 mins, color, 1983.
“The British science fiction writer J.G. BALLARD talks about his life and work. Meanwhile a crashed pilot stalks the landscapes of his dreams. The film is concerned with what constitutes an adequate picture of a person, the role of the imagination in transforming the world.”

Psychic TV - La Edad de Oro (TVE Studios Madrid October 16, 1984)


Remember them this way not this...

Lamb Cake

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(Thanx Anne!)

Psychic TV - Dreams Less Demo Cassette


1 - White Nights (Alternate Mix)
2 - Eden2 (No Insert)
3 - Nursery Funk
4 - Twisted (Backing Track)
5 - Breakthrough
6 - Cold Steel (Alex Vocals)
7 - In The Nursery (Backing Track)
8 - Ancient Lights (Alternate Mix)
9 - Translucent Carriages (Early Mix)
10 - Botanica (Alternate Mix)
11 - Eden3 (Alternate Mix)
12 - Thee Orchids (Alternate Mix)
13 - Iron Glove (Alternate Mix)

Added LOL at the time of posting:
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(Thanx Martin!)

WOW!

'Blue Yodel No 6' Singer "EmiSunshine" is only 9-years-old, but already she can sing, play the ukulele, banjolele, mandolin, kazoo, and a little piano. In this video she is captured playing Jimmie Rodgers' "Blue Yodel No. 6" by an impressed bystander. At The Sweetwater, Tennessee Flea Market

Saturday 5 April 2014

Michael Faber on J.G. Ballard's 'Kindness of Women'

Like many men scarred by war, JG Ballard spent much of his life determined not to talk about it. Had he died in his early 50s (not such an improbable fate, given his intake of alcohol and tobacco) only one short story, "The Dead Time", would have existed to pay direct witness to his wartime experience. He preferred to divert the memories into more fantastical conceptions: drowned worlds, concrete islands, terminal beaches, atrocity exhibitions.
It wasn't until the 1980s that he commanded his fiction to shine a documentary torch into his own life, to illuminate, and perhaps to exorcise his Shanghai ghosts. He confronted them first in Empire of the Sun, tackled them again from another angle in The Kindness of Women, and finally – just before he died – offered a conventionally "truthful" account in his autobiography, Miracles of Life. The Kindness of Women, marketed as a "sequel" to Empire of the Sun, steered back towards the provocative style of Ballard's earlier work, exploring the psychic fallout of horror and violence. The scene where young Jim watches four somnolent Japanese soldiers slowly murder a Chinese prisoner with telephone wire is a masterpiece of understatement and baleful resonance: even as Jim negotiates his own escape, we know that, on a deeper level, there is no escaping from such a sight.
Seventeen novella-like chapters fictionalise the key phases of Ballard's life from 1937 to 1987, starting with his childhood in Shanghai where the rich, perpetually tipsy westerners play tennis, go shopping and sidestep the growing mound of refugee bodies felled by hunger, typhus and bombs. "To my child's eyes, which had seen nothing else, Shanghai was a waking dream where everything I could imagine had already been taken to its extreme." Those last 15 words serve as a manifesto for all of Ballard's novels.
If the strangeness of Shanghai is meant to foreshadow Auschwitz, Vietnam and the contextless chaos of modern media, Jim's medical studies in postwar England tell us a lot about Ballard's values as a prose-writer. When he begins to dissect a cadaver, a friend warns him: "You'll have to cut away all the fat before you reach the fascia." It's an appropriate metaphor for Ballard's clinical approach to narrative, an odd mixture of focus and nonchalance. While he liked to set himself apart from oh-so-literary avant-gardists by insisting that he was "an old-fashioned storyteller at heart", he was impatient with the conventions that had underpinned respectable mainstream fiction since the Victorians. Surrealism's emphasis on the inexplicable and SF's tolerance for haphazard characterisation and unnaturalistic dialogue suited his own inclinations, even if some readers might find these things alienating.
It is in the area of physicality – especially sex – that Ballard's style jars most with the conventions of British fiction. It's hard to imagine another English author who could come up with a sentence like: "Her small, detergent-chafed hands, with their smell of lipstick, semen and rectal mucus, ran across my forehead." Frequent references to penises, labia, pelvises and prostates underscore Jim's contention that "Gray's Anatomy is a far greater novel than Ulysses." Ballard is unashamedly fascinated by the flesh – every pore, blemish and scar of it. The scenes in The Kindness of Women where Jim dissects the woman's carcass inspire some of Ballard's most tender, most respectful, most reverent writing.
For all his modernity, however, Ballard was formed by the fashions of a previous age; he could never quite shake the values instilled in him by Biggles and Boy's Own. His ambivalent fascination with soldiers, his disdain for the defeatism of the British in Singapore, and his lifelong love affair with fighter planes, set him apart from the long-haired peaceniks of later generations. His relationship with the times was atypical. Indifferent to music, immune to the charms of psychedelia and bemused by the idealism of hippies, he felt less enamoured of the 1960s than many of his fellow experimenters. He approved of the shake-up of the class system, and celebrated the rise of the literary counterculture that promoted his work, but in The Kindness of Women he chooses to present the 60s as an era driven to psychosis by a steady diet of drugs, assassinations, war trauma and TV. "The demise of feeling and emotion, the death of affect, presided like a morbid sun over the playground of that ominous decade."

J.G. Ballard: five years on

Richard Heslop and Mark French: Shooting The Hunter (Tribute to Derek Jarman)

Richard was one of the cameramen on Derek's film The Garden and this video contains original Super 8 shot by him on the set, together with contemporary footage shot around Prospect Cottage which features in the film. Original music by Fritz Catlin (Skintologists/23 Skidoo). Edited by Ben Cole

It was 20 years ago today...




Photos

Freedom and its enemies

Bollocks


The Muslims Are Coming!: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror

Friday 4 April 2014

23 Skidoo - F.U.G.I.

TONIGHT IN LONDON: 23 Skidoo and Richard Heslop - Seven Songs @BFI Southbank

‘23 Skidoo’, the driving, intense post-punk, industrial fusion band will play live to a confrontational video collage made by Richard Heslop. As first released in 1982 on video label Double Vision, Seven Songs brilliantly collided a whole gamut of treated, plundered material to tracks from the hit ‘23 Skidoo’ record of the same name. Presented tonight in a new, one-off, live version, the event forms the very special opening to our season This is Now: Film and Video After Punk.
Followed by a DJ set from Don Letts in the benugo Bar.
Tickets £15, concs £11.50 (Members pay £1.50 less)

 Wish I was there for this. Original guitarist Sam Mills will be playing alongside Jim Whelan tonight too

The Rebels - You Can Make It


celluloid records 1984

Thursday 3 April 2014

AUSTRALIA: THIS IS WHAT A 'REFUGEE PROBLEM' FUCKING LOOKS LIKE

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Anna Aaron - King of the Dogs


June Tabor & Oysterband - Love Will Tear Us Apart


Filmed at the Union Chapel London on April 19th 2012, directed by Judith Burrows.

Wednesday 2 April 2014

Third gender must be recognised by NSW after Norrie wins legal battle

CAN - Live @Soest 1970 (Rockpalast Archive) *Uncut Version


0. Intro
1. Sense All of Mine
2. Oh Yeah
3. I Feel Alright
4. Mother Sky
5. Deadlock
6. Bring Me Coffee or Tea
7. Don't Turn the Light On, Leave Me Alone
8. Paperhouse

Holger Czukay – bass
Irmin Schmidt – keyboards
Michael Karoli – guitar
Jaki Liebezeit – drums
Damo Suzuki – vocals 


High quality download @DIME

Irmin Schmidt on the CAN Biography

Every morning Hildegard wakes up with the sentence: 'I have an idea!' Exhausting. In the morning I only want to listen to the emptiness of my head and stare into the mysterious world behind my bedroom window. This time her idea was: 'We really need a proper Can biography. THE Can biography.'
The British novelist, good friend and since Can-times collaborator Duncan Fallowell (who also wrote all the lyrics for my solo albums and the wonderful libretto for my opera Gormenghast) had the next great idea: why not make it two books in one? A biography and – what he called – a symposium. He made the first contact with Faber & Faber and they were excited by the project. No, they ARE excited! Lee Brackstone suggested Rob Young as the writer for the biography. We have known Rob for a long time and regard him highly. He knows Can, the music and all the band members very well, so we were straight away extremely happy about this choice and are delighted to have him on board.
The idea of the symposium fascinated me so much that I decided to make it myself (meaning to curate it, edit it...). To use Can as a starting-point for a wild selection of stories, statements and interviews seemed like a really exciting project. A collage of talks not only with musicians (like Bobby Gillespie, Julian Cope, Geoff Barrow) and
people from the music-business side of things (Daniel Miller, Jazz Summers, Hartwig Masuch) but also people in other arts, like writers, philosophers, film-makers, painters and other nerds and neuroscientists...
And pictures. In 2011 there was a great exhibition in Berlin called HALLELUHWAH! Hommage à CAN, with paintings, photos, installations, sculptures, etc., by over forty artists (including Malcolm Mooney) all based around the theme of Can. Some of these will also be included in the symposium.
I am also very happy that Max Dax, editor-in-chief of Electronic Beats, will join me in working on this project.
Looking forward to being surprised!
Irmin Schmidt
Bandol, France – 16 March 2014