Funeral Parade of Roses (Bara no soretsu)
Black and White. 1969. Japan. 105 minutes.
Directed by Toshio Matsumoto

Unequivocally the best Japanese 60s avant-pop tranny tragedy I’ve seen, Funeral Parade of Roses is a must-see time capsule (I only wish the future Thetans who sift through my ashes hope this is what the 20th century is all about). Part self-conscious art film, part exploitation film, and part gonzo documentary on Tokyo’s underground scene – though where the zones overlap is up for grabs. Even on DVD, the black and white dazzles, as one quotable image supplants another. If you’re into the whole Asian catholic schoolgirl ladyboy thing, and who isn’t anymore, this is the jackpot.
Pithy introduction and discussion following the screening – this is part one in our run of “New Waves” around the world.

Henrietta Lacks rests today in an unmarked grave in the cemetery across the street from her family’s tobacco farm in Virginia. / photo by Rebecca Skloot

‘The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks’ by Rebecca Skloot [excerpt]
http://wired.com/magazine/2010/01/st_henrietta/
http://npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=123232331
“There’s a photo on my wall of a woman I’ve never met. Beneath the photo, a caption says her name is “Henrietta Lacks, Helen Lane or Helen Larson.” No one knows who took that picture, but it’s appeared hundreds of times in magazines and science textbooks, on blogs and laboratory walls. She’s usually identified as Helen Lane, but often she has no name at all. She’s simply called HeLa, the code name given to the world’s first immortal human cells — her cells, cut from her cervix just months before she died. Her real name is Henrietta Lacks. I’ve spent years staring at that photo, wondering what kind of life she led, what happened to her children, and what she’d think about cells from her cervix living on forever —bought, sold, packaged, and shipped by the trillions to laboratories around the world. I’ve tried to imagine how she’d feel knowing that her cells went up in the first space missions to see what would happen to human cells in zero gravity, or that they helped with some of the most important advances in medicine: the polio vaccine, chemotherapy, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization. I’m pretty sure that she — like most of us — would be shocked to hear that there are trillions more of her cells growing in laboratories now than there ever were in her body. There’s no way of knowing exactly how many of Henrietta’s cells are alive today. One scientist estimates that if you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons — an inconceivable number, given that an individual cell weighs almost nothing. Another scientist calculated that if you could lay all HeLa cells ever grown end-to-end, they’d wrap around the Earth at least three times, spanning more than 350 million feet. In her prime, Henrietta herself stood only a bit over five feet tall. Before she died, a surgeon took samples of her tumor and put them in a petri dish. Scientists had been trying to keep human cells alive in culture for decades, but they all eventually died. Henrietta’s were different: they reproduced an entire generation every twenty-four hours, and they never stopped. They became the first immortal human cells ever grown in a laboratory. “Henrietta’s cells have now been living outside her body far longer than they ever lived inside it,” Defler said. If we went to almost any cell culture lab in the world and opened its freezers, he told us, we’d probably find millions — if not billions — of Henrietta’s cells in small vials on ice. Her cells were part of research into the genes that cause cancer and those that suppress it; they helped develop drugs for treating herpes, leukemia, influenza, hemophilia, and Parkinson’s disease; and they’ve been used to study lactose digestion, sexually transmitted diseases, appendicitis, human longevity, mosquito mating, and the negative cellular effects of working in sewers. Their chromosomes and proteins have been studied with such detail and precision that scientists know their every quirk. Like guinea pigs and mice, Henrietta’s cells have become the standard laboratory workhorse: “HeLa cells were one of the most important things that happened to medicine in the last hundred years.”"

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8448974573505946013#]

The Way of All Flesh, by Adam Curtis

Knowledge or Consent
http://jhu.edu/~jhumag/0400web/01.html
“Gey and his colleagues went on to develop a test, using HeLa cells, to distinguish between the many polio strains, some of which had no effect on the human body. With this information, Jonas Salk and his colleagues in Pittsburgh created a vaccine, and the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis established facilities for mass-producing the HeLa cells. They would use them to test the polio vaccine before its use in humans. In the meantime, Gey shared his resources. Researchers welcomed the gifts, allowing HeLa to grow. And though Henrietta never traveled farther than from Virginia to Baltimore, her cells sat in nuclear test sites from America to Japan and multiplied in a space shuttle far above the Earth. Still, David Lacks and his children hadn’t a clue. That is, until a day in 1975, 24 years after Henrietta’s death, when his daughter-in-law went to a friend’s house for dinner. Her friend’s brother-in-law looked across the table at Barbara. ”You know,” he said, “your name sounds so familiar.” He was a scientist who spent his days in a Washington laboratory. “I think I know what it is… I’ve been working with some cells in my lab; they’re from a woman called Henrietta Lacks. Are you related?” “That’s my mother-in-law,” Barbara whispered, shaking her head. “She’s been dead almost 25 years, what do you mean you’re working with her cells?” Actually, by that time, they were standard reference cells–few molecular scientists hadn’t worked with them. Since no one had called in the two decades after Henrietta’s death, the Lacks family got on the phone and rang Hopkins themselves. They did it at an opportune time. Henrietta’s cells, it turned out, had grown out of control. Some scientists thought her relatives were the only people who could help. Henrietta’s cells were, and still are, some of the strongest cells known to science–they reproduce an entire generation every 24 hours. “If allowed to grow uninhibited,” Howard Jones and his Hopkins colleagues said in 1971, “[HeLa cells] would have taken over the world by this time.” In 1974, a researcher by the name of Walter Nelson-Rees started what everyone called a nasty rumor: HeLa cells, he claimed, had infiltrated the world’s stock of cell cultures. No one wanted to believe him. For almost three decades researchers had done complex experiments on what they thought were breast cells, prostate cells, or placental cells, and suddenly, rumor had it they’d been working with HeLa cells all along.”

‘Lab Weeds’
http://www.sunypress.edu/p-133-a-conspiracy-of-cells.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Contamination
“Because of their adaptation to growth in tissue culture plates, HeLa cells are sometimes difficult to control. They have proven to be a persistent laboratory “weed” that contaminates other cell cultures in the same laboratory, interfering with biological research and forcing researchers to declare many results invalid. The degree of HeLa cell contamination among other cell types is unknown because few researchers test the identity or purity of already-established cell lines. It has been demonstrated that a substantial fraction of in vitro cell lines — approximately 10%, maybe 20% — are contaminated with HeLa cells. Stanley Gartler in 1967 and Walter Nelson-Rees in 1975 were the first to publish on the contamination of various cell lines by HeLa. Science writer Michael Gold wrote about the HeLa cell contamination problem in his book A Conspiracy of Cells. He describes Nelson-Rees’s identification of this pervasive worldwide problem — affecting even the laboratories of the best physicians, scientists, and researchers, including Jonas Salk — and many, possibly career-ending, efforts to address it. According to Gold, the HeLa contamination problem almost led to a Cold War incident: The USSR and the USA had begun to cooperate in the war on cancer launched by President Richard Nixon only to find that the exchanged cells were contaminated by HeLa. Rather than focus on how to resolve the problem of HeLa cell contamination, many scientists and science writers continue to document this problem as simply a contamination issue — caused not by human error or shortcomings but by the hardiness, proliferating, or overpowering nature of HeLa. Recent data suggest that cross-contaminations are still a major ongoing problem with modern cell cultures.”

New Species?: Helacyton gartleri
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HeLa#Helacyton_gartleri

“Due to their ability to replicate indefinitely, and their non-human number of chromosomes, HeLa was described by Leigh Van Valen as an example of the contemporary creation of a new species, Helacyton gartleri, named after Stanley M. Gartler, whom Van Valen credits with discovering “the remarkable success of this species.” His argument for speciation depends on three points:

• The chromosomal incompatibility of HeLa cells with humans.
• The ecological niche of HeLa cells.
• Their ability to persist and expand well beyond the desires of human cultivators.

It should be noted that this definition has not been followed by others in the scientific community, nor, indeed, has it been widely noted. As far as proposing a new species for HeLa cells, Van Valen proposes in the same paper the new family Helacytidae and the genus Helacyton. Recognition of Van Valen and Maiorana’s names, however, renders Homo and Hominidae paraphyletic because Helacyton gartleri is most closely related to Homo sapiens.

Cancer Don’t Stop
http://rebeccaskloot.com/book-special-features/henrietta-lacks-foundation/
http://smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/Henrietta-Lacks-Immortal-Cells.html
“It turned out that HeLa cells could float on dust particles in the air and travel on unwashed hands and contaminate other cultures. It became an enormous controversy. In the midst of that, one group of scientists tracked down Henrietta’s relatives to take some samples with hopes that they could use the family’s DNA to make a map of Henrietta’s genes, so they could tell which cell cultures were HeLa and which weren’t, to begin straightening out the contamination problem. Deborah’s brothers didn’t think much about the cells until they found out there was money involved. HeLa cells were the first human biological materials ever bought and sold, which helped launch a multi-billion-dollar industry. When Deborah’s brothers found out that people were selling vials of their mother’s cells, and that the family didn’t get any of the resulting money, they got very angry. Henrietta’s family has lived in poverty most of their lives, and many of them can’t afford health insurance. One of her sons was homeless and living on the streets of Baltimore. So the family launched a campaign to get some of what they felt they were owed financially.”

The Henrietta Lacks Foundation
http://rebeccaskloot.com/book-special-features/henrietta-lacks-foundation/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/42653706@N00/sets/72157623243930457/
http://oprah.com/world/Excerpt-From-The-Immortal-Life-of-Henrietta-Lacks_1
“HeLa cells rode into the mountains of Chile in the saddlebags of pack mules and flew around the country in the breast pockets of researchers until they were growing in laboratories in Texas, Amsterdam, India, and many places in between. The Tuskegee Institute set up facilities to mass-produce Henrietta’s cells, and began shipping 20,000 tubes of HeLa—about six trillion cells—every week. And soon, a multibillion-dollar industry selling human biological materials was born. HeLa cells allowed researchers to perform experiments that would have been impossible with a living human. Scientists exposed them to toxins, radiation, and infections. They bombarded them with drugs, hoping to find one that would kill malignant cells without destroying normal ones. They studied immune suppression and cancer growth by injecting HeLa into rats with weak immune systems, who developed malignant tumors much like Henrietta’s. And if the cells died in the process, it didn’t matter—scientists could just go back to their eternally growing HeLa stock and start over again. Meanwhile Henrietta’s children were consumed with questions: Were clones of their mother walking the streets of cities around the world? And if Henrietta was so vital to medicine, why couldn’t they afford health insurance?”

No Exit—from the Not-So-Great Depression
by Charles Potts

No Exit is the title of one book by Jean Paul Sartre, a French writer, communist and co-father of Existentialism that I’ve never been able to read, even though I have always admired the fact that he thumbed his nose at the Nobel Prize for Literature saying something like, “I don’t accept prizes, whether the Nobel or a sack of potatoes.” The Nobel Prize for Literature, as you’ve probably heard, is passed out by a pack of gunpowder academics from the net proceeds of the fortune of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, by confusing politics with literature. Each year they make some kind of difficult-to-decipher gesture toward one or another enclave in the Third World. They haven’t given one to an American for a long time—trying to snub the Empire, I suppose. Who knows what all they read on their way to spurious decisions.

To give you an example of how far into the mire language has fallen, I’m under the impression the Swedes delegated the awarding of the Peace Prize to the Norwegians, and as an old Swedish girlfriend of mine used to say, “He ain’t Norwegian” when she wanted to insult somebody, the way dweebs from Eastern Montana make fun of the hapless denizens of North Dakota. I mean, they gave the Peace Prize to the Boy Scout from Chicago and he had to pick it up the very week he announced he was sending an additional 30,000 troops to win the war in Afghanistan at a cost of $30,000,000,000, i.e. thirty billion dollars. I hope the unemployed are sitting down for this but my honorary degree in rocket science suggests that it is impossible to win a colonial war when it costs the Empire A MILLION dollars per soldier to put a pair of boots, as the talking heads put it, on the ground. Even if they were taking gold out of Afghanistan by the trainload, colonial war is a losing proposition. And there is nothing else there to “win” either. The last time I can remember that the Peace Prize went to such a warmonger was when the great war criminal Henry Kissinger accepted it, on behalf of the scut work he did for the scoundrel Richard Nixon in the Empire’s war on Vietnam. Americans have forgotten their own colonial history, if they ever knew it. Back in the day, early 1600s, with the importation of some good tobacco from the Orinoco River in South America, Virginia became the drug producing capital of the new world. Fortunes were made. Now the Empire has the effrontery to try to wipe out the opium producers in Afghanistan.

Colonial War in all its many disguises is one of the primary reasons why there is No Exit from the not-so-great depression. To give the Tea Party sympathizers among the audience an example they can get their red meat teeth into, the Cheney-Bush Administration started and lost three unnecessary wars simultaneously while bankrupting the Treasury and blowing a hole in the world economy that likely won’t get re-filled in the length of an ordinary lifetime. And Republicans wonder why they are out of office.

To take their undeclared wars one at a time… (By the way, this civilization declared war in 1941, two years before your author was born, and has never declared peace. We have war as a way of life, described in the political literature as “Peace and Prosperity,” going down in history as a violent parody of standards even double-talk can’t reach.) In their post 9-11 mind set in concrete, they launched the aforementioned War on Afghanistan, allegedly because the perpetrators of 9-11, mostly Saudi Arabians and Egyptians, once trained there. It was described by that half-an-asshole semi-Colon Powell as asymmetrical warfare, overlooking the fact that the asymmetry was provided by the Empire, when a handful of special ops could have taken out the survivors of the plot for chump change. At least that’s the way Eisenhower’s CIA used to do it during the “Peace and Prosperity”-driven 1950s. Discontent with starting a war they couldn’t finish much less win led them on to the War on Iraq, a regime changer if there ever was one, to depose a war criminal satrap the Empire had set up years before, one Saddam Hussein by name, who never made the slightest dent in his long war against Iran, even with the Rumsfeld-provided poison gas.

Lying their way into war is the modus operandi of the Empire, now in need of a theme. Voila! A War on Terrorism. A war on abstract nouns is the perfect setup for the Empire. The enemy can’t be found, so Osama bin Laden is still at large, generating funds for both sides. The siege mentality of the Paranoid Christian Fascists has them fighting Islamo-Fascists and the Fascists are winning. For every terrorist killed three new ones are created, an endless supply for an endless war, in an Empire presided over by endless fruitcakes. The Empire has 16 separate spy agencies, all gathering information and hoarding it from one another, much less the people on whose behalf it is purportedly gathered. If you have a secret and somebody else wants to discover it, that somebody else becomes pro forma an enemy. The interlocution of paranoia; the structure of political madness.

The algorithm for the end of empires has three integrals and derivatives. How fast the leaders burn through their assets, chief of which is the support of their populations; the size of the asset base; and the quality and focus of the opposition. Costs of empire are borne by the entire population while the benefits accrue to the very few with inside jobs: no-bid contractors who milk the sacred American cow. In other words, the calculus of empire and colonial war is an exercise in socializing the costs—socialized war, anyone?—while privatizing the benefits. This best of both worlds is a dream scheme for plutocrats and a nightmare for everybody else. An Alice in Wonderland foreign policy presided over by the presidency, no matter who holds the office, presages an epic disaster.

If you haven’t dropped out yet, it’s probably time.

Charles Potts: wikipedia

Previous work by Charles Potts in Arthur…

“The Recession and How to Live Through It” (Jan 2009)

“The Dope From Muskogee”

Shoethrower Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia”

Poem in Arthur No. 5 (special “Arthur Against Empire” issue)

“Spasm Empire”

Charles Potts & SUNN 0))) at ArthurFest 2005 – video footage

Stream:

Download: Arthur Radio Voyage #9: Forest Dwelling with Overture

This week we arrived at the Newtown Radio studio to find it transformed beyond recognition… emerald green vines blanketed the walls, and a lush carpet of multi-colored mosses and swamp grass covered the floor. We pushed our way through a thicket of elephant ears into a sun-dappled glade, where our guests Jason & Aya (otherwise known as Overture, the minds behind the cover of the recent Six Organs of Admittance/Azul split LP), were seated on bed of soft purple and magenta leaves. We listened under the shade of a poplar tree as they read tales of fantastical landscapes where landslides, floods and rainfall had created a boggy wonderland full of dancing musical animals, rhubarb babies, and a wise old vegetable lady…

After the storytelling, we ventured into the glade to ask our enchanting guests more about these worlds they had woven before our eyes. The first reading, it turns out, was inspired by a spine-tinglingly beautiful animation that the the super-artist duo made for Múm’s song “Rhubarbidoo” from their 2007 album Go Go Smear The Poison Ivy.

The second reading was inspired by the following three animations, which the artists made for experimental piano maestro Hauschka’s 2008 album Ferndorf:

The third reading, a story in which “An old man confronts his fears, traveling across a personal landscape to realize and accept his path,” was based on an animation Overture made for the song “Bless” by Icelandic musician Kira Kira, which is featured on her 2008 album Our Map to the Monster Olympics. This video was just released to the world officially yesterday — Enjoy!!!

Learn more about Jason & Aya’s work and future escapades at http://www.opertura.org and on their blog.

This week’s playlist…

“the frog pond” – frog noises
jon hassell – chor moire
emunclaw – opening of the dawn
avey tare & kria brekken – was oniap (double reversed)
painting petals on planet ghost – side a
meredith monk – gotham lullaby
feathers – silver leaves in the air of starseedlings
lavender diamond – i want to rest my heart
micheal hurley – penguins
leo kottke – song of the swamp
john fahey – bicycle built for two
aphex twin – avril 14th
penguin cafe orchestra – the sound of someone you love who’s going away and it doesnt matter
masaki batoh – world of pain
brion gysin – “i am” machine poem
yahowa 13 – ho
pilgrims – spooky theme
pearls before swine – the surrealist waltz
fear itself – bobby gene / trad gras och stenar – live jam

…2ND HOUR…

STORYTELLING WITH AYA & JASON… FEATURING:
six organs of admittance – furnace
mum – rhubarbidoo
azul – campanella / momo / ocean / gnya gnya blues / a short tip along the way (for david tibet)
haushka – freibad
mum – sleep/swim / green grass of tunnel
life on earth soundtrack – side a

From a piece on the forthcoming “Treme” tv series (from David Simon, creator of The Wire) in this coming Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Magazine…

“THERE’S A THING about being capable of a great moment,” Simon told me on a break from shooting. “This city is capable of moments unlike any moments you’ll ever experience in life. To see an Indian come down the street in full regalia on St. Joseph’s Night on an unlit street of messed-up shotgun houses and one burned-out car, and he’s the most beautiful thing on the planet, and everything around him is falling down. It’s a glorious instant of human endeavor. It’s duende from the Spanish, chills on the back of your neck, and then the next minute it’s gone. Lots of American places used to make things. Detroit used to make cars. Baltimore used to make steel and ships. New Orleans still makes something. It makes moments. I don’t mean that to sound flippant, and I don’t mean it to sound more or less than what it is, but they’re artists with a moment, they can take a moment and make it into something so transcendent that you’re not quite sure that it happened or that you were a part of it…”

Music: Massive Attack with Damon Albarn

“Filmed inside Cambridge University’s anechoic chamber (designed to create total silence) and featuring former Guantanamo Bay detainee, Ruhal Ahmed, this short by Adam and Olly is a reflection on Ahmed’s experiences whilst in detention (particularly how he was interrogated using high-volume music) and about the use of human sound on the body.”

$18 postpaid from wannastartacommune.com

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

pictures from the film by Jirí Trnka

1959

Here is a 20-minute mini-documentary about the festival by filmmaker Michael Johnson.

BONUS CLIP: An excerpt from one of Derek Bailey’s final USA performances, at Tonic in NYC with the Shaking Ray Levis in 2003…

The tendril network of a slime mold is a near match to Japan’s railway sytem. Photo via Science/AAAS

Miraculous Mold! Invade LA’s public transport please…

Pre-Industrial Land-Use
http://www.detroitagriculture.org/GRP_Website/Grown_In_Detroit.html
http://www.greeningofdetroit.com/3_0_cool_projects.php
http://detroitblackfoodsecurity.org/policy.html
http://urbanfarming.org/homefarming.html

Downsizing
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2010/mar/09/detroit-looks-at-downsizing-to-save-city/
Detroit wants to save itself by shrinking
“Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile. Operating on a scale never before attempted in this country, the city would demolish houses in some of the most desolate sections of Detroit and move residents into stronger neighborhoods. Roughly a quarter of the 139-square-mile city could go from urban to semi-rural. Detroit officials first raised the idea in the 1990s, when blight was spreading. Now, with the recession plunging the city deeper into ruin, a decision on how to move forward is approaching. Mayor Dave Bing, who took office last year, is expected to unveil some details in his state-of-the-city address this month. Though the will to downsize has arrived, the way to do it is unclear and fraught with problems. Politically explosive decisions must be made about which neighborhoods should be bulldozed and which improved. Some won’t go willingly. “I like the way things are right here,” said David Hardin, 60, whose bungalow is one of three occupied homes on a block with dozens of empty lots near what is commonly known as City Airport. He has lived there since 1976, when every home on the street was occupied, and said he enjoys the peace and quiet. On some blocks, only one or two occupied houses remain, surrounded by trash-strewn lots and vacant, burned-out homes. Scavengers have stripped anything of value from empty buildings. According to one recent estimate, Detroit has 33,500 empty houses and 91,000 vacant residential lots. The approximately 40 square miles of vacant property in Detroit is larger than the entire city of Youngstown. Faced with a $300 million budget deficit and a dwindling tax base, Bing argues that the city can’t continue to pay for police patrols, fire protection and other services for all areas. The current plan would demolish about 10,000 houses and empty buildings in three years. The city might offer larger tracts for sale or lease, or turn over smaller pieces to community organizations to use.”

More Modest View
http://www.detroitmi.gov/DepartmentsandAgencies/MayorsOffice/ContacttheMayor/tabid/1238/Default.aspx
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703503804575083781073108438.html
Mayor Plans to Use Census Tally Showing Decline as Benchmark in Overhaul
“This city is shrinking, and Mayor Dave Bing can live with that. The nation’s once-a-decade census, which gets under way next month, usually prompts expensive tally-building efforts by cities eager to maximize federal funding tied to the count. But this time, Mr. Bing is pushing the city to embrace the bad news. The mayor is looking to the diminished tally, down from 951,270 in 2000, as a benchmark in his bid to reshape Detroit’s government, finances and perhaps even its geography to reflect its smaller population and tax base. That means, in part, cutting city services and laying off workers. His approach to the census is a product of not only budget constraints but also a new, more modest view of the city’s prospects. “We’ve got to pick those core communities, those core neighborhoods” to sustain and preserve, he said at a recent public appearance, adding: “That’s something that’s possible here in Detroit.” Unlike his predecessors, Mr. Bing, a Democrat first elected last year to finish the term of disgraced former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, hasn’t touted big development plans or talked of a “renaissance.” Instead, he is trying to prepare residents for a new reality: that Detroit—like the auto industry that propelled it for a century—will have to get smaller before it gets bigger again. With no high-profile census push, the city risks an undercount that would mean forgoing millions of dollars in federal funding. Nationwide, each person counted translates into about $1,000 to $1,200 in federal funding to municipal governments. But some community leaders see the hands-off approach as a sign the city’s leadership under Mr. Bing, a 66-year-old businessman and former basketball star, is prepared to face up to the depopulation problem and rethink Detroit’s future. “This is going to be hard to wrestle to the ground,” said Rip Rapson, president of the Kresge Foundation of Troy, Mich., a national philanthropy that has invested heavily in development projects aimed at salvaging the nicest remnants of the city. “He deserves enormous credit for leading the community into this.”

Economies of Scale
http://hantzfarmsdetroit.com/press.html
http://money.cnn.com/2009/12/29/news/economy/farming_detroit.fortune/index.htm
Can farming save Detroit?
“John Hantz is a wealthy money manager who lives in an older enclave of Detroit where all the houses are grand and not all of them are falling apart. With a net worth of more than $100 million, he’s one of the richest men left in Detroit. Not long ago, while commuting, he stumbled on a big idea that might help save his dying city. In some stretches he sees more pheasants than people. “We need scarcity,” he thought to himself as he drove past block after unoccupied block. “We can’t create opportunities, but we can create scarcity.” Yes, a farm. A large-scale, for-profit agricultural enterprise, wholly contained within the city limits of Detroit. Hantz is willing to commit $30 million to the project. He’ll start with a pilot program this spring involving up to 50 acres on Detroit’s east side. “Out of the gates,” he says, “it’ll be the largest urban farm in the world.” If you let it revert to nature, you abandon all hope of productive use. If you turn it over to parks and recreation, you add costs to an overburdened city government that can’t afford to teach its children, police its streets, or maintain the infrastructure it already has. Houses in Detroit are selling for an average of $15,000. That sounds like a buying opportunity, and in fact Detroit looks pretty good right now to a young artist or entrepreneur who can’t afford anyplace else — but not yet to an investor. The smart money sees no point in buying as long as fresh inventory keeps flooding the market. As Hantz began thinking about ways to absorb some of that inventory, what he imagined, he says, was a glacier: one broad, continuous swath of farmland, growing acre by acre, year by year, until it had overrun enough territory to raise the scarcity alarm and impel other investors to act. Rick Foster, an executive at the Kellogg Foundation whom Hantz sought out for advice, nudged him gently in a different direction. “I think you should make pods,” Foster said, meaning not one farm but many. Hantz was taken right away with the concept of creating several pods — or lakes, as he came to think of them — each as large as 300 acres, and each surrounded by its own valuable frontage. “What if we had seven lakes in the city?” he wondered. “Would people develop around those lakes?”

photo by James Griffioen

To increase the odds that they will, Hantz plans on making his farms both visually stunning and technologically cutting edge. Mike Score, who recently left Michigan State’s agricultural extension program to join Hantz Farms as president, has written a business plan that calls for the deployment of the latest in farm technology, from compost-heated greenhouses to hydroponic (water only, no soil) and aeroponic (air only) growing systems designed to maximize productivity in cramped settings. Some of Hantz’s biggest skeptics, ironically, are the same people who’ve been working to transform Detroit into a laboratory for urban farming for years, albeit on a much smaller scale. The nonprofit Detroit Agriculture Network counts nearly 900 urban gardens within the city limits. That’s a twofold increase in two years, and it places Detroit at the forefront of a vibrant national movement to grow more food locally and lessen the nation’s dependence on Big Ag. None of those gardens is very big (average size: 0.25 acre), and they don’t generate a lot of cash (most don’t even try), but otherwise they’re great: as antidotes to urban blight; sources of healthy, affordable food in a city that, incredibly, has no chain supermarkets; providers of meaningful, if generally unpaid, work to the chronically unemployed; and beacons around which disintegrating communities can begin to regather themselves. That actually sounds a lot like what Hantz envisions his farms to be in the for-profit arena. But he doesn’t have many fans among the community gardeners, who feel that Hantz is using his money and connections to capitalize on their pioneering work. “I’m concerned about the corporate takeover of the urban agriculture movement in Detroit,” says Malik Yakini, a charter school principal and founder of the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, which operates D-Town Farm on Detroit’s west side. “At this point the key players with him seem to be all white men in a city that’s at least 82% black.”"

City Services
http://instructables.com/id/Bicyle-Power-for-Your-Television,-Laptop,-or-Cell-/
http://treehugger.com/files/2010/01/pedal-power-in-detroit-green-gym-for-homeless.php

Pathways Of Desire
http://www.jamesgriffioen.net/trailmode.png
http://www.sweet-juniper.com/2009/06/streets-with-no-name.html
Streets With No Name / by James Griffioen / June 23, 2009
“This past winter, the snow stayed so long we almost forgot what the ground looked like. In Detroit, there is little money for plowing; after a big storm, the streets and sidewalks disappear for days. Soon new pathways emerge, side streets get dug out one car-width wide. Bootprints through parks veer far from the buried sidewalks. Without the city to tell him where to walk, the pilgrim who first sets out in fresh snowfall creates his own path. Others will likely follow, or forge their own paths as needed. In the heart of summer, too, it becomes clear that the grid laid down by the ancient planners is now irrelevant. In vacant lots between neighborhoods and the attractions of thoroughfares, bus stops and liquor stores, well-worn paths stretch across hundreds of vacant lots. Gaston Bachelard called these les chemins du désir: pathways of desire. Paths that weren’t designed but eroded casually away by individuals finding the shortest distance between where they are coming from and where they intend to go. Desire lines are considered by many landscape architects to be proof of a flaw in the design of a physical space, or more gently, a sign that concrete cannot always impose its will on the human mind. But what about a physical space that no longer resembles its intended design, a city where tens of thousands of homes have been abandoned, burned, and buried in their own basements? While actual roads and sidewalks crumble with each season of freezing and thawing, Detroiters have taken it upon themselves to create new paths, in their own small way working to create a city that better suits their needs.”

photo by James Griffioen

Born in Peru, avant-turntablist Maria Chavez currently resides in Brooklyn, New York. With a collection of new and broken needles that she calls “pencils of sound” and a selection of records, she creates electro-acoustic sound pieces. Chavez made her New York City debut in a duet with Thurston Moore, collaborated with Otomo Yoshihide as part of the 2007 Wien Modern Festival, and recently shared a stage with Pauline Oliveros and Lydia Lunch during Vienna’s Phonofemme Festival 2009.

Saturday, March 13th @ Roulette, 8:30PM
20 Greene Street (between Canal and Grand Streets)
New York, NY 10013 (See map).

Reservations/Tickets: 212.219.8242
$15: General Admission
$10: Students, Under 30s & Seniors

I heard about Kickstarter just a few weeks ago by word of mouth. It’s a fundraising website that works like an online pledge drive for creative projects. Artists are using the site to fund album recordings, independent film and video game production, book publication, liscensing costs, travel expenses and other art projects. I think this site has a lot of potential and it’s been cool to see it mentioned more and more on the web the past few weeks. Most projects need between $1000-$10000 to become reality. Prohibitive for many individuals; but with the help of a hundred or so backers chipping in the goals are being met.  Kickstarter is there to bridge that gap between the dreamers and their benefactors.

For the past two years, I’ve published a free comics newspaper called Diamond Comics which I distribute through local coffee shops, bars, record shops and other cool businesses around town. Basically the same places where you might’ve found a copy of Arthur. Each issue would generally lose a little money, which I would write off as an advertising cost. But if this thing was sustainable I could afford to do it more often and put out new issues on a regular basis.

With the Kickstarter model I set the monetary goal and the deadline that we need to raise the money by. If we don’t hit the goal in the next 40 days, I actually get none of the funds. On one hand the potential for failure was a little intimidating. But I know from experience that the finances of a business are equally cold, hard, and fast, so it’s an accurate model.

Kickstarter suggests that I film a video where I explain my project and also offer different gifts or incentives for the various levels of sponsorship. If you sponsor a recording artist it’s likely you can get your name listed as a “producer” in the credits or even have something personal worked into a song lyric. With Diamond, I’m offering free issues, a printed ‘thank you’ in the next issue, and archival prints of covers from past issues. The video thing actually held me up for a couple weeks after my proposal was approved. Oh yeah, Kickstarter is invite only. Which I originally misinterpreted as something like a Google invite where users would have to invite me. No, you just email Kickstarter with your proposal and an individual responds within a day or two. They seem enthusiastic to have users spread the word about their site which is the right way to do cooperative marketing.

For anyone who’s used a Blogger, Twitter or Vimeo, Kickstarter’s interface is very appealing and easy to use. I set up my bio and profile, put a picture in, attached some links, came up with the incentive rewards, and finally recorded a video of myself talking to put a face to the project. Now the excitement begins as I watch people from all over the world sponsor the project and spread the word with their Facebooks and Twitters. It’s taking all this internet time and energy we normally dump into our computers every day but actually focusing it into tangible real world results. Put your money where your mouse is.

From Profanity Hill:

The truth is the Punk DIY thing is SO SO SO amazing to me. I hate mainstream society in so many ways. Everything I love is usually done by nuts. Sometimes they get accepted like Herge or Carl Barks but most of the time they are just seen as nuts. And they have to do it themselves. I used to feel so self conscious of that, in that typical comic way where you think you suck cause nobody likes you or wants you to be part of their world. But then I realized that is the root of punk, that you can’t “do it right” so you just end up doing it your way.

Dylan with his Grandma

$6 POSTPAID

DIRECT TO YOU FROM THE ARTHUR STORE

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

Arthur No. 1 (cover date Oct 2002). Quarterfold, newsprint, 56 pages, 11X17. Color, one-color, black and white. We printed 70,000 of these suckers somewhere in New Jersey in September 2002 and got ‘em out—free—to the people across North America thanks to every volunteer my partner (Laris Kreslins) and I could find… including Byron Coley’s eldest, who was paid a set fee by his dad to refold several boxes’ worth of Arthur because our genius printer had folded every single copy of the magazine incorrectly. (That printer begged off the Arthur gig two weeks prior to printing our next issue. Thanks, guys.) Art direction by the brilliant designer-motorcyclist-bodysurfer-Bastard Noisenik-outdoors enthusiast W.T. Nelson—a CalArts grad with serious chops who’d put in serious time art directing for Larry and his psychotic underlings at Hustler only to be (of course) unceremoniously dismissed. Bill used self-designed fonts for the mag’s distinctive interior headlines and deks, and pulled photo editor and ad production duties as well, all for a pittance. Epitaph/Anti/Fat Possum bought something like $4,000 of ads, which was the main income for the project—in addition to $6,000 each from Laris and me. (We had credit cards with room then.) Eddie Dean’s beautiful piece on driving through Bacon Hollow selling Fudge Bombs is the real highlight of the issue for me—his text, and the gorgeous color photos, woulda been at home in National Geographic or maybe Harper’s. But here they are, next to Mat Hoffman talking up his BMX injuries (an excerpt from his autobio co-written with Mark Lewman, the ex-Grand Royal Mag [Beastie Boys] chief who generously thought the piece would work well for Arthur’s first issue), along with the photographs by Spike Jonze and others) and some New York literati guy called Daniel Pinchbeck talking up his ayahuasca exploits. Big thanks to Geoff McFetridge, who I’d worked with just a bit at Grand Royal, for coming through with a full-page color illo of Arthur C. Clarke, who we’d expected to be the first in a series of Arthurs to be featured every issue in the mag. (Another Grand Royal refugee involved in Team Arthur from Day Two was adhacker/clotheshorse Jamie Fraser.) Also big thanks to Camille Rose Garcia, who I’d known since our toilage together at Larry Flynt Publications (1996-7) and our time together working for an extremely difficult doofus rich kid on an allowance/magazine called Mean in 1999. For some reason I decided that her painting “Who’s Afraid of the Peppermint Man” would go well with a piece by Joe Carducci on why mass culture sucks, and she let us run it. Still looks good to me. Pretty weird to look back at what Byron & Thurston reviewed—so many artists that became much better known in the following years—as well as at all these old record label ads, and what must be the coolest American Apparel ad ever (”fuck the brands that are fucking the people”), from the period before that guy realized softcore could now be used to peddle underwear. Total time capsule, dudes! Enjoy it. These are gonna be worth something someday.

Contents

THE SOUND OF THE BONE DRILL: An exclusive chapter-length excerpt from The Ride of My Life, BMX madman MAT HOFFMAN’s new autobiography written with Mark Lewman. Photos by Spike Jonze, Steve Giberson and Mike Castillo.

THUS SPRACH PEATZCHES: The crotchtastic electro-dynamo PEACHES, interviewed by indie-rock godstar IAN SVENONIUS. Portrait photos by Pat Graham and Shawn Mortensen.

THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE VINE: An interview by Joseph Durwin with shamanic psychonaut/journalist DANIEL PINCHBECK, author of the just-published Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism. With a piece of color artwork by Alan Moore.

FAMOUS ARTHUR: A rendezvous with ARTHUR C. CLARKE in his Sri Lankan technoasis, by Paul Moody. Full-page one-color illustration by Geoff McFetridge.

DAMSEL IN THE WELL: A frightful fairtytale in prose by DAME DARCY, excerpted from her new collection. Illustrated by the Dame herself.

ICE CREAM FOR CROW: Writer EDDIE DEAN remembers driving an ICE CREAM TRUCK route in mid-’80s summers through the Blue Ridge Mountains. With stunning photos by Dave Brooks.

LIFE AGAINST DEMENTIA: An essay by the legendary JOE CARDUCCI (author, Rock and the Pop Narcotic: Testament for the Electric Church) against the sorry state of contemporary culture. With a painting by Camille Rose Garcia.

One-panel comics by DAVID BERMAN (Silver Jews, poet), including the now-legendary series “Scenes From the First Yes Tour.”

ONE TEXAS BAND, UNDER GOD: A profile of LIFT TO EXPERIENCE, by Jay Babcock with photography by Jason Amos.

An appreciation of EAGLE PENNELL, the late Texan filmmaking maverick whose work inspired Robert Redford to create the Sundance Festival. By Paul Cullum.

ASK NEIL HAMBURGER: America’s funnyman offers his considered counsel.

BULL TONGUE: Underground culture, as surveyed at lengthy by the dynamic duo of Byron Coley & Thurston Moore.

Plus more…

CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE

Most of the real terrorists were killed at the crash site, so the Department of Justice took advantage of aggressive new statutes to give a violent monster named “Free” twenty years of jail for burning down a beautiful young Truck. National discourse about this chain of events was relegated to sloganeering as the recently purchased Fourth Estate parroted the “For Us or against Us” hokum coming from our beloved “leaders”.

The message to The Left was clear: Motherfuckers ain’t up against The Wall no more. A New Dark Age was upon us, complete with thumbscrews and crusaders. So, all the protest kids lost their phone numbers, changed aliases, switched partners and cooped up in different crash pads. Scared. Riots failed to occur where they were guaranteed before and, consequently, tomatoes lost their flavor.

I put my Defend Brooklyn militia project on the back burner. Who knew what a “terrorism czar” was, or what he thought about jingoistic AK 47 t shirts? The Brooklyn we were defending had been overrun, anyway. By people like me, who I hate. It was fucked up.

The profits accrued during those <911 days afforded me the scratch to start looking for a neighborhood with hardwood floors where I could dig in and the copycat hipsters couldn’t follow me to make my rents go up. Queens was too complicated and there were too many honkies in Harlem. The South Bronx had real potential as the place from which to Defend Brooklyn.

The great restructuring of American cities by Robert Moses has rendered the south Bronx into a prep jail. The rate of incarceration was so high that certain surviving elders felt it wise to teach a lethal fighting style to the local youth in order to enable them to stay out of gangs.

It was a good pitch, anyway. Soon “Jail Karate” had a producer and some Swedish television station showed interest. (Films like “Jail Karate” constitute escapism in Sweden because an effective social system has dulled Svenski graffiti, hip hop and street violence to the most boring in the world.)

Jail Karate’s thesis dovetailed nicely with the previous Defend Brooklyn work and helped me define the nature of the resolve worn so readily on so many T-shirts. The clannish atmosphere of the various dojos and the vulgar noblesse oblige of the Bush administration made me want to conjure a serious, violent left-wing militia into existence, if only just to have someone to talk to.

Friends of mine from New Orleans told me about this guy named Jac Currie hacking the “Defend Brooklyn” meme with “Defend New Orleans.” Apparently he was claiming that he was the genius behind the brand that was sweeping the nation.

It didn’t bother me that much as I was busy parsing what it meant to “Defend” a neighborhood with a bunch of Five Percenters and Werner Herzog’s production manager without getting killed. I’d become inured to salon crusties making chippie money off my reverse prole drift since the third weekend.

Jac Currie’s plagiarized “Defend New Orleans” shirt had an old musket which will make a nice paddle the next time they blow the levies. I won’t even bother to crack on the skull-with-mohawk stencil stolen from Manic Panic hair dye kit. I emailed this Jac Currie and told him that I was about to hire a bunch of lawyers to monkeyfuck him if he didn’t quit messing with my Defense Industry project. I figured that would be all it took, as the threat of a righteous copyright litigation had worked on all the other wannabes.

Biters copying my work all over the country proved that I had a nationwide mandate. This spurred me to try and create more complex types of manipulation than just a T shirt. I was going to use my enormous talent as a documenter and a writertarian to subvert the dominant paradigm from within the military industrial entertainment complex, and make tons of money.

My first assignment was a piece on Larry Clark for The Face magazine, from which I quote myself, respectfully, with permission:

You are familiar with Larry Clark’s photography even if you have never perused his seminal photobooks Tulsa(1971) or Teenage lust (1983). Before Larry was a film director he was already ‘the photographer who changed American films and photography.’ The proof is found in the works of Mario Sorrenti, Nick Knight, Terry Richardson, Juergen Teller, Corrine Day, Nan Goldin, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel, Alexie Hay, David Armstrong or Steven Klein (whose work graces the cover of this magazine).

So many photographers have bled Larry’s art for their advertising work that Larry has been implicated as the father of heroin chic. One critic so profoundly misunderstood the situation that he said “Kids” looked like a bad Calvin Klein ad.’ This is why Larry refers to anyone in the industry as “fashion cunts.”

“They got it all wrong. They don’t understand it. I’m documenting real life. They thought it was all about the drugs. They take what I do, use it and make a lot of money at it. My art is personal. I don’t fucking sell clothes. And then some art director goes out and buys a book and says ‘Here it is! This is the next ad campaign!’ Is that supposed to be talent?” Then Larry calls them cunts again.”

It was unnerving to listen to Larry rail about photograpers who’d stolen his style while they took the picture of him, as if Larry hadn’t shot a guy over a poker debt.

At the time, I thought all the outrage was due to Mister Clark’s prison inculcation, as his conversation is peppered with dogmatic rules like “Don’t talk for nobody,” “Get people back” and “Don’t pop off with no antisemitic bullshit.” Plus, it was hard to hate Steven Klein and his boyfriend as they were nice, cute, and didn’t call anybody the “C” word while their assistants made us coffee. They even let Larry pet their great danes.

The plagiarism implicit in mimeo art and sampled music had eroded the ethics of the arts world allowing Larry to be brazenly robbed in more than one format. If you believe a 19-year-old is capable of being the “creator” of a feature film like “Kids” then you might believe Larry Clark made Gummo, pissing him off all over again.

I didn’t know that having someone successfully plagiarize your work is akin to an artistic rape, resulting in a bastard which the artist can neither claim or deny. Or how distracting it is to lay in bed night after night thinking about how you are going to hit somebody in the head with a brick for pissing on your life work.

It wasn’t until I got the first emails accusing me of being the jerk for stealing Jac Currie’s idea that I began to understand the rage.

I was lying in bed, too angry to sleep, realizing that if violence was part of the Defend Brooklyn ouvre then plagiarism of that work demands a violent response. Or else I lose my tough guy rights. I called Jac Currie’s answering machine and called him a fashion cunt and told him I was serious about the lawyers and the monkeyfucking. For some reason I got no return call.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit. The “Defend New Orleans” flag made great video bites for the national news, emblematic of the necessary feel-good story about town pride bringing people together after a racist storm. Someone sent me a link of Jac Currie claiming the Defense Industry as his own on television.

I couldn’t believe it. After all my revolutionary talk and half-assed planning it had been stolen by a shakey-voiced party chaser wearing my name out like a bitch. Then I recognized him. The salon bedhead. The hundred dollar jeans slouched off the ass. I saw him get off the RISD bus. Jac Currie was the very guy we were Defending Brooklyn from! Of course he would be related to that thieving-ass Ellen…

I called some evil people I knew and plotted a trip to The Big Easy.

COME STALK THE STREETS OF NEW ORLEANS IN THE NEXT CHAPTER OF THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY REPORT: ANATOMY OF A BITER

Our next installment in the Arthur Comics series drops…
so click here to check it out!

About Jean Josef Jesus:
Jean Josef Jesus is a comic zine, 30 pages long going on 100. The work will premiere in conjunction with a narrative installation in an exhibition in May 2010 at the ESAD, a school of decorative arts in Strasbourg, France, as part of its graduate degree program in illustration. Six pages from the collection will appear in the next issue of NYCTALOPE.*

About Tristan Pernet:
Tristan Pernet is a French illustrator/graphic designer and one of the founders of French Fourch, a non profit platform for multimedia publishing. You can check out his stuff over here: tristanpernet.com/

*Thanks to Emilie Friedlander for the worthy translation…

]]> http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/03/10/tristan-pernet-jean-josef-jesus-supreme/feed/ 0 http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/03/10/glass-rock-lion-dance-music-to-drink-wine-and-sway-to/ http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/03/10/glass-rock-lion-dance-music-to-drink-wine-and-sway-to/#comments Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:55:02 +0000 Dave Snoobs http://www.arthurmag.com/?p=11763

Stream:

Download: “Lion Dance” — Glass Rock (mp3)

One of ten beauties on Glass Rock’s debut, Tall Firs Meet Soft Location, out now via Ecstatic Peace (more info…).

Last Sunday Arthur Radio embarked on its eighth voyage, this time to the wind-swept deserts of Greece, Morocco, Arizona and beyond… Special guest Robert Damore (aka Bobby Bouzouki) graced the Newtown Radio studio with the warm, nostalgia-inducing sounds of his bouzouki, and even took the time to tell us some of the narratives behind the rebetika (Greek folk songs) that he played during his set.

Before your journey begins, dear listeners, we have the following message to deliver from ye olde writing desk of DJ Hairy Painter…

The sun is here and opens the curtains slowly! It brings the slow glowing dust! It springs the earth out of polar jail, the winds blow the desert sand to make for better traction. If you sit, it will make your hair look sexier! The tectonic plates are shifting all around us, their quakes make the planet spin faster, and change the pitch! If you jump, you can land in buttes, the plateaus, or the Isle of Cyros! Through our earth’s muzak, the winds blow Bobby Bouzouki up to the Arthur radio treehouse for a jaunt upon rebetika mountain. Happy trials!

Stream:

Download: Arthur Radio Voyage #8 with Bobby Bouzouki

This week’s playlist…

[HAIRY PAINTER & IVY MEADOWS LIVE MEDLEY]

Charlie Tweddle – Psychedelic Tears
801 – Tomorrow Never Knows / Sun Araw – Beams
Religious Knives – Luck
Visitations – S/T album, Side B
OCS – Oh, Babe, it Ain’t No Lie
Marika Papagika – The Dervish
Vengopal Chari – Laughing
Master Musicians of Jajouka – Teasing Boujaoud
Charles D. Speer – House of Gold
Omar Souleyman – Atabat (2) and Atabat
Lagu Kebiar – Gamalan Gong
G.U. Hsu – The English Sound Table
Henry Flynt – Echo Rock
Daniel Aliangana – Dada Margaret
Los Jaivas – Cacho
Willie Lane – Deep Space Raid
MV & EE – Anthem of the Cocola Y&T
Tinariwen – Desert Wind

[LIVE PERFORMANCE BY BOBBY BOUZOUKI @ 56:39]

[VISITATION RITES DJ SET]

Peaking Lights – All the Good Songs Have Been Written
Dashiell Heyadat – Fille de l’Hombre
Wilburn Burchette – Contemplation
Lucky Dragons – It’s Me / Restraint
Rhys Chatham – War in Heaven
Sun Araw – Harken Sawshine

Long interview with the author of Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community and Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities.

Days Now Slightly Shorter
http://jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.cfm?release=2010-071
http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601124&sid=aLAUn4Gy92ss
“The earthquake that killed more than 700 people in Chile on Feb. 27 probably shifted the Earth’s axis and shortened the day, a NASA scientist has said. Earthquakes can involve shifting hundreds of kilometers of rock by several meters, changing the distribution of mass on the planet. This affects the Earth’s rotation, said Richard Gross, a geophysicist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who uses a computer model to calculate the effects. “The length of the day should have gotten shorter by 1.26 microseconds (millionths of a second),” Gross said. “It’s what we call the ice-skater effect,” said David Kerridge, head of Earth hazards and systems at the British Geological Survey. “As the ice skater’s going around in a circle, and she pulls her arms in, she gets faster and faster. It’s the same idea with the Earth going around if you change the distribution of mass, the rotation rate changes.” The magnitude 9.1 Sumatran in 2004 that generated an Indian Ocean tsunami shortened the day by 6.8 microseconds and shifted the axis by about 2.3 milliarcseconds, Gross has said.”

(Rotation Affected Much More by Wind)
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-the-earthquake-that-s

Core Flux
http://www.phy6.org/earthmag/dynamos2.htm
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/12/091224-north-pole-magnetic-russia-earth-core.html
“The magnetic north pole moved little from the time scientists first located it in 1831. Then in 1904, the pole began shifting northeastward at a steady pace of about 9 miles (15 kilometers) a year. In 1989 it sped up again, and in 2007 scientists confirmed that the pole is now galloping toward Siberia at 34 to 37 miles (55 to 60 kilometers) a year. A rapidly shifting magnetic pole means that magnetic-field maps need to be updated more often to allow compass users to make the crucial adjustment from magnetic north to true North. Geologists think Earth has a magnetic field because the core is made up of a solid iron center surrounded by rapidly spinning liquid metal. This creates a “dynamo” that drives our magnetic field. Scientists had long suspected that, since the molten core is constantly moving, changes in its magnetism might be affecting the surface location of magnetic north. Nobody knows when another change in the core might pop up elsewhere, sending magnetic north wandering in a new direction.”

Earth’s Inconstant Magnetic Field
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/dynamic/dynamic.html
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/Y2003/29dec_magneticfield.htm
“Every few years, scientist Larry Newitt of the Geological Survey of Canada goes hunting. He grabs his gloves, parka, a fancy compass, hops on a plane and flies out over the Canadian arctic. Not much stirs among the scattered islands and sea ice, but Newitt’s prey is there–always moving, shifting, elusive. His quarry is Earth’s north magnetic pole. Keeping track of the north magnetic pole is Newitt’s job. “We usually go out and check its location once every few years,” he says. “We’ll have to make more trips now that it is moving so quickly.” Earth’s magnetic field is changing in other ways, too: Compass needles in Africa, for instance, are drifting about 1 degree per decade. And globally the magnetic field has weakened 10% since the 19th century. They’ve also learned what happens during a magnetic flip. Reversals take a few thousand years to complete, and during that time–contrary to popular belief–the magnetic field does not vanish. “It just gets more complicated,” says Glatzmaier. Magnetic lines of force near Earth’s surface become twisted and tangled, and magnetic poles pop up in unaccustomed places. A south magnetic pole might emerge over Africa, for instance, or a north pole over Tahiti. Weird. But it’s still a planetary magnetic field, and it still protects us from space radiation and solar storms. And, as a bonus, Tahiti could be a great place to see the Northern Lights…”

North Magnetic Pole Shifting Rapidly Toward Russia
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/12/1215_051215_north_pole.html
“New research shows the pole moving at rapid clip—25 miles (40 kilometers) a year. Over the past century the pole has moved 685 miles (1,100 kilometers) from Arctic Canada toward Siberia, says Joe Stoner, a paleomagnetist at Oregon State. At its current rate the pole could move to Siberia within the next half-century. “It’s moving really fast,” he said. “We’re seeing something that hasn’t happened for at least 500 years.” The shift is likely a normal oscillation of the Earth’s magnetic field, Stoner said, and not the beginning of a flip-flop of the north and south magnetic poles, a phenomenon that last occurred 780,000 years ago. Such reversals have taken place 400 times in the last 330 million years, according to magnetic clues sealed in rocks around the world. Each reversal takes a thousand years or more to complete. “People like to think something special is happening in their lifetimes, but despite the dramatic changes, I don’t see any evidence of it,” Stoner said. “It’s probably just a normal wandering of the pole.” The north magnetic pole shifts constantly, in loops up to 80 kilometers (50 miles) wide each day. The recorded location of the pole is really an average of its daily treks, which are driven by fluctuations in solar radiation. The pole is currently at about 80º north latitude and 104º west longitude, in the Canadian territory of Nunavut.”

Build Yr Own
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=90947943
“The compass has been around since at least the 12th century, but scientists still don’t know exactly how the Earth generates the magnetic field that keeps a compass needle pointing north. But geophysicist Dan Lathrop is trying to find out — by building his own planet. Later this year he plans to fill it with molten metal and set the whole 26-ton ball spinning. At top speed the equator will whirl by at 80 miles an hour. “It was a little scary the first time we spun it up,” he says. Lathrop figures it can’t be too hard to get a magnetic field — after all, most planets in our solar system have one. But while nature has an easy time making magnetic fields, scientists do not. This is Lathrop’s third attempt.

If you could dig a deep hole, about 2,000 miles down, you would hit the outer core, which is probably made of liquid iron. That iron can conduct electricity. And if it flows in the right way, it can turn the Earth into what scientists call a dynamo, generating a self-sustaining magnetic field — in Earth’s case, producing one pole up in Canada and another down in Antarctica. Iron only melts at high temperatures, though, so Lathrop’s team will fill his sphere with a different metal — sodium. Sodium becomes liquid at stovetop temperatures and conducts electricity well, but it’s flammable. A sodium fire can’t just be put out with water. Water can actually make things worse — so Lathrop’s team has disabled the sprinkler system…”

1. Whatever generation it is now of the St. Marks Poetry Project New York School is beyond us, we stopped counting as soon as we saw Anselm Berrigan running the joint, remembering him as a kid banging around the folding chairs at the Project really not that long ago. Time flies in real time and in poet time and the last decade of young poets around that scene has been consistently engaging, though maybe exuding a transitional character that left us waiting for some kind of sick throw down. A recent publication that kind of comes very close to this is Mum Halo by New York City poet John Coletti, published by Rust Buckle Books. Coletti’s a pal of the true hearts writing, ruminating and starving around the historical churchyard on 2nd Ave and 9th street but keeps a slow and low profile. So when Anselm handed us this book we were curious, and when ripping through its pages we were left both stoned-brained and speed-slapped. Here is writing that takes the economy of word-mythos line play and evokes it with charm, humor and street sophistication. Check this out:

Opens Slowly

Because you’re patient
helping world being
less injured in it
pull up skirt hard inside
simple folding
burnt my finger
putting you out

Killer, here’s another:

Truce

Like to complicate my life no I don’t
sleep all day full pail &
feather your hair grinding sea
for Texas decades, sure
I might be a fuck-up
awesome fuck-up

2. The recent Jack Rose release party in Philly felt pretty cathartic for a bunch of the people who attended and it also kinda highlighted the wide breadth of style-glumph that is currently heralded as volk.

There is, of course, Jack’s own new album, Luck in the Valley (Thrill Jockey), which is a magnificent precis of his career, ranging from long raga fantasias to clackety neo-rags and stomps with Harmonica Dan, D. Charles Speer and other fellow travelers. The beauty and ease of his playing is something we will hold as a treasured memory as long as we live.

Jack’s long-time riding partner Glenn Jones also has a brilliant new album called Barbecue Bob in Fishtown (Strange Attractors Audio House), which is his best blast yet. Soloing on both guitar and banjo, Glenn’s playing has a precision and formal mastery that is jaw-dropping and so wide-ranging it’s incredible. And it’s definitely worth getting the LP version, since there’s a visual tribute contained to Muddy Waters’ Electric Mud album that is sure to crack up any knowledgeable collectors out there. I just hope he gets around to recording the Stockhausen music box pieces he’s been ruminating on for last decade or two. That would be a total gas.

One of the obsessive fanboy strands we’ve shared with Glenn over the years is the immortal Michael Hurley, and he has a smoking new LP as well. Ida Con Snock (Gnomonsong) was recorded over the course of a few years and features a mic of new & old material (as has been Hurley’s wont for a good long while.) What’s different and extremely special here is that he’s backed by the young Brooklyn folk-rock band, Ida, and also the great Tara Jane O’Neil. The gang really provides Hurley with the best backing band he’s had since Have Moicy! They usually hang back, only moving forward when it’s really appropriate, and the results are solid and as satisfying as a spliff, a jug and a warm fireplace. Hurley has the capacity to sound timeless, and he’s in rare form here, doing songs as transcendent as “Wildegeeses” and as boy howdy as “Ragg Mopp.” A massive favorite for all seasons.

Which reminds me of a show we put on in 2002 or so, where Hurley was backed on some numbers by the Philly band, Espers. That was a corker, as is Espers’ new LP, III (Drag City). Someone from the band told me they felt like this album was a holding-pattern in comparison to earlier work, but we sure don’t hear it. The CD has been stuck in the car stereo a lot lately, and the blend of Anglo-style female vocals (this time more like Celia Humpries—from the Trees—and Sandy Denny) and the male ones (which remind us of nothing so much the actually great—we swear—soft-rock of Mark-Almond and Sweet Thursday) is so fine. And the whole thing is laced with shots of guitar so goddamn psych you’ll swear they’re Japanese. But they aren’t. They’re just great.

Lastly in this category (for now) comes Peter Stampfel’s long-overdue Dook of the Beatniks (Pietystreet Files and Archaic Media). Stampfel, of course, as half of the original Holy Modal Rounders has a pretty legitimate claim to being the founding father of the whole psych-volk shebang, so what does he do? Why he perversely records a rock & roll album with Mark Bingham producing. And it’s great, naturally—c’mon, nobody sings a song quite as crazily as Stampfel does—and contains everything from covers of obscure Johnny Cash b-sides to Sam Shepard’s “Take a Message to Omie” (Shepard was in the Rounders for a while too) and various other great damn tunes. It’s really nice that Stampfel allowed himself to take the lead on all the vocals here (something he never did in the Bottlecaps or the Rounders) and the results are extremely uplifting. You have to go online to read the fucking liner notes (similar to one of those Adelphi Rounders albums where you had to write the label to get ‘em), but they’re typically fine and worth the effort. This still ain’t the exact Stampfel album we’re waiting for—back in the ’80s Ira Kaplan tried to strong-arm Peter into doing a solo LP with just voice and fiddle, and that’s the one we’re still holding our breath about. But this one’s a riot. And the cover pic of young beat Pete is wild. But hey—what happened to that album where he was gonna record a song from each year of the 20th Century? That’s due, too. Shake a leg, mofo.

3. Some superior communal and loose-tongue drone by Your Drugs My Money, a collective of peeps from all over the usa and one copenhagenite. They wrapped their heads together a couple years back in Portland and ran tape and it is deep wind-charmed fluidity, both sweet and raw. The session exists on a split tape released by oms/b tapes with Les Aus, two freaks from Barcelona who’ve been making records etc. for a while. Death trip momma Lydia Lunch shows up to intone on a track and the earth cracks open and cream gushes.

4. As it so often does, the Christmas season brought an avalanche of books about the Velvet Underground. Well, maybe not an avalanche, but THREE. And that seems like a lot for band that lost its leader (Lou Reed) 40 years ago, But we don’t wanna complain. ‘Cause the best thing is that whenever a buncha new books come out, it means there’ll be some pics we’ve never seen before. And it’s hard to think of a band that looked as consistently cool as the Velvets. The three are all by scribes we know, and each has a take somewhat reflective of author’s personality.

A Walk on the Wild Side author Jim DeRogatis

The first and most general one is A Walk on the Wild Side by Jim DeRogatis (Voyageur Press). Jim’s best known for daily newspaper work and his serviceable bio of Lester Bangs. His chief function as a rock scribe seems to be restating consensual realities, and so it is here. I mean, the book’s text is a solid introduction, but this is an intro that’s been made many times before. The volume’s raison d’etre, one assumes, is the new visuals. And it’s true—the pics look great (even though the most surprising ones now show up elsewhere as well), but the text is somewhat bland and the stuff about later solo work doesn’t carry the same charge. Still, a worthwhile filer. The Velvet Underground: New York Art by Johan Kugelberg (Rizzoli) is an outgrowth of the art catalog he did that we wrote about a couple of years ago. New York Art is a gorgeously printed, obsessive’s guide to the explosive confluence of Warhol’s scene and the Velvets. If you want a coffee-table Velvets book, this is the one to own. The text pieces are solid (an interview with both Lou and Maureen; random pieces by Bangs and Meltzer; memoirs from Rob Norris, Sterling and others) and the illustrations are pretty mind-bending. Very over-the-top, but wildly cool. White Light/White Heat (Jaw Bone Press) by Richie Unterberger: this one goes beyond obsession. It’s a day-by-day tracking of everything known about the band and their fellow travelers. And it is exhaustive. Richie has even dug up some images that eluded DeRogo and Johan, but the meat of this book is information overload. It’s the kind of book that can keep your ass glued to the toilet for days at a time. So don’t keep your copy in the bathroom. Might be hazardous to your very own ass health! Amazing work.

5. Caldera Lakes is Eva Aguila and Brittany Gould, two Los Angeles women who are displacing the Ladies of The Canyon mantle of Joni Mitchell by taking that songbird’s searching heart and massaging it against an amplified key grinder. And it is seriously killer. With a clutch of releases on Blackest Rainbow, Deathbomb Arc and 905they have proven to be one of the most arresting and savage femme noise units creepy-crawling the planet. Their latest self-titled tape on Accidie is as great as anything they’ve done, if not the greatest. Essential mayhem.

6. There are pretty many great jazz reissues and retrievals every year. People stumble over some crazy ass shit and we are goddamn happy when they deign to bring it to our attention. But it’s also fun to revisit old friends who’ve lingered in the shadows of our record collections for too long. So it was a sweet feeling to get a grey-area reissue of The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, an LP that originally appeared on John Fahey’s Takoma label in 1967. Asked about it, Fahey would only say, “That was ED Denson’s idea!” But Nothing at this time was a Berkeley fixture and was known for wild alto sax improvisations as well as the huge book of writing and art he was always working on. Well, Charlie passed away a couple of years ago, and he recorded a bunch of interesting stuff that will hopefully see wide distribution one of these days, but this album is his first and it is a masterpiece of free improv—sax and percussion, unbridled from formal constrictions, allowed to weasel around like electrified rats. People have occasionally decried this LP in the same terms they use for Beefheart’s soprano playing (”that’s not playing—that’s just breathing!”), but we say “Fuck You,” to those who would quibble over such outmoded concepts. As Duke Ellington so famously said, “If it sounds good, it is good.” You are so right, Duke. And this Charlie Nothing album sounds GREAT.

7. Kryssi Battalene is a New Haven experimental angel who channels the sound of cosmic snowbirds through the physical friction of ferrous oxide tape against smoldering tapeheads. She also plays an astoundingly wicked guitar both traditionally and out of this world. We first saw her perform as a duo with Danny Moore in the amazing Heaven People, since disbanded, and she has been currently soloing every once in a while under the name Colorguard. She’s recorded a few weird cassettes handed off at gigs but thank the long red hair mystic Heath Moerland of Fag Tapes for releasing Shared Planet, a fine premier for this most awesome of wild improv enchantress.

8. Excellent to be able to screen Shout Factory’s new, super clean DVD of the great American International teenage rock & roll spectacular, The T.A.M.I. Show. The older of us actually saw this screamfest at a movie theater when it came out in ‘64, and it was amazing. The weirdest part of it may be the soundtrack, which has a persistent teen-scream huzz which (from the look of the crowd) is something that was tacked on to provide extra energy or somesuch. But the film doesn’t need it. Between the gyrations of the go-go girls (including Teri Garr and Tosi Basil back when they were part of Wallace Berman’s circle), the wild performances of the musicians (James Brown, the Stones, the Barbarians, Chuck Berry, etc.) and goofy MCing by the superb surf duo, Jan & Dean (the first group whose records I collected seriously). It is an insane blend and a testament to the heterogeneity of the early ’60s R&R experience, when the underground and commercial scenes were virtually interchangeable (apart from the creepy singers pushed by publishers and producers). This was shot at the Santa Monica Civic, and the tickets were given away free to local high schools. What a bonus fucking day that must’ve been.

9. One of the great small press poetry publishers, O Books, out of Oakland CA, issued in 1989 the first English translation of It Then, a book of poems by the late French poet Danielle Collobert. Collobert is little known outside the rabid circle of enthusiasts for her minimalist, self erasing style, but she has an intriguing history. Born in 1940, she published her first book of poems, Chant de Guerres (Song of Wars), in 1960, then hunted down every extant copy and destroyed them.

She became a political activist involved with publishing the Revolution Africaine newsletter. She published the Raymond Queneau-championed book Muerte (Murder) in 1964, traveled extensively, wrote and performed radio plays, published Il Donc (It Then) in 1976, and committed suicide in her hotel room in Paris the night before her birthday July 24, 1978. Collobert possessed a dark and romantic visage, especially evident when one notices her jacket photo with its downward gaze and the sensual sadness of her beauty. Her work astounds, moving across the page with a sonance both velvet and machine-gun like. The translation allows us to access her meaning, but the poetry here is compromised by not hearing the sound of the writer’s language. Even so, the thought process, the artistry of the trajectory, comes clear—and it is not always pretty. In fact it can be pretty frightening, detailing emotional negotiations with the poison of inhumanity as well as the living psychology of being female, indeed being REAL.

An excerpt:

I

It – flows – it bangs itself – slammed into walls – it picks itself up – stamps feet – it doesn’t go far – four steps to the left – new wall – it extends its arms – leans – leans hard – rubs its head – again – harder – forehead – there – the forehead – hurts – rubs harder – becomes inflamed – not the forehead – from within – cries

good start for the pain – head between arms – forehead against wall – and rubbing – skin breaks open a little – not enough – ooh the pain – there it is – feet kicking the wall down low – go on – with the toes – striking hard – thrashing – nothing to be done – doesn’t subside – never will subside – the rage – the pain – cries – hits with flat hands – dull noise – a cry – here a cry – no gasp – a little above a gasp – in shrillness – here it comes – collects at the back of the throat – what’s going to come out – still below the pain – not enough

sobs shaken – saliva at lips’ edge – bitter taste – slides a little towards the corner – nose smashing – lips – the lips twisted sideways – pulled back to the gums – moistening the wall – eyes closed – stomach and chest flattened – unsticks – comes back harder – sharp impact of shoulders – unsticks – comes back again with elbows with knees – bangs fists – fists’ backs – to the bone – starts over – skin reddens – rips at last – it falls – doubled up – dragging arms stretched along the wall – kept vertical by ends of fingernails – it collapses – impact of back – head rings on wooden floor – it pushes up onto its elbow – drags along the wall – reaches hung-up coat – hangs onto – hoists itself – buries its head in the wool – grabs the arms – holds the end of the sleeves tight – overlaps them around neck – expecting softness – but no – squeezes hard – chokes – coughs into tears – chokes – lets go – hangs onto cloth – pulls hard to rip – rips with all its strength – tears pieces with its teeth – spits – chokes – arms fall back down – sinks down – slips onto the ground

a body there – practicing pain – as if it hadn’t had enough of this suffering – at each moment – in floods – in vast wave – trying pathetically to practice it

body striking – disfiguring its limbs with the too full pain – which body sudden empty – which violence against – about empty – pain congealed at last – wanting to reach it to set it once and for all – to keep it there motionless – or set it down in front of it – itself – to make it really visible – in its infinitely numerous images – unceasingly

a body there – no – that body there – the one banging its face against the wall – maybe – no

walls fictive also – unnecessary walls – no – only to see from the place of the present invisible – here – facing the stripped body – arms motionless yet sweeping around in space without meeting anything to lean on – temporary connection – just for an instant – to slow the breathing down – slow down the beating – to quiet down – this body seeking the place – the hollow in which to melt back down again – heat ruptured – and cold of the world around – its place or position unsure to inscribe against the lack – the shocks of the day

(copyright © 2002 O Books)

It Then is available again through Small Press Distribution, a fantastic source for small press lit.

10. So many boss records floating through here, really have to just randomize & roll. Talk Normal’s debut full-length, Sugarland (Rare Book Room) is a blazing extension of their earlier EPs. Their basic heft (UK ‘78 DIY/No Wave squall) remains in places, but it is swamped by a new, venomous psychedelic thrust mixed with a post-scum instrumental chiming that is ridiculously effective. And their Roxy Music cover is as perfectly imagined as anything you’ve ever heard.

Then there’s the new album by Pete Nolan’s main non-Magik Markers project, Spectre Folk. Their second LP is called Compass, Blanket, Lantern, Mojo (Arbitrary Signs), which I suppose are the four main points on Pete’s aesthetic compass. Less massed and grueling than the Markers, this band’s sound is far more ramblesome and loosely psychedelic. Largely instrumental and as low-key as it is wasted, the LP wiggles beautifully from the instant it hits yr veins.

One of last year’s most profoundly underrated LPs was definitely Bats in the Dead Trees Parts I-IV (Lost Treasure of the Underworld) by Columbus, Ohio’s Cheater Slicks. This superb band—once based in Boston—has been churning brilliantly for a couple of decades now, and has created some of the world’s most tasty garage raunch in the process. Here they take the challenge and drop structure for an album’s worth of howling free-rock improv, and it sounds so fucking perfect, I just hope a whole lot of garage dudes/dudettes decide now’s the time to put up their own dukes and just LET ONE FLY. Would make for a lotta totally ginchy listening! Thank you, Cheater Slicks.

One band that was born in the land that form forgot was Detroit’s Destroy All Monsters. And luckily for us, Cary Loren has whipped out some expanded jams first presented in edited form in the 1974-1976 3CD box, and smeared them across a glorious slab of vinyl called Double Sextet (The End Is Here/Compound Annex). Yow. Only 500 pressed of this 33-minute chunk of free-form savagery, recorded in 1975, and it’s an instant classic.

Also instantaneous is the garage-vom-darkness of the long-lost LP by Michael & the Mumbles (De Stijl), a ‘66 midwest session led by the teenaged Michael Yonkers. The band’s sound contains elements of frat-romp, folk-rock and pure-garage-fuzz, but the blend is definitely tentative and the sound quality is on a par with Justice albums of the era. Very cool, but only essential if you’re already a head. Which we are. But was this actually released at the time? We’d never even heard rumors of its existence. What the fuh?

Last brain-fugger this time out will have to be Major Stars‘ Return to Form (Drag City). We think it’s their second for the label, but our Drag City service is too spotty to be certain (hint hint). Regardless, we have loved this band’s core (Wayne, Kate and Tom) through decades and every combo mutation they’ve fronted. The Major Stars express more explosive improv gush here than they’ve done on some other LPs (they sometimes feel more like a live band than a studio one, which’s the opposite of some of their precursors), but the balance—as always—in the Major Stars rests on the balance of the instrumental frontline’s grotesque sonic overload and the massed rock-drive of the other players & singers. Sounds fucking incredible this time out (yin/yang energy up the ass), and the cover art by Bill Nace is as beautiful as a foot.

Alright. Gotta get this posted.

If you want some aktion, please send two (2) identical copies of yr object (archaic formats always appreciated) to:

Bull Tongue
PO Box 627
Northampton MA
01061
USA

With the slogan We Are The Crisis, California’s public and private universities, college and community college campuses are experiencing a mass wave of radicalism and revolutionary heat unseen in like forever. With whole academic departments and unions acting in solidarity with occupiers and strikers, the planned actions for tomorrow (March 4th) are gonna be interesting to say the least.

Get hip to the goings on in your area, how you can support the struggle, and the underlying issues at stake here.

Occupy Everything

Anti-Capital Project

In the Golden State with massive public sector cutbacks all ready in effect and more looming, with privatization schemes afoot in many cities and municipalities, with contract labor unemployment and under-employment the norm, with incessant rise in fees and costs, with stagnation and cons in Washington and Sacramento, the future has all ready slipped away. Now’s the time to act.

OCCUPY EVERYTHING

Stream:

Download: Arthur Radio 2-28-2010

This week’s playlist…

Doug Mesner – Good and Bad UFOs
The Electric Prunes – Holy Are You / Clara Rockmore – Vocalise
Baby Grandmothers – Somebody’s Calling My Name
Ivy Receptor – Solar Flare In
Roland P. Young – Curls
James Ferraro – Blacktop Tumble Weed / Headlines (Access Hollywood)
Axolotl – Bonds II (Excerpt)
Growing – Innit
Chmmr When Agitated – Epsilon
Salem – Red Lights
Jah Division – Dub Disorder
Lee “Scratch” Perry – Underground
Men’s Recovery Project – Normal Man
Vibracathedral Orchestra – Wearing Quid Frock
Frank O’Hara – Ode To Joy
Tone-Float Organization – Tone Float
Mick Jagger – Invocation of my Demon Brother
Tart – The Rabbits of Magtarau Pt. 2
Kwaku Baah & Ganoua – Trance
Saddar Bazaar – Sukoon
Amen Dunes – Diane
LSD March – Empty Rubius Red
Michael Bloomfield – Gonna Need Somebody On My Bond
Forest Swords – Hoylake Misst
Congregacion – Arrebol

From the “Radio Unnameable” documentary Kickstarter page…

THE STORY Radio Unnameable is a documentary film about influential radio personality Bob Fass who revolutionized the FM airwaves by developing a patchwork of music, politics, comedy and reports from the street, effectively creating free form radio as we know it today. And for nearly 50 years, Fass has been heard at midnight on New York City listener-sponsored station WBAI. Radio Unnameable documents Fass’s eventful and controversial career, his involvement with some of the most gripping cultural movements of our time, while placing his story in a larger context of the struggle to keep free expression on the dial.

HOW FAR ALONG ARE WE?
We started shooting in Spring 2007 and are about to begin editing the film. Our goal is to finish by the end of 2010 then premiere at a major film festival in 2011.

WHY PLEDGE? WHAT WE NEED.
For the most part, we have been self-financing the film over the past few years. In order to meet our deadline to finish the project, we need your support…

Film for the title track off the gorgeous new Enumclaw record, Opening of the Dawn. Streaming album preview, limited edition vinyl and mp3 downloads: Honeymoon Music

film still from “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Pali Kashi

Charlie Horse Gallery presents:

Time Tunnel

Curated by Pali Kashi

Mira Billotte
John Brattin
Eric Copeland
Jeff Davis
Spencer Herbst
Pali Kashi
James Kendi
Adam Marnie
Keith McCulloch
Rich Porter
Leif Ritchey
Arik Roper
Francine Spiegel
Ruby Sky Stiler

The Large Hadron Collider is the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator, and lies in a tunnel 175 meters beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Physicists hope that the LHC will help answer the most fundamental questions in physics, concerning the basic laws governing the deep structure of space and time.
–Brian Greene reporting for The New York Times

“Time Tunnel” proposes a collision of art-making traditions with the uncertainty of time and space. The collective unconscious is infused with ritual and mysticism, and has become dislodged and reinterpreted. The reformed amalgam of paint, wax, clay, sand, and plaster that is presented here are artifacts of this convergence. Totem poles are now made of monster masks, images of prairie women have paint splattered on them, Roman relics are fractured, sand mandalas are blurred, and our spirit animals have been unleashed into the wild.

Mira Billotte is an artist and musician (White Magic) interested in the “Music of the Spheres”; the belief that the planets of the solar system and stars beyond each create a tone in perfect harmony. Mira’s installations and sand mandalas reference transcendental rituals practiced throughout time.

John Brattin is a multi-media artist who uses sculpture, drawing, and painting to further inform his personal stories and myths which are eventually made into short films. He is currently working on a western.

Eric Copeland’s collages are visual remnants of his pondering of the moon, phallices, faces, and piles of trash. His abstracted compositions use repetition and disjunction much like the music he is known for making.

Jeff Davis’s two-dimensional work usually takes on “mysteriously ceremonial and often orgiastic configurations”. His totem-like structures are made from casting rubber halloween masks with multi-colored wax.

Spencer Herbst’s dadaist videos are a microscopic look into our everyday surroundings. His magnification of objects strewn about his apartment, salt crystals lying on a countertop, and wood grain in the floorboards are examined so closely that they take on an other-worldly reality.

Pali Kashi’s work presents the natural world through the power symbol of the triangle, which grants the viewer a new kind of portal into frozen moments of time.

James Kendi’s photographic process begins with asking people what their spirit animal is. He then creates a mask of that animal and photographs his subjects wearing the mask in the animal’s natural environment.

Adam Marnie is a mixed media artist interested in the sculptural presentation of images. By splicing traditional still life painting with pornography, he can sharply pierce us with flashes of flesh where we are expecting to see stems and roses.

Keith McCulloch’s watercolors meander through a maze-like interior filled with strange yet familiar apparitions.

Rich Porter depicts an array of primordial figures, focusing on the unseen molecular network between our bodies and landscape.

Leif Ritchey is an archaeologist of the sublime accumulations of his everyday surroundings. The objects he extracts from puddles near a sewer or broken glass hidden under a bush are taken back to his studio to be corralled into his futuristic vision.

Arik Roper’s work depicts a fantastical reality filled with mythical warriors, smoky terrain, and decaying skulls. His paintings breathe life into our uncharted history.

Ruby Sky Stiler rummages the storage cellar of historical artifacts to incorporate classic iconography into the context of her own relics. Her fragmented reliefs of ancient Greek and Roman imagery question the potency of sculpting the human form.

Francine Spiegel’s performance, The Curse of the Century Old Egg, which took place at Deitch Projects this last fall, was a literal mish-mosh of the past and present. The eerie happening gathered six women together in a curious ritual of transformation. The repetition of slime-dumping and paint-slinging turned these prairie-esque women, in ruffled regalia, into monstrous beasts over the course of an hour.

Time Tunnel will be on display from March 5, 2010 – March 17, 2010
Opening reception will be from 7-9 pm on Friday, March 5, 2010
Live Performances by Mike Bones and Luke Roberts

Charlie Horse Gallery
28 Marcy Ave
between Metropolitan and Hope
Take L or G train to Union Ave stop, walk down Metropolitan Ave 3 blocks and make a right onto Marcy

A preview for the forthcoming film documentary about psychedelic funk legend Sly Stone. Anticipated to be released in 2010.

Hello cartoon friends,
This marks the beginning of CARTUNE XPREZ’s 2010 future television tour. After a wildly spiraling tour through Europe this past autumn we have returned to North America for more strange loops:
02.26 -Reno, NV – Joe Crowley Theater
02.27 -Oakland, CA – Lobot
02.28 -Los Angeles, CA – The Silent Movie Theater
03.04 -Santa Barbara, CA – Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum
04.03 -Minneapolis, MN – The Soap Factory
04.07 -Chicago, IL – The Nightingale
04.10 -Syracuse, NY – Spark
04.17 -Providence, RI – AS220

This program includes work by (click on each link to see a preview of their work):
Nate Boyce
Martha Colburn
Sebastian Buerkner
Rimas Sakalauskas
Christine Gensheimer
Brandon Blommaert
Jim Trainor
Allison Schulnik
David Daniels
and others…… Adding to the spectacle, Hooliganship will be premiering a new electroluminescent stage show to frame the whole scene.

At the end of this trip I will be heading to Europe to host a series of FUTURE TELEVISION events (the details are still in a dark foggy box). Check cartunexprez.com in the near future for details, or email me! I will be returning to the USA in the mid-summer….. so look for more USA shows to come then!

xo
peter

Get ready for more transpersonal vision and non-locality
as Jesse Moynihan’s GWC continues!
Click to read the new GWC

We are proud to announce the launch of Arthur Comics brought to you by Floating World. Stop by our new oasis, http://www.arthurmag.com/comics, for a leisurely bath in our new interactive format, an exclusive collaboration with GreenerMags / グリーナーマガジン. Enjoy the next eight pages of GWC, followed by all our previous editions in sequence. Check back soon for the full Arthur Comics archive!

About Jesse Moynihan:
Jesse Moynihan self published 2 books in 2005, and ran a strip in the Philadelphia Weekly. He’s been featured in Meathaus and Canicola anthologies. This year, Bodega put out a larger volume of his work called Follow Me. He recently collaborated with Dash Shaw on a strip that will appear in an upcoming issue of Believer Magazine.

Meanwhile Jesse has been plugging away every Thursday on his webcomic, Forming, which is a sprawling account of human origins, transgender aliens, and ripped gods.

]]> http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/27/gwc-part-5-jesse-moynihan-third-eye/feed/ 6 http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/26/faking-the-mars-landing/ http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/26/faking-the-mars-landing/#comments Sat, 27 Feb 2010 01:11:46 +0000 secret santa http://www.arthurmag.com/?p=11700 from : http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2010/02/25/faking-the-mars-landing-pt-3/

Personnel Issue : Not All Pretend Astronauts Equally Serious
http://geekosystem.com/mars-desert-research-station-mdrs/
http://gizmodo.com/5476462/fake-mars-mission-befallen-by-real-drama

“The two-week simulations, including various experiments and equipment tests, take place at the Mars Desert Research Station, located outside Hanksville, Utah. The volunteers who participate are expected to take the matter very seriously—after all, our future Mars colony depends on it. But of course, some pretend Mars astronauts are more dedicated than other pretend Mars astronauts and this is where the trouble starts. After days of snits and snubs, the tension came to a head on February 15. In that day’s report, Commander Vermeulen explains: “…The growing frustration that after 9 days PE, Nora and Margaux are still not able to manage the Hab systems/ standard engineering reporting system (and even don’t consider this as a problem!), exploded during the lunch. The lack of dedication to the mission of some people overloads the others and it had to be spoken out. The problem was already there from the first day, when it came out that some people didn’t prepare anything for the mission, didn’t look at the manuals, which were send to them months ago and didn’t even prepare the tasks for their own role. The accusation into my direction that I didn’t brief enough about the systems was too much. Nicky almost exploded. Arjan reacted double: At one hand he couldn’t stop criticising the incompetence of some others during last week, but during the discussion he acted as if he was from Barcelona (don’t know anything). He has his own mission and own world…” The Commander’s Reports for the last days of the mission, which ended yesterday, obscure the interpersonal conflicts that paralyzed the crew. Only a few bloody noses are referenced, perhaps as physical manifestations of the crew’s frustrations.”

Boredom Practice, Minus Actual Danger
http://newscientist.com/article/dn18025-whats-the-point-of-a-fake-500day-mars-mission.html

“A few aspects cannot be simulated, however. There will be no radiation exposure or zero gravity, and if there is a real emergency during the simulation, volunteers will have the right to get out at any time. A study by Peter Suedfeld of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, argues that such experiments lack some key attributes of real long-haul space flight, such as dangerous voyages through unknown territory and the impossibility of rescue. Suedfeld concludes that mission planners would better identify the psychological stresses likely to be experienced by Mars explorers by reading the diaries of explorers on long expeditions over sea and land in previous centuries. Some behavioural scientists feel Antarctic research stations or nuclear submarines offer better analogies to prolonged space flight. But although Antarctic outposts have the necessary elements of danger, confinement and isolation, they lack the high level of automation found in space flight. Nuclear submarine control rooms are more like spacecraft, but military secrecy puts them off limits for academic research. A better model may be the experience of astronauts aboard space stations orbiting Earth. Their stays have lasted up to 438 days. By and large, space station missions have gone without incident. However, NASA astronauts on a three-month mission to Skylab in 1973 went on strike for a day saying they felt overworked and unsupported by their ground crew. In 1982, two Soviet cosmonauts spent most of a 211-day flight in silence because they got on each other’s nerves. Three years later, a six-month Soviet mission was cut short when a cosmonaut had a nervous breakdown. Sexual harassment could also endanger a mission. In an eight-month space station simulation in 2000, a man twice tried to kiss a woman against her will. As a result, locks were installed between different crew compartments. Astronauts in orbit often express feelings of neglect by ground crews, in part because of lags in communication and perhaps also because of a need by astronauts to take out their frustrations on others. As a result, ground crews as well as astronauts now receive psychological training.”

Alone Time
http://newscientist.com/article/mg18925421.400-in-space-no-one-can-hear-you-scream.html
In space no one else can hear you scream at each other

“You and your fellow inmates are bound to have survived some hair-raising, potentially fatal crises, and everyone’s nerves will be in tatters. The pilot won’t talk to the engineer. And if that geologist looks at you and rolls his eyes one more time, you’ll punch his lights out. Despite the exciting goals, a crewed mission to Mars would mean enormous psychological stress. The centrepiece of each station in the Utah desert and in the outback in Southern Australia, is an 8-metre-wide cylindrical habitat, or hab. Crews of four to six live and work as if they were on Mars, testing reconnaissance robots and collecting rocks in mock spacesuits. During Eggins’s studies, the volunteers completed questionnaires to assess their interactions with others. This revealed that people tend to cluster into cliques that often put their own goals ahead of the whole mission’s objectives. This led to a mishap in a Utah simulation in 2003, when the group split into three teams. One stayed in the hab, and two went out on separate rover trips, returning at about the same time. One person in the second rover damaged his helmet and was theoretically leaking oxygen. “It was obvious to everybody that in theory, if this was really Mars, then this guy would die,” says Eggins. However, the first team insisted on getting into the hab first and told the others to wait their turn, she says: “The first team were not thinking at all in terms of the overall goal of the mission, just of their own rights and the distinct subgroup.” In another Utah simulation last summer, Eggins’s colleague Sheryl Bishop of the University of Texas in Galveston studied the differences between an all-male crew, who lived in the hab for two weeks, and an all-female crew who moved in for the following fortnight. Both teams performed well and were very productive, but they did differ. Personality surveys showed that several of the men scored low on “agreeableness” and “conscientiousness”, and the group’s behaviour echoed this. Every night, the women filed daily reports to mission control by the agreed time. But the men were persistently late. They said they preferred to use the time to explore outside on the buggies.”

Volunteering Not To Leave Earth
http://newscientist.com/article/dn9770

“More than 70 people have volunteered to be confined in a mock mission to Mars – for 520 days. It would be the longest simulation of its kind. The Institute of Medical and Biological Problems (IMBP) in Russia is undertaking the isolation study to learn more about the personal dynamics of long-duration space travel, according to Russian media reports. An actual round-trip mission to Mars could last about 30 months – about twice as long as this simulation. Five people will be eventually be selected for the study. They will spend 250 days on a simulated space trip to Mars. Then, three of the five will leave the mock spaceship for a simulated “landing on Mars” that will last 30 days. The five participants will then embark on a 240-day journey “back to Earth”. They will communicate with mission control by email. The simulations lack some of the appeal that draws people to spaceflight, so researchers may end up studying a different group of people than those who would actually fly on a space mission, he says. The IMBP has tried to minimise this issue by using cosmonauts and astronaut candidates in the past. And they are giving preference in this simulation to applicants who are doctors, biologists and engineers between the ages of 25 and 50. But Musson says a long-duration space mission may take a different type of astronaut than those who go on shorter trips to space. He points out that on the International Space Station and on Russia’s former Mir space station, some of the go-getter astronauts with multiple academic degrees found themselves bored by some of the mundane tasks onboard. Musson says someone with a more laidback personality might be better suited for a long-duration mission to Mars.”

Previously On Spectre :
Faking The Mars Landing
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/04/24/faking-the-mars-landing/
Faking The Mars Landing, pt 2
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2007/07/24/faking-the-mars-landing-pt-2/

(Click here to VIEW LARGE.)

January 28, 2009

THE RECESSION AND HOW TO LIVE THROUGH IT
by Charles Potts

[Arthur editor] Jay Babcock has tempted me with the phrase, “It would be great if you wrote something on this subject,” referring to the subject line of his email, “The recession and how to live through it.”

I’ll take the bait. This is more than a recession. This is going to be a huge depression, with the “recovery” way off in the distance.

A recession, per Christopher Wood, desk chair person for The Economist in Tokyo circa 1995, is “a superabundance of inventory, and can be melted off the shelf; a depression is a superabundance of capacity” and takes much longer to get out of. Remember that it took the bean counters in Wash DC a full year to confirm the economy was in recession, and there’s a lot of over-the-counter chatter about how this recession is already longer than the one in, take your pick: 1976-1980-1991-etc. However, look around you and notice the superabundance of capacity. The industrial hind end of Europe, Japan, the US and China plus all else, can easily produce multiple times more automobiles, cell phones, TVs, computers, refrigerators, et al. than anybody with funds can buy.

This is the fourth major deflationary price collapse in the past 600 years. In the three previous price collapses, there was a long period afterward when prices did not recover their pre-fall levels for decades. Prices last collapsed hard in 1815 after Wellington’s victory over Napoleon at Waterloo; the period from 1815-1896 has been called by economists The Victorian Equilibrium. Many things contributed to this low-level stability, but it is sobering to realize there was scant inflation in the United States during the 19th century. (Inflation, by the by, is not necessarily a bad thing. Inflation simply moves assets around the game board from creditors to debtors; it doesn’t actually destroy anything except purchasing power if all you have is cash. In deflation, which we’re going through now, cash will buy a lot. During inflation it is better to have hard assets that increase in value at least at the same rate as cash.)

Will it take eight decades before the world economy is go-go again?

My reference to 1815 isn’t casual. I just re-read David Hackett Fischer’s The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History. His book is about the three previous big price collapses: in the early 14th century when the Black Death ended the so called “Middle” ages; then, circa 1492, when prices collapsed during the Renaissance, and we encircled ourselves globally; and the aforementioned 1815. What’s so crucial about 1815 is it is also the date and the event that Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West) identifies as the moment Western culture went sideways and into “civilization,” cf. Napoleon at Waterloo. Fischer’s graphs of how the prices rose and fell, can be superimposed one over another. This collapse we’re in, the big one for the rest of our lives, started 20 years ago in Japan in 1989, has hit Argentina and most of Latin America, Russia twice now, and finally the big fish, the rest of Europe and the US. Even Doha is scaling back!

The powers that be with their printing presses will print money and throw it at the wall until enough of it sticks. Some activities will appear to return to normalcy. But you shouldn’t wait for the influx of money to turn deflation into inflation, just as you shouldn’t wait for the bailout to trickle down to you. Unemployment is going to increase and stay high for some time. Challenging moments are upon us.

My advice in hard times would be the same in good times: find something you love to do and master it, become as good as or better at it than anyone has any reason to be. Look up the people who do it really well right now. Study the masters. A musical instrument, a physical activity, painting, movies, art of all kinds, the writing of poetry or other books, whatever makes you feel better about yourself and contributes to our well being. Try enough things until you are satisfied that your fascination with the subject will lead to mastery. Six or eight hours of focused effort a day should suffice. I think this is reasonable advice, coming from an old man who has squandered most of his life by being interested in too many things to master any of them.

We don’t exist as individuals; we exist as the sum total of our relationships. You’ll need all the friends you can get, so be honest, fair and generous in your dealings with other people. Don’t be afraid to ask for help or take unseemly risks. The future does not belong to the risk aversive.

It will be difficult to get rich in the onrushing hard times, but it will be easy to get poor or poorer. Watch where your money goes. Make sure you get good value for it. Avoid buying things you don’t really need. Add value to your activities by putting forth effort. Expect others to do the same.

Spend time with children and if you have children of your own, take the time to understand the world from their point of view.

Assets are things that have to be used up creating additional assets. Almost without exception, your biggest asset is your time. I could have gotten rich teaching a seminar I created called “Seize the Day,” essentially a series of sensory exercises to stimulate your imagination to take over and live your own life. But I preferred life in a small town and didn’t want to see the inside of every airport and convention center in the country.

Maybe it’s time to skip the addictions, look up old friends, or visit long-lost relatives. Life is a gift of such presurpassing value that we sometimes hardly notice. Learn to appreciate simple things, the taste of water, the odor of flowers, the great way gravity contributes to your ability to walk and run.

Some of the things people love to do and do well don’t pay that much: poetry for example. Nobody really gives much of a fuck anymore if you can understand the world and set it to music. You have to feed yourself, and if a family, contribute to their well-being. You may find yourself bearing an overload of dissonance, earning your daily bread and wishing, as the Colorado poet and painter Joe Lothamer said, “I dream of being a janitor.”

Every changed circumstance contains opportunities, which accrue to the first people to recognize them. Since circumstances are in constant flux, there is a steady stream of opportunities. Learn to spot them and make them your own.

Keep the basics in mind. People will still be buying food even if the rest of the consumer economy blows completely up, as it so richly deserves to. Heal the sick, wake the dead, feed the hungry. Food shelter and clothing. Eat slowly and chew your cud well.

Biographical info on Charles Potts.

Previously in Arthur:

“The Dope From Muskogee” by Charles Potts

Muntader al-Zaidi named Arthur Magazine “Man of the Year” 2008; Charles Potts salutes al-Zaidi with new poem, “Balls Out.”

“A Case of Cheney Paranoia” by Charles Potts

Poem in Arthur No. 5

“Spasm Empire” by Charles Potts

CHARLES POTTS & SUNN 0))) AT ARTHURFEST 2005 – video footage

Stream:

Download: “Tell Me Thing” — Dios (mp3)

From the fellas’ new album We Are Dios, available in a large variety of formats from the band via topspin at http://www.wearedios.com/…

The original guerrilla TV pioneers return! See Lily Tomlin, Bill Murray, Steven Spielberg, Abbie Hoffman and a host of other personalities as the TVTV guys invade the 1975 Academy Awards, the Superbowl, presidential conventions and anywhere else they can bring their radical comedy. Join us for a one night only show of rare footage with the original members in person…

March 4, 8:00pm

A Night With TVTV
Co-presented by Arthur Magazine
Buy advance tickets here: $12

Before The Daily Show sent their “reporters” out into the world for satirical newscoverage, before Christopher Guest and This is Spinal Tap utilized cinema verité’s natural deadpan to devastating comic effect, and before American Movie and Heavy Metal Parking Lot popularized the comic documentary form—there was TVTV. Radical, hilarious and influential, “Top Value Television” was an ad hoc collective of documentarians whose pioneering use of portable, low-tech video gear allowed them unprecedented behind-the-scenes access to everything from presidential conventions to the Super Bowl.

Their philosophy,articulated in co-founding member Michael Shamberg’s 1971 manifesto Guerrilla Television (wikipedia, Amazon), was to “demonstrate the potential of decentralized video technology” as a means to break free from the ideological stranglehold broadcast technology had on American culture—forecasting the media free-for-all that’s rapidly becoming our day-to-day lives.

Tonight, the Cinefamily, Cinema Eye and Arthur Magazine celebrate the TVTV spirit, and the top-notch documentary filmmaking they produced, with a panel discussion/reunion of TVTV members, a video “primer” of past works, and a screening of Lord Of The Universe, an expose of 16-year-old Guru Maharaj Ji and “Millennium ‘73,” a three-day national gathering of his followers at the Houston Astrodome.

This evening marks the first time that all principal members of TVTV have been reunited at a retrospective event—do not miss it!

Buy advance tickets here: $12

Above: The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, John Martin

From the Laing Gallery:

Alan Moore & Stephen O’Malley

Simultaneous Conjugation of Four Spirits in a Room: 2010

13 Mar 4 – 4.30pm

For the opening of ‘The Great British Art Debate: Turner Versus Martin,’ AV Festival 10 brings together two great forces in contemporary culture, the graphic novelist Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Watchmen), and musician Stephen O’Malley (Sunn O))), KTL, Gravetemple). Alan Moore will write and perform a new text responding to the energy of the two paintings on show: John Martin’s The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah and Hannibal Crossing the Alps by JMW Turner. Stephen O’Malley will create a new ambient soundscape, sonically melting in the radiance of the paintings.

In 1966 one of the most brilliant American New Wave movie directors—Joseph Strick —made a documentary for the BBC. It was about heckling in the British general election of that year. It is great piece of verite film-making…

In the film you can see both an old Britain and fragments of the new Britain that was emerging side by side in the audiences.

Empire Loyalists shout about the betrayal of Rhodesia and the loss of the last bits of the empire, while in the same audience – towards the end of the film – you can see early examples of British counter-culture. Long hair – but still beatnik, not hippie, fashion – with the slogan “Anarchy – don’t vote, Anarchy don’t vote”…

Read the rest of Curtis’s post and watch the doc here

Edward Abbey: wiki, fansite

Emily Nilsson interviews Croatian born comics artist/musician Dunja Jankovic on the Sparkplug Comics blog.  Click here for the full interview.

What are your main influences as an artist?

In a random order: 60’s and 70’s hairstyles, outsider art in every form, Constructivism, ceramics (even though I’m not making it, but I’d love to), street art and art in the woods, trashy you tube videos, photos from socialistic era, Yugo-nostalgia, thrift stores and flea markets, Kosmoplovci, Komikaze, indigenous art, masks, ritual dances, rituals in general, smoking cigarettes, quitting smoking and then starting smoking again, afghan war rugs, Indian rugs and art in general, music, green architecture, black olives, diving, diving, dying…

Sunday was a very special day for Arthur Radio. We never thought that co-host Hairy Painter would return to Brooklyn after spending a month building Mardi Gras floats and dancing to “sissy bounce” music in Nola, but he surprised us at the station door — out of breath, suitcase in hand — right when we were about to go on. And we never thought we would be able to cram one sound engineer, one baby, five DJs, half a dozen synthesizers, and all six members of Excepter inside the Newtown Radio studio, but somehow we pulled the whole production off without a hitch. Following the release of their new double album Presidence on Paw Tracks last Tuesday, (“Presidence Day observed”), Excepter graced the Arthur airwaves with a set so on point it caused unnoticed seismic shifts beneath a 24-hour techno-rave in Istanbul. Emilie Friedlander (Visitation Rites) engaged Jon Fell Ryan in a wobbly Q&A, and Ivy Meadows and Hairy Painter piled on layer upon layer of elliptical wax to set the scene…

Stream:

Download: Excepter on Arthur Radio 2-21-2010

This week’s playlist…

Dream Magazine Comp – The Radio is Dead
Martin Rev – Island
Medio Mutante – Another Land (played @ 33rpm)
Wicked Witch – Under Your Spell / Liquid Sky – Me and My Rhythm Box
COIL – Where Even The Darkness is Something to See
Sensations’ Fix – Astride a Vibration

[14:51 - LIVE INTERVIEW WITH JFR of EXCEPTER]

Birdsongs of the Mesozoic – Sound Valentine / Shits and Giggles – Spellcaster
Mazing Vids – Cowrie Bells (excerpt)

[32:23 - LIVE SET BY EXCEPTER]

Steve Hillage – Garden of Paradise
In Aeternam Vale – The Next Step
Shits and Giggles – More Valium on the Mellotron

Earth – Teeth of Lions Rule The Divine Part 1 / Moo-lah – terror is Real / Yat-Kha – Kargyram / Erzulie – Ti-jean (Spirits of Life – Haitian Voodoo)
Sounds of The Indian Snake Charmer
Tony Conrad / Genesis P-Orridge
The Congos – Fisherman
Yoko Ono – Mind Train
Voice of the Seven Woods – Fire in my Head
Edgar Broughton Band – Out Demons Out

The Advancement – Stone Folk
Fleetwood Mac – Albatross

This guide was originally published in Arthur No. 9 (March 2004) as one of a set of articles on the MC5 in that issue that ran over several pages (see two of the section’s two-page, 22×17-inch spreads above.) Copies of Arthur No. 9 are available for $25 each (our stock is almost out, that’s why the price is that high) from the Arthur Store…

TEN OUT OF 5
A comprehensive guide to the MC5’s recordings, for the curious, the enthusiast and the hopeless completist by Seth “The Seth Man” Wimpfheimer, James Parker and Ian Svenonius

KICK OUT THE JAMS
(Elektra, 1969)
Amazon

Halloween Night 1968, the Grande Ballroom, Detroit. First night of a two-night stand for locals the MC5, who are being recorded by Elektra Records for their major label debut: a live album. According to the Zenta calendar, which has been devised by religious personages close to the band, it is New Year’s. Zenta will never quite catch on, but the rap of its chief prophet and warm-up man, Brother J.C. Crawford, is ageless: “BROTHERS AND SISTERS! I WANNA SEE A SEA OF HANDS OUT THERE!” etc. The rabble is roused, and the band kicks off: “Ramblin’ Rose,” preposterously overdriven blues-rock, with Wayne Kramer’s falsetto vibrating like a steam-valve. Can you feel it? Hype, beautiful fucking Dionysian hype, is its own kind of electricity, and The Motor City Five, being electricity addicts, were hype kings. To dig the band was almost an act of faith, an investment in the idea that somewhere in this shrouded world there could exist a gang of strobe-lit blue-collar psychosexual freebooters and political daredevils who played like God, lived like pigs, and freed everyone they touched. Crazy? Oh no no no. The MC5 were it. They were IT. And if they weren’t it, you could be certain that nobody else was. They hyped themselves, they hyped each other, they were hyped by their manager John Sinclair and by and by it became the truth—rhetorically inflated and musically bombastic but yes, the truth. They were the only band reckless enough to play to the protesters outside the ‘68 Democratic Convention in Chicago (moments before the baton charge), reckless enough to harness the dynamics of roots rock in the service of a free-jazz mindblow. Nothing they did was effortless; the MC5 weren’t geniuses; they were, by an act of will, supercharged rockstars, and sweating, bellowing exertion is all over Kick Out the Jams, desperate showmanship, an enormous PROJECTION. They come on like vast comedians, trading lines, riffs, yells, leads, calling each other “brother,” yapping “thankyuh! thankyuh!” The scale of the projection unbalances the music—the rhythm section collapses under it, toppling into a general soup of voltage and scuttled drum-fills. At the core of the record is the astonishing triptych of “Come Together,” “Rocket Reducer No. 62 (Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa)” and “Borderline,” which taken in sequence describe the arc of a young man’s lust, from wanting to getting to the complexities of getting OFF. First “Come Together,” which is the volcanic arousal-chant—“build to a rising! Together, yeah, together in the darkness!” (Research undertaken for this writing has revealed that the line I always heard as “Let me sniff it!” is actually “Nipples stiffen.” Oh well.) “Rocket Reducer,” named after a favorite brand of glue, is the fucking song, sheer brainless priapic mastery—“I’m the man for ya bay-beh!” is the chorus—engorged self-belief, satin sleeves ballooning, spangles ablaze, just bashing away rama lama with the balls swinging like trophies, but “Borderline,” inhabits some sort of quivery-quavery threshold state: “Love is true but I just don’t know why/ I-I have to love you so/ You’re movin’ around, pushing me past my borderline’—confusion!—a staggering time signature—failing potency—eddies of the heart—plunging on lost-cocked into desire’s sunset. It breaks down to an uncanny electronic ululation from (I think) Rob Tyner, a long and lonesome “OOOOOOOOOOH…..,” crooned, nearly feminine, before he summons the band again with a panted “Hey!,” a crumping, battering climax ensues, wrung out to the drops, and we settle into the post-coital chug of “Motor City’s Burning.” Er, ten out of ten, motherfucker. —James Parker

BACK IN THE USA
(Atlantic, 1970)
Amazon

A perfect album, Back in the USA is also a riddle of confusion. Partisans hail it either as the group’s liberation from the clutches of White Panther Party activist-manager John Sinclair or as their betrayal/sell-out to market forces, embodied by producer Jon Landau. Really, it’s the Five in disguise as a bubblegum hop group, but still kicking out the jams like primate warrior philosophers. Fatally misunderstood at the time, we now see how vital and intrinsically subversive this album is, and how it could have set off a bloody cultural revolution had it taken its place next to The Archies’ records in America’s playpens as was intended. Sadly, the sophistication of the subterfuge was lost on the group’s hip adherents, who read it as cynicism and abandonment. After all, to Freek America, the MC5 embodied the rock group as guerrilla cadre; a cultural invasion force drawn from the alienated teenage middle-American piss-pot. Ho Chi Mihn with a stratocaster. Their music was James Brown and Blue Cheer working through the revolutionary tracts of Coltrane and Sun Ra. The two guitars traded solos like jazzmen on the stand while the rhythm section mercilessly strafed the room. Meanwhile, their singer intoned Arkestra tone poems, boogie standards and original freek anthems. Their manager released broadsides, outlining their total assault on the culture, in their underground newspaper “Rock N Roll Dope.” Their gigs were high energy orgies of confrontation between freeks, greasers and management. They performed at political riots and teen discos all over Michigan, burning flags while doing “the camel walk” But when Kick Out the Jams, boldly conceived as a live concert postcard in the spirit of James Brown’s breakthrough Live at the Apollo, failed to break on through, the 5 conceived a different approach to their musical revolt.

Employing snot-nosed music critic Jon Landau as producer, the 5 tried to present a more concise, readable version of their highly evolved, multi-faceted, crystalline-sonic ectoplasm. In contrast to the first record’s Technicolor, collaged, bloody free-Jazz /acid-rock freakout, Back in the USA is a highly taut rock ‘n’ roll concept album about, well, youth life in the USA. Landau was a businessman and formalist, concerned with marketing the band as working class saviors of rock. With Back in the USA he tried to draw a circle around the Five’s origins, their fans’ teeny bop circumstance and the promised rebellion/intrinsic paradox of rock ‘n’ roll—all the collective forces which had ultimately transformed the 5 into paragons of communal living and “Rock ‘N’ Roll, Dope, Guns and Fucking in the Streets.” As a critic, Landau was a conservative who could only understand things which had gone before, so he encouraged the group to lose their politics in favor of the raucous themes of early rock. Even so, each song is a furious anthem of rebel celebration: “Human Being Lawnmower,” “American Ruse,” “Call Me Animal,” “Tonight,” “Looking at You“…all performed with lethal economy. Both a joyful rendition of teeny rock and ironical subterfuge, the record was prescient of “punk” in its schizophrenic celebration and condemnation of middle American trash culture. With 11 songs clocking in at under 27 minutes and its post-modern subversion of bubblegum, Back in the USA is The Ramones before the Ramones.

The record begins and ends with Little Richard and Chuck Berry covers respectively, which serve as bookends to the masterwork. This “roots” concept coincided with a general trend in rock n roll at the time toward nostalgia and classicist revision, as exemplified by NRBQ, Zappa’s Ruben and the Jets, The Beatles Get Back project (Let It Be), Dylan’s John Wesley Harding and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed. All of these artists were forsaking the expansive psychedelia typical of their immediately previous work for the old rock, doo wop, blues and country forms which had originally energized them in their formative days. (Sha Na Na, featured at Woodstock, had already jumpstarted the ‘50s fever which would culminate in the next decade with Grease and Happy Days.)

Like Dylan’s electric conversion at Newport, Back in the USA was a two-pronged gamble. Clean and formalistic, it challenged the MC5 acolyte’s limited idea of the group while attempting a more comprehensive conquest over the unconvinced teenybop mass too freaked out by the intensity of their earlier “KICK OUT THE JAMS, MOTHERFUCKERS” attack. After Back in the USA “failed” by industry standards, its producer hawked the template of the album to his next client-Bruce Springsteen, for what would be his 1975 breakthrough album, Born to Run. The formula was the same: working class savior of rock writes Brill Building-style teen anthems celebrating Americana with a post-modern/world weary edge. Even the album covers are nearly identical! Jon Landau, it seems, had one idea. Unfortunately for the Five, neither the freeks nor the greasers were ready for that idea in 1970, let alone the teeny boppers. Now, after decades of critical debate, we can see Back in the USA not as an aberration, but as one part of the MC5’s varied ouvre—a vital facet of one of the most dynamic and influential groups of any age.

Oh, and also it’s really trebly. —Ian Svenonius

HIGH TIME
(Atlantic, 1971)
Amazon

It makes sense. Out of the dialectic of the first two albums—the hyped, throbbing excess of Kick Out the Jams, the trimmed observances of Back in the USA—emerges the synthesis, High Time, in which the MC5 ditch the influences of their father-figures, Sinclair and Landau, and pledge themselves at last to the Goddess. “Sister Anne don’t give a damn about revolution!” is the opening lyrical shot, with the boys flinging aside their seditionary pamphlets and going to their knees before some sort of iron-buttocked Catholic Ur-mama who sneers at them through her wimple, a queen of loving punishment. They have failed to change the world (Back In The USA didn’t even make the top 100), the world indeed has begun to change them, so they come before her humbly. Her gift to the band is discipline—a groove that anchors all their freakishness in solid, primally familiar rock’n’roll. The playing is hot but precise, snappy. And they can’t stop blowing your mind: the twin divining rods of the Smith/Kramer guitars are trained on the old structures and magical spaces are found, little pockets of the future wherein reverbed interludes can occur, fantasias of brass and percussion, and Rob Tyner can ponder the prospect of a “vaccination against castration” while still keeping to verse/chorus/verse. The uniformity of vision means that band members can write their own songs, speak with their own voices as it were, and maintain coherence: everyone but Mike Davis has a song or two, and Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith has four. Politically too the stance has changed—no more the macho righteousness of …Jams, the phallic boom. This new anger is in the key of confusion. Now hooked (according to the rhetoric of the third phase) on “loving awareness,” as opposed to the “defensive awareness” of the old, paranoid days, the 5 open themselves to the general mood, which is a bummer-saturated mess. It’s 1971. But they can’t stop being funky. “Over and Over” is tired, pissed-off, helpless, a litany of futility with Tyner cracking his voice in a merciless high key, but Fred Smith’s quizzical solo takes it somewhere else, empowers it with a kind of lofty bemusement: the cycles of pseudo-revolution may boom and bust, but the 5, says the skewed guitar, will survive. Unfortunately of course they didn’t; the band fell apart before High Time had made a dent. In the words of Dave Marsh, “an album about the future by a band that did not have one,” adrift in time, a little storm of excellence, glimmering with holy possibility.—James Parker

MC5 ARCHIVAL RECORDINGS: An overview by Seth Wimpfheimer
So you already own Kick Out the Jams, Back In the USA and High Time and you want to explore the MC5 further through that vast and sprawling landscape of archival or bootleg releases. It’s a tough back catalogue to wade through as you ask yourself: “How does this one sound?” and “Is the performance good?” or “Do I really NEED another version of ‘Rocket Reducer No. 62’?” and wind up with only one answer: ”AAARRGGHH…”

It IS a daunting task because in the two decades since the 5’s first archival collection was released (1984‘s Babes in Arms), there’s been an inundation of archival MC5 material, now in the region of two dozen albums. Sometimes comprised of complete show live recordings or stitched together from several different sources at once (live recordings, outtakes, demos or early singles), it is hardly an organized body of work, especially with the extraordinary amount of material that overlaps between many of these albums. And as usual with such affairs, the sound quality runs the gamut from excellent to dreadful.

The three albums released while the 5 were together capture the band’s ceaseless evolutions about as much as three stills excerpted from what was their epic film/seven-year rite of passage only could. These archival releases fill in many previously unknown gaps of development, demonstrating that the 5 were a band tirelessly pushing themselves and their music as only the best rock’n’roll does: with defiance, intuition and passion.

This guide seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff by pointing to the location of the best moments that exist within this gargantuan stack of copious releases.

Live: Sturgis, “Dialogue ‘68”, Saginaw and Elsewhere
There are three primary sources of live material that have been recycled over ten (!) albums. They are:

1) Sturgis Armory, Detroit, June 27, 1968
2) The First Unitarian Church in Detroit, September 7-8, 1968 (referred to by its original banner, “Dialogue ‘68”)
3) Saginaw Civic Center, January 1, 1970

Luckily, the following two CDs preempt many lesser titles in both completeness and sound quality: Starship: Live at Sturgis Armory June 1968 and Teenage Lust (live at Saginaw Civic Center, Saginaw, MI: January 1, 1970.) Both are as essential as they are radically different in approach. Starship is an invaluable live document of the band three months prior to Kick Out The Jams that exhibits their “avant-rock” explorations alongside covers of artists ranging from Albert King, Little Richard, The Troggs to James Brown. Teenage Lust is a complete show with good sound displaying the band in good humor as they tear through a variety of material gleaned from the imminently-released Back In The USA album, with far greater energy. A breakneck medley of “Kick Out The Jams”/“Starship”/”Black To Comm” ends it all magnificently.

The “Dialogue ‘68” concert is represented by six tracks spread out over three CDs: Power Trip (“I Put A Spell On You”, “Born Under A Bad Sign”, “I Want You”), American Ruse (“I Believe To My Soul”, “Black To Comm”) and Live Detroit 68/69 (“Come Together” along with its introduction by J.C. Crawford.) Despite its amateur recording, those two nights of “Dialogue ’68” were pretty explosive: all you need to do is listen to “Back To Comm” or the koozedelic slurping/vocal mania of “I Want You” to hear Rob Tyner in one of his most apocalyptic moments of heat, ever, backed by his truly sweaty cohorts giving it all they had…and then some.

Along with the “Dialogue ‘68” tracks, Live Detroit 68/69 incorporates two tracks from Saginaw, although here they are erroneously credited as being from ‘Westfield Highschool, Detroit’ October 1, 1969. (The 5 DID play Westfield High School on that date, but the Westfield High School in question was in New Jersey, not Michigan. The only reason I know is because it’s my hometown, this gig was common knowledge among all the older music fans in the area and there was a tape of the gig in circulation with the following set list: “Ramblin’ Rose,” “High School,” “Tonight,” “Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa,” “It’s A Man’s Man’s Man’s World,” “Teenage Lust,” “Shakin’ Street,” “Let Me Try,” “Looking At You,” “The Human Being Lawnmower” and “Kick Out The Jams”…Which Tyner introduces with a most resounding “Motherfuckers!”)

The companion piece Live 1969/70 is kind of a misnomer—it actually begins with an excellent performance from ‘72 of “Kick Out The Jams” from the West German TV program Musikladen. The rest of this multi-sourced collection is of varying quality. Three tracks unique to this comp, credited to a Grande Ballroom, Detroit performance from ‘69 are “Born Under A Bad Sign,” “I Want You Right Now” and “Shakin’ All Over” while the remaining seven tracks are culled from the Saginaw show.

Clocking in with a running time of over 40 minutes, the Ice Pick Slim CD is just three tracks in length, all from different performances at The Grande Ballroom in ‘68. The album opens with an excellent sound-and-performance of “Motor City Is Burning” from their recorded October 30-31 stand at the Grande (recordings of which would comprise their first album, Kick Out the Jams. Confused yet?), followed by “Ice Pick Slim” and “I’m Mad Like Eldridge Cleaver”: both are extended free-rock workouts informed by avant-garde jazz, blues and soul in very fine quality sound.

The out-of-print vinyl bootleg Live ‘72 Kick Copenhagen (Lawnmower Records) is an audience recording and the last chronological recording extant of the MC5. At this point they were more like the MC2+2 as only Kramer and Sonic were left from the original lineup, backed by Derek Hughes on bass and Ritchie Dharma on drums. Here “Empty Heart” along with rock-bottom chestnuts like “Bo Diddley”, “Let It Rock”, “Gloria” and “Louie, Louie” get the work-out, and although only the twin guitar chassis of the original MC5 vehicle remained, the firing-all-cylinders-at-once stamina that had been fueling the band for the past seven years is maintained.

Motor City Meltdown (Liquid Sky) is one of many releases that re-jig the Saginaw set (with sound quality better than average) as well as adding four tracks from “Dialogue ‘68”—“Come Together,” “I Believe To My Soul,” “I Want You Right Now” and “Black to Comm”—that are all, of course, available elsewhere. Black to Comm has versions of “Ramblin’ Rose” and “I Believe To My Soul” of unknown origin and rough quality sound (this last named is NOT the “Dialogue ‘68” version) while the rest of the album is comprised of live tracks from both the “Dialogue ‘68” and Sturgis Armory gigs. Motor City Is Burning is comprised of live tracks from the Sturgis Armory and Saginaw gigs, with a version of “I Believe To My Soul” available only here and on the Black To Comm comp mentioned above thrown in as for good measure. Receiver’s Looking At You CD is (once again) Saginaw, but the sound quality is far inferior to Teenage Lust. Like Black To Comm and Motor City Is Burning, Greatest Hits Live is a hodgepodge that features the same versions of “I Believe To My Soul” and “Ramblin’ Rose” of unknown location and date while everything else is (naturally) tracks taken from the Sturgis Armory and Saginaw shows. Extended Versions is a mid-priced release from last year that draws from (yup) the Sturgis Armory and Saginaw shows. Sonic Sounds From the Midwest is a vinyl bootleg of the Saginaw show in poor quality.

Although Phun City, Uk is the only CD where live renditions of “Sister Anne” and “Miss X” exist, frustratingly it is also probably the worst sounding recording in the entire canon of amateur MC5 recordings. Reports of this performance by those who witnessed it were and still are universally glowing, so I’m grateful that this document at least exists, because the heat is still in there under a massive scrim of muddy sound and tape hiss. For maniacs and completists only.

Studio: Singles, Outtakes and Other Rarities
Prior to their three major album releases (and their combined three 45s for Elektra and Atlantic), the 5 recorded the singles “I Can Only Give You Everything”/“One Of The Guys” on AMG (1966), “Looking At You”/”Borderline” (1968) on A-2. In ‘69 the AMG single was re-issued with a different B-side, “I Just Don’t Know.” These five tracks are often used as fill-ins on many of these collections, and are all essential listening. All five of these tracks appear together in one place only once—on the long deleted Vintage Years CD (where, incidentally, the other four cuts are live recordings by Rob Tyner, post-MC5. Likewise, the misleadingly MC5-credited, vinyl-only Do It album on Revenge is also comprised of live performances by Tyner plus backing band, and not the original MC5.) You can scoop up four out of five of the early singles sides (“One Of The Guys” is AWOL) on Jungle’s Thunder Express CD, arranged after a six-song performance from France in 1972 recorded live in a studio at Chateau D’Herouville. They churn out a rough-hewn return to roots rock’n’roll that was still nailed down tightly even at this late stage of their career, and the sound is excellent. It also includes one of their last original songs, the title track “Thunder Express.”

Leading the pack on the MC5 archival front is the Alive/Total Energy label. Besides their superior live collections, their ‘66 Breakout! release gathers all three AMG singles tracks in perfect sound alongside various rehearsals and live performances that represent what the 5 sounded like during their early garage punk phase. Alive/Total Energy have also re-released the MC5’s second single on the A-2 label, “Looking At You”/”Borderline” as a vinyl single (after years of bootlegging) and it is ESSENTIAL. If you don’t own a turntable, you need one now in order to fully experience the immense sonic boom that is their first studio release of “Looking At You”: direct from the original master with breathtaking depth (it also made it onto Rhino’s starter compilation The Big Bang: The Best of the MC5, but not so for the tempestuous, bottom heavy B-side, “Borderline”.) Also worthy of investigation on ’66 Breakout! is the inclusion of the earliest performance of “Black To Comm,” the 5’s experimental free-form freak-out centerpiece that even at this stage of the game (1966) was already a sprawlin’, searchin’ and a-groovin’ all over the place improvisation that would only grow in energy and power the more it was performed.

Power Trip was the first MC5 release on Alive/Total Energy and it is just superb: Not only are the performances excellent and sound great but also most of these tracks are unique to this disc only. The three instrumental outtakes from late October/early November ‘70—“The Pledge Song”, “Head Sounds (Part Two)” and an early version of “Skunk (Sonicly Speaking)” named “Power Trip”—are all killer 5 moments as is the extended raw, noised-out improv “I’m Mad Like Eldridge Cleaver” and the previously-mentioned tracks from “Dialogue ‘68” which are trudgeworthy, pre-Kick Out the Jams live assaults played at the same ear-splitting volume but at a fraction of the pace. Highly recommended. (Note: although not credited as such, the version of “Black to Comm” on here is from Saginaw.)

The American Ruse is comprised mainly of Back in the USA studio outtakes with and without vocals, rounded out by “I Believe To My Soul” and the totally out-there ”Black to Comm” from “Dialogue ‘68.” It may not be suitable to throw on during a party, but you can test people’s knowledge of MC5 lyrics with impromptu karaoke sessions. I’m serious: just try to sing along and you will soon have even more respect for Tyner’s vocal prowess as you realize how tightly on a dime he had those lyrics nailed—especially “Teenage Lust.”

Babes in Arms was the very first archival MC5 album, and although in the past 20 years a lot of it has been re-issued with better sound resolution, the alternate take of “Shakin’ Street” and the blaxploitational wah-wah moves of “Gold” (an outtake from the film soundtrack of the same name) have never been available else, AND they still sound great.

Okay. After all this razzmatazz, probably the best place to start is with the recent Human Being Lawnmower: The Baddest and Maddest Of MC5 CD, which collects many of the best moments off previous Total Energy releases along with the best sounding live cover version of Ray Charles’ “I Believe To My Soul” ever, a brilliant sounding “flat mix” of the A-2 version of ‘Borderline” and a poignant Sonic Smith acoustic demo of “Over And Over.“ Rounding it all off is J.C. Crawford’s “What Is Zenta?” and well, what more could you ask for? (Besides the tracks they left off Kick Out the Jams, the pre-Landau run-throughs at Elektra of “Human Being Lawnmower,” “Call Me Animal” and “Teenage Lust,” I mean…)

If you dig “What Is Zenta?”, then Music Is Revolution is a must to check out. Although there is no music, for those with an interest regarding the MC5’s White Panther Party affiliation it is very insightful–it’s 30 spoken-word tracks made in the late ‘60s/early ’70s of White Panther members and associated revolutionaries rapping and so forth. (Contact: Book Beat Gallery, 26010 Greenfield, Oak Park, MI 48237 or thebookbeat.com)

Archival Recordings Discography
* = Recommended

Albums
* ‘66 Breakout! (Total Energy NER3023-2) 1999
* Babes in Arms (ROIR RUSCD8236) 1998
Black to Comm (Receiver RRCD185) 1994
Do It (Revenge MIG5) 1987
Greatest Hits Live (Purple Pyramid CLP0429-2) 1999
* Human Being Lawnmower: The Baddest and Maddest Of MC5 (Total Energy 3032-2) 2002
* Ice Pick Slim (Alive 0008) 1997
Live 1969-70 (NKVD NKVD01) 1991
Live 72 Kick Copenhagen (Lawnmower MOW11) 1990
Live Detroit 68/69 (Revenge MIG8) 1988
Looking at You (Receiver RRCD193) 1994
Motor City Is Burning (Trojan 06076 80213-2) 2001
Motor City Meltdown (Liquid Sky KT005) 1996
Phun City, UK (Sonic SRCD000040) 1996
* Power Trip (Alive CD0005) 1994
Sonic Sounds From the Midwest (Clean Sound CS1014) 1988
* Starship: Live at Sturgis Armory June 1968 (Total Energy NER3018) 1998
* Teenage Lust (Total Energy NER3008) 1996
* The American Ruse (Total Energy NER 2001) 1995
The Big Bang! (Rhino RS79782) 2000
* Thunder Express (Jungle FREUDCD71) 1999
Vintage Years (NKVD NKVD02) 1991
Music Is Revolution (Book Beat) 2000

Singles
* “I Can Only Give You Everything”/“One Of The Guys” (AMG 1001) 1966
** “Looking At You”/“Borderline” (A2 333) 1968 **
* “I Can Only Give You Everything”/“I Just Don’t Know” (AMG 1001) 1969 (reissue with different B-side)

ABOUT OUR GUIDES
Ian Svenonius is the acting chairperson for the Rock N Roll Comintern and an auxiliary member of the group Weird War.

James Parker lives in Boston, Mass., with his wife and son. He wrote Turned On: A Biography of Henry Rollins and once held the position of official astrologer to the Spice Girls Fan Club.

Seth Wimpfheimer is a rock’n'roll writ(h)er. Also known as The Seth Man, he reviews lotsa Rock albums on Julian Cope’s Head Heritage site (headheritage.co.uk) as well as for Cool and Strange Music and New Gandy Dancer magazines. He has so far published two issues of FUZ magazine (copies are available for $8 apiece/$12 for both issues so send cash, or money order to in US dollars to: Seth Wimpfheimer, P.O. Box 1211, Mountainside, NJ 07092-0211.) He also owns three copies of one of the best albums ever made: Alexander Spence’s Oar.

We’ll be posting some articles on the MC5 from Arthur No. 9 shortly. here: TEN OUT OF FIVE.

“If I was the mayor of San Diego, I’d give Lou the key to the city” – Michael Taft, head of the archives of the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

This past weekend the San Diego Union Tribune ran a great feature story about Lou Curtiss, patriarch of the San Diego folk scene known worldwide for his vast knowledge and appreciation of folk, blues, jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, show tunes and a vast inventory of 78 rpm records.  Folk Arts is the home of the Lou Curtiss Sound Library, which comprises over 90,000 hours and 90 years of vintage sound recordings.

Lou hosts Jazz Roots every Sunday night on KSDS 88.3 FM in San Diego. You can listen online at jazz88online.org.  On the 2nd and 4th Tuesdays of each month, Lou hosts a “Singers Circle” at Club Kadan, a pub on the corner of Adams Avenue and 30th Street. Come down and bring your instruments, the pickin’ starts around 6 pm.

Over the course of the past 30 years, Lou has organized or booked over 50 music festivals in San Diego, including the Adams Avenue Street Fair and the Adams Avenue Roots Festival.

Lou also writes a column for the San Diego Troubadour, worth reading to find out about some of the preservation work that is going on to maintain Lou’s library.

Some of my best experiences buying records and learning about music have happened in Lou’s shop.  The history of Folk Arts in San Diego has been carried forward by people like Lou and the community of singers, writers, players and musicians that surround the store.  Plan a journey, I’ve always found something at Lou’s shop unexpected or that I never thought I’d see again.

]]> http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/24/lou-curtiss-folk-arts-rare-records-children-of-america-buy-some-records/feed/ 0 http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/23/serious-gongbath/ http://www.arthurmag.com/2010/02/23/serious-gongbath/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 02:27:16 +0000 Dave Snoobs http://www.arthurmag.com/?p=11674

Via Crystal Vibrations

Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage

February 2 – May 9th

The Howard Gilman Gallery at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

http://www.metmuseum.org

From afterthefallcommuniques.info:

Collecting the major statements from the recent wave of occupations, After the Fall is a love letter to the insurgent students and workers on California campuses. It is intended to spark excitement and discussion and we encourage students and others to use After the Fall to mobilize forces ahead of the March 4th offensive.
• 44 tabloid pages of communiques, texts and photos from across the state
• includes a two color map, timeline and pullout poster

After the Fall: Communiqués from Occupied California is now available as a pdf for download and for viewing on-line at issuu. We have also posted the original conclusion of the publication No Conclusions: When Another World is Unpopular for you to read on-line and repost widely. 10,000 copies of After the Fall, a 44 page compilation of texts that emerged from the struggles on California Campuses in the last months of 2009, were released on Valentine’s day. They have all now been distributed to various sites across California and the world and the stacks that cluttered a living room have dwindled to a few bundles to be handed out locally.

more info: afterthefallcommuniques.info

From March 1, 2010 Newsweek…

…Standing on the hill at dawn, overseeing a team of 40 Kurdish diggers, the German-born archeologist waves a hand over his discovery here, a revolution in the story of human origins. Schmidt has uncovered a vast and beautiful temple complex, a structure so ancient that it may be the very first thing human beings ever built. The site isn’t just old, it redefines old: the temple was built 11,500 years ago—a staggering 7,000 years before the Great Pyramid, and more than 6,000 years before Stonehenge first took shape. The ruins are so early that they predate villages, pottery, domesticated animals, and even agriculture—the first embers of civilization. In fact, Schmidt thinks the temple itself, built after the end of the last Ice Age by hunter-gatherers, became that ember—the spark that launched mankind toward farming, urban life, and all that followed.

Göbekli Tepe—the name in Turkish for “potbelly hill”—lays art and religion squarely at the start of that journey. After a dozen years of patient work, Schmidt has uncovered what he thinks is definitive proof that a huge ceremonial site flourished here, a “Rome of the Ice Age,” as he puts it, where hunter-gatherers met to build a complex religious community. Across the hill, he has found carved and polished circles of stone, with terrazzo flooring and double benches. All the circles feature massive T-shaped pillars that evoke the monoliths of Easter Island…

Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/id/233844

“WE WANT THE WORLD, AND WE WANT IT NOW”

In 1968, after years of self-imposed exile in Europe, the Living Theatre triumphantly returned to America with their theatrical breakthrough “Paradise Now.”

The sensational production, involving group nudity, marijuana smoking, advocacy of a non-violent anarchist revolution, continuous interaction with the audience and something just this side of a full-on public orgy, received attention from those far outside the normal theater-going public.

From The Living Theatre: Art, Exile, and Outrage by John Tytell (Grove Press, 1995):

Doors singer Jim Morrison and poet Michael McClure actively participated in performances of ‘Paradise Now’ at the [San Francisco Bay Area's] Nourse Auditorium…. McClure brought Morrison to visit at [Beat poet/City Light Books founder Lawrence] Ferlinghetti’s office. Julian [Beck, of the Living Theatre} was on and off the telephone to New York, frantically worried about the money to get the troupe back to Europe where engagements has been scheduled. Quietly, Morrison offered to assist with money.

Morrison–who had read Artaud and Ginsberg in college–saw himself as a revolutionary figure. Agreeing that repression was the chief social evil in America and the cause of a general pathology, he was typical of the sectors of support The Living Theatre had received in America. [The Doors'] long improvisational song ‘When the Music’s Over’ proclaims, as in ‘Paradise Now,’ ‘We want the world, and we want it now.’ Morrison had seen every performance in Los Angeles and followed the company up to San Francisco.

“On the day after his visit with McClure, Jim Morrison gave Julian [Beck] $2,500 for the trip home…”

Two years in the making, beautifully assembled with love by Will Swofford, Arthur Magazine’s PARADISE NOW: A Collective Creation of the Living Theatre features a DVD of rare, never-before-distributed films and revolutionary multimedia documents from the production, plus two double-sided posters and a detailed 40-page booklet. This set is worth far more than $29.95, but that’s what we’re charging. We made a single edition of 1,000 in 2008. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

Detailed information on the Paradise Now is available at the Arthur Store:
http://store.arthurmag.com/product/paradise-now

Deforestation in the US from 1620 to 1992
From the English Wikipedia

Source of 1620, 1850, and 1920 maps: William B. Greeley, The Relation of Geography to Timber Supply, Economic Geography, 1925, vol. 1, p. 1-11.

Source of TODAY map: compiled by George Draffan from roadless area map in The Big Outside: A Descriptive Inventory of the Big Wilderness Areas of the United States, by Dave Foreman and Howie Wolke (Harmony Books, 1992).

John Fell Ryan (otherwise known as “JFR” of Excepter) on his ink drawings (shown above – click on view fullscreen to enlarge):

These are all from the Spring of 1998. I was living alone on the corner of Metropolitan and Driggs in Williamsburg, trying to merge cartooning and abstract design with concepts of American Folk mythology and Jungian sex magick. No real art world aim in mind; these were done for reasons of personal development.

Last week on Presidents’ Day, Excepter dropped their new album, “Presidence.” Two days later, a show of drawings by band member JFR came to a close at Fingered Gallery in Bushwick, Brooklyn. In light of these seemingly aligned (and undeniably cosmic) events, Arthur Radio is excited to announce that Excepter will be performing an unbridled freeform transmission, including a live interview session with Emilie Friedlander (Visitation Rites), this Sunday from 4-6pm EST on newtownradio.com. Hairy Painter and Ivy Meadows will be there, and we’re all invited to come along for the ride…

Excepter – “Teleportation: KAL” (Presidence)

“Bishop Beesley, endlessly corrupt gluttonous villain series. Thirsts for power, money, pleasure.” (wikipedia entry on the villain from the Moorcock books)

2008…

February 18, 2010…

2006…

Michael Moorcock (with Arthur editor) at Arthur event at Church of Casper the Friendly Ghost—SXSW, 2005…

Above: Sonny (right) and a Sunset

Stream:

Download: “Lovin’ On An Older Gal” — Sonny & the Sunsets (mp3)

Buy:

There’s something about this song… From an album full of Velvets-on-the-beach singalongs called Tomorrow Is Alright, released late last year by San Francisco-based Sonny & the Sunsets. A run of 500 on vinyl is gone already but CDs are available for pre-order now from the good folks at Soft Abuse.

Sonny & the Sunsets: http://www.myspace.com/sonnythesunsets

Sonny Smith: sonnysmith.com

Subscribe to Arthur’s iTunes Podcast and receive music automatically: click here

Dunbar’s Number
http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/the_web/article6999879.ece
“We may be able to amass 5,000 ‘friends’ on Facebook but humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 actual friendships, a study has found. Robin Dunbar, professor of Evolutionary Anthropology at Oxford University, has conducted research revealing that while social networking sites allow us to maintain more relationships, the number of meaningful friendships is the same as it has been throughout history. Dunbar developed a theory known as “Dunbar’s number” in the 1990s which claimed that the size of our neocortex — the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language — limits us to managing social circles of around 150 friends, no matter how sociable we are. Dunbar derived the limit from studying social groupings in a variety of societies — from neolithic villages to modern office environments. He found that people tended to self-organise in groups of around 150 because social cohesion begins to deteriorate as groups become larger.”

The Social Brain
http://www.commonsenseadvice.com/human_cortex_dunbar.html
“Dunbar has gone through anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up over and over again. For example, he looked at 21 different hunger-gatherer societies around the world and found that the average number of people in each village was 148.4. The same pattern holds true for military organization. Over the years, through trial and error, military planners have arrived at a rule of thumb for the size of a functional fighting unit – 200 men. They have realized that it is quite difficult to make any larger a group than this to function as a unit without complicated hierarchies and rules and regulations and formal measures to insure loyalty and unity within the group. With a group of 150 or so, formalities are not necessary. Behavior can be controlled on the basis of personal loyalties and direct man-to-man contacts. With larger groups, this seems impossible.

Further is the religious group known as the Hutterites, who for hundreds of years, through trial and error, have realized that the maximum size for a colony should be, low and behold, 150 people. They’ve been following this rule for centuries. Every time a colony approaches this number, the colony is divided into two separate colonies. They have found that once a group becomes larger than that, “people become strangers to one another.” At 150, the Hutterites believe, something happens that somehow changes the community seemingly overnight. At 150 the colony with spontaneously begin dividing into smaller “clans.” When this happens a new colony is formed.

Another good example of our hard wired social limits is Gore Associates, a privately held multimillion-dollar company responsible for creating Gore-Tex fabric and all sorts of other high tech computer cables, filter bags, semiconductors, pharmaceutical, and medical products. What is most unique about this company is that each company plant is no larger than 150. When constructing a plant, they put 150 spaces in the parking lot, and when people start parking on the grass, they know it’s time for another plant. Each plant works as a group. There are no bosses. No titles. Salaries are determined collectively. No organization charts, no budgets, no elaborate strategic plans. Wilbert Gore – the late founder of the company, found through trial and error that 150 employees per plant was most ideal. “We found again and again that things get clumsy at a hundred and fifty,” he said.”

A Functional Limit
http://www.liv.ac.uk/researchintelligence/issue17/brainteaser.html
http://radio-weblogs.com/0107127/categories/networksAsTheOrganizationOfTheFuture/2003/02/22.html

Illusion Of Chaos
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/11/noboss.html
http://www.workforce.com/section/09/feature/24/29/22/index.html
“The classic Gore culture began in the basement of the home of Bill Gore, who left DuPont in 1958 to create his own enlightened version of the workplace. Gore built the company upon four core principles–fairness; freedom to encourage others to grow in knowledge, skill and responsibility; ability to honor one’s own commitments; and consultation with others before taking action that could affect the company “below the waterline.” In Gore’s model, associates communicate directly with one another and are accountable to their peers rather than bosses. Ideally, leaders in the company emerge naturally by demonstrating special knowledge, skill or experience –”followship.” Thomas Malone, a professor at MIT and author of The Future of Work, describes Gore as a “miniature democracy. The way you become a manager is by finding people who want to work for you,” Malone says. The $1.84 billion company’s flat organizational structure makes it exceptionally nimble. “If someone has an idea for a new product, they don’t have to go up a hierarchy to find some boss to approve it,” says John Sawyer, chairman of the department of business administration at the University of Delaware. “Instead, they have to find peers in the organization who support the idea and will work with them. That open style of communication allows ideas to come up from the bottom.”

The LA Times reports the slide is still moving. Way to go geology, rock and roll.

http://www.photographarecruiter.com/

We’ve got 50 copies left of Arthur No. 3 (cover date March 2003, pub’d February, 2003). This one’s from the original incarnation (read: best) of Arthur—the pages are gigantic (11×17) and the paper is reasonably high-quality newsprint. Some color, some b/w. We’re selling our remaining stock for $10 each over at the Arthur Store.

Notes on this issue…

Joe Strummer died on December 22, 2002. His death received some notice, of course, but since he’d left us in the period between Thanksgiving and the New Year—when glossy music and culture magazines are basically shut down—real coverage of his passing, and the life that he lived, didn’t happen in the pop culture magazines of record. Big-budget American publications like Rolling Stone, Spin and Blender had already finished their January 2003 issues, so major features couldn’t fit in there without major expense (pulled features, pulped magazines, etc.); and by the time their February 2003 issues rolled around, the news of Joe’s passing would be (to their market-minds) “stale,” and thus to be deserving of only an obligatory page or two. Which is absurd for someone of Joe’s stature, his body of work, and commitment to The Cause.

At Arthur, we decided to pull the cover feature that we had in progress. Working together, with no editorial budget, the budding Arthur gang was able to put together something of substance very quickly, and get it out to the people, for free, in mass quantities (50,000 copies), within weeks of Joe’s passing.

Our wake for Joe Strummer would not have happened without journalist/archivist Kristine McKenna. She had a recent, lengthy (3800 words), and yes, poignant conversation with Joe on tape—a really great conversation, of course (this IS Kristine McKenna, after all) that the LAWeekly had used just a bit from in a feature earlier in the year. Kristine had witnessed The Clash at the top of their game, so she could offer some real historical perspective. And, crucially, Kristine knew that her friend, the L.A. photographer Ann Summa, had a trove of gorgeous photographs of Joe, few of which had ever been published. And Kristine got us permission to reprint a Clash-related page from Slash, the crucial late-’70s underground L.A. magazine. Meanwhile, my old colleague Carter Van Pelt, a reggae enthusiast, offered a new interview about Joe that he conducted with Mikey Dread.

Soon we had reports from all over. People were picking up multiple copies of the magazine and redistributing it. The golden centerfold of Ann Summa photo of Joe (worked on with a great deal of care and attention by Arthur’s brilliant art director, W.T. Nelson) was being torn out of the magazine and posted on record store walls, in dorm rooms, in clubs. There are other strong pieces in this issue—the John Coltrane book excerpt, especially—but it’s Joe’s issue. As it should be.

Here’s how the contents page read:

JOE STRUMMER, 1952-2002

Arthur holds a wake in print for a man who mattered. In addition to stunning photographs by Ann Summa and excerpts of back-in-the-day Clash coverage from Slash magazine, we present reflections on Joe by Kristine McKenna; a lengthy, poignant interview with Joe from 2001 by McKenna; a consideration by Carter Van Pelt of the Clash’s embrace of reggae, featuring insights from Clash collaborator Mikey Dread; and a brief on Joe’s legacy: a forest in the Isle of Skye.

At the height of both his popularity and his artistic powers, JOHN COLTRANE went for something deeper. An exclusive, chapter-length excerpt from A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane’s Signature Album by Ashley Kahn.

The intrepid Gabe Soria connects with every single member of THE POLYPHONIC SPREE, the cheeriest 24-person pop symphony on the planet, in addition to chatting at length with Spree leader Tim DeLaughter about the “c” word, the Spree’s next move, and the sadness that remains. Portrait by Paul Pope.

“ASK JOHN LURIE”: He may be in self-described “hermit mode” but this longtime Lounge Lizard is eager to lend a helping hand to his fellow man. And woman too.

In the work of artist SHIRLEY TSE, plastic aspires to more than Pop. Mimi Zeiger reports.

COMICS by Sammy Harkham, Jordan Crane, Johnny Ryan, Sam Henderson, Marc Bell and Ron Rege Jr.

Byron Coley & Thurston Moore review underground music, film and texts.

And more more more

Arthur No. 3 is available from the Arthur Store.

This past Sunday, Emilie Friedlander (Visitation Rites) joined Ivy Meadows in the depths of the Newtown Radio caverns to celebrate the first day of the Year of the Tiger. Zeljko McMullen of the music/visual/art collective Shinkoyo played us a live set via his solo musical vessel Wish, and we all took a moment to reflect on the dazzlingly multidimensional, many-mirrored, endless maze that is love…

Stream:

Download: Arthur Radio #5: Amor Apocalíptico 2-14-2010

This week’s playlist…

1. Gandalf – Golden Earring
2. The Incredible String Band – Creation
3. Psychic Ills – Meta
4. Conrad Standish – Diamonds, Fur Coat, Champagne
5. Crass – Could This Be Love?
6. Sonic Youth – Creme Brulee
7. Rhys Chatham – A Rite For Sahmain
8. Bryce Hackford and Victor Timofeev – 12€
9. Infinity Window – Internal Compass
10. Run DMT – Ramona
11. Universe – I
12. Led er est – Man With Tree
13. Moon Duo – Dead West
14. Stellar Om Source – The Source Pilot

[LIVE SET BY WISH @ 1:08:33]

15. Excepter – Teleportation LIL
16. Best Coast – Sun was High
17. Los Llamarada – I’m Sorry

Living to 1,000
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aubrey_de_Grey
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/4003063.stm
“This means that all parts of the project should be fully working in mice within just 10 years and we might take only another 10 years to get them all working in humans. When we get these therapies, we will no longer all get frail and decrepit and dependent as we get older, and eventually succumb to the innumerable ghastly progressive diseases of old age. We will still die, of course – from crossing the road carelessly, being bitten by snakes, catching a new flu variant etcetera – but not in the drawn-out way in which most of us die at present. So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage. I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already. It is very complicated, because ageing is. There are seven major types of molecular and cellular damage that eventually become bad for us – including cells being lost without replacement and mutations in our chromosomes. Each of these things is potentially fixable by technology that either already exists or is in active development. The length of life will be much more variable than now, when most people die at a narrow range of ages (65 to 90 or so), because people won’t be getting frailer as time passes. The average age will be in the region of a few thousand years. If you are a reasonably risk-aware teenager today in an affluent, non-violent neighbourhood, you have a risk of dying in the next year of well under one in 1,000, which means that if you stayed that way forever you would have a 50/50 chance of living to over 1,000. And remember, none of that time would be lived in frailty and debility and dependence – you would be youthful, both physically and mentally, right up to the day you mis-time the speed of that oncoming lorry.”

Longevity Escape Velocity
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/degrey07/degrey07_index.html
“The key conclusion of the logic I’ve set out above is that there is a threshold rate of biomedical progress that will allow us to stave off aging indefinitely, and that that rate is implausible for mice but entirely plausible for humans. If we can make rejuvenation therapies work well enough to give us time to make then work better, that will give us enough additional time to make them work better still, which will … you get the idea. This will allow us to escape age-related decline indefinitely, however old we become in purely chronological terms. I think the term “longevity escape velocity” (LEV) sums that up pretty well.”

SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence)
http://www.sens.org/
http://us.cnn.com/video/?/video/international/2009/11/30/vs.clinic.immortality.cnn
http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/strategies_for_engineered_negligible_senescence.cfm

Donate Or Compete
https://www.mfoundation.org/index.php?pagename=mj_donations_donate
http://www.mfoundation.org/?pagename=mj_mprize_how

Negligible Senescence
http://www.agelessanimals.org/
http://www.smart-publications.com/articles/MOM-guerin.php
“There are certain species of rockfish, whales, turtles, and other animals that are known to live for hundreds of years without showing any signs of aging—a phenomenon known to biogerontologists as “negligible senescence.” No one knows for sure how long these animals can live for, but we know that they can live for over two hundred years without showing any observed increase in mortality or any decrease in reproductive capacity due to age. Striking examples are a 109 year old female rockfish that was captured in the wild while swimming around with fertilized eggs, and a hundred-plus year old male whale that was harpooned while having sex.

Q: What is negligible senescence?
Guerin: Basically, this refers to an animal species that doesn’t show any significant signs of aging as it grows older. Unlike humans and most other mammals, there’s no decrease in reproduction after maturity. There’s also no notable increase in mortality rate with age, but that’s a little harder to prove. I’ve been talking with a statistician and he’s asking, how do you know? To do a study of this type would take a couple of hundred years to complete. But compared to us there’s no noted increase in mortality rate. I mean, if you are ninety years old, you’re much more likely to die next year then you are if you’re only twenty years old. But we don’t seem to see any increase in mortality with rockfish and several of these other animals over time.

Q: So we don’t know if these animals are simply aging more slowly or not at all? Since we have haven’t found any rockfish or whales that live for four hundred years, that might suggest that there is a certain limit on how long they can live.
Guerin: Well, we just do not know. We honestly do not know. It really is unfortunate that there is so little known in this field. Ecologists have never thought of this in the terms that gerontologists are now thinking of it in. But this other group of organisms, those that possess what Finch termed “negligible senescence,” they don’t seem to be showing the classical signs of aging that we’re used to. So, who is to say the longest they could live? As an example, in Finch’s book that was published in 1990, at that time the longest lived whale was—I believe it was a Blue Whale—something like 108 years old. That’s like, okay, well that’s not so startling. Humans live longer than that. We’re mammals. They’re mammals. We live longer. Then a study was done on bowhead whales, and they found that out of forty whales sampled, four of them were over a hundred years old, and one of them was over two hundred years old. And they didn’t die of old age either—they were harpooned.”

Lobsters Immortal?
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=11382976
http://animals.howstuffworks.com/marine-life/400-pound-lobster.htm/
“In humans, telomerase levels decline later in life and are only found in some types of tissue, but in lobsters, telomerase is found in all types of tissue. That likely accounts for lobsters’ ability to grow throughout their lives. And because lobsters’ skeletons are on the outside and the molting process allows them to periodically shed their exoskeletons in favor of a new, larger one, their constant growth isn’t a problem. With a steady, evenly distributed supply of telomerase, lobsters don’t approach the Hayflick limit, which means that their cells stay pristine, young and dividing. Related animal species with vastly different life spans are also a point of interest. Conventional mice live only three years, but naked mole rats can live for 28. Other animals being studied include whales, bats, rockfish, zebrafish and clams, the oldest of which, a quahog clam, lived to be 220 years old. In many of these animals, the rate of telomere deterioration corresponds with their lifespan. The longer the telomeres last, the longer the animals live. Studying these creatures may tell us much about human aging and lead to treatments for aging-related diseases. If one day humans discover an important new treatment for cancer, it may be due to one of these creatures — or to the 200-pound lobster living peacefully in a tank at Boston University.”

Forever
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/12/20/184723/82
http://metafilter.com/88971/Nobody-Home
“For the past 21 years, across the limitless expanse of the North Pacific, a lonely whale has been singing, calling for a response. There has been none, and there never will. Picked up first in 1989 by NOAA hydrophones, the call is clearly a whale, but different than all other known species. Different enough that no other whale has responded in all this time. Hypotheses vary, but the mental image is definitely haunting.”

photos from Les Folies du Music-Hall by Jacques Damase

A History of the Paris Music-Hall from 1914 to the Present Day

From today’s The Guardian, on the occasion of the new Ballard exhibition at the London Gagosian…

PAUL DELVAUX: Le canapé bleu, 1967 (Oil on canvas/55 1/8 x 70 7/8 inches)

Crash: JG Ballard’s artistic legacy

Shortly before JG Ballard’s death last year, Iain Sinclair made a pilgrimage to the author’s Shepperton semi, a shrine to his surreal tastes and happy family life. A new exhibition of his favourite paintings and of art work he has inspired honours this distinctive vision

Coming away from the official path, on a walk from the mouth of the Thames to Oxford in October 2008, I diverted through Shepperton. Light rain misted my spectacles. An uncertain detour was blocked by a two-tonne Jaguar saloon, white and racing green: XJ MOTOR SERVICES. The upstream settlement has evident 21st-century loot, as well as Edwardian weekend villas and chalets. There is a blue plaque to the literary giant they choose to commemorate: THOMAS LOVE PEACOCK LIVED HERE, 1823-1866. Modernist white cubes with big windows are attracted by reflections of light on water. Natural metaphors for unnatural liquidity in a time of recession.

I head for the station. That’s where JG Ballard met me when I visited him. I never saw the inside of his house. We drove to a riverside pub and sat under whirring fans. I wondered why, after his great success with Empire of the Sun, he didn’t relocate to one of those balconied, sharp-angled properties that were so attractive to the convalescing architects and blocked advertising men who populate his books. Foolish thought. Ballard was a working writer, first and last; the where of it was not to be disturbed. Fixed routines served him well; so many hours, so many words. Breakfast. Times crossword. Desk overlooking a natural ­garden. Stroll to the shops to observe the erotic rhythms of consumerism. Lunch standing up with The World at One on the radio. Back to the study. Forty-minute constitutional down to the river. TV chill-out meditation: ­Hawaii Five-O and The Rockford Files rather than Kenneth Clark.

The interior landscape of the suburban semi was a mirage. The more you studied it, the cannier the decision to settle the family in Shepperton, all those years ago, appeared. It was far enough out of London to limit the pests, the time-devourers. When journalists gained access they were mesmerised by the reproduction Delvaux canvases propped on the floor, the ­aluminium palm tree, the lounger in the front room; dutifully they repeated the standard questions about surrealism and how The Drowned World was saturated in Max Ernst. The house in Old Charlton Road was a premature ­installation; a stage set designed to confirm the expectations of awed pilgrims. But it was also a home in which the widowed author brought up three children who are always laughing in family snapshots.

Ballard may be the first serious ­novelist whose oeuvre is most widely represented in books of interviews. And whose future belongs as much in white-walled warehouse galleries as the diminishing shelves of public libra­ries. He was so generous to those who found his phone number, so direct: he rehearsed polished routines – and ­always agreed, with unfailing courtesy, that the world was indeed a pale Xerox made in homage to the manifold of his fiction. A late moralist, he practised undeceived reportage, not prophecy: closer to Orwell than HG Wells. Closer to Orson Welles than to either. Closer to Hitchcock. Take out the moving ­figures on staircases that go nowhere and stick with hollow architecture that co-authors subversive drama.

CHRIS BURDEN: L.A.P.D. Uniform (1994, Fabric, leather, wood, metal and plastic
88 x 72 x 6 inches Ed. of 30)

Spurning critical theory, Ballard joined his near-namesake Baudrillard as the hot topic for air-miles academics. Off-highway universities, indistinguishable from hospitals or hotels, approve infinite theses. A hall of mirrors in which students, who have lost the habit of literature, recognise, in the Shepperton master’s exquisitely calibrated prose, intimations of a hybrid form capable of processing autopsy ­reports and invasion politics into accidental poetry. The incantatory manifesto, “What I Believe”, deploys Ballard’s favourite device, the list, as he curates a museum of affinities: “I believe in Max Ernst, Delvaux, Dalí, ­Titian, / Goya, Leonardo, Vermeer, Chirico, Magritte, / Redon, Dürer, ­Tanguy, the Facteur Cheval, / the Watts Towers, Böcklin, Francis Bacon, and all the invisible artists / within the psychiatric institutions of the planet.”

It was almost dark when I got there, after walking down a street occupied by Indian ­restaurants, Chinese take­aways, charity and novelty shops. A man spotted me as I lined up the shot.

“A writer bloke is supposed to live in that house. We’ve been out here 25 years and I’ve never set eyes on him, tell the truth. But he’s on the box….”

Read on at The Guardian

WIZARD WEDNESDAYS takes place first and third Wednesdays of every month at Footsies at 261 N. Figueroa in Highland Park.

February 17 special guest is DJ Nobody!

Poster by Alia Penner

Poster:
http://www.justseeds.org/09prism.html

More info:
imaginarycompany.org

“This print is the first in a series that Becky Stark and I are making together. We write slogans and turn them into prints and videos. This is the first print and is designed in collaboration with Jacob Ciocci.

Jacob is a founding member of the art collective Paper Rad and plays in the band Extreme Animals. Becky is the lead singer/songwriter of the folk pop band Lavender Diamond. We’ve been longtime collaborators and friends. We live across the country from one another and write these slogans via text message. It’s fun to get a random positive message, and our intent is for people who come across these posters to get the same feeling of unexpected joy.

Our work together is about giving off healing vibrations generated by humor and beauty. We hope it makes you smile.

Your Heart Is A Prism!”
—Peter Glantz

Scheduled for publication on April 1, 2010, Blaise thought of a unique promotion for fans interested in reading his new book.  Make a Yoko Ono zine and he will mail you 1x pre-order package (1x Young Lions + 1x untitled experimental zine).

Mail a copy to:
Blaise Larmee
3720 SE 28th Pl. #19
Portland, OR
97202

or post an excerpt on your blog (example)

This offer will expire (perhaps)

Wikipedia: Chris Morris

From the archives…

Here’s a nice follow-on from the Raoul Vaneigem interview, posted earlier this week: British author/poet/journalist Iain Sinclair on what he’s discovered through the years from “motiveless walking” in London. From the Telegraph:

In London, from the first, I walked. As a film student, newly arrived in the early Sixties, I copied the poet John Clare on his feverish escape from Matthew Allen’s asylum in Epping Forest, when he navigated by lying down to sleep with his head to the north. Skull as compass: all the secret fluids and internal memory-oceans aligned by force of desire. Clare returned, as he thought, to Mary, his first love, his muse; to his heart-place, Helpston, beyond Peterborough, on the edge of the dark fens. My drag was cinema, Bergman seasons in Hampstead, Howard Hawks in Stockwell. Or art: the astonishing Francis Bacon gathering at the old Tate, at Millbank, former prison and panopticon. Bacon’s melting apes were robed like cardinals. Naked men, stitched from photographs, wrestled in glass cages.

Motiveless walking processed the unanchored images that infiltrated dreams of the shadow-belt on either side of the Northern Line. I lodged in West Norwood, a house on a hill, like the one I had left behind in Wales. I wandered through mysterious suburbs to the rooms above the butcher’s shop in Electric Avenue, Brixton, where the school was based. Street markets, I discovered, were a significant part of the substance of this place. Walking was a means of editing a city of free-floating fragments. I composed, privately, epic poems conflating the gilded Byzantium of W.B. Yeats with the slap and strut of Mickey Spillane’s California. London was an impossible relativity of historical periods and superimposed topographies.

After Dublin, where I enjoyed four years of apprentice exile, I came to Hackney: perched, settled, stayed. The modestly impoverished zone had the virtue of being unknown, even to itself. Submerging into a novel territory, as a casual labourer, I found both time and means to pursue my obsession with alignments, reforgotten writers, lost rivers, Hawksmoor churches, crime clusters. Street signs and spray-can slogans were a code to be broken. I had no idea, back then, that rogue Parisian intellectuals had already branded these strategies and given them a provocative title: psychogeography.

30 years later, assembling a collection of essays on London, which I called Lights Out for the Territory (after Mark Twain), I realised that, unconsciously, I had been operating, all along, as a disenfranchised psychogeographer. I stalked a defining urban narrative by sleepwalking through downriver reaches, sniffing after faded traces of Thomas De Quincey – and challenging the post-architectural infill of Docklands, the empty hubris of the Millennium Dome, with ritual expeditions that doubled as curses. Compulsive digressions disavowed the bullet-point banalities of developers and promoters. I wrote about pit bulls and satellite dishes. I attended the funeral of that mythical east London gangster Ronnie Kray: the godfather of the ghosted memoir, of mendacious boasts disguised as confessions. The pulp model for self-serving political autobiographies. I looked down on the glittering Thames from Lord Archer’s penthouse. London was revealed as a city of hidden connections and weird coincidences.

I had stumbled on a model for future projects: the walk as a narrative, as a moving film made from static images. This was a method of preparing the writer for an act of occult possession: in the way that William Blake was captured by the spirit of John Milton in the form of a star striking his heel. Considerations of the present Olympic Park in the Lower Lea Valley would begin by employing the Lights Out for the Territory template…

Read on at the Telegraph…

Jack Rose passed away suddenly at home in Philadelphia on December 5, 2009. He was widely regarded as the most profound exponent of acoustic guitar playing of his generation. Jack grew to be loved and admired by a great many people through his live performances, electric personality, [serious] cooking skills and a general mastery in the art of friendship. This concert is a release party for his new album Luck In The Valley and an occasion to celebrate and remember the good Dr. Ragtime. The artists performing were all dear friends of Jack’s and admired by him musically.

Saturday, February 13, 2010 – 7:00 PM
Latvian Society of Philadelphia – 531 N. 7th Street

Tickets: $18
Available now: http://www.ticketfly.com/purchase/event/4067

Performers:
D. Charles Speer & The Helix
Thurston Moore | Paul Flaherty | Chris Corsano
Michael Chapman
Pelt
The Black Twig Pickers
Glenn Jones
Byron Coley
Meg Baird | Chris Forsyth
Megajam Booze Band
DJ Ian Nagoski
Video clips curated by Tara Young

Newspaper articles previewing this event:

“Blues for Jack Rose: Friends and fans pay tribute to Philadelphia’s lost guitar genius” by A.D. Amorosi (Philadelphia City Paper, Feb 9, 2010)

Remembering an acoustic artist: Philly guitarist Jack Rose seemed poised to reach a new stage in his career before a fatal heart attack in December. Two concerts this weekend will pay tribute to him.” by Joel Rose (no relation) (Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb 9, 2010)

Here is a new song from Jack Rose from Luck of the Valley, out next week, courtesy Thrill Jockey Records:

Stream:

Download: Jack Rose — “Woodpiles on the Side of the Road” (mp3)

Wikipedia:
Roky Erickson
13th Floor Elevators

Definitive 13th Floor Elevators biography, published 2008 by Process:

Definitive 13th Floor Elevators ten-CD boxset, released 2009 by International Artists:

And, just for kicks, here’s Jason Pierce of Spiritualized and Spacemen 3, wearing his Roky shirt on the cover of Arthur in 2008:

Müller told New Scientist. “It’s as if the black hole is like a mirror.”

1. I guess it’s beyond the point of convincing anyone that some of the best music/sounds is happening on small cassette labels, but once in a while something gets slapped in the tape deck that just utterly, completely nails you to the underpinnings of heavens dripping maw. Such an experience is to be had by anyone lucky enough to grab hold of if only goodnight, the first cassette on the Wagtail label by Eastern Massachusetts improv/noise/strange-string shaman-femme Ashley Paul. Ms. Paul has been on the hot tongues of local noise lovers for a few years now and has gotten some recognition through her collaborations with the amazing Rel Records imprint. This cassette is really, really stirring and odd and affecting with high-frequency vox (which may or may not be ACTUAL vocals, but the mystic air conjured by reed-tongue) that call to mind early Connie Berg (Mars) interacting with bowed percussion and dislocated guitar sex. Cool as it gets. Get it.

2. Recent times appear to have been busy for Ed Sanders (above), one of the heroes of this century and the last. Amidst rumblings of a vast archival reissue series of material recorded by Ed’s band the Fugs, there is also a new Fugs album due sometime soon, and a slew of printed material already in hand. Poems for New Orleans (North Atlantic Books) came out in ’08, but only recently came to our attention. The book is full of Sanders’ beautiful verse, inspired by a trip to the city, which lead to intense reading about its history, and imaginings of chance encounters that might have been. Thus, the book’s a mix of investigative poetry (a school of thought Sanders founded), pure conjecture, and his own special lyricism. Great stuff, tying together near-ancient history with the catastrophes of Katrina and much else. Here’s a brief sample of the poem, “Echoes of Heraclitus”:

A helicopter flew me away
I wound up in Utah
where I am waiting for Jesus
or anybody
to help me home.

Also new to us is America, A History in Verse: The 20th Century Volumes 1-5 (Blake Route Press). The first three volumes of this massive, detailed ride through the American consciousness were published by Black Sparrow Books, but following the retirement of the legendary publisher, John Martin, there was no one around to actualize the words. Thus, the full set is available as pdf files on CD. And hideous as this format feels (we spend way too much time on screen already), the work is fantastic. Here’s a short piece from Volume 5:

The Oklahoma City Bombing
April 19
Timothy McVeigh
looked like someone who could have been a NASCAR driver
or a retired quarterback
Close cut hair
White eyes of blue a Gulf War vet
and bursting from a sliver of the small town ethos
that allowed grumbling gun nuts
& gummint-haters
to exist without much hassle

It would be delightful if someone would turn these last two volumes into actual books as well, but for now, this will have to do. Ed was also the main subject of a recent show hosted by an amazing gallery/printing shop in Brooklyn called The Arm. They hosted a brief show of his many glyph-based artworks from the last half a century, and while the show has ceased to exist, The Arm’s Dan Morris is working on a portfolio reprinting several of Ed’s most eye-commandeering efforts. There are also a few loose sheets of this work available. And they are guaranteed to make yr brain very hot.

Anyway, we await finding a copy of Ed’s new poetry collection from Coffee House Press, and the soon-due Fugs CD as well. ‘Til then—keep grope alive.

3. One dude who has been on the UK underground noise cassette scene as long as Ashtray Navigations’ Phil Todd is Joincey. Haven’t really heard to much from Joincey in a while but he has this new thing now called My Carapace Is Leaking and the first thing we’ve heard by “them” is a split cassette with Swiss-Swedish double bass improvisor Nina De Heney on the Rayon Records label from Lyon, France. Joincey, or My Carapace Is Leaking, also employs bass action, though unlike De Heney’s more raw, organic scrape and touch (which is ruling), it is more of a skin-melting lather. And it is completely great. A wonderful split by these two, and anyone who has followed Joincey through the years with Wagstaff, Inca Eyeball, Coits, Stuckometer, and his amazing Face Like A Smacked Arse label will desperately want this.

4. Another great set of releases has appeared from Mondo Macabro, who seem to have a truly insane grasp of international exploitation films. The third volume of their Bollywood Horror series pairs two films from the Ramsay Brothers studio, Mahakaa and Tahkana, which combine tons of bad vibes, dance numbers and surreal juxtapositions of elements – I mean, who knew Nightmare on Elm Street was lacking a gay Michael Jackson character? Not us. But now we do.

We also understand, from seeing Akio Jissoji’s Marquis De Sade’s Prosperities of Vice, that it would have been a bad idea to create a criminal theater based on the works of De Sade in Japan during the 1920s. As to whether it’d be a good idea now, we can only guess. But watching how the bad idea actually was is a great visual treat. Weird to think this same director did the Ultra Man movies!

5. Great Dividing, the Australian label that kicked in the front door of our o-brain with the posthumous 3 Toed Sloth LP (which for better and/or worse is as close as we can get to contempo Feedtime action as it features almighty Feedtime drum-jesus, Tom), has issued a cassette comp, A Range of Greatdividing, which has some primo Sloth as well as other Oz dementia like the top-notch Shoptoprockers. Primal, guitar scrawl with dirty-hair free-chug moves that proves Oz still the sexiest dirtbarge ‘neath the meridian.

6. Willie Lane, long an active participant in New England underground swamp hijinks, moved to Philadelphia a few years ago and has really kinda flourished in the land of Fishtown. He released the great Known Quantity LP last year, and has followed that up with an extremely choice single, “Sleepy Hands/Arrested for Decay” on his own Cord-Art Records. The sound is wildly slubbed electric guitar, wrung through god’s own wringer and whacked in a way that recalls the dementia of early Black Sun Ensemble. The cover art rips off Don Bikoff’s Celestial Explosion album (a classic in its own right), which seems to us just more testimony to Willie’s scholarship and good taste. Jump on it.

7. For some reason or another, recent long car drives have often been made to the accompaniment of prog rock from the South African underground of the early ’70s. This would seem like a daffy-ass thing to listen to, but what the hell? The German Shadoks Music label has been reissuing a bunch of material from the period, and the stuff has a crude charm I find totally cool. The musical models for the bands I’ve heard are fairly obvious and mostly drawn from the upper echelon bands of the UK psych/prog continuum, but the South African versions sound pretty great. And that’s no lie. Biggest of the bands (in terms of popularity) was probably Freedom’s Children (pictured above), who had three albums between ’68 and ’71. Battle Hymn of the Broken-Hearted Horde is a varied, heavy psych/prog bridge, with tunes ranging from deadly serious poetic phlug to great Traffic-style rural fluff. Astra has a Floydian feel and is probably their most fully realized and successful album. But Galactic Vibes is my fave because it’s wildly schizophrenic with a wonderful spudly blend of jack-ass prog action, rock doofery, and genuine weirdness.

Third Eye (above) were another big local band with three LPs in ’69 and ’70. Awakening is a bit of a hodge-podge with horn parts and dull “sunshine” vocals placed amidst the organ gush. Searching is much more focused with a Procol Harum tooth-flash, and a few blasts of highly acidic guitar. Brother is a hybrid of the earlier two albums, sans dreaded horns, and with a manic cover of Arthur Brown’s “Fire” that challenges the original for sheer sonic madness.

But my favorite of the selections I’ve heard is Time to Suck, the sole album by Suck, originally issued in ’71. This album is a true pinnacle of dunt-rock. The album opens with a cover of Grand Funk’s “Aimless Lady,” a song so amazingly devoid of lyrical brain weight, it feels as though it emerged from an era in which people had forgotten how to use words. What an amazing choice for a cover! And the whole album is covers—two Grank Funks, Deep Purple, King Crimson (their “21 Century Schizoid Man” shreds even the version on Earthbound) and so on. Just brilliant. And they have a sonic attack as beautifully slothed as anything Stackwaddy or Soggy ever attempted. Really a deep toke of pure splooge. Makes me recall the way Nigel Cross once described the live sound of Sweet Slag. Some of these Shadoks came out on vinyl, a few seem to be CD only, but maybe I just missed the vinyl. Not sure, but it makes me real curious to check out some other SA stuff—Otis Waygood, Abstract Truth and whatnot. Don’t fret—we’ll issue reports as we get them.

8. A sorta newish cassette label called Rotifer Cassettes out of Gainesville, FL has been issuing some very interesting new-garde forays into the sound/sky/vision axis. The one we’ve been flipping over (and over) is the c16 called Versazi Yenisei by Abolicao, a project de plume of Jeff Astin who runs the amazing Housecraft label. (There is also an Abolicao tape Flowering Judas on the righteous Cabin Floor Esoterica label which we’d LOVE to grip but is sadly sold the fuck out). Rotifer only pronounces that this is “deep gusts from inlands satiating harvest” which makes more than perfect sense. What we hear is the sonic manifestation of a Floridian breeze wafting through a rusting clothesline. It is beautiful music and the world melts away.

9. The world according to Chris D is a weird goddamn place. But that’s not to say it’s an uninteresting place. A prolific writer, musician and jack-of-all-trades (Slash editor, record producer, film director, loverboy, etc.), Chris is also a poet and lyricist of amazing power. This was first demonstrated in such legendary ‘70s anthologies as Bongo Chalice, but was made explicit as hell first on the lyric sheets to Flesh Eaters‘ records, then in Double Snake Bourbon (published by Laura Cloud’s ill-starred Illiterati imprint), and now in A Minute to Pray a Second to Die (New Texture Books). The new book is almost 500 pages of lyrics, poetry, stories, dreams journals and even lists of fave films by Mr. D, and it is a brilliant gas to read. We recently hosted a reading in celebration of the book’s publication, and it was totally wild evening. Chris’s stories about insanely violent and/or obsessive people are informed by his encyclopedic knowledge of film noir, Asian cinema, beat poetry, and friendship with Darby Crash, and his words ring with a deep and ugly truth. Chris’s head must be a crazy ass place to live. But let’s thank him for the occasional access he grants us.

10. SEXKRIME ARTS has released another trio of tapes by the cream of the harsh industrial cretins slithering in the back corners of noise basements across the wasted universe of skum. The focus is on ultimate porn darkness with savage mind trashtronics serenading the depressed hole of bitter bleakness. The new ones are III by Custodian, who the label regard as “the most important artist operating in the U.S. noise scene,” Exchange by Corporate Park (“an alien voice examines the remains of humanity”) and the one we’ve been turning the lights off to most often, a masturbation noise fantasist masterpiece by J/O which is a mail collaboration betwixt Luke Moldoff and A. Kmet. Moldoff has been recording amazing harsh gunk wave for some years and running his own Razors & Medicine label and it’s all straight up excellent. But this release really has a sinister and reality-defying quality that will have you prowling your neighbors’ backyard clothesline for soiled sniff. Amazing and sublime b+w pantie bellybutton artwork suitable for framing etc. “sticky industrial harsh noise for those who lack self-control.”

That’s all for now. Back soon.

REMEMBER: 2 COPIES ARE BEST WHEN SENDING TO:

BULL TONGUE
POB 627
NORTHAMPTON, MA 01061
USA

SHARE YOUR BIKINI KILL STORIES

Bikini Kill has set up an official archive online:

http://bikinikillarchive.wordpress.com/

We are collecting stories of how people got into the band/shows they saw/memories/testimonials etc.

It would be awesome if you wanted to contribute. It doesn’t have to be fancy or well-worded, we’d just like you to leave a record of your experience and get an idea of what Bikini Kill means to you. Maybe it’s your reaction to a song we wrote, something weird that happened at one of our shows, a personal anecdote or just WHATEVER. Send yr story to bkillarchive@gmail.com and we will post it or just leave a comment somewhere on the site. You can also send us images to post.

Please help us spread the word. To document the history (or herstory) of the band it is necessary to include an oral history from “the fans”. We say fans for lack of a better word–a more expansive term would be inclusive of friends, peers, comrades, co-conspirators and imply participation rather than an audience separate from the band–which is what we hope to achieve with this interactive approach.

Also, if you have video/film footage of the band, please contact us, Thanks!

First, some biographical notes courtesy of Vaneigem’s American publisher, PM Press:

Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934) is a native of Lessines (Hainaut), Belgium, a small town whose traditional claim to fame was the production of paving stones but which in the twentieth century also produced the Surrealist painter René Magritte and the Surrealist poet Louis Scutenaire. Vaneigem grew up in the wake of World War II in a working-class, socialist and anticlerical milieu. He studied Romance philology at the Free University of Brussels and embarked on a teaching career that he later abandoned in favor of writing.

Situationist International bongo session, November 1962: from left—unknown woman, J.V. Martin, Raoul Vaneigem and Guy Debord

In late 1960 Vaneigem was introduced to Guy Debord by Henri Lefebvre, and soon after he joined the Situationist International, which Debord and his comrades-in-arms had founded not long before, and he remained in the group throughout the decade of the 1960s. There is a grain of truth in the stereotypical view that Debord and Vaneigem, as two leading lights of the SI, stood for two opposite poles of the movement: the objective Debord versus the subjective Vaneigem: Marxism versus anarchism: icy cerebrality versus sensualism: and, of course, The Society of the Spectacle versus The Revolution of Everyday Life—the two major programmatic books of the SI, written by the two men without consultation, both published in 1967, each serving in its own way to kindle and color the May 1968 uprisings in France.

Raoul Vaneigem’s The Revolution of Everyday Life offered a lyrical and aphoristic critique of the “society of the spectacle” from the point of view of individual experience. Whereas Debord’s masterful analysis of the new historical conditions that triggered the uprisings of the 1960s armed the revolutionaries of the time with theory, Vaneigem’s book described their feelings of desperation directly, and armed them with “formulations capable of firing point-blank on our enemies.”

“I realise,” writes Vaneigem in his introduction, “that I have given subjective will an easy time in this book, but let no one reproach me for this without first considering the extent to which the objective conditions of the contemporary world advance the cause of subjectivity day after day.”

Vaneigem names and defines the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than life, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and above all the replacement of God by the Economy. And in the second part of his book, “Reversal of Perspective,” he explores the countervailing impulses that, in true dialectical fashion, persist within the deepest alienation: creativity, spontaneity, poetry, and the path from isolation to communication and participation.

For “To desire a different life is already that life in the making.” And “fulfillment is expressed in the singular but conjugated in the plural.”

Other works by Raoul Vaneigem already published in English translation include The Totality for Kids (London: Christoper Gray/Situationist International, 1966 ["Banalités de Base", 1962-63]); Contributions to the Revolutionary Struggle (London: Bratach Dubh, 1981 [De la grève sauvage à l'autogestion généralisée, 1974]); The Book of Pleasures (London: Pending Press, 1983 [1979]) The Movement of the Free Spirit (New York: Zone Books, 1994 [1986]); A Cavalier History of Surrealism (San Francisco: AK Press, 1999 [1977]); and A Declaration of the Rights of Human Beings (London: Pluto, 2003 [2001])

Hans Ulrich Obrist: In Conversation with Raoul Vaneigem (2009)

Translated from the French by Eric Anglès

Excerpts from http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/62:

Hans Ulrich Obrist: I just visited Edouard Glissant and Patrick Chamoiseau, who have written an appeal to Barack Obama. What would your appeal and/or advice be to Obama?

Raoul Vaneigem: I refuse to cultivate any relationship whatsoever with people of power. I agree with the Zapatistas from Chiapas who want nothing to do with either the state or its masters, the multinational mafias. I call for civil disobedience so that local communities can form, coordinate, and begin self-producing natural power, a more natural form of farming, and public services that are finally liberated from the scams of government by the Left or the Right. On the other hand, I welcome the appeal by Chamoiseau, Glissant, and their friends for the creation of an existence in which the poetry of a life rediscovered will put an end to the deadly stranglehold of the commodity.

HUO: Could we talk about your beginnings? How did your participation in situationism begin, and what was your fundamental contribution? At the outset of your relationship with the Situationist International, there was the figure of Henri Lefebvre. What did he mean to you at the time? Why did you decide to send him poetic essays?

RV: I would first like to clarify that situationism is an ideology that the situationists were unanimous in rejecting. The term “situationist” was ever only a token of identification. Its particularity kept us from being mistaken for the throngs of ideologues. I have nothing in common with the spectacular recuperation of a project that, in my case, has remained revolutionary throughout. My participation in a group that has now disappeared was an important moment in my personal evolution, an evolution I have personally pressed on with in the spirit of the situationist project at its most revolutionary. My own radicality absolves me from any label.I grew up in an environment in which our fighting spirit was fueled by working class consciousness and a rather festive conception of existence. I found Lefebvre’s Critique of Everyday Life captivating. When La Somme et le reste [The Sum and the Remainder] was published, I sent him an essay of sorts on “poetry and revolution” that was an attempt to unify radical concepts, Lettrist language, music, and film imagery by crediting them all with the common virtue of making the people’s blood boil. Lefebvre kindly responded by putting me in touch with Guy Debord who immediately invited me to Paris. The two of us had very different temperaments, but we would agree over a period of nearly ten years on the need to bring consumer society to an end and to found a new society on the principle of self-management, where life supersedes survival and the existential angst that it generates.

HUO: Which situationist projects remain unrealized?

RV: Psychogeography, the construction of situations, the superseding of predatory behavior. The radicality, which, notwithstanding some lapses, never ceased to motivate us, remains a source of inspiration to this day. Its effects are just beginning to manifest themselves in the autonomous groups that are now coming to grips with the collapse of financial capitalism.

HUO: The Situationist International defined the situationist as someone who commits her- or himself to the construction of situations. What were those situations for you, concretely? How would you define the situationist project in 2009?

RV: By its very style of living and thinking, our group was already sketching out a situation, like a beachhead active within enemy territory. The military metaphor is questionable, but it does convey our will to liberate daily life from the control and stranglehold of an economy based on the profitable exploitation of man. We formed a “group-at-risk” that was conscious of the hostility of the dominant world, of the need for radical rupture, and of the danger of giving in to the paranoia typical of minds under siege. By showing its limits and its weaknesses, the situationist experience can also be seen as a critical meditation on the new type of society sketched out by the Paris Commune, by the Makhnovist movement and the Republic of Councils wiped out by Lenin and Trotsky, by the libertarian communities in Spain later smashed by the Communist Party. The situationist project is not about what happens once consumer society is rejected and a genuinely human society has emerged. Rather, it illuminates now how lifestyle can supersede survival, predatory behavior, power, trade and the death-reflex.

HUO: You and Guy Debord are the main protagonists of the situationist movement. How do you see Debord’s role and your role?

RV: Not as roles. That is precisely what situationism in its most ridiculous version aims at: reducing us to cardboard cut-outs that it can then set up against one another according to the spectacle’s standard operating procedure. I am simply the spokesman, among others, of a radical consciousness. I just do what I can to see that resistance to market exploitation is transformed into an offensive of life, and that an art of living sweeps away the ruins of oppression.

HUO: You have written a lot on life, not survival. What is the difference?

RV: Survival is budgeted life. The system of exploitation of nature and man, starting in the Middle Neolithic with intensive farming, caused an involution in which creativity—a quality specific to humans—was supplanted by work, by the production of a covetous power. Creative life, as had begun to unfold during the Paleolithic, declined and gave way to a brutish struggle for subsistence. From then on, predation, which defines animal behavior, became the generator of all economic mechanisms.

HUO: Today, more than forty years after May ‘68, how do you feel life and society have evolved?

RV: We are witnessing the collapse of financial capitalism. This was easily predictable. Even among economists, where one finds even more idiots than in the political sphere, a number had been sounding the alarm for a decade or so. Our situation is paradoxical: never in Europe have the forces of repression been so weakened, yet never have the exploited masses been so passive. Still, insurrectional consciousness always sleeps with one eye open. The arrogance, incompetence, and powerlessness of the governing classes will eventually rouse it from its slumber, as will the progression in hearts and minds of what was most radical about May 1968.

HUO: Your new book takes us on a trip “between mourning the world and exuberant life.” You revisit May ‘68. What is left of May ‘68? Has it all been appropriated?

RV: Even if we are today seeing recycled ideologies and old religious infirmities being patched up in a hurry and tossed out to feed a general despair, which our ruling wheelers and dealers cash in on, they cannot conceal for long the shift in civilization revealed by May 1968. The break with patriarchal values is final. We are moving toward the end of the exploitation of nature, of work, of trade, of predation, of separation from the self, of sacrifice, of guilt, of the forsaking of happiness, of the fetishizing of money, of power, of hierarchy, of contempt for and fear of women, of the misleading of children, of intellectual dominion, of military and police despotism, of religions, of ideologies, of repression and the deadly resolutions of psychic tensions. This is not a fact I am describing, but an ongoing process that simply requires from us increased vigilance, awareness, and solidarity with life. We have to reground ourselves in order to rebuild—on human foundations—a world that has been ruined by the inhumanity of the cult of the commodity.

HUO: What do you think of the current moment, in 2009? Jean-Pierre Page has just published Penser l’après crise [Thinking the After-Crisis]. For him, everything must be reinvented. He says that a new world is emerging now in which the attempt to establish a US-led globalization has been aborted.

RV: The agrarian economy of the Ancien Régime was a fossilized form that was shattered by the emerging free-trade economy, from the 1789 revolution on. Similarly, the stock-dabbling speculative capitalism whose debacle we now witness is about to give way to a capitalism reenergized by the production of non-polluting natural power, the return to use value, organic farming, a hastily patched-up public sector, and a hypocritical moralization of trade. The future belongs to self-managed communities that produce indispensable goods and services for all (natural power, biodiversity, education, health centers, transport, metal and textile production . . .). The idea is to produce for us, for our own use—that is to say, no longer in order to sell them—goods that we are currently forced to buy at market prices even though they were conceived and manufactured by workers. It is time to break with the laws of a political racketeering that is designing, together with its own bankruptcy, that of our existence.

HUO: Is this a war of a new kind, as Page claims? An economic Third World War?

RV: We are at war, yes, but this is not an economic war. It is a world war against the economy. Against the economy that for thousands of years has been based on the exploitation of nature and man. And against a patched-up capitalism that will try to save its skin by investing in natural power and making us pay the high price for that which—once the new means of production are created—will be free as the wind, the sun, and the energy of plants and soil. If we do not exit economic reality and create a human reality in its place, we will once again allow market barbarism to live on.

HUO: In his book Making Globalization Work, Joseph Stiglitz argues for a reorganization of globalization along the lines of greater justice, in order to shrink global imbalances. What do you think of globalization? How does one get rid of profit as motive and pursue well-being instead? How does one escape from the growth imperative?

RV: The moralization of profit is an illusion and a fraud. There must be a decisive break with an economic system that has consistently spread ruin and destruction while pretending, amidst constant destitution, to deliver a most hypothetical well-being. Human relations must supersede and cancel out commercial relations. Civil disobedience means disregarding the decisions of a government that embezzles from its citizens to support the embezzlements of financial capitalism. Why pay taxes to the bankster-state, taxes vainly used to try to plug the sinkhole of corruption, when we could allocate them instead to the self-management of free power networks in every local community? The direct democracy of self-managed councils has every right to ignore the decrees of corrupt parliamentary democracy. Civil disobedience towards a state that is plundering us is a right. It is up to us to capitalize on this epochal shift to create communities where desire for life overwhelms the tyranny of money and power. We need concern ourselves neither with government debt, which covers up a massive defrauding of the public interest, nor with that contrivance of profit they call “growth.” From now on, the aim of local communities should be to produce for themselves and by themselves all goods of social value, meeting the needs of all—authentic needs, that is, not needs prefabricated by consumerist propaganda.

HUO: Edouard Glissant distinguishes between globality and globalization. Globalization eradicates differences and homogenizes, while globality is a global dialogue that produces differences. What do you think of his notion of globality?

RV: For me, it should mean acting locally and globally through a federation of communities in which our pork-barreling, corrupt parliamentary democracy is made obsolete by direct democracy. Local councils will be set up to take measures in favor of the environment and the daily lives of everyone. The situationists have called this “creating situations that rule out any backtracking.”

HUO: Might the current miscarriages of globalization have the same dangerous effects as the miscarriages of the previous globalization from the ‘30s? You have written that what was already intolerable in ‘68 when the economy was booming is even more intolerable today. Do you think the current economic despair might push the new generations to rebel?

RV: The crisis of the ‘30s was an economic crisis. What we are facing today is an implosion of the economy as a management system. It is the collapse of market civilization and the emergence of human civilization. The current turmoil signals a deep shift: the reference points of the old patriarchal world are vanishing. Percolating instead, still just barely and confusedly, are the early markers of a lifestyle that is genuinely human, an alliance with nature that puts an end to its exploitation, rape, and plundering. The worst would be the unawareness of life, the absence of sentient intelligence, violence without conscience. Nothing is more profitable to the racketeering mafias than chaos, despair, suicidal rebellion, and the nihilism that is spread by mercenary greed, in which money, even devalued in a panic, remains the only value.

HUO: In his book Utopistics, Immanuel Wallerstein claims that our world system is undergoing a structural crisis. He predicts it will take another twenty to fifty years for a more democratic and egalitarian system to replace it. He believes that the future belongs to “demarketized,” free-of-charge institutions (on the model, say, of public libraries). So we must oppose the marketization of water and air.1 What is your view?

RV: I do not know how long the current transformation will take (hopefully not too long, as I would like to witness it). But I have no doubt that this new alliance with the forces of life and nature will disseminate equality and freeness. We must go beyond our natural indignation at profit’s appropriation of our water, air, soil, environment, plants, animals. We must establish collectives that are capable of managing natural resources for the benefit of human interests, not market interests. This process of reappropriation that I foresee has a name: self-management, an experience attempted many times in hostile historical contexts. At this point, given the implosion of consumer society, it appears to be the only solution from both an individual and social point of view.

HUO: In your writing you have described the work imperative as an inhuman, almost animal condition. Do you consider market society to be a regression?

RV: As I mentioned above, evolution in the Paleolithic age meant the development of creativity—the distinctive trait of the human species as it breaks free from its original animality. But during the Neolithic, the osmotic relationship to nature loosened progressively, as intensive agriculture became based on looting and the exploitation of natural resources. It was also then that religion surfaced as an institution, society stratified, the reign of patriarchy began, of contempt for women, and of priests and kings with their stream of wars, destitution, and violence. Creation gave way to work, life to survival, jouissance to the animal predation that the appropriation economy confiscates, transcends, and spiritualizes. In this sense market civilization is indeed a regression in which technical progress supersedes human progress.

HUO: For you, what is a life in progress?

RV: Advancing from survival, the struggle for subsistence and predation to a new art of living, by recreating the world for the benefit of all.

HUO: In your view there is no such thing as urbanism?

RV: Urbanism is the ideological gridding and control of individuals and society by an economic system that exploits man and Earth and transforms life into a commodity. The danger in the self-built housing movement that is growing today would be to pay more attention to saving money than to the poetry of a new style of life.

HUO: Is Oarystis based on natural power, like the Metabolist cities? Rem Koolhaas and I are working on a book on the Japanese Metabolists. When I read your wonderful text on Oarystis, I was reminded of that movement from the 1960s, especially the floating cities, Kikutake’s water cities. Is Oarystis a Metabolist city?

RV: When Oarystis was published, the architect Philippe Rothier and Diane Hennebert, who ran Brussels’ Architecture Museum at the time, rightly criticized me for ignoring the imaginative projects of a new generation of builders. Now that the old world is collapsing, the fusion of free natural power, self-built housing techniques, and the reinvention of sensual form is going to be decisive. So it is useful to remember that technical inventiveness must stem from the reinvention of individual and collective life. That is to say, what allows for genuine rupture and ecstatic inventiveness is self-management: the management by individuals and councils of their own lives and environment through direct democracy. Let us entrust the boundless freedoms of the imaginary to childhood and the child within us.

HUO: How can the city of the future contribute to biodiversity?

RV: By drawing inspiration from Alphonse Allais, by encouraging the countryside to infiltrate the city. By creating zones of organic farming, gardens, vegetable plots, and farms inside urban space. After all, there are so many bureaucratic and parasitical buildings that can’t wait to give way to fertile, pleasant land that is useful to all. Architects and squatters, build us some hanging gardens where we can go for walks, eat, and live!

HUO: In 1991 I founded a Robert Walser museum, a strollological museum, in Switzerland. I have always been fascinated by your notion of the stroll. Could you say something about your urban strolls with and without Debord? What about Walser’s? Have other strollologists inspired you?

RV: I hold Robert Walser in high regard, as many do. His lucidity and sense of dérive enchanted Kafka. I have always been fascinated by the long journey Hölderlin undertook following his break-up with Diotima. I admire Chatwin’s Songlines, in which he somehow manages to turn the most innocuous of walks into an intonation of the paths of fate, as though we were in the heart of the Australian bush. And I appreciate the strolls of Léon-Paul Fargue and the learning of Héron de Villefosse. My psychogeographic dérives with Guy Debord in Paris, Barcelona, Brussels, Beersel, and Antwerp were exceptional moments, combining theoretical speculation, sentient intelligence, the critical analysis of beings and places, and the pleasure of cheerful drinking. Our homeports were pleasant bistros with a warm atmosphere, havens where one was oneself because one felt in the air something of the authentic life, however fragile and short-lived. It was an identical mood that guided our wanderings through the streets, the lanes and the alleys, through the meanderings of a pleasure that our every step helped us gauge in terms of what it might take to expand and refine it just a little further. I have a feeling that the neighborhoods destroyed by the likes of Haussmann, Pompidou, and the real estate barbarians will one day be rebuilt by their inhabitants in the spirit of the joy and the life they once harbored…

Read the complete interview at http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/62

New edition of Vaneigem’s classic The Revolution of Everyday Life:

tues. feb 16th 7-10pm
herbal house salon
with ‘weedeater’ nance klehm
and delectable edibles by eden batki

for this evening, we will have an urbanforage by flashlight, sip herbal infusions and eat delicious homemade snacks, discuss herbal energetics, learn basic tincturing techniques and make a tincture to take home. please bring an 8 oz jar with a lid filed with two fingers of vodka, french brandy or raw vinegar.

1519 allessandro st. 90026
(large peach colored building on west side of the street. empty lot next door. up stairs to the back house)

$22

Please let me know if you can come. Thanks!

x Eden
eden@edenbatki.com

The White Stripes have come out swinging very hard and very righteously against the United States Air Force Reserve’s unauthorized (and yes, illegal) use of their music in a major Super Bowl commercial this past Sunday.

Here’s their statement, as posted at Jack White’s Third Man Records‘ website yesterday:

“We believe our song was re-recorded and used without permission of the White Stripes, our publishers, label or management.

“The White Stripes take strong insult and objection to the Air Force Reserve presenting this advertisement with the implication that we licensed one of our songs to encourage recruitment during a war that we do not support.

“The White Stripes support this nation’s military, at home and during times when our country needs and depends on them. We simply don’t want to be a cog in the wheel of the current conflict, and hope for a safe and speedy return home for our troops.

“We have not licensed this song to the Air Force Reserve and plan to take strong action to stop the ad containing this music.”

Apparently the geniuses at Blaine Warren Advertising of Las Vegas, Nevada were behind this idiocy. According to the New York Times, Blaine Warren will be issuing a statement later today. That should be amusing reading.

Here’s an idea for a settlement: The Air Force Reserve must fund an anti-military recruiting commercial in next year’s Super Bowl, put together in consultation with the American Friends Service Committee’s “Youth and Militarism” program. And the ad should be scored by, oh I dunno, maybe the lovely lads from Godsmack? Or maybe by Charlie Nothing’s “Fuck You and Your Stupid Wars”? Whatever works.

P.S. Have you been to an anti-war protest in the last two years in the USA? Do they even happen anymore? Because voting for Obama didn’t stop the wars, did it?

Hiya,

If you are interested in advertising on Arthur, fer crissakes don’t hesitate to drop us a line or give us a ring.

We offer ad packages that range from $100 to $250 to $500 to, oh, $1.75 million: basically there’s something that should be affordable to anyone with some cash who wants to get the word out about something via the Arthur website and/or weekly Arthur Email Bulletin.

We don’t have any hard-and-fast rules about what is advertised on Arthur—we don’t “curate” advertising—so, if you think our audience/readership is who you want to be reaching, please be in touch. Especially if you have $1.75 million.

Please direct all advertising inquires to:

Jesse Locks

Advertising Director

(916) 548-7716

jesse@arthurmag.com

Thank you kindly,

Jay Babcock
Arthur Magazine

“Kingfisher”: another new song from Joanna Newsom’s forthcoming tripler Have One On Me, via the good folk at Drag City of Chicago.

Stream:

Download: “Kingfisher” — Joanna Newsom (mp3, 10.3mb)

Previously:

Stream:

Download: “Good Intentions Paving Company” — Joanna Newsom (mp3)

Stream:

Download: “‘81″ — Joanna Newsom (mp3)

Previously in Arthur Magazine:

“Forty-Six Strings and Some Truths”: JOANNA NEWSOM’s first ever major interview, by Jay Babcock, from Arthur No. 10 (April 2004)

“Always Coming Home”: How California harper JOANNA NEWSOM’s masterpiece album Ys grew from a time of personal turmoil, ambitious collaboration and eating hamburgers again. By Erik Davis, from Arthur No. 25 (Nov 2006)

Subscribe to Arthur’s iTunes Podcast and receive music automatically: click here

Above: Sonny and a sunset

Stream:

Download: “Too Young To Burn” — Sonny and the Sunsets (mp3)

Buy:

Haven’t heard a California beach party bonfire singalong this ramshacklin’ good since Little Wings drifted out… On second thought: this song is plenty sturdy, isn’t it? From an album full of Velvets-on-the-beach singalongs called Tomorrow Is Alright, released late last year by San Francisco-based Sonny & the Sunsets. A run of 500 on vinyl is gone already but CDs are available for pre-order now from the good folks at Soft Abuse.

Sonny & the Sunsets: http://www.myspace.com/sonnythesunsets

Sonny Smith: sonnysmith.com

Subscribe to Arthur’s iTunes Podcast and receive music automatically: click here

Arthur Radio Voyage No. 4: SOUNDSCAPES. Ivy Meadows and Gustav Ernst meditate in the zen-like interior of the new Newtown Radio studio. Hairy Painter joins telepathically whilst building a float in New Orleans. We invite you to climb aboard the sonic airship…

Stream:

Download: Arthur Radio Voyage No. 4 SOUNDSCAPES 2-07-2010

Pete Toms is back with PAWS, another comic that blurs the line between fiction and reality.

The comic is essentially a horror comic about a guy that only experiences the outside world through television trying to sell an autobiographical screenplay.  It has all the same themes as my other comics, how people choose identity roles, the media’s effect on memory, how we mythologize our personalities, but this one has a lot more dogs and possibly werewolves, and jokes about how creepy sitcom laugh-tracks are.

I’m doing the same stuff as always, drawing at night, using my natural jazz dancing ability to put my kids through college during the day.

We found an interview Pete did with Ecstatic Days back in November where he talks about what’s abstract and what’s real.  Enjoy this 9 page preview and stay tuned to Pete’s website for the conclusion of the story!