happy birthday, Ryuichi Sakamoto! <3
January 17, 2012, 12:41am Comments
/ Naomi /
Pigs on the Wing (by vulture labs)
today in battersea
oh wow, did they really hang up an inflatable pig again? (Animals is not my favorite Pink Floyd album, but I love the weird fact that its cover photography was by Peter Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle.)
it was flown for the re-release of their complete back-catalogue yesterday, but the original pig was too “leaky” so they had to make a replica. :)
i didn’t know that photo was taken by Peter Christopherson, wow!
Reblogged from the eyepool.
September 28, 2011, 8:01am Comments
If you’ve missed Sigur Rós, you’re in luck. The band will soon release Inni, a double live album and 75-minute filmfeaturing footage from Sigur Ros’ last show at London’s Alexandra Palace. Here’s a clip of the song “Festival” that shows the highly stylized look of the film, directed by Vincent Morisset.
i was at this show! that long held note gave me goosebumps. :)
Reblogged from Nothing to see here.
September 16, 2011, 3:37pm Comments
‘When belongings are snatched by the deprived…’
Here in the UK these days, most people are preoccupied by the widespread unrest in our cities. Now I don’t write about politics, but I do research and write about social differences in ancient Egypt. I find it interesting to note that the debates we’re having today about criminality, deprivation, & social responsibility can also be found in ancient Egyptian poetry dating back to almost 4000 years ago. Despite the vast inequality in ancient Egyptian society between pharaohs and peasants, despite corporal punishment being commonplace and literacy rare, an Egyptian poet was still able to eloquently question the condemnation of criminal acts by the poor over those of the rich. The poem entitled ‘The Eloquent Peasant’ (the inspiration behind the name of my blog) tells the story of a peasant whose only possessions are stolen by a wealthy official and his subsequent articulate pleas for justice, which move even the pharaoh.
This is the passage that came to mind recently:
A lord of bread should be merciful, whereas might belongs to the deprived,
theft suits one without belongings, when the belongings are snatched by the deprived;
but the bad [are those who] act without want—should it not be blamed? It is self seeking.
Criminal responsibility is a controversial topic. Although one can’t really properly contrast a fictional robbery committed by a government official in ancient Egypt with the rioting of thousands of teenagers in deprived areas, it is fascinating to see that the social issues we struggle with today are the same as those of ancient Egypt. Humans have been around for tens of thousands of years, but human nature has not greatly changed in the past few millennia. Plus ça change…
You can read the rest of ‘The Eloquent Peasant’ in Richard Parkinson’s book of translations of ancient Egyptian poetry, ‘The Tale of Sinuhe’. I’ll be giving a talk on the lives of the rich and poor in ancient Egypt in the Nebamun gallery at the British Museum this Friday, August 10th.
- by my friend Margaret Maitland (The Eloquent Peasant)
August 11, 2011, 1:11am Comments
c86:
The new roof at King’s Cross station is coming along nicely
via Ross Lydall
Reblogged from TOMBOLARE.
August 10, 2011, 4:56pm Comments
» most of the kids are alright article by rosamicula
I just read this article forwarded to me by my wife. It shed more light on the riots in London & how events like these can be prevented. It’s a good article so please check it if you have a moment.
I just read this too, it’s the best thing I’ve seen written in the past week about the riots and our society as a whole. Worth reading to the last sentence.
Reblogged from Patterns In The Grass.
August 10, 2011, 2:43am Comments
Why the Specials’ Ghost Town is still the sound of a country in crisis | The Guardian
“Certain genres are aflame with crisis music: late-60s rock, mid-70s reggae, punk, turn-of-the-90s hip-hop, the bleaker end of grime and dubstep. I can’t help noticing that a common newspaper headline echoes the title of one of the Clash’s crisis songs, London’s Burning, but the one most mentioned over the last few days is Ghost Town.
Like all cultural myths, the myth of Ghost Town can be annoying and overstated. The charts, as a rule, are not stuffed with records documenting social anxiety. My colleague Alexis Petridis is fond of pointing out that the single competing for the No 1 spot when riots exploded across Britain in the first week of July 1981 was Bad Manners’ version of the Can Can, which would certainly make for a more antic soundtrack to archive footage of Brixton and Toxteth. Apart from UB40’s Don’t Let It Pass You By and the Jam’s Funeral Pyre, no other songs in the top 40 at the time spoke to what was going on in Britain’s inner cities, unless I missed some coded messages in Body Talk.
But still, that was the No 1 single and a remarkable one at that. Forget the lyrics for a moment: the mood is the message. As I wrote in the book: “It is the negative image of a song like Babylon’s Burning: hollowed out rather than crammed with incident, smouldering instead of blazing. Like all great records about social collapse, it seems to both fear and relish calamity.” Whatever your feelings about Cher Lloyd’s Swagger Jagger, the current No 1, it doesn’t quite have the same effect.
Ghost Town is a prophecy that sounds like an aftermath. The ghost town it describes, gutted by recession, is the terrain before a riot (“people getting angry”) but you get the sense that it will be as bad or worse after the anger has erupted. Hence the song’s circularity: it begins as it ends, with a spectral wail that could be either a cold wind or distant sirens. When the riots did break out, the Specials found the experience frightening rather than vindicating. Let’s not forget that the violence had pernicious unintended consequences: Thatcher ignored many of the recommendations in Lord Scarman’s report and instead invested in state-of-the-art police riot gear that came in handy during the miners’ strike three years later. In the US, the 1967 Detroit riot hastened the city’s decline and was one of the events that fostered a rightwing backlash during the Nixon years.
In its nauseous fatalism Ghost Town expresses how I’ve felt watching the chaos on London’s streets over the past few days. The comments, in newspapers and online, which chime with me are the ones professing sadness, confusion and a willingness to wait for more information before jumping to conclusions, the latter being particularly welcome. Some commentators leapt to equal and opposite forms of idiocy. Conservative pundits spoke mechanically of “mindless” violence (it’s never mindless, it just means you don’t care to consider the mind behind it) while some on the left bent over backwards to justify looting as an anti-consumerist act, failing to discriminate between anti-police violence and nicking trainers from Foot Locker, understandable outrage and plain old criminality, and thus doing rightwing pundits’ job for them. (Because I align myself with the left, I’m always more disappointed by lazy thinking from that end on the spectrum. I can’t say the Daily Mail has ever disappointed me.)
What’s happening now isn’t a protest or, as Darcus Howe put it, an “insurrection” – it’s a nervous breakdown. The motor isn’t a political cause but a mood. Politics is in the background, in the pervasive frustration and anxiety of an alienated underclass: record levels of youth unemployment, widening inequality, social services (especially youth services) slashed to the bone, the Education Maintenance Allowance scrapped, a damaged relationship between the police and the community, and collapsing faith in a seemingly indifferent political class. But the immediate outcome makes the lives of residents – many of whom are every bit as deprived as the rioters – even worse than they were last week and opens the door to an authoritarian response. A riot is a weapon of last resort; a cry for help; a public form of self-harming. It pays for short-term catharsis with long-term pain.
When people rush to either condemn or condone a riot rather than taking time to understand it they are merely assuming their usual positions, like commentators after 9/11 who, wrote Greil Marcus, “stepped forward to deny that anything had been done that required any rethinking of anything at all. None had changed his or her mind in the slightest about anything. Nearly every argument was intended to congratulate the speaker for having seen all the way around the event even before it happened.” A riot is neither a solution nor an unforeseen calamity but a problem brought to the surface: a manifestation of social angst and official failure. As the global economy shudders, that kind of angst is not a localised phenomenon and this will not be the only explosion. In its circular misery, and the memories of past violence it now contains, Ghost Town’s crisis music is horribly relevant to Britain in 2011.”
August 09, 2011, 5:30pm Comments
00:38 9/8/2011: Camden Town, London
As looters and rioters smashed up shops, looted and fought with police in Camden Town, Philippa Morgan-Walker, 25 and her husband, Jonny Walker, 31, made tea for the police who were protecting their street. Some of the officers had been on duty for more than 30 hours. (via pixel-eight)
August 09, 2011, 1:17pm Comments
no no no no no no no
What even is this?
Jesus fucking Christ, what are people?
What is humanity?
This is what the peak of modern civilization has come to — rioting in the streets of London, chaos, panic, destruction.
How can anyone look at this and think that it’s justified? This is in a civilized country which, on the most part, does not initiate force against its own citizenry — and people are tearing each other down in the street, blowing up buses, buildings…
I don’t even know what to say.
It’s almost unreal.
I haven’t read much about this, but I thought I heard that it was started because a guy was shot by police…after firing on them? I’m confused. Is this how shock registers in a country that’s unused to gun violence or something? Whatever the cause was, now it just seems like an excuse to loot and blow shit up.
I’m relieved we’re in an area of London not currently affected, but I have friends here who have these scenes playing out on their streets. Insane.
Reblogged from Hard-Boiled Wonderland.
August 09, 2011, 12:37am Comments
