Media Mead for the Week

Little time for blogging this week. I have managed to almost complete the revisions to a chapter for the thesis beast. I have been doing nine hour days for a most of the week, but Friday was spent in HUMlab which is always very cool. Not much else to say. We are in Stockholm on Monday for the programming of son Ben's cochlear implants. Sort of exited about it. However still a lot of work I should be doing.
Here are a few pieces I have encountered on the web this week that are worthy of attention.

Weekly Signals: John Lamb Lash author of Not in His Image: Gnostic Vision, Sacred Ecology, and the Future of Belief (Podcast)
Not in His Image delves deeply into the shadows of ancient Gnostic writings to reconstruct the story early Christians tried to scrub from the pages of history, exploring the richness of the ancient European Pagan spirituality—the Pagan Mysteries, the Great Goddess, Gnosis, the myths of Sophia and Gaia—and chronicles the annihilation of this Pagan European culture at the hands of Christianity.

UbuWeb Sound - Brian Joseph Davis "Minima Moralia" (2004) (Mp3s)
It's just a bad idea, and it began when I was mentioning to a friend about how funny it is that all those old anti capitalist punk albums with the "PAY NO MORE THAN $3" warnings can now be Ebay-ed for a $100. For some reason, we then both thought of Greil Marcus's book Lipstick Traces. How he made a glib aside about Marxist theorist Theodore Adorno and his exhiled-in-1940s-America memoir, Minima Moralia. With its bleaker-than-black humour and dismantling of modern life, Marcus said it would have made an excellent punk album. Why not take this pop wish and make it come true?

Rhizome | 'ROAD TO RUINED' Remix Album (2009) - Jesse Hulcher
Jesse Hulcher took to the song-splicing for his pragmatically titled art piece "Ramones Remixed," which loops and splices the punk band's songs into extended, lengthy jams that magnify the natural repetition in the band's songs. "Pinhead" is stretched out longer than 20 minutes -- longer than an entire side of the vinyl release of 1977's Leave Home on which the original appeared.

Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository
Welcome to the Al Jazeera Creative Commons Repository On this site you will find select broadcast quality footage that Al Jazeera has released under various Creative Commons licenses. Through Creative Commons licensing, you are able to legally share and reuse our footage. Learn More.

NFB.ca - Watch quality Canadian Documentary, Animation and Fiction
The National Film Board of Canada launched Screening Room last week. The site hosts over 700 films produced by NFB, which are now available for streaming and sharing. During the span of their 70 year history, the National Film Board of Canada have been a major force in independent Canadian cinema, underwriting a number of forward thinking documentaries, animations, and short films. NFB have been especially supportive of experimental and emerging film practices, a fact that becomes apparent when perusing their collection. (More recently, the organization began supporting moving image on other platforms as well. mobiDOCS: Confessions in a Digital Age, co-produced by NFB, is a series of short documentary films made especially for mobile phones.) See below for a few choice selections from Screening Room.

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have a great weekend....

Live Stream HUMlab Seminar

Tomorrow in HUMlab Dr Julie Tolmie will be presenting a seminar entitled Structural Mapping: Deliberate Topology for Fluid Layers. The seminar is at 13:00 CET (1pm) and from my chat with Julie today I think it will be a very interesting session. All welcome in HUMlab under the UB library at Umeå University.

Dr Julie Tolmie is a member of King's Visualisation Lab at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London, where she represents 3DVisA, the 3D Visualisation in the Arts Network within vizNET, the UK Visualization Support Network. (3DVisA @ vizNET)

Active in the UK visualization community, Julie recently convened an expert workshop, From Abstract Data Mapping to 3D Photorealism: Understanding Emerging Intersections in Visualisation Practices and Techniques (June 2007), funded by the AHRC ICT Methods Network, as a follow up to vizNET 2007.

As usual the seminar will be online streamed live from this link (opens at seminar time).

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action. As our story opens, a mysterious plague has fallen upon the quiet English village of Meryton—and the dead are returning to life! Feisty heroine Elizabeth Bennet is determined to wipe out the zombie menace, but she's soon distracted by the arrival of the haughty and arrogant Mr. Darcy. What ensues is a delightful comedy of manners with plenty of civilized sparring between the two young lovers—and even more violent sparring on the blood-soaked battlefield as Elizabeth wages war against hordes of flesh-eating undead. Complete with 20 illustrations in the style of C. E. Brock (the original illustrator of Pride and Prejudice), this insanely funny expanded edition will introduce Jane Austen's classic novel to new legions of fans.

Order HERE.

The Week in Media

Welcome to the Friday recommended online media. This week I have been working a lot, writing for the past three days and before that teaching work. I seem to have missed the recommended media last week (I don't really remember much of last week either), so there is an extra helping this week. Make sure you eat it all kids.


Salvador Dali on What's My Line.

Stag Hare. Botn into magic (mp3)
Man, I really like this....

Stag Hare ripples into the meditative psych territory with a heavy earthen smell rising out of every track on their second self-released album. Tones shimmer over the rhythmic chug of tribal percussion, fraught with chimes and more than a hint of campfire smoke. Though they ride quite easily through the free-folk valley, the din that sometimes finds its way into that genre at is kept at bay (see early Badgerlore); instead allowing the loose song-forms to take on dream-like qualities. As the band introduce vocals somehow shoegaze and forest folk careen into each other in a fevered hallucination that definitely begs to be repeated. Black Medicine Music is a strong second statement from this project, even garnering some mastering help from RSTB fave Adam Forkner whose work makes a good touchstone for where this release is rooted.

Internet Archive: 78 RPMs & Cylinder Recordings
Listen to this collection of 78rpm records and cylinder recordings released in the early 20th century. These recordings were contributed to the Archive by users through the Open Source Audio collection.
Artists available here include Ada Jones, Caruso, Eddie Cantor, Edison Concert Band, Harry MacDonough, Len Spencer, Paul Whiteman, and many others.

Hippies by Dennis Johnson
Denis Johnson gets cynical about drum circles and drugs at a Rainbow Gathering. George Plimpton reads it aloud.

Momus (Nick Currie)Six Studio Albums (Mp3)

"Okay, this is quite a big decision, but I've taken it. Six Momus albums -- the ones I recorded for Alan McGee's Creation label between 1987 and 1993 -- are out of print. Creation doesn't exist any more, and in theory Sony owns the rights to these albums, but isn't doing anything with them and probably never will. In the meantime, only Russian pirates are profiting, charging punters for illegal downloads."

Internet Archive: Lost Children
The Lost Children Net Label releases EPs and Full Lengths from Instrumental/Experimental/Post-Rockish kind of bands. We're an mp3 online releaser only and provide the music free as we believe that art should be free to the world. We are currently recruiting some of the great young bands coming up to get their limited releases to a wider audience and these bands truly deserve some support. So if you should like a band you hear please don't hesitate to forward the links on to others!

Philosophy Bites
Podcasts on philosophy for free. By real philosophers and their mates.

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House (video)
Video segments of a presentation by Young and Zazeela. Really excellent.

"When music becomes a spiritual experience, it goes beyond the concept of "I have the fixed composition right here which is a certain duration." And this process was beginning as I was learning how to improvise. But by the time I had put together my group The Theatre of Eternal Music, I was creating music in which I had sustained drones. I asked Tony Conrad and John Cale and Marian Zazeela to sustain tones while I played saxophone..."

Legal Torrents
Too many to mention. Books, CDs, Films. Why does anyone pay for anything anymore? (I myself have given away over 10000 copies of my own CDs, films and texts online....it feels great!!)

Learning Ancient History for Free
Ancient history...I love it.

For lifelong learners, courses on Ancient Greece and Rome always remain in steady demand. While these courses are poorly represented in undergraduate programs (at least in the States), they seem to make a comeback in continuing education programs designed for older students. Eventually, it seems, many come to the conclusion that you can’t skip over the foundations and still make sense of it all. And so they go back to basics.
The Teaching Company, a commercial provider of courses for lifelong learners, has recognized this demand and built a surprisingly rich collection of lectures dedicated to the Ancients. These courses are polished and well put together. But they cost money. If that’s a concern, then you should know about some of the free alternatives. Thanks to the “open course” movement, you can now find a series of free courses online, including some from top-ranked universities.

Bibliomania
Free Online Literature with more than 2000 Classic Texts. Literature Book Notes, Author Biographies, Book Summaries and Reference Books. Read Classic Fiction, Drama, Poetry, Short Stories and Contemporary Articles and Interviews. Study Guides to the most read books and Help for Teachers. Research our Reference Books, Dictionaries, Quotations, Classic Non-fiction, Biographies and Religious Text. Does it ever end...apparently not.

Guided By Voices :: Maxwells, Hoboken, NJ 3.30.95
Amazing. In 1994 as I lived the life of a crusty flâneur in Surry Hills in Sydney one of the soundtracks was Guided By Voices. Here they are in 1995 in Hoboken, live and clear in Mp3 grandness. (You should be using Download Them All to harvest this goodness, the last word in Firefox Plugins).

Insubordinations
Insubordinations is a netlabel dedicated to improvised music - freejazz or electroacoustic or other experimentations - catched without artifices, energy explosions, spontaneous constructions, abused structures, unstabilities, confrontations or simply absolute liberty.
The Insubordinations releases are completely available as free downloadable mp3s under creative commons license and are sometimes accompanied by limited physical releases.
As in the artistes interest as listeners's, Insubordinations try to provide detailed informations about its releases contents.
Insubordinations is an audioactivity colletive sub-project.

As you go about your daily, remember this is not a rehearsal.

sol island media works

This is a beautiful piece of collaged film:

A 16mm and digital video collage composed of found footage, home movies and hand-scratched animations. Originally exhibited as Movement 7 of a seven-movement video-symphony entitled Female Alchemy, this piece addresses the concept of maturity, self-realization and the continuous evolution and elevation of the human spirit. With music by composer Paul Yeon Lee and a brief cameo appearance by beat poet Anne Waldman.

By sol island media works:

Experimental films by artist Dinorah de Jesús Rodriguez, hand-made in 16mm using scratch-on-film and paint-on-film techniques (direct filmmaking), damaged cameras, found footage, and digital video effects. These works are exhibited in various forms, as films and/or as visual art or as part of multimedia performance works.

More from the blog (you owe it to your eyes to look at this stuff, it is georgeous)

The Year of Internet Radio is Here

I love internet radio. Being an expatriot person I rely on global media for information and entertainment, art and education. So, I was pleased to see this article today;

After years of being out there and talked about, but not much more, internet radio may finally go from an interesting idea to a stand-alone commercial medium.

And that promise is pretty grand in the view of some analysts. "In 2009, internet radio may not just reinvigorate the medium of radio. It may reinvent it,” predicts Deloitte, the consulting outfit.

What will allow that to happen is what spawned internet radio in the first place: technology that untethers internet radio from the computer, making it far more portable. Enter the WiFi radio set, which uses wireless technology to access the internet and play internet radio stations and podcasts.

WiFi radio offers features not available through traditional radio, such as allowing users to search electronic programming guides, and in time the devices will offer DVR features as well. Media Life Magazine

To accompany the idea that 2009 is the year that Net Radio breaks out of the mass of stupid broadcatsing rules and local media monopolies that restrict it in some parts of the world, here are my six top Net Radio stations at the moment:

1. WFMU
Hard to choose the best, in my mind it is between WFMU and number two. WFMU is a listener-supported, non-commercial radio station based in Jersey City, New Jersey, broadcasting at 91.1 MHz FM using a freeform radio format (and on the net). It is currently the longest running free-form radio station in the United States

2. Resonance FM
Excellent broadcaster of arts, ideas, music, sound and opinions. Resonance 104.4 FM is a London based non-profit community radio station run by the London Musicians' Collective (LMC), with a licence to cover "practising artists and engaged consumers and persons standing outside mainstream media". The coverage area is designated as a 5km radius from the transmitter in London Bridge. The station is based on Borough High Street, having completed a move from Denmark Street in September 2007.

3. SR Radio Välrden
Swedish net radio playing global music; mostly African, Middle Eastern and South American with a little Asian sounds. It is the soundtrack to my thesis writing. Almost no chat so it speaks the langauge of the world; Music!

4. 2SER
The dark underbelly of Sydney when I lived there in the 1990s has become more mainstream, but still inovative and creative. 2SER (which stands for Sydney Educational Radio) had its origins in the burgeoning community broadcasting movement of the early 1970’s when it was proposed that an educational radio station be established based on a consortium of Sydney universities. 2SER made its broadcasting debut on October 1, 1979, with the support of many hundreds of groups and individuals.

Today, 2SER operates as a company limited by guarantee and is jointly owned by Macquarie University and the University of Technology, Sydney. Both institutions contribute an annual grant to 2SER, however the station is largely self-supporting, relying upon revenue raised through programming, sponsorship, fund-raising events and listener subscriptions.

2SER holds a community broadcasting license with a special interest defined as educational broadcasting. Through its programs, and the making of programs, 2SER aims to stimulate learning and educate its listeners and is committed to social change, access and diversity.

3RRR
3RRR (pronounced "Three Triple R", or simply "Triple R") is a popular Australian community radio station, based in Melbourne. It is the largest per capita subscribed radio station in the world.

3RRR first commenced broadcasting in 1976 from the studios of 3ST, the student radio station of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (now RMIT University), on an educational licence with the name 3RMT. In 1979 it relocated to Fitzroy, and adopted its present name. During the late 1970s and early 1980s, it became synonymous with the post punk and new wave subcultures. It has developed a devoted listener base, many of whom donate their time or money to keep the station going; either as volunteers or through the annual "Radiothon". In late 2004 supporters raised enough money for the station to purchase and move into new premises on the corner of Blyth and Nicholson Streets in Brunswick East after the 20 year lease on their previous studios, in Victoria St., Fitzroy, expired.

3RRR's mission statement was defined in 1990 as "To educate, inform and entertain by drawing upon appropriate community resources. To develop a critical approach to contemporary culture." Triple R's programming is split roughly 70% specialist music and 30% talk-based shows. Hosts have complete autonomy over content and the station does not have playlists. As such, the nature of 3RRR broadcasts vary wildly depending on time of week. 3RRR is funded entirely by community sponsorships and public subscribers (currently around 12,000), which, by removing standard commercial pressures, allows this diverse programming.

6. Radio Patapoe 88.3 FM Amsterdam
When I lived in the Dam it was Radio 100 that all the interesting people listened to. Alas Radio 100 went under in 2004. But Radio Patapoe lives on. At once stage the squat I lived in housed the transmitter for Patapoe but one day the police came and took it away, so we built another :-)

I wish Radio 4ZZZ in Brisbane had a Net broadcast, truly a great station but one I have not listened to for years.

Art:21 | Alfredo Jaar | Gramsci & Pasolini

Alfredo Jaar in his installation "Infinite Cell" (2004) in Santiago, Chile, and various works.

Through installations, photographs, and community-based projects, Alfredo Jaar explores the public's desensitization to images and the limitations of art to represent events such as genocides, epidemics, and famines. Jaar's work bears witness to military conflicts, political corruption, and imbalances of power between industrialized and developing nations, often taking the form of an extended meditation or elegy.

Alfredo Jaar is featured in the Season 4 (2007) episode Protest of the Art:21—Art in the Twenty-First Century television series on PBS.

VIDEO | Producer: Susan Sollins & Nick Ravich. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Lizzie Donahue. Artwork courtesy: Alfredo Jaar. Thanks: Fundación Telefónica, Santiago, Chile.

"Art is critical thinking and by its essence it is political." Alfredo Jaar

The Day After

Ill Doctrine: Why I’m Happy, Why I’m Not Satisfied


A very stumbling fuzzy sort of oath taking.

Farewell

"I'll be long gone before some smart person ever figures out what happened inside this Oval Office." Washington DC, 12 May, 2008

Dream Analysis

Lindefelt, Iris Piers & So So live at Moonshake, Umeå.

Getting Ready for Monday Music

A trip down memory lane.

Ninety Percent of Revenue from Sales to Music Publishers

How copyright extension in sound recordings actually works.

Mission Accomplished

The streets of Baghdad are now safe.

From Subtopia

Flash Mob Heathrow

Protesters dressed in Edwardian fashion settle down to a picnic inside Heathrow Airport's Terminal 1 check-in hall. Up to 250 men and women gathered there in opposition to BAA's (British Airport Authority) plan to enlarge Heathrow and build a third runway over the neighbouring village of Sipson.

Museeum Students Exhibit Exam Work in Second Life

From the University Press Release:

Virtual worlds such as Second Life have become an ever expanding area of interest for pedagogical and artistic experiments. Now, students in the museology program at Umeå University have entered the digital scene.
A vernissage exhibition will take place on Tuesday 20 January at 7:00 PM at HUMlab at Umeå University, located one level below the University Library.
Second Life is a 3-D virtual world community accessible via the internet with users around the entire globe. Countless galleries, museums and artists are already engaged in worlds like Second Life. The museology program students at the department of culture and media studies are the latest entrants in the digital scene. For several intensive weeks within the framework of their study program, the students have explored the possible opportunities that virtual worlds have as platforms for museology. The result is four exhibitions that illustrate and adapt to themes such as gender/sexuality/disability, social stratification, place/region/nation, and ethnicity/religion.
Existing Second Life users can experience the exhibition from the 20th
of January via:
http://world.secondlife.com/region/d3b84553-8e9a-4345-a84a-2aaa011ee1a8
The 3-D world of Second Life is a social arena that makes it possible to communicate and learn in new and different ways than previous digital platforms. A far as we know, the museology program at Umeå University is the first in Sweden to use Second Life in this educational format.

Time: Tuesday 20 January, 7:00 PM
Place: HUMLab, Social Sciences Building
Web site: http://www.humlab.umu.se/about

For further information, please contact:
Susanne Lindström, Department of Culture and Media Studies
Phone: +46 (0) 90-786 69 79

Benyamin Post Op

The surgery is over. Ben had an x-ray this morning and a check up with the doctor and everything looks good at this stage. In a few weeks we will be returning to the hospital to have the implants activated and Ben will begin to hear sound. Until then he is totally deaf. It has been a stressful couple of days but things are starting to feel better today.

Artist Talk in HUMlab: Iris Piers and Ola Lindefelt

In collaboration with Moonshake:

Together with sound artist Ola Lindefelt, Iris Piers will give a lecture on her most recent collaborative art work.

The next day, on the 17th, Iris and Ola are going to perform at the Moonshake event “Art’s Birthday” showing their live cinema performance.

http://www.irispiers.com/

http://www.myspace.com/moonshakeclub

Biography
Iris Piers, born in 1983, is an experimental filmmaker who creates film installations, live cinema performances, music videos and sound art. From 2001-2006 she studied Fine Arts in Berlin, Rotterdam and New York City, during and after her studies she has set up exhibitions, screenings and performances in many places around the world, for example at the Transmediale in Berlin, Full Pull in Malmö, the Berkeley Art Museum in California, LMAK Projects in New York and SDLX in Tokyo. Her work has been nominated at various film festivals and in 2007 the short film ’Casimiration or the Beginning of Dreaming’ won the award for Best Online Film at the national Dutch Film Festival. Her main focus in 2008/2009 is collaboration and the developing of new film and sound installations.

When:
This Friday, 5 pm
at HUMlab Umeå University (Under the UB)

Benyamin Goes to Hospital

The blogging will be sparse over the next few days. We are taking the train to Stockholm tonight, arrive tomorrow and Benyamin will be having surgery for bilateral cochlear implants beginning on Wednesday morning. I expect everything to go well.....but have my fingers crossed at the same time. We should be back home on Friday morning.

Recommened Media for the First Week of 2009

The media I have found this week seems to have a time zone stamped on it. Much is from the 1960s and 70s. This week saw Ron Asheton leave planet earth. The original guitarist with The Stooges, the band that have done so much to so many:


Iggy Pop and The Stooges, Live in Cincinnati, 1970 ("We seem to have lost him. We are trying to get a light on him now.") To remember how great The Stooges were (It is incredible that their first album came out 1968!) here is a bootleg live recording from 1973, My Girl Hates my Heroin. Listen to 'Gimme Danger' loud, it builds into a symphonic rhythmic mass of sound. Ron gives some words of advice of quality rock n roll over dinner somewhere.



The Perro Tapes
David Crosby is no stranger to danger. Here we have the studio outtakes from the 1970 album "If I could Only Remember My Name", which is described as:

A fully realized embodiment of the sound of California’s folk/rock/country/psychedelia movement of the time, the album features such players as Neil Young, Jerry Garcia, Joni Mitchell, Phil Lesh, etc., etc. Almost as good as the album (and just as, if not more, interesting) are these outtakes from the 1970 sessions. These tracks are further proof that Crosby was an artistic force to be reckoned with at his creative peak.

Nine Inch Nails Release 405GB of Concert Footage for Free Download
Of course you need to have a decent sized hard drive to accommodate the material but here it is.

Neil Young :: Live @ Canterbury House 1968
Only one song available for free but I have listening to Neil Young again recently and this is cool.

Cambodia Rocks :: Sounds From The ’60s & ’70s
I may have blogged this before but it is still good. Semi-bootleg entitled Cambodia Rocks which gathered up a dozen or so late sixties and early seventies tracks found on random cassettes, many without the name of the artists and song titles. I say semi-bootleg as the collection was sold on compact disc for a time (apparently not in eight or so years). Not unlike reggae, thousands of miles away in Jamaica, these Cambodian musicians were being exposed to an exceptionally wide array of Western influences (in an accelerated time frame) including a lot of American and British rock & roll and pop. The following tracks are there answer to what they heard and it could not be more fascinating. Far from just an aural curio, or an exercise in cultural appreciation, some of these tracks are as vital as what you’ll find on your old copy of Nuggets.

Best wishes to the readers of this small corner in the great galaxy of the Sign.

Division Empire and Time

When I look at this image of the slow erosion of Palestine I think also of the Partition of India. The British did the same thing with India (in the very same year that the UN partition plan was rejected). The Indian catastrophe is a division along ethnic and religious groundings that haunt the world to this day. I recomend (once again) Yasmin Kahn's book, The Great Partition:

The Partition of India in 1947 promised its people both political and religious freedom—through the liberation of India from British rule, and the creation of the Muslim state of Pakistan. Instead, the geographical divide brought displacement and death, and it benefited the few at the expense of the very many. Thousands of women were raped, at least one million people were killed, and ten to fifteen million were forced to leave their homes as refugees. One of the first events of decolonization in the twentieth century, Partition was also one of the most bloody.

In this book Yasmin Khan examines the context, execution, and aftermath of Partition, weaving together local politics and ordinary lives with the larger political forces at play. She exposes the widespread obliviousness to what Partition would entail in practice and how it would affect the populace. Drawing together fresh information from an array of sources, Khan underscores the catastrophic human cost and shows why the repercussions of Partition resound even now, some sixty years later. The book is an intelligent and timely analysis of Partition, the haste and recklessness with which it was completed, and the damaging legacy left in its wake.

It seems like dividing occupied populations was quite the thing to do in 1947. And then leaving them to sort out the mess.

Friday Focus and Flow: Yungchen Lhamo

Yungchen Lhamo - Ranzen



Yungchen Lhamo: Lama Dorje Chang

Yungchen Lhamo is a Tibetan singer living in exile in New York City.Lhamo's international success as a Tibetan singer is unprecedented. She has toured the world, singing unaccompanied a combination of songs of her own composition and traditional Buddhist chants and mantras. She has performed with artist like Annie Lennox, Billy Corgan from Smashing Pumpkins, Peter Gabriel, Sheryl Crow, Natalie Merchant, bringing her traditions to new audiences. She has toured extensively as a part of the WOMAD World music festivals.

Yungchen Lhamo's name means "Goddess of Song", a name given her by a holy man soon after she was born near Lhasa. She left Tibet in 1989 at age 22, via the perilous navigation of the Himalayas in order to escape oppression from the Chinese regime governing Tibet. She made a pilgrimage to Dharamsala, to receive the blessings of the Dalai Lama, where he lives in exile. She was inspired to reach out to the world through her music, to share her culture and educate people about Tibet. She moved to Australia in 1993, then to New York City in 2000.

Lhamo's Australian debut album Tibetan Prayer won the ARIA Australian Record Industry Award for best Folk/World/Traditional Music release in 1995. She is the first Tibetan singer to win a prestigious music industry award. The success of that record led to her signing with Peter Gabriel's Real World label. Her first record for the label, Tibet, Tibet, mainly features powerful a cappella renditions of original compositions -- authentic Tibetan Buddhist prayers and songs. Her next recording, Coming Home, was a collaboration with producer Hector Zazou, showcasing her beautiful voice, and also featuring chanting by Tibetan monks, a wide range of mostly modern Western instruments, and the benefits of multi-track recording, enabling Lhamo's voice to be layered repeatedly.

Yungchen Lhamo's much-awaited album Ama (which means Mother in the Tibetan language) was released in April 2006, and was produced by Iranian-American musician Jamshied Sharifi. Featured artists include Annie Lennox and Joy Askew.

Official Website

Works of Mahatma Gandhi Enter Public Domain

AHMEDABAD, India (Reuters Life!) - The thought-provoking literary works of Mahatma Gandhi, India's iconic freedom fighter, are set to go public after the copyright on his writings and speeches lapses this month.

Anyone will now be able to publish the writings and speeches of the legendary leader, often referred to as the Father of the Nation, since the copyright on these works expires 60 years after his death.

Gandhi, who pioneered the philosophy of non-violent resistance to the British occupation of India, was assassinated on January 30, 1948 in New Delhi by a Hindu radical.

Gandhi had given his works to the Gujarat-based Navajivan Trust which he founded, but according to the Copyright Act of 1957, works of a person go into the public domain 60 years after their death.

Trust authorities said they did not want to ask the Indian government for an extension of the copyright, based on the leader's philosophies.

"If you consider the spirit of Gandhian thought, one should not ask for such extension. And we have considered this issue and we are not going to ask for such extension," Jitendra Desai, managing trustee of the Navajivan Trust, told Reuters Television.

Since its inception, the Navajivan Trust has published some 300 volumes of Gandhi's works including articles, letters and speeches, as well as translations of his autobiography.

And although Gandhi entrusted the copyright of his works with the Navajivan Trust, he never subscribed to the idea.

"Gandhi never supported the idea of copyright. But due to some instances, where his thoughts were misinterpreted, he was forced to give into the insistence of his well-wishers urging him to get his works copyrighted," said trustee Amrut Modi.

Gandhi scholars, however, want the copyright to be revived by the government, as they fear free use of his works would lead to misinterpretation of his texts by other publishers.

"Once the copyright ends, prices of the works are sure to shoot up. The task of taking Gandhi's thoughts to the people might also be affected. The government should immediately do something about it and entrust the copyrights back to Navajivan Trust," said Dhimant Badiya, a Gandhi scholar in Ahmedabad.

The Navajivan Trust will however continue to publish Gandhi's works at subsidized prices, even after the copyright lapsed.

Occupation 101: Voice of the Silenced Majority

After staying up until midnight writing, I then stayed up longer and watched this film (so tired). Occupation 101 is a amazing summary of the forces behind the conflict between the Palestinian people and the modern state of Israel. I found it a thought provoking and surprisingly balanced account of the situation. One thing that shone through for me was the post-colonial/colonial realities of what is going on in the occupied territories. This is not an ancient struggle, it is an occupation based on power. I have been thinking a lot about this film since I saw it. Maybe you will too.

Occupation 101: Voice of the Silenced Majority is a 2006 documentary on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict directed by Sufyan Omeish and Abdallah Omeish, and narrated by If Americans Knew founder Alison Weir. The film focuses on the reality and the effects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and discusses events from the rise of Zionism to the Second Intifada and Israel's unilateral disengagement plan, and presents its case through dozens of interviews. It questions the nature of Israeli-American relations. Specifically, it questions the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and whether Americans should help pay for it.[1] Occupation 101 includes interviews with mostly American and Israeli scholars, religious leaders, humanitarian workers, and NGO's critical of the injustices and human rights abuses that stem from Israeli policy in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip.

Wikipedia

Commons Licenced CD Number One Seller on Amazon

This throws a spanner in the works of so many arguments against P2P technology and Creative Commons licenses:

NIN Best Selling MP3 AlbumNIN’s Creative Commons licensed Ghosts I-IV has been making lots of headlines these days.

First, there’s the critical acclaim and two Grammy nominations, which testify to the work’s strength as a musical piece. But what has got us really excited is how well the album has done with music fans. Aside from generating over $1.6 million in revenue for NIN in its first week, and hitting #1 on Billboard’s Electronic charts, Last.fm has the album ranked as the 4th-most-listened to album of the year, with over 5,222,525 scrobbles.

Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that.

NIN fans could have gone to any file sharing network to download the entire CC-BY-NC-SA album legally. Many did, and thousands will continue to do so. So why would fans bother buying files that were identical to the ones on the file sharing networks? One explanation is the convenience and ease of use of NIN and Amazon’s MP3 stores. But another is that fans understood that purchasing MP3s would directly support the music and career of a musician they liked.

The next time someone tries to convince you that releasing music under CC will cannibalize digital sales, remember that Ghosts I-IV broke that rule, and point them here.

Creatice Commons Weblog

Those music artists that do use digital peer to peer networks to distribute their material can make money it seems. Radio Head, Einstürzende Neubauten and now NIN seem to be doing well out of it. It may be different for software producers and film makers, but I am not sure. I attended a workshop recently where several computer game designers and software manufacturers spoke most bitterly about Peer to Peer file sharing. I actually felt for them, seeing it from their side I can understand that new technologies are placing pressure on how their products are marketed and distributed. However, speaking to a software manufacturer during the workshop he said he was currently implementing a new distribution system over the internet, with upgrades and community services being a central part of it. I got the feeling the difficulties of the digital market place are more a product (excuse the weak pun) of resistance to innovation than the dark side of the technology or the people who use it.
Interesting times we live in.

Hz Journal #13

Fresh, new and online:

Hz
www.hz-journal.org
#13 presents:

[ARTICLES]

"Program" System of Digital Art:"BOOM! Fast and Frozen Permutation" – Taiwan-Australia New Media Art Exhibition
by Yu-Chuan Tseng
Yu-Chuan Tseng reports on Taiwan-Australia New Media Art Exhibition from the perspective: "An important element of digital computer technology ... has digital art features of aesthetic concepts and behavioral structure....'program' is an important factor in constructing the work."

Games: The Art of Making, Bending, and Breaking Rules
by Andrew Yashar Ames
"In interactive art, the observer and the work are constructed by rules that can be bent or broken, but cannot be absent." Andrew Y. Ames examines "Game-based art..[with] implied and explicit rules that artists expose and exploit for aesthetic and ideological purposes."

The Miracles of Feedback
by Mario van Horrik
"This paper deals with my fascination for acoustic feedback... I want to express my doubts, theories, and questions, as well as our motives and enthusiasm for using this medium." Sound artist Mario van Horrik explains his involvement over two decades with acoustic feedback experiments.

Hz vs Church
by Novi_sad
Sound artist/composer Novi_sad's project "'Hz vs Church' aims to use Churches (or other big sized public buildings) as post loudspeakers in order to create, unfold and play live various sounds which appear in the 'aural surface' by using and manipulating in real time different kinds of frequencies."

We Are Not Alone
by Salvatore Iaconesi and Oriana Persico
"Network and information technologies, with a mutagen leap, directly connect the mind of the human being to hyper-contents and to hyper-contexts, creating perspectives that are totally new." Iaconesi/Persico on their projects which emerge as one of the possibilities/directions network technology brings forward.

Intimate Transactions: Close Encounters of Another Kind
by Tony Fry
"Crucially, the interactive intent of the work was to create a means to reflect upon a particular kind of experience – the experience of our being relationally connected as a collective body." Writer/theorist Tony Fry on Keith Armstrong(creative director)'s "Intimate Transactions," and its link to Ecosophy.

[NET ART]

Pollen Soup by Pierre Proske

Sharedscapes - Points of View on Landscapes by Grégoire Zabé

Cityscapes by Myron Turner

Passivitate Imunitass (Activista)by Poderiu

88 Constellations for Wittgenstein (To Be Played with the Left Hand)by David Clark
--------------------

The Logic of Print vs. The New Grammar of Imagery (1990)

Guest: Robert Pittman (CEO of Time Warner)
Theme: Media

Robert Warren "Bob" Pittman (born 28 December 1953), the programmer who led the team that created MTV, has been CEO of MTV Networks, AOL Networks, Six Flags Theme Parks, Quantum Media, Century 21 Real Estate and Time Warner Enterprises. He was also COO of America Online, Inc. and AOL Time Warner.
He has also been a radio and TV programmer, marketer, media entrepreneur and investor who has had multiple careers in a number of consumer-focused industries.

Pittman also has a history in philanthropy, building community and philanthropic projects into every business he managed from Live Aid at MTV to educational efforts using the Internet at AOL. He is currently chairman of the non-profit Robin Hood Foundation, which fights poverty in New York City. He is a former chairman of the New York Public Theater and still serves on that board as well as the boards of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, NYU Medical Center, Trinity School and the Alliance for Lupus Research. He is also a former board member of Electronic Arts, Atari Games, Excite, 3DO, MTV Networks, America Online, HFS/Cendant/Realogy and AOL Time Warner.

PressPress Chapbook Award 2009

The news is that after a successful Award in 2008 the PressPress Chapbook Award will run again in 2009!

The Award is for an unpublished chapbook length manuscript of poems. The winning manuscript will receive $500 (Australian, 355.644 USD) and chapbook publication with PressPress. The closing date is 31 May 2009.
Last year's Award had entries from all Australian states, as well as China, Turkey, Poland and New Zealand with one bilingual manuscript. There was a great standard overall which is good for the state of poetry and judges are happy to see innovation and risks taken with the entries. Carolyn Fisher's manuscript, The Unsuspecting Sky, was the winner and was published in October 2008. It was Carolyn's first chapbook and has been well received - especially in her home state of Tasmania.

Go to the site to check out the guidelines and get a copy of the entry form. Pass it on to people you think might be interested.


PressPress
www.presspress.com.au

Checklist:

1. Manuscript has a title but not the poet's name
2. One hardcopy of manuscript is enclosed
3. SSAE enclosed if you want your original returned.
4. Cheque/money order to PressPress or PayPal receipt for $15 is
enclosed.
5. Entry form enclosed.
6. Posted to

PressPress Chapbook Award,
PO Box 94,
Berry NSW 2535,
Australia

so it arrives by 30 May 2009.

Online Media Recommended: Downloads, Streams and Visitations

Preparing for the back to work of Monday after a pleasant but intense break (our apartment is not large and we have two small children). The world in the first days of 2009 seems to be going its same mad way as it was in 2008; I read last night that average life expectancy in Zimbabwe is now 39 years! The Middle East, where does one begin? With a song perhaps:

(The Fugs Wide Wide River (1966). The song was originally about the war in Vietnam...but it applies to so many situations of conflict)

And so on to the media I have stumbled upon in the past week. To begin with a summary of the best of 2008 from UBUWEB as recommended by some stars on KFMU, ohhh the greatness of UBUWEB:

UBUWEB :: Featured Resources 2008 (+ Jan '09)
As selected by James Hoff, Julian Cowley, Neville Wakefield, Gary Sullivan, Rick Moody, Ben Rubin, Zach Feue, Ron Silliman, Christian Bök, Laura Beiles, Seth Price, Stephanie Strickl and Alan Licht, Bettina Funcke and Alex Ross. It will take you a year to go through these, a treasure trove of sound and vision.



Listening to Famous Poets Reading Their Own Work
The internet has given poetry new scope and a new freshness. It’s almost like the ‘70s, when punk fanzine readers were famously told ‘Here are three chords, now form a band’. Today, the injunction could be: ‘Here are three web sites, now perform some poetry’.

No Neck Blues Band: Two New Tracks
The band holed up in their own Black Dirt Studios for only three days to crank out this thorny mix of twisted improv-psych but the result was an expansive record that bounces through the darkened corridors of human insanity. Moving from burdened, manic sexual ecstasy to unnerving calm with the precision that only a band of 15+ year veterans could pull off without sounding sloppy, the album elevates improvisational psychedelia to a new level. Feeling much like a sonic sculpture depicting the depths of madness, longing, perversion and lack of control in general; this is no mere collection of clattering chimes. The reverberated screams only serve to make the underlying languorous slide guitar sound more menacing.

Free Albums Galore :: Pixieguts – four albums
I was skeptical when I read the blurb on the blog:

Pixieguts is a bizarre name for someone with such a pretty and sensuous voice. The Australian vocalist specializes in cyber-collaborations with electronic artists throughout the world. The results are collected on three albums under her own name and a team effort album with Wales’ electronic sound artist Dementio13. All these albums explore various territories of trip-hop, drum & bass, IDM, trance, and pretty much anything else lurking in the electronic music scene. Pixieguts brings a lot of talent to these tracks but how she interacts these studio producers and remixers is the real treat

But then I listened to some of the collaborations with Demetio13 and these are really good. These pieces (like performance art with a great voice) have a strange quality that is difficult to describe; noise art meets cabaret trash in the chill out section of a rave somewhere in the Australian rainforest. I have since become a fan of Pixieguts and have discovered a video channel:



There is also a Pixieguts MySpace (of course)

Days of War Nights of Love
Are there ways of thinking, acting and living that might be more satisfying and exciting than the ways we think, act, and live today?
As someone who used (and still uses) this book, I wanted to make it easier for others to do the same if they didn't feel like paying, stealing or borrowing a copy. The greatest thing about this internet thing we have going is that it allows for a truly open exchange of information and ideas so I figured I'd take advantage while I'm still able.
A few notes on the book - there are no "copyright" issues on it, so everything here is "legal". Even if it wasn't, I'd still try to keep these digital versions up as long as I could. The ideas in it or I should say your power to learn to do something important from it are too great not to. No further words to you from a stranger are probably necessary... I'm not selling you shit! (refreshing, no?)

Mender Banah - Bab Rag Terra
Sitar tabla album. Nicely done. From Mexico and MySpace. Perfect for the ipod.


Martyn Wyndham-Read: Ned Kelly and That Gang (Trailer LER 2009) 1970
Martyn's first UK solo album featuring a selection of Convict/Bushranger ballads.
When I was a kid in Australia in the 1970s we would sometimes go on a Saturday night to the local Trades Hall for a bush dance. There men in rough linen shirts, jeans and riding boots who had long beards would dance with women with long hair parted in the middle with long cotton skirts and flowery blouses. A family me parents named all their kids after the members of the Kelly Gang and family: Ned, Dan, Kate and Joe. it is with this in mind I include this CD. The roaring days of Australia.

BBC Radiophonic Workshop - Music From The BBC Radiophonic Workshop (2003)
Following the broadcast of the documentary The BBC Radiophonic Workshop 1958-1998 which I have already blogged, I thought to follow it up with something that is on the web for a longer time (the doco has been removed). Here is a torrent of a 50 recordings from the workshop.

And that's all folks. More next week.

A Pixieguts Winter 2009

Awakening to another year. Moon over snowfields with Venus a bright orb upon the ink line tree crested horizon. So dark it is in winter. The land is sleeping. Slow birds eat from the feeder outside my window. Food and warmth are the currency of the season. Deep in my own shelter I have replanted a tree. A topical broad leaf that lasts these frozen months on light bulbs and TV. We wait together for thaw and sun.