Some Old Time Favorites

Einsturzende Neubauten - Yu-Gung [Dusseldorf 1990]


Pussy Galore - Alright


Butthole Surfers Graveyard...you had to be there.


100 Million People Dead by the Surfers.


Royal Trux, Let's Get Lost

And that's why have tinnitus today........

Temples of Time

A mountain is a living thing; it has an ecological balance, a process of evolution manifested in slow, subtle ways; but it is also subject to the ravages of human intervention. Filmed in the Canadian Rockies and in Garibaldi Park, this picture brings to the screen magnificent footage of mountain solitudes and the wildlife found there, of natural splendor in all its changing moods. The film carries the implicit warning that all this may pass away if people do not seek to preserve it.

1971, 42 min 27 s

Directed by
William Canning

Produced by
William Canning

Production Agency
National Film Board of Canada

Sitar God and Hippies

Ravi Shanker Music Circle at the Moneterey Pop Festival 1969 Parts 1 and 2).

Gigi

Ejigayehu Shibabaw, or Gigi as she is popularly known, is one of the most successful contemporary Ethiopian singers worldwide. Coming from an ancient tradition of song originating in the Ethiopian Church, she has brought the music of Ethiopia to wider appreciation and developed it in combination with a wide variety of styles.

TRAILER: One Flew Over the Dead Poets Nest [MASH-UP MOVIE]

Not Simply Another Mash-up Trailer...

This is the Trailer of a REAL Mash-up Movie.

http://myspace.com/dead_poets_nest

If he's crazy, what does that make you?
He was their inspiration. He made their lives extraordinary.

The School and the Clinic:

Foucault's understanding of the development of the clinique is primarily opposed to those histories of medicine and the body that consider the late 18th century to be the dawning of a new "supposed" empirical system, "based on the rediscovery of the absolute values of the visible". On Foucault's understanding, the birth of modern medicine was not a common sensical movement towards simply seeing what was already there (and therefore a science without a philosophy), but rather a decisive shift in the structure of knowledge. That is to say, modern medicine is not a mere progression from the late 18th century wherein an understanding of the true nature of the body and disease is gradually acquired. Foucault recommends a view of the history of medicine, and clinical medicine in particular, as an epistemological rupture, rather than result of a number of great individuals discovering new ways of seeing and knowing the truth:

The clinic - constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse - owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.

Thus the empiricism of the 18th and 19th centuries is not a naive or naked act of looking and noting down what is before the doctor's eyes. The relationship between subject and object is not just the one who knows and the one who tells; the contact between the doctor and their individual patient does not pre-exist discourse as "mindless phenomenologies" would suggest. Rather, the clinical science of medicine came to exist as part of a wider structure of organising knowledge that allowed its articulation, making possible "the domain of its experience and the structure of its rationality".

Foucault would later formalise this notion in the episteme, where one epistemological era gives way to another, thus allowing one concept of what is scientific to move aside for another. In this case, as outlined in The Order of Things, the taxonomic era gave way to the organic historical era; thus, the clinic was not simply founded upon the observation of truth, and therefore more correct than any preceeding medicinal practice, but rather an artefact of a theory of knowledge inserted within a specific discursive period. The authority of the clinician relies on a relationship to the then current organisation of knowledge, instead of a relationship to a non-discursive state of affairs ('reality').

Importantly, this means that anatomists like Morgagni and Bichat were not students of the same discipline, even though their work was only thirty years apart. The epistemic change meant that the bodies, diseases, tissues and pathologies that each cut open and explored were articulated in completely different and discontinuous discourses from one another. Thus anatomy's claim to be a privileged empirical science that can observe and determine a true bodily schema cannot stand when its beginnings were not in a discovery of a way of coming to know what was real, but rather emerged amongst a new philosophical way of granting meaning and organising certain objects. Hence the use of "birth" in the title; the clinic had no origins, but simply and suddenly arrived.

The weekly Zizek

At 02:10 mins when Zizek speaks about the "so-called tolerant postmodern father" manipulating the child's "apparent free choice" reminds me of politics today. The concealment of "a much stronger order". The previous entry on this blog, of a 1954 BBC production of Nineteen Eighty Four is another example, where "Slavery is Freedom".

Nineteen Eighty Four BBC Live Television (1954)

BBC Television's live production of George Orwell's "1984". Produced in 1954. Creative Commons license: Public Domain.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a classic dystopian novel by English author George Orwell. Published in 1949, it is set in the eponymous year and focuses on a repressive, totalitarian regime. The story follows the life of one seemingly insignificant man, Winston Smith, a civil servant assigned the task of falsifying records and political literature, thus effectively perpetuating propaganda, who grows disillusioned with his meagre existence and so begins a rebellion against the system. The novel has become famous for its portrayal of surveillance and society's increasing encroachment on the rights of the individual. Since its publication the terms Big Brother and Orwellian have entered the popular vernacular. Orwell, who had "encapsulated the thesis at the heart of his novel" in 1944, wrote most of Nineteen Eighty-Four on the island of Jura, Scotland, during 19471948 while critically ill with tuberculosis. He sent the final typescript to his friends Secker and Warburg on 4 December 1948 and the book was published on 8 June 1949. Nineteen Eighty-Four has been translated into more than 50 languages. The novel's title, its terms, its language (Newspeak), and its author's surname are bywords for personal privacy lost to national state security. The adjective "Orwellian" denotes many things. It can refer to totalitarian action or organization, as well as governmental attempts to control or misuse information for the purposes of controlling, pacifying or even subjugating the population. "Orwellian" can also refer generally to twisted language which says the opposite of what it truly means, or specifically governmental propagandizing by the misnaming of things; hence the "Ministry of Peace" in the novel actually deals with war and the "Ministry of Love" actually tortures people. Since the novel's publication "Orwellian" has in fact become somewhat of a catch-all for any kind of governmental overreach or dishonesty and therefore has multiple meanings and applications. The phrase Big Brother is Watching You specifically connotes pervasive, invasive surveillance. Although the novel has been banned or challenged in some countries, it is, along with Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Kallocain by Karin Boye and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, among the most famous literary representations of dystopia. In 2005, Time magazine listed it among the hundred best English-language novels published since 1923. The book has often been misinterpreted as an attack on socialism, and Orwell himself had occasion to refute such claims, both privately and in public. In a letter to Francis A. Henson of the United Automobile Workers, dated 16 June 1949 (seven months before he died), excerpts from which were reproduced in Life (25 July 1949) and the New York Times Book Review (31 July 1949), Orwell stated the following: "My recent novel [1984] is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions ... which have already been partly realized in Communism and Fascism. ...The scene of the book is laid in Britain in order to emphasize that the English-speaking races are not innately better than anyone else and that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere." In his 1946 essay, "Why I Write", Orwell described himself as a Democratic Socialist. Nineteen Eighty-Four is set in Oceania, one of three intercontinental totalitarian super-states. The story occurs in London, the "chief city of Airstrip One", itself a province of Oceania that "had once been called England or Britain". Posters of the ruling Party's leader, "Big Brother", bearing the caption BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, dominate the city landscapes, while two-way television (the telescreen) dominates the private and public spaces of the populace. Oceania's people are in three classes — the Inner Party, the Outer Party, and the Proles. The Party government controls the people via the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue), the workplace of protagonist Winston Smith, an Outer Party member. As in the Nazi and Stalinist regimes, propaganda is pervasive; Smith's job is rewriting historical documents to match the contemporaneous party line, the orthodoxy of which changes daily. It therefore includes destroying evidence, amending newspaper articles, deleting the existence of people identified as "unpersons".

Last One for George

Swam to the store, tryin' to look for food
Corner store's kinda flooded so I broke my way through
I got what I could but before I got through
News say the police shot a black man trying to loot

8 Years of Bush in 8 Minutes

I wonder if he will ever face a court of justice.

Powers of Ten

Powers of Ten is a 1977 short documentary film written and directed by Ray Eames and her husband, Charles Eames. The film depicts the relative scale of the Universe in factors of ten (see also logarithmic scale and order of magnitude). The film is a modern adaptation of the 1957 book Cosmic View by Kees Boeke—and more recently is the basis of a new book version. Both adaptations, film and book, follow the form of the Boeke original, adding color and photography to the black and white drawings employed by Boeke in his seminal work. (Boeke's original concept and visual treatment is all too often uncredited or insufficiently credited in contemporary accounts.)

In 1998, Powers of Ten was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Star Wars: Retold (by someone who hasn't seen it)

My friend Amanda had never seen a whole Star Wars film. When I asked her if she wanted to watch the original trilogy she said that she would, but that she already knew what happens. So I took out my voice recorder and asked her to start from the top. I then created some very basic animation in Final Cut to go along with her narration.

Sweded: The summarized recreation of popular pop-culture films using limited budgets and a camcorder. The process is called sweding. Upon completion the film has been Sweded.

Origins: In the Michel Gondry film BE KIND REWIND, the character Jerry accidentally erases the videotapes at Mos Def's rental store, and the pair remake all the movies themselves. These versions become popular with customers, who are told they take longer to arrive and cost more because they come from Sweden. Hence, the films are referred to as 'Sweded'.
Many versions of Star Wars Sweded can be found on the internet.

The Theatre of Eternal Music

Terry Riley - Repetitive Music Godfather (French TV)


Terry Riley - A Rainbow in a curved air - 1969


Tony Conrad - Ten Years Alive on the Infinite Plain


"The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda" (1969)


Trance #2
Choreography: Dorian Nuskind-Oder
Performance: Alison Clancy, Dorian Nuskind-Oder
Music: Angus MacLise, Tony Conrad, and John Cale


The Theatre of Eternal Music:Dream House78'17 / La Monte Young　Marian Zazeela

The Theatre of Eternal Music, sometimes later known as The Dream Syndicate, was a mid-sixties musical group formed by LaMonte Young that focused on experimental drone music. It featured the performances of La Monte Young, John Cale, Angus MacLise, Terry Jennings, Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Billy Name, Jon Hassell, Alex Dea and others. The group is stylistically tied to the Neo-Dada aesthetics of Fluxus and the post-John Cage noise music continuum.

The Theatre of Eternal Music gave performances on the East Coast of the United States as well as in Western Europe that consisted of long periods of sensory inundation with combinations of harmonic relationships, which moved slowly from one to the next by means of "laws" laid out by LaMonte Young regarding "allowable" sequences and simultinaeities.

In 1964 the ensemble contained Young and Marian Zazeela, voices; Tony Conrad and John Cale, strings; and sometimes Terry Riley, voice. The Theater of Eternal Music's discordant sustained notes and loud amplification influenced John Cale's subsequent contribution to the Velvet Underground in his use of both discordance and feedback. John Cale and Tony Conrad have released noise music recordings they made during the mid-sixties, such as Cale's Inside the Dream Syndicate series (The Dream Syndicate being the alternative name given by Cale and Conrad to their collective work with LaMonte Young).

Most of the pieces performed by The Theatre of Eternal Music have long titles, such as The Tortoise Recalling the Drone of the Holy Numbers as they were Revealed in the Dreams of the Whirlwind and the Obsidian Gong, Illuminated by the Sawmill, the Green Sawtooth Ocelot and the High-Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. Likewise, the works are often of extreme length, many pieces having no beginning and no end, existing before and after a particular performance. The Theatre of Eternal Music ensemble’s masterwork, begun in 1964, is titled The Tortoise His Dreams and Journeys and is divided into several sections, of which Map of 49’s Dream: The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Light-Years Tracery, is the only one of which a fragment can be found on disc (forty minutes, with Jon Hassell on trumpet, Garret List on trombone, Zazeela on voice and Young on electronics). [5] The longest "Dream House" performance was that given at the Harrison Street gallery in New York, which lasted uninterruptedly for six years, from 1979-1985.

Video interview with Terry Riley (1975)

La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela at the Dream House
Video segments of a presentation by Young and Zazeela.

"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..."

A Clown Leaves the Stage

A loudmouth bone stupid bore maybe. But, while the world will be a safer place when George W. Bush is escorted away from the seat of power by his helpers, global politics will loose one of the great mad clowns of the 20th century. In the tradition of Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, The Three Stooges, the Keystone Cops and Bobcat Goldthwaite, George Bush has blundered and stumbled with the best of them.


Is the President of the United States, George W. Bush, an idiot? Scarborough Country asks the forbidden question. They look at his inability to speak correctly, not at his inability to lead correctly, however. Of course the real question is, is the Republican Party full of idiots because they nominated the sucker, and continue to blindly follow his crap? Is the US full of idiots, because they elected the sucker and have not begun demanding better until recently?


Yo Blair. How's my favorite poodle.


The orator of the White House.

Jack Kerouac - King of the Beats

Documentary about the life of On the Road author Jack Kerouac.
Jack Kerouac (pronounced /ˈkɛɹuæk, ˈkɛɹəwæk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American author, poet and painter. Alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, he is considered a pioneer of the Beat Generation.

Kerouac's work was very popular, but received little critical acclaim during his lifetime. Today, he is considered an important and influential writer who inspired others, including Hunter S. Thompson, Tom Robbins, Lester Bangs, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Haruki Murakami, and writers of the New Journalism. Kerouac also influenced musicians such as the Grateful Dead, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jim Morrison, Tom Waits, Simon & Garfunkel, The Smiths, Death Cab For Cutie, and Ulf Lundell.[1] Kerouac's best-known books are On the Road, The Dharma Bums, Big Sur, The Subterraneans, and Visions of Cody.

Examined Life: Philosophy in the Streets (2009)

From the director of ZIZEK! comes EXAMINED LIFE, a film by Astra Taylor coming to theaters this February. For more information visit http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/examinedlife/

Popeye is Public Domain

Popeye the Sailor, the first episode (1933)


Public Domain popeye content

Popeye the sailorman is in theo public domain in Britain from January 1, 2009. Elzie Segar’s copyright on the character expired on that date.

His copyright on the character finished with the New Year’s beginning, as a European Union law restricts the rights of authors to 70 years after their death.

So, from that date anyone can sell Popeye books, toys and action figures to computer games, Popeye posters, T-shirts and even make new comic strips.

But this bonanza is not for US citizens! The character will remain protected in the U.S. until 2024, as the country’s law protects a work for 95 years after its initial copyright.

Occupation 101

Since the invasion began on the Strip I have been feeling ill
Carrying the thought with me all the time
The images in my head of children in dark cellars waiting
For ambush and booby traps for tanks and cylindrical death
Falling from the skies or opening up the earth
Beneath the feet of the fleeing fighting fearing mass

At night the blood stays behind my eyelids closed
Full as I am with the fragments sent out to a world
Indifferent to the fire which raises these messages
To a wind that is sour and poisonous for all
Dreams of mad death in a broken stone prison
Take me into a world of pain than is a circle

The Nazis: A Warning from History

Arguably one of the most important documentary series ever made, The Nazis: A Warning from History sets out to show that, far from being a uniquely German aberration, Nazism fed upon and was fostered by the prejudices and lemming-like inclinations of ordinary people. Although culminating with the atrocities of the Holocaust, these programmes are equally good on the motives of otherwise perfectly normal people, who needed only the tacit encouragement of the regime to perpetrate horrors against their enemies, their neighbours, or their own family. When confronted with evidence of their Nazi past, elderly former party members are often unable to find any other justification for their actions than simply that they could get away with it. Far from being a monolithic dictatorship which compelled the citizenry to act in rigidly prescribed ways, the Nazi state just allowed people to give their worst inclinations free reign. Hitler, it turns out, was a profoundly lazy man who rarely got out of bed before midday, and preferred to leave affairs of state to sort themselves out. He subscribed fervently to the doctrine of survival of the fittest as applied to all social and political matters, and actively encouraged in-fighting among his subordinates. The result was an organisational vacuum at the centre of state, which super-ambitious acolytes were only too eager to fill, often acting on nothing more than the Fuhrer's off-the-cuff remarks. One small example is revealing: after reading a letter from the father of a disabled child, Hitler agreed that it would be best for the boy to die. From this single statement arose a nationwide policy of euthanasia for all disabled children, carried out willingly and without compulsion by the doctors and "carers" themselves. It needed nothing more than the Fuhrer's nod. The message is clear and shocking: it happened in Germany, it could happen anywhere

Some Recent Tunes Noticed

Son House, Death Letter (1967)


Redd Kross, "Somebody Wants To Love You" LIVE @ Santa Monica Pier 1982

The Weekly Žižek Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself

Fear Thy Neighbor as Thyself: Antinomies of Tolerant Reason, begins by asking, "What can philosophy do today? What can it tell the general public haunted by the problems of ecology, racism, religious conflict, and so on?" The role of philosophy, Žižek says, is not to provide answers, but to analyze how we view questions. "How we perceive a problem can itself become part of the problem," he says. To illustrate his various points, he uses such examples as Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS'55, HON.'59), the doomed passengers on September 11's United Flight 93, and former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, among others. The lecture takes the audience on an enlightening journey through the perceptions of identity and tolerance. A question-and-answer session follows the lecture.

The Big Snooze (1946) Bugs Bunny

Looney Tunes
Public Domain
October 5, 1946
Director: Robert Clampett
Producer: Edward Eddie Selzer
Production Company: Warner Bros.
Audio/Visual: mono, color

The Coconut Revolution (2001)

Bougainville, with a populations of only 160,000 has managed to close and keep closed one of the biggest mines in the world. They have held their ground for a decade with antique weapons and homemade guns. These people have taken on the biggest mining company in the world and won. Ripped from the DVD "Indigenous Resistance in New Guinea" made by Solidarity South Pacific: www.eco-action.org/ssp - respect!

This is an incredible modern-day story of a native people’s victory over Western globalization. Sick of seeing their environment ruined and their people exploited by the Panguna Mine, the Pacific island of Bougainville rose up against the giant mining corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc. The newly formed Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) began fighting with bows and arrows and sticks and stones against a heavily armed adversary. In an attempt to put down the rebellion the Papua New Guinean Army swiftly established a gunboat blockade around the island, backed by Australian Military personnel and equipment. With no shipments allowed in or out of the island, the People of Bougainville learned to become self-dependent and self-sustained.

terracid @ the booknook 29.11.08

Part one


Part Two

Welcome to 2009...its going to be great!