Bonnie Bassler: Discovering bacteria's amazing communication system

Bonnie Bassler discovered that bacteria "talk" to each other, using a chemical language that lets them coordinate defense and mount attacks. The find has stunning implications for medicine, industry -- and our understanding of ourselves.

Bonnie Bassler studies how bacteria can communicate with one another, through chemical signals, to act as a unit. Her work could pave the way for new, more potent medicine.

Swine Flu (1976)

1976 Swine Flu Propaganda - actual public service ad for the same damn thing, 30 yrs ago. From Benjamin Palmer

Bongwater

The Power of Pussy


Nick Cave Dolls


Psychedelic Sewing Room


Lesbians of Russia/Jimmy

I continuing trawling the recesses of my musical memory. Drawing to the surface the tangled wreckage of those tunes that changed my mind and the world around me. Bongwater was the soundtrack to my Bachelor of Arts in Journalism and Asian Studies (1988-90).By third year I was finding it difficult to attend classes.

And listening to Bongwater today I can understand why. Ann Magnuson and Mark Kramer create collages of noise layered over with smart ironic vocals that cut through any pretension and a lot of dogmatic thinking. Combined with a strict regime of poetry yoga and the substances of the universe its a wonder I ever finished that degree.

GODFATHERS - Birth, School, Work, Death - 1987

This came out when I was 18 years old. I remember pondering its deep truth then and it seems to be relevant today..

Thunderbirds are Go!!!

Thunderbirds is a British mid-1960s television show devised by Gerry and Sylvia Anderson and made by AP Films using a form of marionette puppetry dubbed "Supermarionation". The series followed the adventures of International Rescue, an organisation created to help those in grave danger using technically advanced equipment and machinery. The series focused on the head of the organisation, ex-astronaut Jeff Tracy, and his five sons who piloted the "Thunderbird" machines. A popular show, the series is still shown today and has inspired a number of subsequent television programmes and films.

It was also may be a reason why so many of my generation took drugs. Just check this out:



Life was just not exciting enough. I have spoken to two people today about the Thunderbirds and it seems it never has made it to Sweden. A cult show from my childhood.

The Vault of Death


Part One


Part Two


Part Three

Amadou & Mariam - Je pense a toi

Amadou & Mariam - Je pense a toi

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez

Sugarman


Hate Street Dialogue


Establishment Blues


Inner City Blues


Crucify Your Mind


Jane S. Piddy

Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (also known as Rodriguez or as Jesus Rodriguez) is an American folk musician, born in Detroit, Michigan on July 10, 1942(1942-07-10). He was named 'Sixto' (pronounced sees-to) because he was the sixth child in his family. Rodriguez's parents were middle-class immigrants from Mexico, who left in the 1920s. In most of his songs he takes a political stance on the cruelties facing the inner city poor.

In the 1980s I bought all of Rodriguez's albums on vinyl:

* Cold Fact (1970)
* Coming from Reality (1971)
* At His Best (Australia – 1977)

for around half a dollar each in charity shops around my hometown. Nobody listened to him except the hippies who lived in the hills. I lost two of them to an ex-girlfriend in Sydney in 1994, but bought them again on CD in Australia in 2003. I still listen to them often.

You Suck

Consolidated featuring The Yeastie Girls: You Suck (1993)

Continuing with the inner city hits of my years spent in the grungier side of Sydney, Australia this one comes from my Redfern years (1995-1999). A warehouse upstairs on Redfern Street featured the You Suck/Crackhouse single by Consolidated and The Yeastie Girls. What more can I say......

The Cut Ups

Cut-Ups

"When you cut into the present the future leaks out" William S. Burroughs

Mr Moon

It was summer 1993-94. I inhabited the cafes and bars around Newtown, Glebe, Marrickville, St Peters, Erskinville, Stanmore, Camperdown, and Petersham in Sydney Australia. It was a hot summer. I had a green Volkswagen kombi van, a dog and all the time in the world. Experimentation and poetry were the order of the day. And many strange days they were. I remember one of the houses I lived in (Corunna Road, Stanmore) had a Headless Chickens album in the collective record collection. This song was a gem among them. I thought of it the other day and realized..it must be on YouTube.

"The Penultimate Truth about Philip K. Dick"

Part One


Part Two


Part Three


Part Four


Part Five


Part Six


Part Seven


Part Eight


Part Nine

"The Penultimate Truth about Philip K. Dick"

In 2007 I produced this documentary about the mystical experiences of sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick.

Philip K. Dick is considered by many to be one the world's greatest science fiction writers ever; as a sufferer from mental illness himself he had the ability to turn his hallucinations about the universe into an extraordinary writing career.
During his lifetime, Dick produced an astonishing amount of prize winning novels and short stories, which were translated into more than 25 languages. Three of his literary works were transformed into blockbuster movies: Blade Runner, Minority Report and Total Recall.
Several years before his death, Philip started having mystical experiences that affected his everyday life. As a result, he started to wonder if what he had imagined for his stories was real and if life was just an illusion or the creation of each person's subjectivity.
This in-depth program explores Philip K. Dick`s world, a universe full of mysteries and intrigues.

Jennifer Gentle & Kawabata Makoto - live in Rome February 2005

Live at Circolo degli Artisti, Rome, Italy
With special guest Kawabata Makoto from Acid Mothers Temple

Lineup is
Kawabata Makoto - guitar
Marco Fasolo - guitar, vocals
Alessio Gastaldello - drums
Liviano Mos - keyboards
Francesco Candura - bass
Paolo Mioni - guitar

Disturbing Strokes

Mr Drummond cruised the poor neighbourhoods for boys. None of the young lads were every seen again.....

My Best Friend

2000 Theatrical Release and Cannes 1999 Official Selection Special Screening! A film about the tempestuous yet legendary working relationship between two creative giants of the film industry - Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski. A chain of coincidences brings the 13-year-old schoolboy Werner Herzog together with Klaus Kinski to the same apartment in Munich. In an unabated, 48 hour fit of rage, Kinski immediately proceeds to lay waste to all the furniture, only one of such fits to come. Herzog therefore knows what awaits him when, some years later, he engages Kinski to work with him on Aguirre, The Wrath Of God, their first film together. Four more films would follow. My Best Fiend is a film about the love-hate relationship between director Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski - utterly puzzling to others. It reveals the deep trust between two exceptional artists and their independently and simultaneously hatched plans to murder one another.

"Yet Herzog continued working with Kinski—they eventually made five films together—and in this, one can detect something of the perversity that impelled the director to drag a boat across a mountain in the first place. Herzog has never really been able to fully account for his and Kinski’s twisted reliance upon each other. He did pull from Kinski some astonishing performances—particularly in Woyzeck, a film basically composed of several long one-take sequences—but their working relationship involved serial pledges to kill each other. Kinski, who died in 1991, wrote in his autobiography that “I absolutely despise this murderous Herzog. . . . Huge red ants should piss into his lying eyes, gobble up his balls, penetrate his asshole, and eat his guts!”
The Secret Mainstream: Contemplating the Mirages of Werner Herzog

Lord Byron: The Mark Steele Lectures

Part One


Part Two


Part Three

"I would blow my brains out but for the pleasure I know it would give my mother-in-law" Byron.

George Gordon Byron, later Noel, 6th Baron Byron FRS (22 January 1788– 19 April 1824) was a British poet and a leading figure in Romanticism. Amongst Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So, we'll go no more a roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest European poets and remains widely read and influential, both in the English-speaking world and beyond.

Byron's fame rests not only on his writings but also on his life, which featured upper-class living, numerous love affairs, debts, and separation. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know". Byron served as a regional leader of Italy's revolutionary organization, the Carbonari, in its struggle against Austria. He later traveled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero.[2] He died from a fever contracted while in Messolonghi in Greece.

Super Size Me (Full Length)

Filmmaker Morgan Spurlock makes himself a test subject in this documentary about the commercial food industry. Rigorously eating a diet of McDonald's fast food three times a day for a month straight, Spurlock is out to prove the physical and mental effects of consuming fast food. Spurlock also provides a look at the food culture in America through its schools, corporations, and politics as seen through the eyes of both ordinary citizens and health advocates.

Jack Kerouac, On the Road

The American Novel Since 1945 (ENGL 291)

Professor Amy Hungerford's lecture on Kerouac's On the Road begins by contrasting the Beats' ambition for language's direct relation to lived experience with a Modernist sense of difficulty and mediation. She goes on to discuss the ways that desire structures the novel, though not in the ways that we might immediately expect. The very blatant pursuit of sex with women in the novel, for example, obscures the more significant desire for connection among men, particularly the narrator Sal's love for Dean Moriarty. The apparent desire for the freedom of the open road, too, Hungerford argues, exists in a necessary conjunction with the idealized comforts of a certain middle-class American domesticity, signaled by the repeated appearance of pie.

Complete course materials are available at the Open Yale Courses website: http://open.yale.edu/courses

This course was recorded in Spring 2008.

Spires That in the Sunset Rise

Spires That in the Sunset Rise is an American Psych folk band from from Decatur, Illinois. The four original members of the band (Kathleen Baird, Georgia Vallas, Taralie Peterson, and Tracy Peterson) grew up together in Decatur, Illinois, eventually moving to Chicago, Illinois where they began to experiment with creating songs. Drawing from experimental music and multi-cultural music, they created a unique sound which they debuted on their first self-titled album 'Spires That in the Sunset Rise'. The first album was created without Taralie's sister Tracy Peterson, but she soon joined the group before the making of their second album 'Four Winds the Walker.' A year later they created their third album 'This Is Fire' which today is considered one of their most accessible albums thus far. Tracy Peterson left the band before the making of their fourth album 'Curse the Traced Bird.' Since the release of their first album, they have contributed a new slant to the New Folk movement, by incorporating a darker sound and witchy vocals- often involving cackles and yelps- to their music. Their music has drawn comparisons to The Raincoats, Current 93, Comus, and The Ex, and they have toured throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe.

Shellac of North America

Shellac - Squirrel Song

Walking home this afternoon listening to Shellac. A good thing.


Shellac - My Black Ass


Steve Albini and Shellac live at the anniversary party of The Ex at The Paradiso, Amsterdam 1999.

And then one from the distant past...


Rapeman - Trouser Minnow off 'Two Nuns & A Pack Mule' LP (1988)

and even...


Rapeman: Dutch Courage (Live)

May the Gods bless Steve Albini!!

The Ten Cent Plague; The Life of Outlaw Comics

David Hajdu: The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America
In the years between World War II and the emergence of television as a mass medium, American popular culture as we know it was first created-in the pulpy, boldly illustrated pages of comic books. No sooner had this new culture emerged than it was beaten down by church groups, community bluestockings, and a McCarthyish Congress-only to resurface with a crooked smile on its face in Mad magazine. The story of the rise and fall of those comic books has never been fully told-until The Ten-Cent Plague. David Hajdu's remarkable new book vividly opens up the lost world of comic books, its creativity, irreverence, and suspicion of authority.

When we picture the 1950s, we hear the sound of early rock and roll. The Ten-Cent Plague shows how-years before music-comics brought on a clash between children and their parents, between prewar and postwar standards. Created by outsiders from the tenements, garish, shameless, and often shocking, comics spoke to young people and provided the guardians of mainstream culture with a big target. Parents, teachers, and complicit kids burned comics in public bonfires. Cities passed laws to outlaw comics. Congress took action with televised hearings that nearly destroyed the careers of hundreds of artists and writers.

The Ten-Cent Plague radically revises common notions of popular culture, the generation gap, and the divide between "high" and "low" art. As he did with the lives of Billy Strayhorn and Duke Ellington (in Lush Life) and Bob Dylan and his circle (in Positively 4th Street), Hajdu brings a place, a time, and a milieu unforgettably back to life.

Jerry Garcia & Ken Kesey on the Electric Kool-Aid Talk Show

Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and Ken Kesey interviewed on Tom Snyder's Tomorrow Show (also known as the Electric Kool-Aid Talk Show).

Live @ NBC Studios
New York City
May 7th, 1981

Sound and Noise

Shunryu Suzuki Roshi - Sandokai - Sound and Noise

Empty Mirror- Life in a Zen Buddhist Monastery 1946-47

Morton Stith, a Marine Corp veteran of World War II enters a Zen Monastery in 1946. Pierian Spring Academy. icollege. Fifty Plus.

Do It Yourself: The History of Rough Trade

Rough Trade Records is an independent record label, based in London, England. It was started in 1978 by Geoff Travis. Geoff Travis was traveling in North America and amassed a huge record collection as he moved from coast to coast. He then shipped these records back to the UK which became the basis of the Rough Trade Shop. The label grew out of the Rough Trade Shop, founded by Travis in West London in 1976. The Label was set up in 1978 and also went into the distribution business. Distributing amongst others "Joey Parratt's" first band The Flying Brix. It became independent from the shop in 1982, then went bankrupt in 1991, ruining quite a few smaller record labels to which money was owed. Rough Trade was relaunched in 2000.

Rough Trade specialised primarily in European post-punk and other alternative rock of the late 1970s and early 1980s. In the late 1980s Rough Trade branched out by issuing an eponymous album by Lucinda Williams. Other early signings included Agitpop, The Raincoats, Young Marble Giants, The Smiths and Scritti Politti (the latter re-signed to the label in the mid 2000s). Geoff Travis later launched Blanco y Negro Records in partnership with Warner Bros. Records.

Rough Trade was an independently owned entity — a partnership between Mr. Travis, Jeanette Lee, (a former member of PiL), and minority partners, Sanctuary Records, as a part of the Zomba Music Group until June 11, 2002 when BMG bought out this business. In July 2007 Sanctuary Records then sold Rough Trade to the Beggars Group making Rough Trade independent once again.

Since its re-birth, Rough Trade has released albums by high-charting artists such as The Strokes, The Libertines, Babyshambles, and Belle & Sebastian. A 192-page illustrated history of Rough Trade, written by Rob Young of The Wire, was published in September 2006 by the UK-based company Black Dog Publishing.

Birthday Party. Junkyard

Birthday Party on Gotterdamerung - Junkyard (incredible)

AN EVENING WITH VANDANA SHIVA

International food sovereignty and deep democracy activist VANDANA SHIVA shares her views on the current planetary situation in an event presented by the International Forum on Globalization (IFG), KPFA Radio 94.1 FM, and Navdanya International