William Burroughs interviewed by Kathy Acker

This is a fairly rare interview with William Burroughs by Kathy Acker, a great punk/postmodern/experimental writer, originally released on video by the Institute of Contemporary Art in London although it is no longer listed in their catalog. This particular copy comes from Dutch television.

Echoes and George Greenough

Pink Floyd "Echoes" (1973) from the film Crystal Voyager

Crystal Voyager is one of the most beautiful surfing movies ever made, and one of the most successful. It was the first surfing film biography, and the first to concentrate largely on one surfer. Greenough’s innovations had helped revolutionise surfboard design in the 1960s, but the film concentrates on his efforts to capture the perfect surfing footage, from the perfect platform – his own boat.

The film took the surfing road movie, a well-established genre, to the water, with a camera strapped to Greenough’s back. Riding his famous kneeboard – known as 'the spoon’ – Greenough’s footage from under and inside the waves gave the film an extraordinary immediacy.

The final sequence, a 23-minute odyssey, has an almost abstract beauty, aided by an ecstatic song contributed by Pink Floyd. The band had seen his first film, The Innermost Limits of Pure Fun (1970), when it was shown in a Sydney experimental art gallery, The Yellow House. Crystal Voyager was produced and directed by David Elfick, who went on to produce Newsfront.


The Innermost Limits Of Pure Fun- George Greenough (1970)

This release is essential watching because it is a cinematic masterwork of the highest magnitude. In it, George Greenough chronicles ground zero of the shortboard revolution as it evolved in 1968. This highly personalized film is the prime instigators perspective of the innovations that changed surfing forevermore as they came down. Track the inside out with George in groundbreaking point of view sequences that are utterly unique. Experience remote Australia and hidden California as ridden by Mac T, Ted Spencer, Baddy Treolar, Chris Brock, Gary Keys, Russell Hughes and a brigade of the undergrounds best. Revel in the morphic hand hewn artwork of Patty Hennick. Hear the distinctive improvisational soundtrack which was scored on the spot by Dennis Dragon, (before the Surf Punks), his brothers Doug and Daryl, (the Captain before Tennille), and Denny Aaberg, (before Big Wednesday).

Finances entirely with the proceeds generated by Greenoughs fishing business, this document is entirely free of and commercial constraints or advertising sludge. Gritty, witty, unexpurgated, unadorned and essential; this is the first film from the tubes perspective (GreenoughVision). It is the Innermost Limits of Pure Fun.
-C.R. Stecyk

Himalayan Yoga Neuroscience & Astrophysics

Wings to Freedom

Mystic Revelations from Babaji and the Himalayan Yogis

There never has been, nor will be, a time when man's own nature shall cease to demand his foremost attention. The evolution of human consciousness is the most comprehensive enterprise ever undertaken by mankind, besides which the greatest of human achievements pale into insignificance.

In the quiet spaces of our lives we often wonder: Where did we come from? Where do we go after death? Who are we and why are we here? Meditating Yogis realized that the answers lay within the depths of one's own consciousness, unlocked by the key of breath and the Science of Yoga.

Join award winning documentary film makers Som and Rita Bakshi as they follow the path of a yogi's mystic journey through the Himalayas.

The film captures candid moments as Gurunath illumines us on man's timeless questions against the breathtaking high-altitude scenery, glacial rivers, and caves hallowed by Ancient Sages. A unique feast for the eyes and the intellect unfolds as the Yogi's experiences and in-depth revelations come to life.

Featuring Yogiraj Gurunath Siddhanath, a living Kriya Kundalini Solar master.

"To transmute the minds of sincere seekers of yoga into a higher state
of consciousness is the purpose of my work." -- Siddhanath

If earth peace is to herald the dawn of the new age, we must all realize:

Humanity is one's only religion,
Breath one's only prayer, and
Consciousness one's only God.

Evolution of the Human Brain:

In the center of the human brain, there is a miniature cave of Brahma. This cave of Brahma is the 3rd ventricle.

In the human brain lies the corpus callosum. Connected to the corpus callosum is the Hamsa swan.

Since eons yogis have reported seeing a Hamsa during meditation. Now in the 3rd eye center there is the agya chakra, called the "shiva netra", the eye of shiva. The Hamsanath yogi sees the shiva netra, which is just in front of the cave of Brahma.

Within the center of the 3rd eye is the scintillating white star called the kutastha chaitanya. When the yogi by constant years of meditation, penetrates the star—he is already in the no mind state, the "unmani avasta" a state of bhav samadhi, sabikalpa samadhi. —he penetrates the star and enters into a state of nirvikalpa samadhi! And now this lofty soul, radiant in his splendor, rests with his pranic spiritual energy in the ventricles of the Hamsa swan, which are the lateral ventricles in the brain. The evolution of human consciousness is still going on, as the human brain develops, vaster and more beautiful, the texture refines. The 100 billion cells in the human brain are uniting with the 100 billion stars in our galactic system, and they go beyond the galactic system into the wonderful state of supernal splendor of niranjan nirvana, kaivalya samadhi, the Nirvana.

His physical brain and body cannot take it much, but the ultimate stage is that the corona radiata in his brain cells, these subtle fibers, these tubes, light up with a divine effulgence. This radiant splendor goes and spreads in its aura far beyond the earth system, way into the galaxies.

Os Mutantes Documentary Movie

A trailer from the upcoming documentary on psychedelic rock pioneers "Os Mutantes". The story of Os Mutantes is perhaps one of the strangest in the entire history of rock music, and has served as heady inspiration for artists as varied as David Byrne, Beck, Sean Lennon, and Nirvana. Imagine a 1960's Brazilian rock band on a weekly television program disguised as aliens, witches, or conquist-adors performing surreal hymns to such bizarre figures as Don Quixote (or at other times: Genghis Khan and Lucifer) while tossing massive nets and giant rubber caterpillars across their audience. Add the fact that they had the courage to perform a fusion of traditional Brazilian rhythms with psychedelia at a time when the "MPB" (the Brazilian music establishment) were openly hostile to the wild sounds of American rock 'n roll and this provoked even further outrage by fashioning their own outrageous musical instruments, often constructed out of such common household objects as rubber hoses, cans of hot chocolate, or bottles of bug spray. Finally, they did all of this under the watchful eyes of a brutally repressive right-wing military dictatorship, as they were regularly censored by the government while performing alongside such musical revolutionaries as Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso (who, like many artists in Brazil at the time, were imprisoned and exiled for their political stance). For more information - visit: www.americangirlproductions.com This is by far the best copy of this video of the Brazilian group Os Mutantes. Recorded in a Festival in 1967 in São Paulo, Brazil.

Dorothea Tanning

Dorothea Tanning (born August 25, 1910) is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor and writer. She has also designed sets and costumes for ballet and theatre.
Born in Galesburg, Illinois, Tanning lived in Paris for twenty-eight years. Having moved to New York, she exhibited with the Julien Levy Gallery prior to meeting the German painter Max Ernst in 1942; she married Ernst four years later (becoming his fourth wife, after Luise Straus-Ernst in 1918, Marie-Berthe Aurenche in 1927 and Peggy Guggenheim in 1942). Ernst introduced her to the circle of the Surrealists. Her best-known work, Eine kleine Nachtmusik (a dark painting laden with symbolism; ironically named after Mozart's light-hearted serenade), shows that she became a member of that group for a while, but later her painting style became prismatic and lyrical.

During her 95th year, a New York gallery published a new monograph entitled Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias 1955--1965. Her most recent museum exhibition was organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, entitled Birthday and Beyond, and mounted in 2000 to mark their acquisition of Tanning's celebrated 1942 self-portrait, Birthday.

In the 1940s, when she was one of the painters in Julien Levy's stable, Tanning painted within the idiom of surrealist representation. By the mid-50s, her work had radically changed. As Tanning explains, "Around 1955 my canvases literally splintered . . . I broke the mirror, you might say." Insomnias (Moderna Museet, Stockholm) — the group takes its name from a painting of the same title that Tanning made in 1957 — are forays into the realm of conjured energies. They represent a forceful shift at a particular, postwar moment that continues to reverberate today. In his essay for Dorothea Tanning: Insomnias, Charles Stuckey describes these "seemingly multidimensional mindspaces" as "among the most ambitious and sophisticated paintings to address the dilemmas of imagination and culture in a new atomic, space-race age."

Following her retrospective at the Centre Pompideau organized by Pontus Hultén in 1974, Tanning returned to New York in 1978 following the death of her husband. In her tenth decade, Tanning frequently has been publishing poetry in The New Yorker, and is completing several books. Her most recent novel is Chasm.

The Obama Deception

Yesterday a good friend told me about a film he saw on the net that made an impression on him. It is called The Obama Deception and it deal with:

The Obama phenomenon is a hoax carefully crafted by the captains of the New World Order. He is being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American people into accepting global slavery.

Last night I watched some of it with this blog post in mind and a critical eye at the ready. My thoughts congealed around the idea that power for 99% of the population is as distant as the moon. Conspiracy (and I will explain what I mean by that) is one way of bringing the conception of power closer to the mundaneness of daily life. To explain how I came to this idea I go back to the Goombungee school bus in the hot summer of 1983. The Australian government had just changed and after 8 years of centre-right leadership the adults who could had just voted in a Labour government led by Robert (Bob) Hawke, then holder of the beer sculling world record, a yard glass - approximately 3 imperial pints or 1.7 litres - in eleven seconds.

On my school bus sat several teenagers from religious families. I remember one of these kids speaking at length about Hawke "being pushed as savior in an attempt to con the American Australian people into accepting global slavery" involving a world bank and Zionist plots. There was even a prophecy from Nostradamus involved in his explanation (something about "a man with the name of a wild bird in a land yet undiscovered coming to power"). We on the Goombungee bus looked out over the eucalyptus scrub and dry fields and felt somehow involved in the functions of power by being privy to this 'truth'. The machinery of power may have been impossibly distant from us there in that hot tin box on wheels, but we understood something that perhaps others did not. There was a conspiracy at work and we had come into contact with it through narrative.

Later in my life, in 1994 I attended a lecture at Sydney University by Noam Chomsky (who no doubt is part of the same conspiracy as Bob Hawke but we on the Goombungee bus did not get much exposure to anarchist linguists so he was never in the story). I remember Chomsky touched on the idea of conspiracy theories in his presentation. He said that conspiracy theories are dependent on distance; if it is an enemy state it is not a conspiracy, it is intelligence (think Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq, the famine that has been going on in North Korea for a decade and so on). If the theory under consideration is closer to 'home' and involves one's own government then we are talking conspiracy.

In the decade and a half since I saw Chomsky speak, power has drifted even further away from the masses in many lands. With jobs moving to the new industrial economies of the East and governments moving upwards into a level of global blocs (NAFTA, EU, ASEAN and so on) the average citizen can be forgiven for feeling there is more to the story of government than what they are being told. The concept of politic agency at the individual level is not strong and healthy at the moment in many nations. It is here that the conspiracy enters into the fabric of political narrative. Conspiracy, such as The Obama Deception brings power closer to people via narrative and thereby provides a sense of mythic agency in relation to politics.

The tragedy of media such as The Obama Deception is not the possible degrees of truth value that can be related to it as a text. Rather, that political agency is translated into complex narratives and enacted out along reactionary lines of behaviour as a part of the political process (it has had 2.5 million views on just one of its YouTube sites) I find very disturbing. The more time people spend putting together the pieces of The Obama Deception puzzle (even if it is just in their minds) the less time is being spent on actually doing something to participate in the democratic political process. Of course the people behind The Obama Deception would say that there is no democratic process today. That's the way they want it. The result of such a narrative as The Obama Deception and "the man with the name of a wild bird" from 1983 is a negation of what few democratic rights we have remaining.

Terry Hall & Mushtaq

Terry Hall & Mushtaq: A Tale Of Woe from the CD Hour Of Two Lights (2003)


Terry Hall & Mushtaq / Ten Eleven (Live)

TERRY HALL & MUSHTAQ
The Hour of Two Lights : Release Date: August 26, 2003

Terry Hall's career has always been one of spotting trends and breaking new ground. In the early '80s he helped spearhead the hugely popular ska revival as lead vocalist with The Specials, who went on to become one of the most popular and influential bands of the punk era inspiring the likes of Rancid, Blur and No Doubt and The Basement Jaxx. Hall followed that up with Fun Boy Three, ushering in a musical eclecticism seldom heard in the pop charts and on mainstream radio.

Throughout these projects as well as his subsequent group, The Colourfield, and several solo albums, Terry Hall's understated, evocative vocals has continued to be one of the most distinctive and recognizable voices in all rock music. Now, together with Mushtaq, a UK-based, Middle Eastern musician with a background in hip-hop, reggae and r'n'b Terry Hall has created an album no less groundbreaking and arresting than anything he has done in his career.

Terry Hall and Mushtaq's album couldn't be more in tune with today's headlines, fusing the Jewish and Arabic musical cultures which draws upon the duo's own lineage -- Terry Hall being a Polish refugee with a Jewish background and Mushtaq being a Middle Eastern Muslim. In some ways, the album is a return to Terry Hall's musical roots (you'll recall The Specials' breakthrough hit "Gangsters" was based around a Middle Eastern-influenced melody).Yet, together with Mushtaq, the album breaks bold new ground by creating a stunning topical tapestry of music. This melting pot of sounds features Jewish Gypsy music (from the group Romani Rad), a Mongolian throat singer, an Egyptian violinist, an Algerian rapper, a Turkish percussionist, a Syrian oud player, an Arabian pianist, and a Jewish Clarinet player whose resume includes being a sessions musician on the original "Pink Panther" theme! Even Blur and Gorillaz front man Damon Albarn provides guest vocals and instrumentation.

No wonder the album is positioned as an early contender for Britain's prestigious Mercury Prize awarded
for the best British album of the year reflecting originality and talent chosen by an independent jury of
industry leaders, musicians and critics.


"Everybody we worked with had a story to tell," says Terry Hall. "And their stories became part of the record. We were blessed with the range of people we found. But it really happened by accident."

Napalm Sticks to Kids by Alien Virus

The Brisbane sound from 1990.

Gongs Across Borders

Music and dance from the highlands of Cambodia and Vietnam. Some beautiful images and sounds.

A Musician from Non Lec Village in Cambodia explains: “The Gong, is very important because all my ancestors no matter what they faced, they always had Gongs. Every ceremony we must play Gongs for the Spirits. Without Gongs it’s useless to hold the Ceremony. The Gongs speak to the Spirit and represent our Tribe. They are so important that if we lost Gongs it will be like we lost half of our bodies. Gongs are extremely important.”

Terrence Koh

"The Voyage Of Lady Midnight Snowdrops Through Double Star Death" By Terrence Koh.

I watched a documentary on Terrence Koh this weekend, Hey Koh Bunny, Hey Koh Bunny!. A cool account of a 'cool' artist. What impressed me about Koh is not so much his art, which is clever and summarizes a lot of what has been happening in the west over the last ten years in art, media and buying, but the whole 'art as reality/reality as art' paradigm that is present in Koh Bunny.