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Brightblack Morning Light news

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From BBML HQ:

BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT have been invited to MY BLOODY VALENTINE ‘s curated event of the United Kingdom’s All Tomorrow’s Parties!
A first performance for BBML in France, the French Transmusicales Festival kindly invites BBML in December!
Expansive European Tour Dates Announced!

BBML Announce A New Collection Of Artists For The Band
Nico Turner & Jenean Farris of LA’s underground duo Voices Voices & Danielle Stech Homsy of Rio En Medio have musically joined BBML for this 2009 multi-nation journey.
The quartet are currently deep in Pueblo country, visioning & getting musical. Danielle has sat in with BBML during their early spring shows in the American South, as well as the April 2009 Denver & Seattle shows opening for My Bloody Valentine.

Other BBML News
Recent 2009 autumn shows included Shineywater with a new BBML backing band opening for HOPE SANDOVAL & THE WARM INVENTIONS both in San Francisco & in Humboldt County. BBML would like to honor Linnea Vedder-Shults & Danielle Stech Homsy for their musicality & fun fun fun travels.
Missing from the usual line up is long time pianist Rachael Hughes, who is adventuring in technicolor in an emerald forest of Northern California. Usual trombonist & vibraphonist, Santa Cruz’s Matthew Davis is currently playing trombone in a Chicago broadway musical. BBML’s touring singer & harpist Meara O’Reilly is rumored to be working on visuals for a video for Bjork & playing shows as Avocet. Gypsy artist & drummer Tommy Rouse has been working with bands White Magic & Celebration around the East Coast USA. Recent thanks to Otto Hauser for joining BBML in some shows around New York City & Brooklyn.

2010 = BBML’s AUSTRALIA JANUARY TOUR DATES COMING SOON !

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BBML/LUNGFISH limited edition 7″ vinyl still available by calling:
Harvest Record Shop, North Carolina @ (828) 258-2999
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TOURDATES AFTER THE JUMP


GERMANY 11/23/2009 BRIGHTBLACK MORNING LIGHT / RIO EN MEDIO @ STEINBRUCH-DUISBURG

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Lavender Diamond "Like a Prayer"

Here’s the long-awaited video of Lavender Diamond’s cover of Madonna’s “Like a Prayer,” featuring Lavender Diamond singer Becky Stark (interview). Animation by Jacob Ciocci (Paper Rad) and Tom McConnell. More art by Ron Rege, Jr. Directed by Peter Glantz.

Download video in HD: imaginarycompany.org

The song is available on the charity benefit album Through the Wilderness: A Tribute to Madonna released in 2007 by Manimal Vinyl.

UNEMPLOYMENT by Aaron Lake Smith

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Punk Rock pessimism best describes Arthur contributor Aaron Lake’s Smith narrative of the anguish of being an aging, unemployed, punk. After receiving a zine written by German squatters titled “Happy Unemployed” Smith is forced to realize that the punk rock fantasy of outsmarting the work-world and eradicating deadtime do not so easily go hand in hand. Unlike the happy squatters, Smith is too old to be a crusty, too ambitious for some sort of career success, and too not-German to suckle off a welfare state.

Published by the zine world’s HarperCollins, Microcosm, Unemployment is formatted in the style of a Jack Chick tract. The story reads nothing like a classic Evangelically-polemic Jack Chick storyline until Smith turns to Crimethinc’s Days of War Nights of Love like the Good Book, and is climactically visited by its messianic author in a dream. The religious turn cements Smith’s pessimism, both for integration into capitalism and the faith that his ideals will deliver anything better.

Perhaps Unemployment‘s thematically closed approach lead Smith to release it as a single issue instead of as a regular issue of Big Hands. The punk zine form reminds us of a collective project underway, while Unemployment is the isolated story of an isolated person that is lacking something far more significant than a paying job. It’s the perfect read for urbanites like myself who appreciate allusions to Black Flag and Nietzsche within pages of each other, drinking black coffee, and waxing endlessly about the ugly confines of civilization.

Buy it from Microcosm press for 2 bucks.

"There is a head that is inside of another head and we all walk outside of a pair of eyes that is the backdrop to a theater's stage…"

A press release from The Unit Breed‘s Joseph Demaree that we thought merited posting:

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I paint things – www.josephdemaree.com
I make music – www.theunitbreed.com
I myspace – www.myspace.com/theunitbreed
I like to share – www.idiomism.com

Top 3 dreams this month
1. Swimming with my dad while he explains how he will be island-hopping by holding onto a rope tied to a cruse ship. While he starts his journey I float off in my sleeping bag across the water to a suburban island. A friend of mine joins me and breaks into a house where two little kids live. Their father comes out and thinks I’m there to purchase porn. The real porn buyer shows up behind me and I back away and join the blacks down by the docks where we dance and drink while a live band plays the blues.

2. While walking along the sidewalk of a large city, possibly New York, I am with three beautiful women. A carnival is passing by. The carnival consists mostly of rocker kids in punk get-ups on top of burned-out cars playing trashy music and showing off their peacock feathers. One of the cars makes a harsh turn and the band on the roof falls to the street but continue to play.

3. There is a head that is inside of another head and we all walk outside of a pair of eyes that is the backdrop to a theater’s stage. The audience are in penguin suits. Everything empties out and I am standing alone in what once was an active beautiful theater but now looks as if it has burned down in the 1920s.

Top 3 brain foods
1. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds – Dig!!! Lazarus Dig!!! – 2008
2. Terry Gilliam – Brazil – 1985
3. Carlos Castaneda – The Art of Dreaming – 1993

Top 3 life-changing experiences
1. Smoking DMT
2. The death of my father
3. Losing the hearing in my right ear

Top 3 recent visions
1. There is a man who is following me. He is not part of this world. I’ve most recently seen him in my basement, at a close friend’s house in Portland, and the most pronounced appearance was at 4 am at the Gingerbread House in San Jose CA the day after Halloween where he walked up to me and vanished.

2. There is a doorway inside of my basement. I’ve only seen it once. It opened in the center of my room and someone’s shadow closed it.

3. The week following my DMT experience a white-haired goat creature began peeking into my window. He has not been seen since I spoke about him.

Top 3 stupid tricks imagination drugs lights shadows and mirrors can play on you
1. Dimensional non-understanding
2. The beginning and end of all things
3. Perfection’s simple wonder

AGAINST EMPTY HISTORY: Steve Berra on the current crisis in skateboarding

What Steve Berra is talking about applies to other essential cultural sites/practices as well. Bookshops. Record shops. Coffeehouses. Magazine publishers. Book publishers. Record labels. And so on…

Excerpts:

“I receive emails almost every single day telling me about another skate shop or skatepark that’s going, or has gone, out of business. I get asked if there’s anything I can do to keep them from closing their doors or if maybe I can build a Berrics to take its place. With the U.S. unemployment the worst it’s been in 26 years, I get job inquiries from all over the country.

“And I want to give them a job. I want to build skateparks for you; I want to help skateshops open. I want skateboarding to survive the way baseball, and football, and basketball do here in America—but without it having to turn into them. Without it losing its autonomy to a board of directors inside big corporations who think the letter X was a label any of us liked because they didn’t understand the principles it was founded upon: principles that drew me to it, and have been carried forth through the years by skateshops and skateparks that existed long before television and mass retailers saw an upside to it.

“There’s a war being waged on small businesses. They’re being taxed on both the state and federal levels. They’re over-regulated, outspent and out-advertised by mall stores with deep pockets and empty history. And in the current economic climate, they don’t stand a chance without your support. Without the foundation of these kinds of skate shops, or skateparks, the skateboarding culture slowly dies in your area, and with it, so does skateboarding…

“A system can always estimate how close it is to being revolted against by counting how many smart and willing people it is excluding from participation. And [right now] there are quite a few smart and willing people being excluded from participation. So the Berrics Unified can be considered a revolt, of sorts…”

MORE INFO
Berrics Unified: http://www.berricsunified.com/
Steve Berra: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Berra

hipped to this by Jesse Locks

November 23rd – Film screening of Sandy Bull doc in Greenpoint, BROOKLYN


A documentary screening slash musical showcase in commemoration of the legendary banjo-pickin’, oud-playing folk guitarist Sandy Bull. This lineup will surely satiate the soul of any wayfaring traveler…

Documentary screenings
Oma (16mm short) portrait of Daphne Hellman (Sandy Bull’s mom)
Sandy Bull: No Deposit, No Return Blues (45 min)

Live musical performances
Colin Langenus Acoustic Guitar Orchestra
D Charles Speer
Ramble Tamble

Free admission!

Monday, November 23rd, 8:30pm
18 Java St. / Greenpoint, Brooklyn 11222
(View map.)

Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint — Voltairine de Cleyre

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NOVEMBER 17 — VOLTAIRINE DE CLEYRE
The original American anarcha-feminist, writer, social rebel.
“Humanity can not be made equal by declarations on paper. Unless the material conditions for equality exist, it is worse than mockery to pronounce men equal. And unless there is equality (and by equality I mean equal chances for every one to make the most of himself) unless, I say, these equal chances exist, freedom, either of thought, speech, or action, is equally a mockery.”
— In Defense of Emma Goldman and the Right of Expropriation, 1893.

NOVEMBER 17 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
CREATIVE ALIENATION DAY. HERE TO GO DAY.

ALSO ON NOVEMBER 17 IN HISTORY
1624 — Mystic philosopher Jacob Boehme dies, Görlitz, Germany.
1637 — American rebel Anne Hutchinson, antinomian, brought to trial.
1734 — John Peter Zenger arrested for libels against colonial government.
1790 — August Möbius, topologist, born, Schulpforta, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.
1866 — Anarcha-feminist Voltairine de Cleyre born, Leslie, Michigan.
1875 — American Theosophical Society founded.
1896 — Sacramento, California reports first of dozens of sightings of huge myste-
rious airships appearing all over U.S. for the next six months.
1942 — Hobo organizer, cultural drop-out Ben Reitman dies, Chicago, Illinois.
1966 — 46,000 meteoroids fall on Arizona in twenty minutes.
1979 — Russian crackpot astro-physicist Immanuel Velikovsky dies.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective.

Today's Automedia Jubilee Saint — Mikhail Bakhtin

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NOVEMBER 16 — MIKHAIL BAKHTIN
Russian literary and cultural theorist, anti-Stalinist Marxist.
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NOVEMBER 16 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS…
Côte d’Or: THREE DAY WINE FESTIVAL. RESIDENT ALIENS’ DAY.

ALSO ON NOVEMBER 16 IN HISTORY…
1747 — Knowles Riot in Boston; hundreds of sailors, laborers & free blacks
rise up against British Navy Press Gangs, temporarily ending impressment.
1811 — Mississippi River flows backwards (due to earthquake).
1885 — Mètis rebellion leader Louis Riel hanged, Assiniboia, Canada.
1889 — Playwright George S. Kaufman born, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
1895 — Russian cultural theorist Mikhail Bakhtin born, Orel, Russia.
1916 — Margaret Sanger arrested for her birth control clinic, Brownsville, NY.
1946 — Shamanarchist, psychonaut Terence McKenna born, Hotchkiss, Colorado.
1973 — Free Religionist Alan Watts dies, Mill Valley, California.

Excerpted from The 2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints: Radical Heroes for the New Millennium by James Koehnline and the Autonomedia Collective.