Category Archives for Uncategorized
Fuck Buttons – Surf Solar
The first time I heard Fuck Buttons I was in a house that was belching smoke from a smoke machine and there was a guy swinging from the rafters by his hands, wearing nothing but pajama bottoms. The friend who delivered me to this party — you may know his work as the author of Arthur’s “Do The Math” column — disappeared into the gloom, only to pop back through the fog moments later yelling incomprehensibly over the music and swinging a giant bong around. He was also wearing a flight helmet, while another guy behind him was fast approaching in a fencing mask. So needless to say the band’s videos for their glistening kaleidoscope noise jams have a long way to go when it comes to trumping the images I already have in my head. Luckily, this video for “Surf Solar” — the first single from Tarot Sport, their Andrew Weatherall-produced sophomore release due out in October 2009 — delivers with penguin races and pulsating symmetrical neon signs or something. The video was directed by Fuck Button Andrew Hung.
Their first album, Street Horrrsing is also just grrreat, and yielded this wonderful video for “Bright Tomorrow,” directed by Hung, and comprised entirely of camera phone photography asplosions.
'44 PRESIDENTS' by MZA & Maria Sputnik
Forty Four Presidents by MZA & Maria Sputnik. Available in hardcover from Garrett County Press.
A brief illustrated history of the U.S. presidency told by the presidents themselves in the style favored by modern social networking web sites, Forty Four Presidents imagines 220 years of presidential succession pancaked into a single moment — documented simultaneously by each commander-in-chief in status updates designed for easy consumption by their Facebook friends. Each status update is accompanied by a jaunty, high-contrast profile picture intended to reflect something of the essential personality (and hotness) of the president.
Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint — Leo Ferré
AUGUST 24 — LEO FERRÉ
French anarchist songwriter, composer, popular performer.
August 24, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
England: BARTHOLOMEW FAIR. Originally a 12th-century
cloth fair, opening with the snapping of shears, but by the
15th century it had become a raucous, rowdy pandemonium
of midways, freaks, sideshows, performing animals.
After 1640 London theaters shut down to go perform at the fair.
ALSO ON AUGUST 24 IN HISTORY…
79 — Vesuvius erupts, southern Italy.
1814 — British burn U.S. Capitol building and White House.
1902 — Annales “long-durée” historian Fernand Braudel born, Lunéville, France.
1916 — French anarchist songwriter, composer Leo Ferré born, Monaco.
1943 — French writer, activist Simone Weil dies, Ashford, Kent, England.
1954 — U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower signs Communist Control Act.
1980 — Solidarnosc union founded, Gdansk, Poland, a challenge to Commie rule.
Benefit read-a-thon at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia
Reposted from Ask Nicola, the oldest LGBT bookstore in the USA is looking for authors to read at its forthcoming benefit event.
Dear LGBT authors:
The Board of Directors of the Lambda Literary Foundation and Ed Hermance, owner of Giovanni’s Room, would like to invite you to read at our first “Read-a-thon”. The event, to be held at 7:30pm on Saturday November 21, 2009, at Giovanni’s Room in Philadelphia, will be a benefit for both the Foundation and the bookstore. We’d like to invite LGBT authors to read from a recent or classic book and answer questions for approximately 15 minutes each. 100% of the proceeds from the event will go to the two beneficiaries. We will be serving donated wine and snacks during the marathon reading. While the foundation and the bookstore can’t offset any expenses authors might incur participating in this benefit, we can possibly arrange housing in local homes. Both the Foundation and Giovanni’s Room will be very grateful for your help in these trying economic times. While this is a fundraising event, we’re hoping it will be a lot of fun for a community of people who treasure our words and writers.
The Lambda Literary Foundation is dedicated to raising the status of openly lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans people throughout society by rewarding and promoting excellence among LGBT writers who use their work to explore LGBT lives. The Foundation sponsors the annual Lambda Literary Awards and held its first Writer’s Retreat in 2007.
Giovanni’s Room, located at 12th & Pine in Center City Philadelphia, is the oldest LGBT bookstore in the USA. The store is faced with a financial challenge as their front wall of their historic structure is being replaced. The queer community of Philadelphia, rather than lose their cherished bookstore, is organizing fund-raising events through the fall to ensure the store’s survival.
We hope that we’ve enticed you to participate at this, sure to be wonderful, event. If you would like to read, or have any questions/comments/suggestions, please contact Scott Cranin at scranin@tlavideo.com.
Today's Autonomedia Jubilee Saint(s): Sacco & Vanzetti
AUGUST 23 — SACCO & VANZETTI
Executed Italian-American anarchists,
wrote stunning letters from prison.
August 23, 2009 HOLIDAYS AND FESTIVALS
Lithuania: HARVEST FESTIVAL. Ridiculous speeches, feasting and dancing.
In the “Kirvis,” a pretty maiden stands in the center of a circle of
dancers, holding an ax. The circle sings, the ax is thrown, & the young
man who catches it, often bleeding, gets a kiss & a dance.
ALSO ON AUGUST 23 IN HISTORY…
1900 — Folk, protest singer Malvina Reynolds born, San Francisco, California.
1911 — Ishi, last member of his stone-age tribe, discovered in California.
1927 — Anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti executed in Boston, amid great protests.
1983 — Back-to-the-Earth advocate Scott Nearing dies, Maine.
FRIDAY NIGHT HOUSE ROCKIN WITH HOUND DOG TAYLOR!
"New Fang" live – Them Crooked Vultures (JPJ, Homme, Grohl)
Excellent article on AYAHUASCA in National Geographic
Major praise to National Geographic for putting together the best single article on ayahuasca-as-medicine that I’ve ever seen, anywhere. Lengthy article features a first-person account of two ayahuasca treatments by courageous reporter Kira Salak, as well as commentary/information/insights from leading, sensible Western ayahuasca researchers (Charles Grob at UCLA; Benny Shanon at Hebrew University, Jerusalem; and psychologist/author Ralph Metzner) and footage of the beginning of an ayahuasca session.
Excerpt:
At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine. In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a native church, the União do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin—one of the mood-regulating chemicals produced by the body—by increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.
Unlike most common antidepressants, which Grob says can create such high levels of serotonin that cells may actually compensate by losing many of their serotonin receptors, the Hoasca Project showed that ayahuasca strongly enhances the body’s ability to absorb the serotonin that’s naturally there.
“Ayahuasca is perhaps a far more sophisticated and effective way to treat depression than SSRIs [antidepressant drugs],” Grob concludes, adding that the use of SSRIs is “a rather crude way” of doing it. And ayahuasca, he insists, has great potential as a long-term solution.
According to Grob, ayahuasca provokes a profound state of altered consciousness that can lead to temporary “ego disintegration,” as he calls it, allowing people to move beyond their defense mechanisms into the depths of their unconscious minds—a unique opportunity, he says, that cannot be duplicated by any nondrug therapy methods.
“Ayahuasca is not for everyone,” Grob warns. “It’s probably not for most people in our world today. You have to be willing to have a very powerful, long, internal experience, which can get very scary. You have to be willing to withstand that.”
Summertime rock n roll: FREE ENERGY
Arthur Magazine 