20150710

Original Digger Keron Smith!


One of the original contributors to the Dig Shows at Corbans Estate Arts Centre was Keron Smith. Her furry transgender barbies and layered wax B&D prints were a hit as were her multi media painterly pieces. Here she is back leading the paint restoration on another of Auckland's fine historic landmarks. 

20150105

DIG says...Collect collect collect

Why Collecting Matters: Citizen Archivists and the Battle for Future Pasts

By Jesse Jarnow 

Wondering Sound http://www.wonderingsound.com/


"At a time when markets for used LPs like eBay and Discogs have snuffed the mystery from record shopping, Bob Abrahamian and Patrick Lundborg were the kind of collectors who actively sought out unexplored territory. Over decades of discovery, their lives’ work accumulated meaning that exceeded the value of the vinyl on their shelves — even if those records were breathtakingly rare. Their sudden deaths (Abrahamian took his own life at age 35; Lundborg passed away of unspecified causes at 47) this past summer left the record collecting world in mourning. They were important voices, snuffed out too young.
‘While vinyl’s small share of the market continues the grow, the amount of listeners purchasing mp3s is plummeting at a much faster rate. It is increasingly clear that a majority of listeners are happy to let far-off server farms fulfill their needs for recorded music.’
Both men used their fandom as a means to uncover lost narratives. In the mid ’80s, as the Stockholm garage rock scene discovered psychedelia, Lundborg became part of what was known as the Lumber Island Acid Crew, a social circle where his interest in lysergic experimentation led him to write both Acid Archives, an indispensable encyclopedia of obscure LPs, and a subsequent 520-page research opus, Psychedelia: An Ancient Culture, A Modern Way of Life (2012). His last major bit of research lead him from a cryptic ad placed in underground newspapers in 1966 to the discovery of the only known copy of LSD Underground 12, a mysterious LP of psychedelic musicians tripping and jamming in a Los Angeles studio, recorded while LSD was still legal.
The Chicago-bred Abrahamian’s passion for soul music led him to the hidden byways and lost stories in his hometown as he tracked down and showcased forgotten soul musicians on Sitting in the Park, his weekly show on the community radio station WHPK. He befriended elderly musicians in a way unknown to many disc diggers, and built up an irreplaceable and mostly untapped body of knowledge. His interviews and research became liner notes, his tireless digging often feeding the renowned Chicago-based archival label the Numero Group.
“Bob was at the top of his world, and was able to take advantage of special powers,” says Numero co-founder Rob Sevier. “He had a combination of really incredible intelligence and memory, plus insomnia and the obsessive traits that gave him almost super-human abilities for collecting and archiving.”
But to listen to the chorus of tech pundits and the most passionate among streaming advocates, that kind of adventurous, passionate collecting may be a thing of the past. “We are no longer collecting music,” New York Times tech writer David Carr observed in a column in June, “it is collecting us on various platforms.” Spotify and YouTube continue their seemingly infinite expansion, as album sales continue to hit record lows. A recent essay by Ian Svenonius argued that Apple’s minimalist technological and design aesthetic subconsciously equates possessions with poverty. The New Yorker‘s Alex Ross made a similar point. “What was once known as building a library is now considered hoarding,” he wrote. “One is expected to banish all clutter and consumer culture in a gleaming, empty room.” While vinyl’s small share of the market continues the grow, the amount of listeners purchasing mp3s is plummeting at a much faster rate, 5 percent over the course of last year, another 13 percent during the first quarter of 2014. It is increasingly clear that a majority of listeners are happy to let far-off server farms fulfill their needs for recorded music.
‘The difference between listening to music from the cloud and listening to a music that’s saved on a hard-drive is, in large part, that one cared enough to get the music onto the hard-drive in the first place. For those overwhelmed by the deluge of music, the act of collecting functions as a way to make sense of it.’
The difference between listening to music from the cloud and listening to a music that’s saved on a hard-drive is, in large part, that one cared enough to get the music onto the hard-drive in the first place. It is that assignation of value that makes collecting a distinct activity from clicking. Streaming rates aside, collected music has a different kind of fidelity. For those overwhelmed by the deluge of music, the act of collecting functions as a way to make sense of it. Collections “make public events private,” the scholar Susan Pearce once suggested, “and move history into the personal sphere, giving each person a purchase on what would otherwise be impersonal and bewildering experiences.”
And while physical media is slowly becoming a thing of the past, there still remains plenty to collect. There’s a vast musical world that falls beyond Spotify’s officially licensed purview, and even outside the realm of established retailers like Amazon and iTunes. It may not have the allure of tracking down rare LPs, but it’s a good bet that the Bob Abrahamians and Patrick Lundborgs of the future will be stalking digital music: the Bandcamp albums that appeared for two weeks, Soundcloud mixes zapped by record companies, vanished YouTube covers, ProTools sessions stored on unsupported peripherals, old MySpace pages, out-of-print LPs lost in the Megaupload purge. A few years ago, the songwriter Aaron Freeman — formerly known as Gene Ween — posted a large batch of recordings to his Soundcloud account, including some of his most experimental and personal material in years. Within a few months, he deleted nearly all of them. All of which raises the question, if there’s music you care about and you don’t save it, who will?
“Digital is different from analog recordings,” says Butch Lazorchak, a digital archivist in the Library of Congress’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. “It’s a little more ephemeral.” The earliest MySpace accounts and ProTools versions have begun a swift slide into inaccessible obsolescence, and preserving them is far more complicated than, say, maintaining a reel-to-reel. For those who value music made at the turn of this century and beyond, collectors — especially collectors of digital ephemera — are more necessary than ever.
‘For those who value music made at the turn of this century and beyond, collectors — especially collectors of digital ephemera — are more necessary than ever.’
“Institutions have always relied on collectors to collect,” says Lazorchak. “But people and organizations have to start collecting these [digital objects] earlier in their lifecycle. In the past, we could wait for a collector to collect over decades, and then acquire those materials, because they were in a format that was still understandable.” To help combat the loss of years of recorded material, the Library is engaged in a variety of outreach programs, advocating for file standardizations, staging events (like this summer’s three-day Digital Preservation 2014 summit and accompanying CURATEcamp “unconference” and maintaining an unofficial blog, the Signal, as a clearinghouse for digital preservation news. Above all, the Library wants to encourage an uprising of what Lazorchak and others call citizen archivists.
“The idea of the citizen archivist isn’t new,” says Lazorchak. Citizen archivists are “the first responders of history,” he has written, “arriving early on the scene to gather, capture, describe and preserve ephemeral artifacts of interest and helping to ensure they survive over time to share with the future.” He cites local Washington, D.C., hardcore hero Ian MacKaye and the extensive Dischord vault of master recordings, live tapes, countless demos by other bands and show flyers as a sterling example of the practice.
Can SoundCloud or any of the streaming companies be trusted to preserve their endless feed of casual recordings? “I don’t think we trust anybody,” says Lazorchak, sounding more like Fox Mulder than a government librarian. “[Data] can disappear over time and no one realizes it, because no one has taken responsibility for it. Those are the twin challenges of organizations like ours. You want to preserve things, but there’s also the ownership aspect. You want to navigate that landscape very carefully.” As an official government librarian, Lazorchak has to be careful about the rights-holders of the material he is intending to preserve, another reason why casual collectors and citizen archivists are fundamental to the historical ecosystem.
Someone who has no such reservations is Kenneth Goldsmith, the conceptual poet, sloganeer and radical collector behind UbuWeb, a massive and proudly unlicensed online repository of rare avant-garde music and film. “Copyright is Over — If You Want,” he titled an editorial on Billboard, (“Guest Post,” Billboard was sure to note in the headline.) He agrees with Lazorchak on one point: “These streams are enjoyable and I use them. Use these things, just don’t trust them,” he says. (“How many times do we have to remind you?” one tweet from UbuWeb read recently. “#donttrustthecloud. Control yr servers.”)
‘For anyone wondering if modern music has lost its meaning, weathered away by the kind of temporal relationship with song that streaming can foster, collecting is a perfect antidote. Copyright is over, if you want it — collecting, meaning and maybe even history itself. But none of it has to be.’
Goldsmith’s UbuWeb is defiantly anti-institutional. Goldsmith bristles at the formal practices of the Library of Congress, and the idea that a “real” archivist must keep scrupulous backups. “There are many levels [of collecting],” he says. “A kid with an mp3 blog is an archivist just as much as these guys are.” Goldsmith compares the disappearing libraries of Megaupload and other similar sites to theorist Hakim Bey’s temporary autonomous zones, where the landscape changes from one generation to the next.
Another method of preservation, and one that Goldsmith fully endorses, is sharing. Arguably the most successful citizen archivists of modern times are the Deadheads. Over the course of the 1970s and ’80s, they built an unbreakable fan network to distribute Grateful Dead live recordings within days of their performance. Available online in high fidelity as early as 1998, the decentralized head-maintained repository (currently most accessible via archive.org or listentothedead.com) has multiplied so extensively that it seems a good bet that many versions of the Dead’s jam epic “Dark Star” actually will survive for future generations.
The instinctive impulse to share is the common trait linking all collectors, from Deadheads to enthusiastic experts like Bob Abrahamian and Patrick Lundborg. “A MAJOR psychedelic discovery,” the late Lundborg raved (in what would be his final blog post) about the forthcoming LSD Underground 12 reissue on Subliminal Sounds, “a fukkin GAME-CHANGER both musically and historically.”
One got the sense that this wasn’t hype. Lundborg was honestly overjoyed that he had dug up something huge, and couldn’t wait to share it with the world. For anyone wondering if modern music has lost its meaning, weathered away by the kind of temporal relationship with song that streaming can foster, collecting is a perfect antidote. As Kenneth Goldsmith suggested, copyright is over, if you want it — collecting, meaning and maybe even history itself. But none of it has to be."


20140617

Millers Crossing

D.I.G condones the reading and rereading of Henry Miller on a daily basis!
Great insight into the mind and environment of a master....https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iCRUQRa2yYo

20130604

Combat Rock Redux

The Clash's fifth and final LP Combat Rock was provisionally titled Rat Patrol from Fort Bragg and was originally  mixed by Mick Jones. Who knew?
Check the link here for some of the back story and a few of the original mixes. Something tells me it could have been a very different album if they'd played around a bit more with Jones' versions.

20130603

DeeLa

The madness and energy which is nuevo cumbia is contagious. From its humble roots in the shanties of Columbia the cumbianization of the planet is a virtual aural epidemic. Check the likes of DeeLa (AKA Ingo Möll) from Moers Germany, who mashes global sounds with the traditional accordian and clipclop cumbia beat. This, his latest offering, Ritmo De Las Calaveras is available for a listen or as a free download in the below. Nice. Thanks Dee La!

20130530

The War On Consciousness


For those of you that have read Fingerprints of the Gods will know Graham Hancock pulls no punches on his theories on universal experiences/human spirituality and indigenous cultures. Here he talks intimately about his experiences with ayahuasca and shamanism.

20110915

I.O.U.S of A



I.O.U.S of A
Neil Buddle 2011

Block Print

Paper - Recycled Bills and Business pages
Blocks - Recycled Floor Vinyl
(Sustainable Economy)


My first new print for a while (too long), came from considering my own past debt problems and the fact that the USA owes more than me! It also references the fact that I/we owe the States a cultural debt for giving the world and me so much culturally. The print includes, Hunter S thompson, Miles Davis, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol and Michael Jackson, which is a mix of counter-culture and mainstream icons. Hard to see in a scan but it also includes in gold, a mushroom cloud and the space shuttle.

If ever there was a time for NOT spending money from the future it is now.


This print featured in the Recent Whanagnaui National Exhibition and Award show, currently on at the Community Art Gallery in Whanganui.






20110704

SUPER SONIDO




The Supersonido blog streams tidbits of Latin nostalgia, underground and garage. The ear-child of record LA based Joseph Franko, Supersonido is a sweet take on the vintage slew of aural gap fillers that bridge north Americanised latinification and Sud American appropriation. Music is always a two way street. This site runs along the Pan American highway pulling onto every highway and by-way along the route. For a complete fruit and nut trip try this instrumental by Luis Luis on for size. The blistering mariachi trumpet through an echo chamber.


Speaking of Latinised madness, the other day I found this surf infused Lima born gem from Los Saicos, Peruvian punks who knew? Yeahyeahyeah!




20110517

Working Behind Enemy Lines

Rogue Council employee loose on the art tip! All because he wanted to colour up some grey places. Lets have more of it!

20110509

13 Confusions

Frieze Magazine

Revisiting Amos Vogel’s 1966 essay about the ‘everyday misconceptions’ of the avant-garde film scene

I recently picked up a copy of The New American Cinema, which was edited by Gregory Battcock and originally published in 1967. Featuring 29 essays about what people back then were calling ‘underground’ film, its contributors include the leading lights of US experimental cinema: Stan Brakhage, Gregory Markopoulos, Jonas Mekas, Annette Michelson, Brian O’Doherty, P. Adams Sitney, Susan Sontag, Parker Tyler and Stan VanDerBeek. Many of the works discussed were then a year or two old at most, and the scenes it was trying to make sense of, from East Coast to West Coast, were still young: I imagine it felt like an urgent book at time of publication.
Reading it, I was struck by a 1966 essay titled ‘Thirteen Confusions’. Written by Amos Vogel, who founded New York’s avant-garde ciné-club Cinema 16 and went on to write Film as a Subversive Art (1974), the essay was intended to ‘represent a criticism from within, fully cognizant of the movement’s many achievements’ (although Battcock’s introduction notes that ‘there will be those from “within” who may find Mr Vogel’s criticism comes from outside and to the right’). Vogel pulls few punches. One by one, he tackles what he observed as ‘confusions’: everyday misconceptions about the avant-garde film scene held by both its champions and detractors.1 Although opinionated and polemical, some of these ‘confusions’ are now long-finished turf battles or obsolete theoretical issues. I wondered what it would be like to re-tool Vogel’s list, expanding its remit from the underground film of the ’60s to what could be called the above-ground art world of 2010. This is my attempt. Some entries are new, some are revisions of Vogel’s originals. It is ‘a criticism from within’, packed with tendentious generalizations and untrustworthy opinions.


1. Confusing cost with value
The boom years of the mid-2000s had a marked effect on the way that art is portrayed in the press: astronomical auction prices held journalists and editors transfixed; articles on contemporary art in the mainstream press began to look more like stock-market reports than art criticism; media profiles of a powerful collector class grew exponentially. Of course, for writers and journalists to ignore the ways in which economics was transforming the art world would have been to bury our heads in the sand. However, one effect of this has been to plant in the broader public consciousness the idea that the art world is only concerned with money and that the production of art and the discourse around it are just fig-leafs there to cover the vulgarities of business. Russian oligarchs’ conspicuous consumption of works by Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst makes great copy but it does not help arguments for public arts funding in times of fiscal crisis.

2. Confusing publicity with achievement
Warhol would have argued that these are one and the same – visibility breeds success, which in turn breeds visibility. The contemporary art world, for all its savviness regarding the mechanics of media, is still, and always will be, a sucker for celebrity and publicity. To quote writer Dieter Roelstraete, this is partly a function of art’s ‘confusion concerning its relationship to a cultural system (one that used to be called “mass culture” or “popular culture”, but those terms have certainly lost their legitimacy) that it clearly desires to be immersed in, or just belong to: a confused desire for its own disappearance into something other, bigger, badder.’2


3. Confusing the typist with the writer
Roelstraete goes on to point out that ‘we have long known that anything and everything can be art, but […] conversely, contemporary art can be anything and everything.’3 Artists write novels, design buildings, cook meals or stage plays. On the one hand, this is an exploratory and inclusive approach to the world – a good thing. On the other, the imprimatur of art can be self-serving. Other disciplines – literature or architecture, for instance – are annexed and treated as materials like clay or paint, there to be played with or to dress up in. Deny it as we might, many still cleave to an idea of the artist as genius. As such, there’s a tendency to assume that if an artist writes a book, the fact of that alone is proof of their talent, regardless of whether the book has any merit. (‘X has made a play! How clever! Because she’s an artist, her play must be much more profoundly self-aware than those of people who have been writing plays all their lives!’) The trick is in distinguishing surface from depth.


4. Confusing a moment with a movement
In the October 2010 issue of frieze, we published a ‘hot or not’ analysis of current trends in art-making. Compiled from observations the editors had made of recurring topics or styles in art we had noticed on our travels, it was intended as a parody of the kind of lists of who’s in and who’s out found in gossip magazines. We later discovered that a disturbing number of people thought the list was serious, and that we were advocating that artists who make work using ‘piles of “cool” books’ were hotter than artists making work with antlers or W.G. Sebald in them. The fact is, micro-trends exist in art just as they do in music, fashion or design; one year we’re all talking Le Corbusier, the next Roberto Bolaño. Trends result from information being exchanged, from cross-pollination between artists. The greater frequency with which they change is the result of the deregulation of knowledge enabled by the Internet, of greater numbers of artists and curators travelling, and of capital looking for new forms to colonize. Style, as Jonathan Raban once said, is a ‘medium of consent’. The difference is between innovation and fashion.


5. Confusing politics with pictures of politics
In 2010, two major biennial exhibitions – Berlin and São Paulo – took art and politics as a core theme. Both shows fell into an all-too familiar register; video and photography depicting political activism, marginalized communities or life in areas such as the Middle East or Central Africa, and archive material relating to activist art groups from the 1960s and ’70s. This form of engagement often serves only to fetishize the dispossessed and oppressed. The idea that such exhibitions have political traction outside art circles is largely the playing out of a fantasy of being a political intellectual active in the world. In trading intellectually or commercially with the rhetoric of boundary breaking, revolution and challenges to the status quo, artists, curators, critics and dealers have all been complicit in stripping the terminology of opposition of its force and repurposing it as PR; the consequence-free language of ‘criticality’ found on museum walls and in gallery press releases. Exhibiting a video in a museum of a demonstration is not the same as participating in a demonstration, and standing at an opening with a free beer in your hand, looking at photos of refugees, is not the same as joining Médicins Sans Frontières and going to Haiti. Who are such shows for? As Jeremy Deller once remarked, ‘the art world is a great place to meet retired arms dealers.’


6. Confusing having your cake with eating it
Perhaps one reason why we might see someone flirting with political criticality but never constructively pursuing it, or proclaiming their distaste for the art market whilst selling work to collectors, is because human beings are remarkably good at holding two opposing ideas in their heads and acting on both of them. F. Scott Fitzgerald famously thought this was a good thing: ‘The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.’


7. Confusing the footnote with the essay
Sociologists use the term ‘prostheses’ to describe how people use the symbolic value of the clothes they wear or items they own in order to demonstrate their cultural competence or literacy. In contemporary art, we can identify this in the referential turn – ‘X work references Robert Smithson, Martin Heidegger’s theory of dasein and the music of Donna Summer in order to …’ etc. As a strategy that has permeated the way much work is made and is signposted for interpretation, it has now entered its mannerist phase. Critical value gets transferred from the formal or conceptual functions of objects and images to the collection and arrangement of impeccably chosen cultural products, events and historical allusions. In many cases (though not all), the auratic value of a well-appointed suite of references creates a smokescreen of illusory scholarship and can falsely imply an historical lineage between the artist doing the referencing and the thing being referenced. It masks the fact that creatively little is being done such sources in the first place. It’s just pointing at things or, in Vogel’s words, ‘sterile eclecticism as artistic philosophy’.4


8. Confusing literary with visual critics
Vogel argued that film criticism was suffering because too many critics were from a literary rather than visual arts background ‘with the visual serving as illustration of an underlying literary thesis’5. Today, it’s tangentially related to the referencing problem; criticism – in part, taking its lead from curating – that privileges artistic intent, back-story or the assessment of referential sources over describing what the thing itself did or looked or sounded like. If we don’t need to know what an exhibition actually looked like, do we need exhibitions at all? Don’t let the press release become the show.


9. Confusing tourism with international relations
Your jet-set itinerary of art destinations starts in Sydney, then Berlin, followed by São Paulo and finally Yokohama. You see the same artists’ work in four different exhibitions on four different continents. What does that mean?


10. Confusing buildings with culture
Over the past decade, the architecture of museums and galleries has become as talked about as the art it houses. The iconic starchitect-designed museum has become the must-have edifice for any aspirational city, following the lessons of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Bilbao. Yet, as critic Owen Hatherley notes, the success of Bilbao ‘in bringing well-heeled tourism to the Basque port has become a boosterist cliché’, whereby a dowdy city is transformed into ‘a cultural capital, replacing unionized factory work or unemployment with insecure service-industry jobs’ in the name of ‘regeneration’.6 Will the number of vast halls for contemporary art ever outstrip the supply of work? Or is there an inexhaustible stock of Richard Serras and Antony Gormleys with which to fill the space? No matter how much money cities and developers throw at them, gallery expansions cannot alone create or sustain an artistic community at its most important, grass-roots level. Affordable housing, art schools, cheaply available studio space; these are the kinds of things that nurture.


11. Confusing expertise with shop talk
To what extent does insularity shape exhibitions and their audiences? Is there a difference between ‘specialist’ languages (be they the formal visual languages of art, for instance, or the languages of interpretation – wall signage, catalogue essays, reviews etc.) and ‘insular’ languages? Much art requires specialist knowledge in order to engage with it. This might be knowledge of historical precedents, or how to spot the signposts in a work that allow you to read it, but such sophistication doesn’t necessarily equate with elitism or exclusivity. Some things in the world are just difficult to understand, others we can get in an instant. But do the pressures of professionalization in the art world indirectly breed insularity and an anxiety on the part of artists, curators and critics to ‘demonstrate’ expertise and literacy in exhibition making to their peers, or do they encourage a greater awareness of broader audiences?


12. Confusing the art world with the world7
Art professionals should remind themselves from time-to-time that contemporary art does not play a significant part in most people’s lives.


13. Confusing telephones with conversations
The ‘art world’ is many things to many people: it’s a big business or a scholarly discipline, it’s a safe place, an excuse to be with like-minds, a way of helping others or being on your own. Some of us want games, apps and email on our phones; others of us just need it for calling home. Art is a medium through which we can talk to each other and engage with the world. Its problems – confusions such as these, and the myriad of others you may or may not have – can be useful, since they might indicate where I stop and you begin.


1 Vogel’s original list was: Confusing Times Square with Manhattan; Confusing a Producers’ Co-operative with a School; Confusing Historical Continuity with Immaculate Conception; Confusing Freedom with Formlessness; Confusing Content with Quality; Confusing Non-Selectivity with Art; Confusing Good with Bad; Confusing Propagandists with Critics; Confusing Publicity with Achievement; Confusing One Swallow with a Summer; Confusing One Generation with Another; Confusing Literary with Visual Critics; Confusing Popes with Free Men
2 Dieter Roelstraete, ‘What is Not Contemporary Art?: The View from Jena’, published in What is Contemporary Art?, e-flux journal/Sternberg Press, Berlin, 2010, p.192
3 Ibid, p.193
4 Amos Vogel, ‘Thirteen Confusions’, 1966, published in The New American Cinema, ed. Gregory Battcock, E.P. Dutton & Co, New York, 1967, p.137
5 Ibid. p.137
6 Owen Hatherley, A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Verso, London, 2010, p.xxii
7 Paraphrased from the title of Nina Power’s 2008 essay ‘The Art World is Not the World’, published in Gest: Laboratory of Synthesis #1, ed. Robert Garnett and Andrew Hunt, Book Works, London, 2008, pp.106–7

Dan Fox, Frieze Magazine.


20110418

The Ai of the Storm


An honest background doco from American channel PBS on the missing Chinese artist Ai WeiWei who was detained by "officials" some time last month.

His disappearance comes after a series of events to censor the man who was until recently celebrated for his design of China's 'birds nest' Olympic stadium. WeiWei is unrelenting in turning the focus of his art back onto the Government. Not only does his art and writing call attention to a repressive regime WeiWei has also been able to mobilise large groups of people to help ask the difficult questions about the motivations and credibility of the State.

WeiWei has been beaten in 2009, his blog was first censored then taken down, his artist community/compound surrounded by CTV cameras and his new studio building suddenly demolished at the beginning of this year.

Still he remained undeterred he documented the demolition with his camera and video and turned it back on the Government as he created new art from the event.

See a secretively recorded talk WeiWei gave to TED one month before he was detained here.

The image posted here is taken from an excellent blog on Ai Weiwei over at Eat Pink Love run by Australian artist Santina Amato. Santina is responsible for a FaceBook campaign to raise international awareness about WeiWei's detention.

20110404

Take a Trip on the Music

Another site for you music DIGgers, is the aptly named Lysergic Funk catering to anyone who likes to take a trip on the music and some music on the trip! Jazz, latin, funk, jazz-funk, jazz-rock, soul, all with an acid-fused flavour. I'm currently digging JazzKraut - 'Teutonal Excursions' German experimental, jazz-rock and funk, and it's an awesome and interesting ride. Some individual tracks, some albums and plenty to get you coming up and feeling fine! LYSERGIC FUNK Blog

20110329

DIG Radio - Tune in, Turn on, Drop Out!


The DIG Radio Show - 60 odd shows, every Tuesday 7-10pm, Radio Piha, 2005/06.

A fantastic year of aural madness from The Reverend Y El Presidente, aided and abetted with jingles and stings, created by The Hamilton Taight Process, presented an Audiosonic Travelogue for the 3rd Ear/3rd Eye/3rd Nostril. A clash of sounds, styles, genres, spoken word, unreleased music and oddities that either followed themes or just anarchic intuition .

The show was a lot of fun and the opportunity to truly wig-out behind the decks, to a an unspecified audience of freaks and fruits. This complete show is a mellow trip into existentialism, with the customary, diversion, distraction and randomness, that still confuses me to listen to and I was 'allegedly' there! Thanks for the memories - DIG it!





You lucky, lucky, lucky...bastards!

20110328

Fluoride-just saying

There is more fluoride in the pineal gland than any other organ in the body and flouride calcifies the pineal gland. The pineal gland is a midline structure, and is often seen in plain skull X-rays, as it is often calcified. Susceptibility weighted imaging (SWI) is a new MRI technique that can identify calcification by using phase images.[ref] Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) does not expose the patient to the hazards of ionizing radiation as with computed tomography (CT) scanners that uses X-rays. Calcification of the pineal gland is typical in adults.[ref]

Lets go back to the history of fluoride. The G-Series is the first and oldest family of nerve agents[ref] that was accidentally discovered in Germany on December 23, 1936 by a research team headed by Dr. Gerhard Schrader working for IG Farben. Since 1934, Schrader had been working in a laboratory in Leverkusen to develop new types of insecticides for IG Farben. While working toward his goal of improved insecticide, Schrader experimented with numerous fluorine-containing compounds, eventually leading to the preparation of tabun. In experiments, tabun was extremely potent against insects: as little as 5 ppm of tabun killed all the leaf lice he used in his initial experiment.[ref] Treatment for suspected tabun poisoning is often three injections of a nerve agent antidote, such as atropine (found in Atropa belladonna).[ref]. Fluorination of hallucinogenic tryptamines either reduces or has little effect on 5-HT2A/C receptor affinity or efficacy.[ref]

The first occurrence of fluoridated drinking water on Earth was found in Germany's Nazi prison camps. The Gestapo had little concern about fluoride's supposed effect on children's teeth; their alleged reason for mass-medicating water with sodium fluoride was to sterilize humans and force the people in their concentration camps into calm submission.[The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben, by Joseph Borkin]

References that should be further investigated

The following letter was received by the Lee Foundation for Nutritional Research, Milwaukee Wisconsin, on 2 October 1954, from Mr. Charles Perkins, a chemist:

“I have your letter of September 29 asking for further documentation regarding a statement made in my book, The Truth About Water Fluoridation, to the effect that the idea of water fluoridation was brought to England from Russia by the Russian Communist Kreminoff. “In the 1930's, Hitler and the German Nazi's envisioned a world to be dominated and controlled by a Nazi philosophy of pan-Germanism. The German chemists worked out a very ingenious and far-reaching plan of mass-control which was submitted to and adopted by the German General Staff. This plan was to control the population in any given area through mass medication of drinking water supplies. By this method they could control the population in whole areas, reduce population by water medication that would produce sterility in women, and so on. In this scheme of mass-control, sodium fluoride occupied a prominent place. ...”

“Repeated doses of infinitesimal amounts of fluoride will in time reduce an individual's power to resist domination, by slowly poisoning and narcotizing a certain area of the brain, thus making him submissive to the will of those who wish to govern him. [A convenient light lobotomy]”

“The real reason behind water fluoridation is not to benefit children's teeth. If this were the real reason there are many ways in which it could be done that are much easier, cheaper, and far more effective. The real purpose behind water fluoridation is to reduce the resistance of the masses to domination and control and loss of liberty.”

“When the Nazis under Hitler decided to go into Poland, both the German General Staff and the Russian General Staff exchanged scientific and military ideas, plans, and personnel, and the scheme of mass control through water medication was seized upon by the Russian Communists because it fitted ideally into their plan to communize the world. ...”

“I was told of this entire scheme by a German chemist who was an official of the great IG Farben chemical industries and was also prominent in the Nazi movement at the time. I say this with all the earnestness and sincerity of a scientist who has spent nearly 20 years' research into the chemistry, biochemistry, physiology and pathology of fluorine--any person who drinks artificially fluorinated water for a period of one year or more will never again be the same person mentally or physically.”
CHARLES E. PERKINS, Chemist, 2 October 1954. [ref]


Population receiving fluoridated water, including
both artificial and natural fluoridation.

Historically, most cases of fluoride poisoning have been caused by accidental ingestion of insecticides or rodenticides (e.g. sodium fluoroacetate) containing fluoride. Currently most cases are due to the ingestion of toothpaste.[ref] Water fluoridation is the controlled addition of fluoride to a public water supply to reduce tooth decay.

In an analysis published in the March 2006 issue of the Journal of Evidence Based Dental Practice, the authors examine the water fluoridation controversy in the context of the precautionary principle. The authors note that:

  • There are other ways of delivering fluoride besides the water supply;
  • Fluoride does not need to be swallowed to prevent tooth decay;
  • Tooth decay has dropped at the same rate in countries with, and without, water fluoridation;
  • People are now receiving fluoride from many other sources besides the water supply;
  • Studies indicate fluoride’s potential to cause a wide range of adverse, systemic effects;
  • Since fluoridation affects so many people, “one might accept a lower level of proof before taking preventive actions.[11]
[ref]

The flood of sodium fluoride in water and food also creates other more serious health problems that are not widely publicized, even suppressed. According to a scientific study done several years ago, Comparative Toxicity of Fluorine Compounds, industrial waste sodium fluorides are 85 times more toxic than naturally occurring calcium fluoride.[ref] 355 million worldwide receive artificially fluoridated water. Water fluoridation's science and practice are predominantly American and in China an estimated 200 million people receive water fluoridated at or above recommended levels. Communities have discontinued water fluoridation in some countries, including Finland, Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland.[ref]

Since 1952 a slick PR campaign rammed the concept of 'fluoridation' through the Public Health departments and various dental organizations.[ref]

In addition to fluorosis, independent labs and reputable researchers have linked the following health issues with daily long term intake of sodium fluoride:

  • Cancer
  • Genetic DNA Damage
  • Thyroid Disruption - affecting the complete endocrine system and leading to obesity
  • Neurological - diminished IQ and inability to focus, lethargy and weariness.
  • Alzheimer's Disease
  • Melatonin Disruption, lowers immunity to cancer, accelerates aging, sleep disorders.
  • Pineal Gland, calcification, which clogs this gland located in the middle of the brain.
  • Reduced IQ: 23 published studies reporting an association of reduced IQ with high fluoride exposure
Read the full article here.

20110325

The Art of the Insult

'It's not often I would post email frippery on the DIGlog. However as lovers of words and language, this email footnote, amuses and rewards as well as reminding us of the power of language, artfully employed.
Rev'

These glorious insults are from an era before the English language got boiled down to 4-letter words.

The exchange between Churchill & Lady Astor:
She said, "If you were my husband I'd give you poison."
He said, "If you were my wife, I'd drink it."

A member of Parliament to Disraeli:
"Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease."
"That depends, Sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."

"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr

"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill

"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow

"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
- William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway).

"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it."
- Moses Hadas

"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain

"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde

"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend .. if you have one."
- George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill

"Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second .... if there is one."
- Winston Churchill, in response.

"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop

"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright

"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb

"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson

"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating

"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand

"He loves nature in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker

"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain

"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West

"Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde

"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts.... for support rather than illumination."
- Andrew Lang (1844-1912)

"He has Van Gogh's ear for music." - Billy Wilder

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx

20110313

Another Life on Mars



Seu Jorge - Life Aqautic Sessions
A friend put me onto this great artist who has recoorded a whole album of David Bowie covers in Portugese, and as a born and bred Bowie fanatic, these sublime covers really impress!

Music For Your mInD with No Ceiling!

There are plenty of places to get a musical fix and sometimes for keeps on the web. Music lovers, like to spread the joy and the word around, so here are a couple of links to sites where you can discover some seriously great tunes and whole albums, spanning different genres and time. We know the moral dilemna of 'sharing' all too well, but we Have given up food for funk, what we love we buy (although, as in Sky Saxons case, screwing the artist by doing so?). We have and do spread the word, as far as DIG can. But, like Gideons Bibles, file-sharing allows us to share and spread the good news, and that news is......that the music will never stop.

Oufar Khan
Blog presenting some fantastic and obscure albums, currently giving U Reverend's latin favourite - Pucho and the Latin Soul Brothers.
Funky16Corners
And here is one from my main man and music guru El P - Funkier than a Mosquito's Tweeter!


That should keep you diggers, diggin' for sometime yet!

20110312

Local Colour 3

Local Colour 3 - Whanganui by Night
Neil Buddle 2011