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[26 Feb 2009|06:27pm] |
i really, really hope that movie isn't wretched.
we had a first neighborhood collective meeting in my living room, and someone said my kitchen "looked like prohibition".
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[07 Feb 2009|04:40am] |
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y'know, maybe if i felt a little better adjusted, i'd feel less inclined to steal from parties, but right this second, i'll enjoy my bottle of cheap whiskey, my bodega candle, and my two bananas. maybe i'll feel differently when i sober up. i'm a little inclined to doubt it. also, despise it as i might, shows in allston are, regret it or not, part of my community. i just need to find someplace i feel challenged. or less like a weird alien. and i'm sick to death of hating everything. or someone come play old time with me.
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| from an article on why the arab version of the simpsons flopped. |
[12 Jan 2009|04:01pm] |
"It didn’t have to be that way. “I loved it,” says Hosny of the show. “I take off my chapeau: they are very good artists. And the writers are unbelievable. I loved the character of Homer. There is something very strange about this character. It’s very close to the Egyptian point of view. He’s a very simple and kind person; from some points of view you feel that he’s incredibly stupid, and from some points of view you feel he is wise. Sometimes I felt I was talking about an Egyptian person. Nothing is certain and taken for granted — it’s not ipso facto — and this makes good art.”
what a strange paragraph.
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[10 Jan 2009|04:53am] |
drunken profundities to be considered while sober:
"you know what? i feel like i fit in ok enough a lot of places, but i don't fit in anywhere perfectly well".
ie i think there's more to this than i realize at this moment, not having sobered up yet.
praise from caesar:
"if you applied that back to electric guitar, you'd really shred"
- ben weiser on my carter picking
spiky punk ian in general complementing my style - fedora, long wool coat, black and red scarf, fingerless gloves - sure, good style isn't the be all and end all, but coming from someone so fashion conscious, i'll take praise when i find it.
that and for fucking christ's sake, we've been collectively running a business for a year now and we haven't killed it yet. seriously, wtf? take that as a good thing or a bad thing.
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[26 Dec 2008|02:38pm] |
There's A Riot Goin' On
The Infamous Public Image Ltd. Riot Show
The Ritz- 1981 Ed Caraballo (July 1997)
ED NOTE: this story was weeded out of Ed so don't think of it as an article so much as a guy who was there, telling you the story. IN THE BEGINNING...
This all started when I met the members of Public Image because a friend of mine, Lisa Yapp (who's a producer for CNN now), was doing a cable show around '79. It was a gossip show where she did interviews. It was a syndicated show and she did the club scene. The show was called DIRT and she did her interviews in a garbage can. I was the director of her cable show and I thought I was hot shit even though I was only 18 at the time. One day, she did an interview with Keith Levene. They weren't really promoting anything. They moved to New York in May '81. Keith and John (Lydon) decided that punk and rock were dead so they weren't going to do any more performing and they weren't going to be a band anymore. They were going to be a company- that was the concept of Public Image Limited as they explained it to me. Jeanette (Lee), who wasn't a musician at all, was in the band as kind of a performance artist. They planned to use John's vocal talents and Keith's guitar and editing talents. He was doing sampling back then which was pretty new, like on Flowers of Romance with those celtic, tribal sounds. They rented this loft on West 18th Street, looking to form this company to do soundtracks and make videos. Remember that this was before MTV started out. They wanted to hook up with someone who was invovled with video and computers. Lisa talked me up and Keith said 'I wanna meet this guy.' So we met when she was taping her interview with him. We became good friends and somehow I started hanging out with Keith and Jeanette. Actually, Keith and John were starting to have a lot of fights then. They were starting to get on the out's with each other. It was creative things. They split up about a year after I was on the scene. I was just a star-struck kid then. It was like winning a music contest where you get to hang out with the rock band. They were on Warner Brothers and they always seemed to be getting paid in cash. Keith always seemed to have this big wad of cash with him that he didn't know exactly what to do with. So I became their tour guide to New York and their buddy and their play mate. We would drive around in my beat-up '73 Plymouth Satellite. Keith would wave around his money so flagrantly sometimes that I just grabbed it once and threw it out the window in the Holland Tunnel. He yelled at me so I had to stop and go get it. We were in a little dream-land. I started taking Super-8 movies and I owned a broadcast camera package that was state-of-the-art at the time. I started filming their lives. John is a very intense guy. He liked me and he liked my sense of humor but to him to I was 'Keith's guy.' I always seemed to be going out with Keith and Jeanette so we seemed to him like a little faction. He was a little bit paranoid about us and it wasn't until later that he and I got along. After about a month of hanging out, Keith said to me 'you should be in the band.' I told him that I wasn't a musician, just a video guy. Then I decided 'OK, whatever.' Keith actually made me a full member of the band.
THE SET-UP
So one day, we're up at Warner Brothers at Rockefeller Center. We'd go up there like spoiled brats. Whenever we'd come in, there'd be a whole staff of people and we'd walk in and demands drinks (John never came with us up there). It was really cool for me, being a high school drop-out from the Bronx. So we were there playing pool one day and one of the publicists gets a call from someone who wants to talk to Keith or John. We're deep in this game of pool and Keith said 'What do you want!' It was the Ritz calling, this big popular venue then. It was their first or second anniversary and they had Bow Wow Wow scheduled to perform. At the last minute, they cancelled after they spend all this money promoting the show. They were hoping that PIL would be able to fill in at the last minute. Keith said 'Fuck off! We're not interested!' I was excited though because the Ritz was the first video club in New York- they had this 40-foot wide screen with high intensity video projection. I said 'Wait Keith- they have all this fabulous video equipment there and we could do this really cool performance art thing.' He said 'yeah?' So we went down to check it out.
I'm very proud of this actually. I came up with this concept for the band where they would play live behind this huge screen. You would never actually see the band straight on. What we did was we used this whole row of parcans, high-intensity lights, really low. So these lights would shine the band's silhouette against the video screen. We could alternate that with a live camera that was shooting the band behind the stage and we would project this image on the screen. Jerry Branch, who ran the Ritz, was negiotating with us (he looked like a mafioso). Somebody said 'we're going to pay you $8,000 for the Friday and Saturday show.' I don't know why but I said 'no, that's not enough- we want $12,000.' It was like a surreal game but they said OK. We made our intentions clear to them. Keith told them 'Rock and roll is fucking dead. We're not a band, we're a company. We're here to do performance art. This is going to be a show.' We told them to promote the show that way. They didn't do this though. They immediately went on the air with these radio stations and spent a lot of money promoting it. The Ritz was really exciting because PIL really hadn't done live shows for a while. John still had his core audience carrying over from the Sex Pistols and that was the primary audience for PIL. Both shows immediately sold out. So we had to go to work really quickly. I had this footage and I had to use their editting equipment to put everything together. They gave me full access to all of their equipment. The video screen was on an electric motor that could be raised and lowered. We found a huge white tarp in their basement. Another crazy idea of mine was to make the precenium (the stage) this big white thing and where we'd put this tarp on the stage to drap over into the audience and it would be all white and pure looking. We found this session drummer for the show in the Bowery (Sam Ulamo). He was this really cool, old guy who did blues. He met him in a bar and asked him if he wanted to play the gig. Keith took out his bankroll and slipped him a couple of hundred bucks. So we just told him to be there Friday. It was kind of organic and haphazard, the way that the whole thing came together. So we took his drum kit and all the rest of the instruments on the stage behind the screen. To keep and hold the tarp in place so it didn't fall into the audience, we weighed it down with all of the instruments. The screen was controlled back in the video control booth where I would be. So we quickly used the editting system to put together the Super-8 footage I had. It was pictures of PIL taking helicopters rides and John in a hotel room getting obsessed with cable TV (he pretty much never left the hotel when I knew him). It was odd the way I was learning from Keith. Even though Keith was kind of lacadaisical, to him it was still a performance. That was just his style. Almost like a jazz vibe. Everything was improvisational, just taking and using whatever was there. The concept of the show was that it was like a mask. PIL would have this show playing behind the video and you could never actually get to see them live.
ON WITH THE SHOW
The evening of the show, we hired a limosine, maybe to impress or allude the press. There was a bunch of music press running around getting hyped about this show because this was their first show in a while. A guy from Rolling Stone was chasing Keith around. Even though no one knew me, I felt cool being the secret member of the band. We went around town, picking up supplies for the show. Meanwhile, John was back at the hotel doing his own thing. There was absolutely no rehearsal for the show- it was just going to be John singing, Keith playing guitar, Jeanette playing tambourine and other rhythm things and the drummer.
We get to the Ritz and it was pouring rain. There was a crowd a people lined up. They were getting soggy and Keith got out, looked at them and laughed. They started yelling and calling out to him and he ignored them. He wasn't disrespectful and didn't taunt anyone like John would. We got inside and got things ready but John is nowhere to be seen. There was an opening act that was weird- we just found them in a bar and hired them. The Ritz didn't let the opening band go on or even let the audience in until John arrived. The crowd was standing out there in the rain but Keith didn't seem too concerned about the crowd or John so I just tested the video while Keith did a sound check. John finally showed up so the crowd was let in and the opening act came on. This was a full one hour later than when it was supposed to start. So the audience is wet, soggy and pissed. This opening band had a totally different sound from PIL. It was almost like a folk band. The audience was thinking 'what the hell' and the band eventually got booed off. So now it was PIL's turn to go on. The crowd was really cranky and pissed by then, chanting 'PIL, PIL, PIL!' I was in the control booth with my headphones, nice and snug in there in the back of the club with a beautiful view of the audience and the stage: I felt like I was manning the Starship Enterprise. We felt that it would be appropriate to have a video of Lisa Yipp interviewing Keith and John in the trashcan she used for the show. Lisa gets on the headphones and says 'I'm not going out there- they're rowdy, they're screaming!' I told her 'you're a professional, go out there and do it.' So one of the stage crew drags out the trash can she used for her show with her inside and with the lid on top. The audience looked at it like 'what the hell' and she pops out like Oscar the Grouch and says 'HI, I'M LISA YAPP! I'M HERE TO TALK ABOUT PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!' So now the crowd's really pissed and they start chanting louder. She starts to give an introduction about the band and we play this interview she did with Keith. In the interview, he's saying 'Rock and roll is dead. This is a new age of performance.' The crowd had it by then. They turned on Lisa for everything that happened. They pelted her with beer bottles but Lisa was such a trooper that she kept going with her introduction. She fended off the bottles with the lid of the trash can like a gladiator shield. Then she says 'AND HERE'S PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!' The whole band's behind the screen and Keith starts playing and the drummer's playing this celtic rhythm to start the show. Then Keith starts playing the record 'Flowers of Romance.' He cranked it up and took all the equalization out of it- it sounded so cacaphonous. I started pulsating the parcan lights. It was really eerie and screechy. The crowd just loved it- they fell silent. You just saw the glow and the lights flashing. Keith's guitar was feeding back, playing off the record that was on and John was just silent throughout this whole thing. He just stood next to Keith. You could only see the silhouettes of them and the projections of them on the screen. The crowd is just loving this, thinking 'what a great introduction.' The first song ends and John starts to talk to the audience for the first time. He says 'sil-ly fuck-ing aud-ience, sil-ly fuck-ing aud-i-ence...' He's slowly taunting the audience. Now the crowd's not quiet anymore. They start chanting 'raise the screen, raise the screen, raise the screen!' John's never been one who likes to be told what to do so he's chiding the audience. He says what fuckers they were to pay 12 dollars to see this, just taunting the audience. The more they say 'raise the screen,' he says 'we're not going to raise the fucking screen!' So the band goes into another song that was this kind of improvisational kind of thing. It seemed to be directed by the drummer! John and Keith were just doing their thing. John made those sounds with his voice, almost like a yodelling type of thing. Keith is doing this screechy, primal sounding thing with his guitar, almost like a jazz number. They go through this and it's a ten minute number. The crowd is kind of liking it but you could hear them add their two cents by syncopating the rhythm with 'raise the screen! raise the screen!' At the end of this, John is really being abusive. So the audience starts pelting the screen with beer bottles. Even in the balconies, they were throwing bottles and some of it was hitting the audience down below. The more that they threw bottles, the more that John would chide them. The manager of the Ritz comes to me then as I'm the only member of the band that was accessible- everyone else is behind the screen. Jerry says 'you gotta raise the screen! There's a riot happening right before our eyes!' I felt like Nero watching Rome burn, seeing these bottles all over and I never realized how abusive John was to his audience. So I tell Jerry 'No, I'm not raising it. You should have advertised and said that this wasn't a concert. It's a performance art show. That is what it is, that's what they paid for and that's what we're putting on.' I was guarding the remote control switch, not letting anyone touch it. Jerry kept yelling at me to raise it and I'd yell at him that I wasn't going to do it. Then Jerry turns to the crowd and sees something going on as they let out a collective 'aaah.' The front of the crowd started pulling on the tarp and I start getting scared because the instruments and amplifier were moving forward like they were going to go into the audience. So Jerry says 'Are you crazy? Look at that!' I said 'you're probably right.' So I raised the screen just a little bit, enough to put on the parcans full blast so that we're blinding the audience with light. For a minute, they shrink back from this huge flash of light. It looked like the screen from 'Wizard of Oz' where everyone sees the magical workings of the Wizard, like 'pay no attention to the PIL behind the screen!' The stage hands started scrambling to get the equipment off the tarp as the audience was still pulling at it. The poor drummer was freaking out as his kit was moving. One of the stage hands grabs the mike out of John's hand and starts screaming 'THE SHOW'S OVER! THE SHOW'S OVER!' They bring the house lights on but the audience is still pulling the tarp towards them. It was like 'we want our money's worth no matter how we get it out of you!' The stage hands rushed John and Keith off the stage for safety's reasons. My camera people got out of there. The management of the Ritz took over, saying 'the show's over. That was the show. Thanks for coming.' It was kind of funny because the crowd just slowly said 'oh...OK.' For me, I was in 7th heaven. From the back of the auditorium, it was a beautiful site. It was a sick feeling because part of me said 'wow, I'm responsible for this carnage' and part of me said 'wow, I'm fucking cool!' The manager of the Ritz was freaking out still, wondering how many people were hurt because there were bottles all over the place. As it turns out, there was only one guy hit by the bottle. I made my way backstage to make sure the group was OK. On the way, I meet this producer friend of mine who I invited to the show and who I wanted to impress for a possible job in the future. He called out to me and I thought 'I'll never get a job now.' 'Ed, that was the most brilliant thing I've ever seen in my life!' he told me. I was like 'What? Oh yeah, that was great.' I couldn't believe it. I finally got backstage and there was John, Keith and Jeanette, drinking beers and laughing. Right next to them was this punk kid with his head bleeding profusely. Jeanette got him an ice pack and they gave him a beer and he was hanging out with them. He couldn't have been happier- he was bleeding and he was with his heros. He was the only person that got hurt and not only wasn't he interested in suing us, he was happier than he could be. Actually 50 people asked for their money back and the Ritz actually gave it to them. Basically, it was a big fiasco and the next night of the show was cancelled.
AFTERMATH
The next Monday morning, Warner Brothers scheduled a press conference because there was a lot of press around there and it became a news event. So the four of us showed up and I set up my video camera behind Keith while he was fielding these questions from the reporters. I was filming the reporters as they were filming us. They asked 'how could this happen?' Keith was just being flippant and he basically told them to go screw themselves. A lot of the questions were positive, asking about the concept. Warner Brothers loved the publicity because it got written up in Rolling Stone, New Music Express and all those music magazines.
FALL-OUT
After that show, they later got a loft and we hung out for a little while longer. Then John and Keith were really getting on the out's. Keith was getting more and more paranoid. He just started getting really nasty to me. When I asked him about putting together a tape of that night to sell as a video, he thought I was trying to rob him. 'Ed, we have different contracts,' he'd say. I guess if I was older, I would have overlooked this because I knew why he was cranky. I was just as cocky as he was so I said 'fuck those assholes' and just stopped coming around. He called me and said 'why don't you come around the loft anymore?' but I didn't want to deal with that. About a year after that, John and Keith split up. John hired a whole new band and that turned into Public Image Limited. Then Keith and Jeanette split up. I'd see John out at Danceteria and all those clubs. It was only after that show that John really started to like and appreciate me. He'd see me and say 'Ed, how's that fabulous gear you got?' and I'd say 'Good, how's that bright red hair you got?' We'd laugh and we'd see each other but then we fell out of touch. I went on to do my thing and John went on to do his thing and the rest is history. I felt bad that Keith just dropped off because the whole idea of Public Image and the METAL BOX idea was all him. Everything that was cool about that band was him. Like FIRST EDITION, that's all him and also with all the sampling they did. John made a great contribution because he has a style nobody else has- that tribal chanting/yodelling kind of thing. He's a historical figure just for being himself. It's a shame that they didn't get along. For me, they had something brilliant going. But looking back at that whole event, it's one of THE experiences of my live. Even that night, I thought 'I could die tonight and seeing what I've seen, I could say I've lived a complete life.' I was just really cool! I still think about it. I was almost like a fantasy for me. I got to ride in limos, fly in helicopters, push the paparazzi away. I got to live the fantasy of a rock star for a brief shiny little month.
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| my submission to "what would jack do" on the world inferno website |
[10 Dec 2008|03:36pm] |
thanks to being introduced to your fine musical ensemble around 2000 or 2001 by a young miss katie lewis, me and my best friends at the time all instantly gravitated to teaching ourselves how to breathe fire, particularly after seeing you almost burn down abc no rio. which, while perhaps not to the extent that being devoured by wolves or meeting and managing to horribly insult your one true love would be, was to some extent a life changing experience for all of us. so here is a thank you for showing us the joys of high proof rum and a lighter.
just a few short days ago, "the most irresponsible man in punk", a mr. sturgeon from new york, yelled something unintelligible at me. it probably had to do with lighting the ceiling of the venue on fire with high proof rum. taking this as a challenge, i spat more rum at the ceiling fire. shortly thereafter, the fire alarm went off, the show was over, and we all scattered.
all i have to say is "i learned it from watching you".
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[24 Nov 2008|01:58pm] |
cigar box guitar i built
the box i got for free
the neck is a piece of wood i found in the pizza shop basement, which is 98% hand carved. i got a dremel towards the end of it.
the bridge is a threaded bolt
the nut is a part of the cigar box
i bought the strings and tuners
i usually keep it in open g
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| i was a little amused |
[26 Oct 2008|08:27pm] |
HOW TO CREATE A FOLK SONG
Another excellent contriubtion from Alex Mogieleff and Stephan Grossman's Woodshed Forum
* All folksongs begin with the phrase: ''I asked my love to take a walk'
* The walk should be:
o Down by the riverside
o Past the prison
o Into the valley
o Over the sea and far away.
It should NOT be:
o To the store for a loaf of bread
o To Wallmart
o Along the Champs-Elysee, Park Avenue, or Pennsylvania Avenue
o On rollerblades.
* The conversation along the way should be about:
o Your racehorse
o The perfidious British
o The revelation that you are her/his longlost brother/husband/blacksmith/Lord
o The inevitable baby
o Murder
* Places to be mentioned include:
o Botany Bay
o The Mountains of ...
+ A Land called Honalee
+ Carrickfergus
+ The valley
+ The fair
o All of the above in reverse order, Botany Bay always coming last.
* All folk songs repeat the same words in each verse, but move them around until one person is killed or the ghost appears. If the ghost appears, it repeats the original verses and the process begins all over again. This is known as revenge.
* The chorus of all folk songs is half of the words of the verse moved around some more, and with the addition of some poignant nonsense syllables, all in a minor key. No new information is provided.
* References to work in folk songs should include:
o Hammers (visionary or steam)
o Railroad trains, preferably on the same track hurtling towards each other
o Lots of whales
o Sowing, reaping, harvesting, babies dropped in furrows, etc.
o Job categories allowed in folk songs include:
+ Circus work
+ Lighthouse keeping
+ Mourning
+ Gypsying (especially kidnapping)
+ Blowing up British buildings.
o References to work in folk songs should avoid the following job categories:
+ Insurance
+ Work for any government agency except prisons
+ Re-insurance
* Words that can be sprinkled at random over folk songs:
o gather,
o farewell,
o thee,
o dead,
o twa,
o alas,
o true love,
o bonnie, dagger,
o do Lord.
and so on.... These apply mostly to ballads:
* True loves are always either:
o Missing (gone for seven years)
o Dead (see Necrophilia element)
o In disguise
o Your brother/sister (either known or unknown)
o False (off chasing/married to another)
If it's a happy ending, it's a very rare folksong...
* If your true love is dead, you must:
o Long to kiss his/her dead lips or other portions of the anatomy (The Tradition of Necrophilia)
o Never love again
o Have done her in yourself after spending all night diggin' of her grave
o Have done him in yourself because he done you wrong
* If you are a sailor, and you meet a fair young lady, you will:
o Wind up with no money and no clothes, wearing a dress (the Transvestite Element)
o Get laid after pulling her string
o Acquire a painful and unpleasant social disease
o Get shot after she dresses in men's clothing and finds you've been false
(see Transvestite Element)
* If you are a young lady, and you meet a sailor, you will:
o Turn him down because he's dirty
o Turn him down because you don't recognize him
o Change your mind when you find out he's got money
o Change your mind after experiencing his sexual prowess
o Dress up in man's clothing (the Transvestite Element, yet again)
* And LOTS of metaphors!! Refering to various actions, body parts, etc., should be as circumspect as possible. Birds,flowers,alcoholic beverages,(blud red wine, etc)... may be freely substituted for lips, breasts etc.
And for Male Parts...anything is ok as long as it is longer than it is wide.
* Women who are NOT active heroines in the song may be given away as prizes to men who achieve some goal...such as killing villians, saving ships, etc.
* You are a bona fide folk singer if:
o you have nine different guitar capos, including a semi-automatic flipoff
o our first name is one syllable long, or at most is two syllables that end in a vowel, e.g. Doc, Pete, Woody, Joan, Judy
o you learned the song on a porch, preferably one with a sofa with the insides sprung out
o you refuse to make an anatomical pun about “The Londonderry Air”
o you have ''This X fights Y'' inscribed somewhere on your instrument,
e.g.''this E string fights sexism''.
o you have a dog named after a color.
You are not a bona fide folk singer if:
o you play the Hammond Organ
o your first name is Brittany (unless you are a boy)
o your last name is Rockefeller or Windsor
o you learned the song from your chauffeur or housekeeper, unless her name is Elizabeth Cotton
o you have a sticker on your guitar that reads: “Baby On Board”
o you have a cat (whether it comes back or not) or goldfish (see Entry under whales). You can have a horse as long as you race it in England or France.
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[23 Aug 2008|01:09am] |
this may sound remarkably goofy, but if you are in some way able to be judged by the friends you keep, i feel like you can be judged a little bit by your foes and frenemies as well. and when you lionize joe hill and the original frank little and folks like that, when what passes for labor negotiations is draining conversations with what amounts to the psychic vampire version of an annoying little brother - well, it's just kind of disappointing. maybe it's just reverting back to being an eight year old who loved tolkien and dungeons and dragons, but you want to feel heroic, and a lack of appropriate foes to vanquish doesn't really help that. maybe i'm just being rambly and defining that poorly.
i think it's pretty natural to take a look at where you were a year ago to get a sense of where you are now. and i'm certainly not coming apart at the seems on every single front like i probably was on today's date last year. that being said, i feel like a lot of my closer friends and other folks aren't particularly available, mostly for fairly legit reasons, and while i don't really need to complain to people about petty crap, it would be really nice to feel like i was able to. this isn't really about any one person in particular, it's just that i've felt a little blown off across the board for a while now. and bringing it up feels petty. not acknowledging that it's annoying is probably worse, though. that and i feel like i don't let myself complain about stupid crap to people for the most part because i know i've burdened other people really heavily with that in the past, and while i know i don't have those endless resevoirs of hurt and anger inside me the way i used to, i'm really scared of opening those parts of me up to other people because i know i've hurt some of the last people i'd ever wanted to by doing that in the past. and while there's really no dignity or meaning in endless apologies for the same shit, i still feel like i can't think of any actual way to make amends for that.
on a tangential note, real friendship involves stepping in, helping people with their shit, and not judging. i'm not really going to say more because i'm sure this particular situation is going to wind up gossip central soon enough anyway.
i know most of this shit is really vague, but i just needed to vent because i've been really cranky all day, outside of the part where i drank a bottle of mead and improvised numerous gruesome murder ballads for said psychic vampire.
meh. i'm fucking exhausted and i'm going to sleep.
that and i saw a deer in central square last week.
that and phone tag is annoying. across the board.
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[07 Aug 2008|03:12pm] |
France's Wine Terrorists A commando vineyard owner empties one of 13 wine tanks filled with Chilean wine in Nimes, France. Pascal Parrot / Getty Too much wine, it is known, can cause violent behavior. But few have gone as far as the grape growers of France's Languedoc-Roussillon region, the world's biggest wine-growing area by volume. Hurting from overproduction and cheap imports and punished lately by the rising cost of gas, a small group of local winegrowers has resorted to "wine terrorism" in a violent attempt to shock the French government into helping them. Related Articles  There is nothing like a Bordeaux, a Chianti or a Riesling to evoke the taste and scent of Europe in ... THE STORY OF O The hippest new wineglasses, like the O series from Riedel, leave the stems on the ... I am standing in a Napa Valley, Calif. field early on a Friday morning with 24 yuppies who paid $87... The world of wine is complex and global in scope. That makes it a perfect match for the Internet, w... On July 26, police arrested a vineyard farmer from the region for production and possession of illegal explosives. Apprehended in a hospital where he was being treated for injuries suffered when those explosives unexpectedly detonated, 34-year-old Jérôme Soulère confessed to police that he'd been responsible for the July 2006 bombing of a tax-collection office in a neighboring village. He also admitted, police say, to authoring the failed bombing last year of a site the Tour de France was set to pass the following day. Those incidents are just two of many in a series of violent and destructive acts by local grape growers over the past three years that has targeted public and private buildings, supermarkets, tanker trucks hauling cheap imported wine, and businesses accused of gouging growers with ever shrinking prices. Claiming responsibility: a clandestine group known as the CRAV, or Regional Committe of Viticulture Action. CRAV's commando operations began with the 2005 bombing of a state agricultural building. CRAV members, or independent sympathizers, have since repeatedly carried out bombings and other acts of vandalism, including three acts of property destruction in a 10-day span in May. In mid-July, CRAV logos were discovered spray-painted at a Narbonne agriculture collective whose vandalized vats had drained nearly 132,000 gallons of wine to the ground — an estimated loss of around $450,000. Last year, it sent a video to newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy demanding assistance to the region's grape growers or else "blood will flow." Quixotic as it may seem to outsiders, the group — and many Languedoc-Roussillon growers who support its aims while condemning the violence used to achieve them — want the French government to protect them from a rapidly globalizing market. Foreign wine from cheaper producers such as Italy, Spain, Australia, the U.S. and South America — where costs can be one-fifth those in France — has saturated the market and driven down demand for locally grown grapes. That has depressed the price Languedoc-Roussillon growers get for their crops up to 50% in recent years. With revenues plummeting and production costs on the rise, owing in part to escalating gas prices, local farmers are demanding financial aid from Paris. But European Union rules limit how much help the French government can extend; Brussels has repeatedly urged growers to cut costs by letting nearly 500,000 acres of land lie fallow and by swapping plonk production for more expensive, higher-quality wine. That doesn't impress locals. "Many of these vineyard owners are committed to production and investment plans spanning 20 or 30 years," says a member of the regional wine sector, who asked not to be named due to the "vivid tension" the situation has created. "These aren't operations that can change strategy or cut production overnight." Jérôme Soulère's lawyer, Jean-Marie Bourland, doesn't justify his client's avowed acts of destruction but sympathizes with his client's predicament. "We're in a country where, alas, our leaders don't pay attention to well-behaved and listen to those who leave them no choice," says Bourland. "Many of these people are agonizing and dying a slow death," he says. "For some, I suppose, posing a bomb is their attempt to pose a question."
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| hooray somerville! |
[30 Jul 2008|11:17am] |
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Now that Good Time Emporium has closed, the people of Somerville have sought out new venues to hold their melees. One of these test locations, the parking lot of the Market Basket at 400 Somerville Ave., saw more than 100 gathered to watch a massive brawl Saturday morning. Police broke up the proceedings and arrested two. [Somerville Journal]
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| sometimes things are just nice |
[12 May 2008|01:48pm] |
so last night me and my new roommate erik started up a two gallon batch of kombucha and john flax, my new neighbor, came over. making stuff is awesome, and i really like being able to apply my beer brewing skills to something else. i like living with erik - he's one of the most solid people i work with, we share a very similar sense of humor, and i like that me offering him the empty room in my apartment was what got him out of his parents' house, because i know how much of a big deal getting out of home was to me. i like john being in the neighborhood and i like that hanging out last night felt really natural and chill. i noticed this when i saw katie lewis for the first time in about two years in philly a few months ago: there are some people where no matter what really changes about you as people, the conversations are like a dance where you remember the pulse and the rhythm and you remember the steps quick enough. shit was weird and awkward between me and john for a while after the acrimonious black freighter breakup, and after that started to fade out the claustrophobia of the apartment he shared with sarah and the difficulty it took to get them out of it for anything that wasn't a perennials show didn't help. but last night was good. making kombucha, watching firefly, listening to music and drinking good beer. it's also nice in that it felt homey without me worrying if i'd somehow invited someone onto my couch for a six month time span.
i'm not really committed, to somerville or massachusetts, but i like that this house is starting to feel more like a home. then again, i still haven't moved my records or my turntable.
me and whiskey are taking some time off from each other. i like drinking, but i don't like being a drunk, and i crossed that line a few times in the past two weeks. eg not remembering i'd made that post about inferno until i saw it again. oh well. at least my spelling isn't so bad when i'm that drunk. saturday i had to work at the homebrewing store with a blinding sick to my stomach hangover and i had to deal with my coworker being obnoxiously drunk.
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[10 May 2008|01:54am] |
dear world inferno friendship society
speaking as a 30 year old wobbly
thank you for existing
this is what we listen to when we clean up and close
i have bigger dreams than vegan pizza. this is what i have control of right now. thank you for inadvertently being a part of it. your three song cycle about love in a temporary autonomous zone makes it a little more ok to deal with sweeping and mopping and everything wrong with my life. that and thank your for more or less the past seven or eight years. without you i wouldn't have kurt weil or paul robeson or a lot of other things. no blame is to be issued for any physic trauma at any of your shows - it's not really your fault, although both your and my interest in attracting extreme situations is more to blame. the allston store front, however, has next to nothing to do with you, unless you deign to play here.
matt, hoping to stay on the charming side of drunk.
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[06 Feb 2008|01:33pm] |
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The girl, 10, who could die from shock just by watching a scary film
By JAYA NARAIN -
Rare condition: Jennifer Lloyd has to avoid watching scary TV shows
Like most children her age, Jennifer Lloyd loves watching her favourite programmes on TV.
But when a scary bit is about to happen the ten-year-old has to leave the room quickly - because the sudden shock could kill her.
Jennifer is one of just six known sufferers of polyglandular Addison's disease, which causes her to become ill whenever she is surprised or shocked.
The condition means she is unable to produce adrenaline in response to alarm or any sudden form of emotional or physical stress.
Instead her body goes into shock and her organs could shut down unless she receives medical treatment.
It means Jennifer can only watch television with the permission of her parents, who also watch with her then ensure she leaves the room if they fear something startling is about to happen.
Since Jennifer was diagnosed three years ago, her parents Amanda, a nurse, and Robert Lloyd, 47, an engineer, of Prestwich, Greater Manchester, have been desperate for more information on the disease.
Named after Dr Thomas Addison, who first described it in 1855, the condition affected U.S. president John F Kennedy.
The polyglandular form of the disease is far rarer than the ordinary one.
The inability to produce adrenaline has a knock-on effect on blood pressure, major organ function and salt levels.
Jennifer suffers from stomach and kidney problems as a result of the condition and has to take a complex range of medication to help her body cope.
Her parents also carry an emergency kit to provide extra medication-when required.
Mrs Lloyd, 44, said: "When anything particularly good or bad happens, we have to handle it very carefully so it doesn't surprise Jenny.
"We always have to expect the unexpected."
Jennifer was diagnosed with polyglandular Addison's disease when she fell ill with severe stomach ache aged seven
However, Jennifer is able to live a relatively normal life and particularly enjoys Harry Potter.
Mrs Lloyd said: "With something like Harry Potter we have to watch it with her.
"There was one scene in the Chamber of Secrets where all the spiders came down and she kind of got a bit worried, saying she had to leave.
"But we just tried to reassure her that it's not real. We gave her some more medication and were able to calm her down."
She added: "Jenny has learned a lot about her condition in the last few years and we are all really proud of how she deals with it."
The family have set up a campaign, Jenny's Pennies, to raise cash for research into the condition.
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[04 Feb 2008|05:22pm] |
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i kinda feel like some of my favorite articles of clothing are like the velveteen rabbit.
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[04 Feb 2008|01:53pm] |
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[04 Feb 2008|01:47pm] |
i think this has some interesting implications about diy culture:
Elgan: Will cell phones save books?
Mike Elgan
January 31, 2008 (Computerworld) A recent essay in The New Yorker called "Twilight of the Books: What will life be like if people stop reading?" tracks a long decline in the popularity of reading books in the U.S. since at least 1937.
Worse, according to the essay: "Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult's skill in reading prose slipped one point on a 500-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient -- capable of such tasks as "comparing viewpoints in two editorials" -- declined from 15% to 13."
To me, even more alarming than the loss of reading skill -- and probably related to it -- is that many young people have lost interest in books.
Why American kids hate books
Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs recently criticized Amazon's Kindle e-book reader by saying that "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don't read anymore." He went on to say that "Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year." (It turns out that the correct number is 27%, not 40%, but Jobs does have a point.)
I think I understand why Jobs has come to believe that the book-buying public isn't worth serving. Apple does a great job making all kinds of media available through iTunes -- not just music, movies and TV shows, but podcasts and audiobooks sold through Audible.com. (We'll see how long the Audible.com relationship lasts now that Amazon has purchased the company.) And guess what? The music sells like crazy, and TV show and movie sales are growing fast. Meanwhile, podcasts aren't nearly as popular even though most are free, and hardly anyone buys audiobooks for their iPods. If people won't even listen to written works, why would they actually read them?
Much of the world is following America down the literary toilet. But one interesting exception is, of all places, Japan.
In an essay in The American Thinker, writer Lawrence Murray warns of a "new Dark Age" brought about by a combination of information overload, the "passivation of leisure" and the "triumph of triviality." In other words, technology in general has caused our culture to evolve into one in which long-form books can't compete for our attention against the onslaught of Internet celebrity gossip, YouTube videos and iPod music.
Much of the world is following America down the literary toilet. But one interesting exception is, of all places, Japan.
Why Japanese kids love books
Half of Japan's top 10 best-selling books last year -- half! -- started out as cell phone-based books, according to the New York Times.
The books-on-phones genre started when a home-page-making Web site company realized that people in Japan were writing serialized novels on their blogs, and figured out how to autocreate cell phone-based novels from the blog entries.
The popularity of these blog novels on cell phones sparked huge interest among readers in writing such novels. Last month, the site passed the 1 million novel mark.
Some of these amateur writers become so famous on the cell phone medium that the big publishing houses seek them out and offer lucrative deals for print versions. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school.
One of the apparent reasons that cell phone literature has taken off in Japan is that so many Japanese people, including students, have long daily commutes in trains too crowded for open books. The size and portability of cell phones have made them the most important source for all media, including "printed" media.
Which raises the question: Can the English-speaking world replicate Japan's cell phone book craze?
Cell phone books in America
At first glance, the conditions that drove Japan to embrace cell phone novels, including the primacy of cell phones over PCs and TVs, appear not to be present in the U.S.
However, there is clearly at least some unmet demand for cell phone books here. I asked readers of my blog, The World Is My Office, about whether they currently do, or would, read books on their cell phones. A reader named Jonathan wrote: "The size of the screen has never been an issue. Having to recharge the phone has never been an issue. Traditionalists who talk about the intimacy of cozying up with a good book seem to forget that it is the material that sweeps you away. I become just as engrossed in a book on my phone as any print book I've read."
If Jonathan represents a huge potential market for English-language cell phone books, why hasn't the genre taken off? I think another blog reader answered that question exactly when he wrote: "As an aspiring writer, I'm fascinated by this genre. How does a writer access the venue for cell phone novels? I've searched the Net and came up empty-handed."
I think cell phone novels are hot in Japan and not in America because the Japanese have made novels participatory, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
I think the decline in reading is caused by the same thing that's causing the decline in television -- one too many media like books and TV are losing out to more engaging participatory media.
In other words, I think cell phone novels are hot in Japan and not in America because the Japanese have made novels participatory, and we haven't figured out how to do that yet.
People, especially young people, prefer media created by peers or artists, or writers they perceive to be peers.
Even novels started out as largely participatory adventures and romances in Europe -- just like Japanese cell phone novels today. A tiny group of people had the means and the education to write, and they wrote letters with a frequency that would make some modern bloggers blush.
Their books were "consumed" exclusively by their own narrow peer group, a small collection of lettered aristocrats and professional story writers who could relate to each others' experiences. Their letters constantly referenced books, and books were enriched by the culture of writing letters. Stories, ideas, plots, characters and other elements were shared and borrowed, stolen and copied.
Gradually, books got both cheaper and better and nonaristocrats got richer. People outside this group started to read novels, many in an "aspirational" capacity. They wanted to "enrich" themselves by immersing themselves into socioeconomic or intellectual groups higher than their own.
In that sense, Japan's cell phone novel craze takes us back to the origins of novel writing: People use available publishing technology to have a dialog -- not a monologue -- with their peer group.
The engaging nature of participatory media doesn't require actual participation, by the way. One of the compelling elements of popular music, for example, is that fans feel like bands and artists are part of their world and vice versa. There's a constant feedback loop in clothing and hairstyles between bands and their fans. They share vocabulary and a world view. Kids aspire to become rock and rap stars.
TV and books, on the other hand, look and feel like media handed down from on high. Young people don't have a sense of how this content is created or that they could do it themselves. They feel increasingly alienated from it, especially since they now have instant messaging, YouTube, MySpace and other media that feels more like a conversation within their own peer group.
Another point worth making: I don't have the data to back this up, but I'm convinced that young people today are reading more than any other generation in history. By that I mean they're passing their eyes over and "processing" more words. But the words are coming in the form of IMs, text messages, blogs, social networking messages and other nonbook material. They gravitate to this not because it's trash, but because it's participatory. They're reading as part of a dialog that involves writing.
"Literacy" isn't about passively reading, it's about reading and writing. If we want to increase the reading of books, we'll need to figure out how to increase the writing of books, especially novels.
Can we emulate Japan? Yes. But the secret to getting young people excited about books isn't about taking our existing published books and formatting them for cell phones. Instead, we need to figure out how to let readers publish their own books in a way that can reach a mass audience -- not just on obscure blogs, but on all media: print, online, audio and, yes, even cell phones.
Mike Elgan writes about technology and global tech culture. He blogs about the technology needs, desires and successes of mobile warriors in his Computerworld blog, The World Is My Office. Contact Mike at mike.elgan@elgan.com or his blog, The Raw Feed.
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