“When a crow flies over Kandahar, he only flaps one wing.
With the other wing, he covers his tail”.

This is a quote from a presentation at Magnum In Motion of portraits collected in Afganistan by Thomas Dworzak, and published in a book.

Did you know that (so the internets say) one of the reasons why Mullah Omar started Taleban was to put an end to homosexual practices?

I was interested in this book as a document of a beautiful portraiture phenomenon until I saw the links at the side, one of which sends you to the CFR.

Is this book ‘just an interesting book’ or is it part of the ‘Cultural Cold War‘ as Frances Stonor Saunders describes?

Its a great pity that works like this cannot be delivered neutrally and separated from World Insanity™ because the photographs are very beautiful…but then, when they are put in a context, that is precisely what they need to be to make you despise Taliban, and you need to be made to despise them so that you continue to passively support troops being sent there.

When do you think that this cartoon was drawn?

Click here to find out.

Everyone has been warned again and again about all of this….

gah!

Ther love songs start at dusk, at first drifting across from the other side of the river. The bamboo groves on the mountain opposite are bathed in the gold of the lingering rays of the sun while this side of the river is already cloaked in night. Young women in groups of five or six come to the river bank, some standing in a circle and others calling their lovers. Melodious singing rapidly fills the vast night. Young women are everywhere, still with their parasols up and holding a handkercheif or a fan. There are also some thirteen- or fourteen year old girls who are just becoming aware of boys.
In each group one girl leads the singing and the other girls harmonize. I observe that the lead singer is invariably the prettiest of the group, I suppose choice by beauty is a fairly natural principle.
The voice of the lead singer rises in the air and I can’t help noticing her utter sincerity. The correct word is perhaps not “sing”, for the clear shrill sounds come from deep within so that body and heart respond. The sounds seem to travel from the soles of the feet then shoot up between the eyes and the forehead before they are produced – no wonder they’re called “flying songs”. It is totally instinctive, uncontrived, unrestrained and unembellished, and certainly devoid of what might be called embarrasment. Each woman exerts herself, body and heart, to draw her man to her.

[…]

So-called civilisation in later ages separated sexual impulse from love and created the concepts of status, wealth, religion, ethics and cultural responsibility. Such is the stupidity of human beings.

Gao Xingjian on Miao courting.

————–

Our singer is called Josephine. Anyone who has not heard her does not know the power of song. There is no one but is carried away by her singing, a tribute all the greater as we are not in general a music-loving race. Tranquil peace is the music we love best; our life is hard, we are no longer able, even on occasions when we have tried to shake off the cares of daily life, to rise to anything so high and remote from our usual routine as music. But we do not much lament that; we do not get even so far; a certain practical cunning, which admittedly we stand greatly in need of, we hold to be our greatest distinction, and with a smile born of such cunning we are wont to console ourselves for all shortcomings, even supposing—only it does not happen that we were to yearn once in a way for the kind of bliss which music may provide. Josephine is the sole exception; she has a love for music and knows too how to transmit it; she is the only one; when she dies, music—who knows for how long—will vanish from our lives.

I have often thought about what this music of hers really means. For we are quite unmusical; how is it that we understand Josephine’s singing or, since Josephine denies that, at least think we can understand it. The simplest answer would be that the beauty of her singing is so great that even the most insensitive cannot be deaf to it, but this answer is not satisfactory. If it were really so, her singing would have to give one an immediate and lasting feeling of being something out of the ordinary, a feeling that from her throat something is sounding which we have never heard before and which we are not even capable of hearing, something that Josephine alone and no one else can enable us to hear. But in my opinion that is just what does not happen, I do not feel this and have never observed that others feel anything of the kind. Among intimates we admit freely to one another that Josephine’s singing, as singing, is nothing out of the ordinary.

[continues]

* Sarah Asproon
* Donna Aubert
* Stephen Benson
* Steve Benson
* Anna Bergman
* John Bird
* Alexandre Borski
* Alexandre Borsky
* James Burke
* Lee Castle
* Lynn Clark
* O.J. Clarke
* Hugo Clevers
* Joe De Mato
* Michael Di Caprio
* Dario Donati
* Raf Donato
* Romano Gastaldi
* Robert Hall
* Richard Haller
* David Hills
* Igor Horwess
* George Hudson
* Gerry Lively
* Kevin Mancuso
* A. Massaccesi
* Aristice Massaccesi
* Aristide Massaccesi
* Arizona Massachuset
* Andrea Massai
* J. Metheus
* Peter Newton
* Una Pierre
* Zak Roberts
* Tom Salima
* John Shadow
* Federico Slonisco
* Frederick Slonisco
* Fédérico Slonisco
* Dan Slonisko
* Frederick Slonisko
* Frederico Slonisko
* Frederic Slonisko
* Frederiko Slonisko
* Fred Slonisko
* Chana Lee Sun
* Chang Lee Sun
* Michael Wotruba
* Robert Yip

Stranger Magazine is out, and it has an article about Numbers Stations in it…

What a beautiful magazine, and what a beautiful way to preview it!

And I have just been informed by Der Kopf that ‘Strich’ is back on the air, after a ten year absence. This makes us ask several questions:

• Who has ordered this station back on to the air?
• Who is this station transmitting to?
• Are the messages going to the same people that used to receive Stritch messages?
• What have these people been doing for ten years?
• Why are they using Strich instead of some new structure?
• Has Stritch been taken over by western agencies?
• What are these Stritch agents up to right now that necessitates the use of Numbers Stations?
• Is this why we cannot get a first hand account? (i.e. all the staffers are still on duty and not retired after the ‘end of the Cold War).

Stranger and stranger Magazine.

Ending on a triplet!!!

Interested in the facts behind the new twenty pound note? You need to listen to these two clips:

[…]

http://mises.org/money/2s5.asp

Some Graffiti

Where I found it

Someone’s lost keys with a strange keyring

Jean Baudrillard

This painting of a fictional event from the English Obesity War (2012 – 2016) is perhaps the most popular work in the Walker’s Crisps Art Gallery. It shows a Rejectionist house under occupation by Parliamentarians. The young boy is being interrogated as to the whereabouts of the cook of the house. Behind him, a soldier gently holds the boy’s crying sister. To the left can be seen the children’s mother, her fear and anxiety at the boy’s possible answer written in her face.

Or you can insert any variation of the State mechanism impinging on personal liberty. The household will always be populated by people with colour in their lives, the State will always be a drab black and white clad intrusion.

Spire on Saturday was extremely good. First some great beer in KoKo bar (Goodramgate), which used to be a fabulous shop selling a myriad of bottled beers and now a lovely, cosy bar run by the same man. From the window we watched images of the East Window of the Minster projected onto the scaffolding that will continue to cover it for years to come.

The concert itself was a mix of classical, religious organ pieces, some accompanied by piano and tape, some vocal pieces, some individual chants, and solo offerings from Fennesz, Jeck and BJ Nilsen. Fennesz played in the Chapterhouse, with transmission into the Nave. It was interesting to wander from one place to the other, feeling the changing acoustics and feel of the rather subdued (for Fennesz) sounds.

For me, Jeck was the surprising highlight. From listening close to his set-up at the front of the Nave,  I wandered to the far end. Here, instead of the intense, personal feel of close quarters, his samples and loops of various organ and church sounds filled the huge space wondrously. It felt like the memories of centuries of ceremonies breathed themselves from the stones to fill the void. Something vaguely familiar, borderline comforting, yet still ethereal and untouchable swirled around, the huge and reverberating space preventing the sounds from coming into anything but the softest of focus.

Nilsen tried his best to send everyone into a coma, and it failed to move me at all. However, a final set of organ and vocal pieces including some Pärt sent me home with a warm glow inside.

Otto Dix, War Cripples Playing Cards (1920)

So, on Friday I saw Parlane/Jeck/Fennesz perform. It was an interesting listen, some stimulating noises.
Then last night, in the same venue, I saw the Payvar Ensemble from Iran.

Their performance left me full of joy, with a broad smile on my face. Absolutely stunning!

More than that, with their music, their togetherness, honesty and humility they gave me a better understanding of Iranian people, Iranian culture, Iranian spirit, free from political predujices and at a completely human level.
Ostad Mohammadali Esmaeili, who enchants the tombak itself with his playing, has a childlike playfulness in his drumming. It was impossible not to love him. He is possibly the best musician I have ever seen. I wanted to hug him.
The space and time they found for the music to flow into was marvellous.

Apparently, they will record for Radio 3 next week. I recommend it highly. But if have the privilige to get an opportunity to see them perform, see their faces and benefit from their wisdom… do not miss it!

http://www.amc.org.uk/press/

Did I dream it, or is Spire coming to York Minster?  I
have the idea from somewhere that it is, but now I can’t find it anywhere.

Meanwhile, Parlane, Jeck and Fennesz will be at the NCEM later this month.

Part of Sightsonic 2006.

Come on, I’ll buy you a pint.

Stop Motion Studies

David Crawford |

“To translate the stilled image into movement is to see the uncanny nature of the photograph transformed out of one emotional and aesthetic paradigm into another. The uncanny of the indexical inscription of life, as in the photograph, merges with the uncanny of mechanized human movement that belongs to the long line of replicas and automata.”
—Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second

Stop Motion Studies – Tokyo, 2004

The threat of liquid explosives would remain, as it was not possible to “uninvent” a threat, but the ways in which it was dealt with could change, officials said.

[…]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/5281896.stm

The mind BOGGLES at the illogic of these people.

They invent a threat, and then say everyone must suffer because they cannot uninvent what they have invented!

The comletely bogus ‘ricin plot’ is no different from this ‘liquid bomb plot’. It is a fiction, an invention, a fairy tale, a sham, a circus, a fraud, a deception, a shake-down, a fourberie, a ruse.

I’ll tell you about ‘uninvention’; the beasts who are behind this are going to be uninvented very shortly, at the polls.

This absurd baggage ban demonstrates that the Soviet yearning snakes at the helm are wiling to destroy Britain as a place of culture…without any reason whatsoever. This is hardly surprising; after all, they think that Ballet is not suitable for charity status since it is a ‘liesure activity’ and not an art. Classical music? Like private schools, its for the elite only, not fit for charitable status and should be banned altogether.

This is the true nature of the unimaginable beasts that have taken over this country. They have now locked all fine instruments into Britain and locked out all fine instruments. This means that if Hélène Clerc-Murgier wants to come here with her instrument, she cannot. It means that all classical musicians in the UK cannot get out with their instruments.

This is total insanity.

For years people have been threatening to blow up planes…and sometimes they got away with it. At no time did anyone ever suggest that everyone everywhere should be penalized due to the actions of a small number of people, and that was in the days when the threat was not manufactured; in the days of the Red Brigade, Baader-Mienhof, and Carlos ‘The Jackal’ . Are we now supposed to cower like dogs because a couple of bearded STUDENTS chat about ‘bombz’ on teh internetz?

Come on!

Ariel Sharon, the incapacitated former Israeli Prime Minister, is wearing an SS uniform. A man with Jewish side locks is depicted as a vampire drinking from a container marked ‘Palestinian blood’. An Arab figure is impaled to the ground by the absurdly long nose of a man in a black hat characteristic of orthodox Jews and marked ‘Holocaust’.At their worst, the images conform to lurid western stereotypes of Iran as a hotbed of anti-Semitism, as evoked by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of the Holocaust as a ‘myth’.

They are among the results of a competition run by the country’s biggest-selling newspaper, Hamshahri, to find the ‘cleverest’ cartoons satirising the slaughter of six million Jews by the Nazis in the Second World War.

More than 200 images have gone on public display in an exhibition at Tehran’s Palestine Contemporary Art Museum. The exhibition’s opening was attended by the de facto Palestinian ambassador to Iran, Salah al-Zawawi, who has full diplomatic status in Tehran.

Organisers say they received about 750 entries from around the world, including America and Britain, as well as many Muslim countries. The winning entrant will be announced next month and will receive a prize of US$12,000 (£6,380).

The contest, condemned by Israel and Jewish organisations, was launched in February in response to widespread Muslim outrage at the publication of Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed in European newspapers. It followed a series of anti-Israeli outbursts from Ahmadinejad, including a call for the Jewish state to be wiped off the map.

Massoud Shojai Tabatabai, director of the Iranian House of Cartoons which co-ordinated the project, said its aim was to challenge perceived western double-standards on free speech, which Iran’s leaders insist precludes openly debating the authenticity of the Holocaust.

‘Why is it acceptable in western countries to draw any caricature of the Prophet Mohammed, yet as soon as there are any questions or doubts raised about the Holocaust, fines and jail sentences are handed down?’ Tabatabai told The Observer.

That sentiment finds expression in a split-image cartoon from a Brazilian entrant in which a stand-up comic is portrayed performing in a venue called the West Club. In one image, captioned ‘Making jokes about Islam’, the comedian is greeted with raucous laughter. But the accompanying picture, marked ‘Making jokes about the Holocaust’, shows him being booted out of the window.

The exhibition’s other themes are a contention that the death toll of the Holocaust is exaggerated and a comparison of the Nazis’ behaviour with Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. The latter is explored in a cartoon, purportedly by a Belgian Jewish artist, in which two parallel railway lines – one marked with a swastika, the other with a star of David – merge before leading into a building resembling Auschwitz and bearing the slogan ‘Welcome home’. […]

Graniaud

I wonder if the Guardian printed any of these drawings…or any other newspaper running this story for that matter. hmmmmmmm!

While we are on the subject of publishing, they apologise today for publishing the name of someone who they said was arrested in the phony turrr plot, but who in fact was not arrested at all. They do not say how they made this mistake, they just say ‘sorry’. They should also say ‘sorry’ for whipping up hysteria whenever these false plots are unleashed to scare the the (half)wits out (there) of(in) the public.

And here is a TV report on the exhibition, via MEMRI.