#..... when is capitalism going to reach critical mass and explode

[softpine]

can everyone quit making games for children literally fuck them kids 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[happymetalgirl]

Black Lives Matter (adapted from previous post)

I was finishing up my April albums post but I honestly couldn’t write about the albums I needed to without getting this out there first, and (as usual) it ended up being really long, so I separated it and made it its own post here.

I’m writing this part now at the beginning of June after an already tumultuous April and May, and now I’m just making myself sit down and do this because, well, honestly, it’s been pretty hard to justify spending my time writing about anything else with all all of what is going on right now. (I can’t wait to see what July throws at us.) But again, in all seriousness, I’m not looking for any pity or sympathy for my relatively mild circumstances at all because in all honesty, my assorted privileges have allowed my life to be pretty okay and proceed mostly uninterrupted in the midst of everything going on.

I’ll start by disseminating any ambiguity on what I’ll be talking about in these paragraphs. As I write this in the midst of a respiratory virus pandemic, another epidemic (possibly pandemic) of racist police brutality that has always existed in a culture of unhinged toxic masculinity in the United States has exploded to unbelievable and disgusting levels against Black people and peaceful protesters, ironically in wake of protests against fucking police violence, all of which is only emboldened and encouraged by local and federal leadership that is showcasing its oppressive, totalitarian ambitions in its unprecedented attempted revocations of its citizens constitutional and human rights.

I’ll make the necessary side note that this increasingly oligarchical government subservient to the will of military and prison industry has already shown its complete disregard for human rights for decades upon decades now through its violation of human rights through offensive wars and sanctions against other countries and its dehumanization of the refugees and immigrants who its actions create.

If you haven’t already checked out of this from all the political correctness breaching your conservative bubble (good job not being that person), but you’re upset because tHiS iS sUpPoSeD tO bE a MuSiC bLoG, uh, you’re on the wrong website buddy, and the potential tipping point of a long-awaited revolution in the midst of an economic depression, a viral pandemic, and a dual crisis of grotesque police violence and evolutionary transformation of proto-fascism into fascist dictatorship is no time to go about business as usual.

BUT OKAY, ENOUGH INTRODUCTION AND ENOUGH ABOUT ME! The point of this is to spotlight what to do in the wake of all of this. First of all, I don’t have all the answers and my perspective is as limited as any person’s, so if you’re an expert on any of these matters or if you have insight from having experiences that I as a white cis male have not had, if anything I’m bringing up here could be better in any way, feel absolutely free (but not obligated) to let me know.

Okay, so lots of problems at hand. The big, all-encompassing one facing all of humanity of course is the ecological disruption caused by industrially driven human-catalyzed climate change, and the rot of everything crystallizing at this current moment feeds into exacerbating that catastrophe, the next wide-reaching issue being capitalism, whose prioritization of profit and short-term gains is incredibly ill-equipped to handle a slow emergency like climate change or a more acute emergency like a global pandemic. Here in the U.S. we have a federal government so infested with corporate corruption to maximize capital profits for the country’s most wealthy that they couldn’t even choose the obvious solution of pausing the economy and providing for its people for the duration of the pandemic in the interest of public health over the appallingly quick choice of protecting the financial interests of the corporate “donors” that help them hold their positions of power, at the risk of maybe closing the gap a tiny bit between the truly despicably wealthy and the growing number of hopelessly impoverished. So while the wealthy get protection of their assets from the slow-down of business (you know, ‘cause the pandemic), the people in most need of help because of that slow-down and plunged into spiking unemployment get shit from the people meant to represent them. And that’s just the corporate rot that rears its head as a result of a pandemic!

Even in “normal” times, capitalism in this country has built its foundation on slave labor and justifying the use of slavery through racism (even after it became illegal to outright own people as slaves). That cornerstone of free/cheap labor that this country’s economy is built on whose role was served by slavery was filled by outsourcing to countries with an easily exploitable lower class (whose conditions are often exacerbated by U.S. meddling on behalf of business interests) and prison labor made possible by mass incarceration that has targeted similarly vulnerable people and communities of color through strategic, racially profiled over-policing of minority communities trapped in poverty through historic systemic racism.

The study of that global climate change I mentioned earlier is referred to as a crisis study because there isn’t an unlimited time to do something about it, and the ever-changing conditions and pivotal events of the world effect what needs to be done to combat it (and what it is too late to do). This current crisis of police brutality is one of those types of critical moments, for climate change and social justice. Police brutality didn’t become an issue when George Floyd was murdered on May 25th 2020; it’s been an ugly facet of this multifactedly ugly country for a long time now, but its being brought to light has instigated an uprising the likes of which has not been seen in a long while, and with it, an especially insidious aggression toward it by the increasingly fascist government and its authoritarian figurehead (to the point of threatening institution of martial law and suspending first amendment rights and habeas corpus) that at this point serves only to maintain complacency for the benefit of the ruling class and to the detriment of the disproportionately non-white lower working class (treated as a slave class). Consequently this is a pivotal time that obligates widespread action and ceasing of silence from privileged people like me who have been able to get away with writing about music largely apolitically for years. This is a time when we either plunge unfathomably further into the depths of fascism at the hands of the ruling class and the silence of the less-effected or we consolidate in this moment of broad energizing to both enact substantive change on the critical issue of police brutality and set a precedent and build momentum to achieve justice for LGBTQIA+ folk, other racial minorities and marginalized groups, and make the critical changes need to avoid civilizational dissolution in the face of the imperative to mitigate our impact on global warming.

Speaking of that change and the actions that this moment implores of us all to contribute our energy to: the most immediately critical issue at our feet, to both save human lives from being taken unjustly at the hands of police brutality and to galvanize this revolution to be able to demand further justice and critical social transformation, is ending police brutality. Being an institution born out of rounding up escaped slaves and given the state-supported monopoly on violence that attracts largely those seeking to satiate sadism with the license to that monopolized violence, police culture is inherently toxic and not worth even preserving for the sake of transforming structurally. While abolishing the police is obviously too ambitious of an immediate goal, there are a lot of proposed steps to defunding and largely dismantling the police as a whole. The project Campaign Zero outlines and pushes for ten tangible reforms that would (some of which have recently been proposed in Colorado) decrease police violence, especially in the majority-Black communities that suffer from it the most. The “8 Can’t Wait” proposal that has been making rounds lately is part of Campaign Zero, and donations to these projects are of course, quite helpful and a good start for this blossoming movement. Furthermore, donations to local bail funds is especially important at this time with police making wanton arrests of peaceful protests (and also just random Black people not making any disruption) to support the people going out and protesting. Because this money of course gets siphoned into the courts, and then partially to law enforcement, it’s important to also direct funds to organizations where that money will not later be used against us, but again, keeping people able to protest is of utmost importance, since that it what is driving positive change in this moment.

Also helpful is direct support of the people on the frontlines of these protests. It is a time for privileged people to take action in solidarity and support, but not one for privileged groups to take over or “lead” the movement. Right now, this is about who is hurting the most and who is being oppressed the most, and right now that is Black people, by police, hence BLACK LIVES MATTER. Now is not a time for even underprivileged white people to use these protests’ likelihood of escalating to indulge in venting frustrations against the system by inciting police violence that puts Black people disproportionately in more danger in such situations. Now is the time to use that privilege of being less prone to racism police violence to whatever extent possible to protect the people of color protesting. And again, this isn’t about being white saviors or martyrs, this is about supporting people in the way they wish, so don’t listen to my advice over the insight and requests of what Black people and the Black community have. And by all means, fucking listen to them! Read from them! Engage in good-faith conversation with them (though don’t expect any individual Black person to give you a seminar on racism when there are ample resources that don’t demand someone devoting their precious time to you)! Learn where the limits of your perspective fail you! And for fuck’s sake, don’t just cherry pick the word of one token Black friend that happens to have some class privilege to conveniently discount the testimonies of other Black people!

Lastly, on a personal note to the metalheads that read this blog, I think this is a particularly important time for the metal community, not to center itself, but to bring itself alongside social justice in a more complete way than it has in the past. Former Opeth and current Soen drummer Martín López said last year in an interview published in Blabbermouth that the metal community is very behind the curve on sociopolitical issues, and the response to his saying that from the metal community that floods Blabbermouth comment sections basically just made the case for the exact point he was making. And it’s a shame because I think such a huge part of metal is about standing up to injustice as part of or in support of the oppressed, or at least such a huge part of the metal I gravitate toward is. Without sounding too spiritual or cheesy because I’m not a really spiritual person, I feel like when I see the injustice going on, I feel that spirit of metal in all of it on the side of the oppressed. I feel like all the grindcore and deathcore and thrash and death metal I’ve been binging lately is in the spirit of the protesters standing up to and, when they have to, fighting back against the unjustified aggression of the police, and looking back at old, certified classic albums like …And Justice for All, Toxicity, and Chaos A.D. and more recent albums like Machine Head’s The Blackening, and Thy Art Is Murder’s Human Target, and Venom Prison’s Samsara, it’s always been about standing up to this kind of bullshit. So I think if there ever was a time since Sabbath birthed it for metal to prove that it’s as important as it makes itself out to be and as important as it is to everyone who listens to it in such a way that they read an obscure blog about it, now is that time to show that it’s not just about being an angry white guy. Now is the time to make Martín López happy by proving him wrong.

Well, in typical Happymetalboy fashion, I can’t seem to make anything brief.

[all-things-are-nothing-to-me]

On Sabotage as One of the Fine Arts: a contribution to the topic of the theory of the practice of Sabotage

Chapter 1

Who will revive the violent whirlpools of flame if not us and those that we consider brothers? Come! New friends: this will please you. We will never work, oh tides of flame! This world will explode. It’s the true path. Forward, on the march.

— A. Rimbaud

The spread of sabotage, its increasing practice, on a greater or lesser scale, far and wide against the domination of the market is a given fact. Burning ATM booths, disabling locks at shopping centers, smashing shop windows, setting fire to the offices of temp agencies and employment offices, the sabotage of the infrastructure of capitalism (high-speed railroads, dams, expressways, construction projects) ... are offensive practices against the colonization of our lives by the most advanced form of colonialism — the integrated spectacle.

All this is put into practice by individuals bored with survival as commodities (life reduced to economic imperatives) and disillusioned with false opposition (more false and less oppositional with each day that goes by), parties and unions that want to manage our misery and integrate us into a mode of production that prevents us from any participation in the decisions that relate directly to us and that assist in enslaving us, mutilating every gesture of negation of the existent.

The spectacle writes the scenario and distributes the roles: worker, professor, student, housewife, mother, father, son, daughter, unemployed, police, soldier, artist, humanitarian, intellectual... the majority, individuals who assume different roles in the course of 24 hours, see their existence as still more terrible, assuming this is possible. Everyone with his neurotic-schizoid viewpoint will react to the stimuli launched by power in the way that was already expected.

All social activity is planned in order to reinforce the spectacle, thus slowing down its unstoppable process of decomposition. Though we don’t want to hear the shrieking of militants of whatever organization, clearly we are not against the concept of “organization” as such, but against “organization” conceived as an end in itself , as the crystallization of any ideology, and as a separated organ, representing a class.

We are for the autonomous self-organization of the exploited. History has shown through two clear examples that the traditional form of the party (Russian revolution) and union (Spanish revolution) were nothing more than two attempts to manage capitalism and not to overcome it, and this is something that, consciously or unconsciously, everybody knows. In the seizure of power, it is not destroyed, but exercised: in the first case, the class of bureaucrats replaced the bourgeoisie, and in the other case, the anarcho-syndicalist leaders participated in bourgeois power, calling for the self-management of exploitation and alienation, while the base tried to overcome the relationships of production and social relationships in practice through the direct management of every aspect of their lives and not just work.

To be precise, both forms have the exaltation of work in common (something that they also share with national-socialism and with every political form of capitalism).

Their quantitative vision sought an increase in production, leaving aside the qualitative increase of life. This (practical and theoretical) defeat of the traditional organizations, which claim to represent us, has not been absorbed by the working class (it seems that we only know how to work), and we go along without maintaining any possibility of control over essential aspects of our lives, in a world that is developed, not only without our participation, but against us.

But, comrades, history is not cyclic; it is a cumulative process and already weighs too heavily upon our weary bodies.

Chapter 2

Never did mockers waste more idle breath.

— William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

The contradiction between the possibilities of the means of production (the use of a few of them for the enjoyment of all, since most of them are useless and harmful and would be destroyed) and the relations of production (waged exploitation, commodification, the exclusions of class society) has reached an insurmountable point of rupture. In the spectacle it is easier to falsify the nature of this contradiction than to increase mercantile production with increasing use value. This inertia forces it to display all of its methods for recuperating any real movement of opposition and to turn the spectacular critique of the spectacle to its advantage.

A self-critical hypocrite directed by its own police of decomposed thought (pro-situationists, cadres, non-governmental organizations, recuperators, artists, journalists... the clique of politically correct alternatives).

These toilet brushes of modernity, like good priests, hope that with their patches, the proper development of the system will lead us, hand in hand, into an ideal world planned by their false consciousness and by the putridity of their armoured brains; as if they had ever given us anything. Their social function, which has been denounced for decades already, has been worth more to them than any aggressions, beatings or assassinations, and we are sure that these will not be mere anecdotes. They deceive and manipulate us. We must not allow them ta have a single day more. They are the guardians to the keys of our informal chains. They amuse us with insignificant debates. They impose their opinions on us, avoiding questions so simple that they make them tremble with terror: How best to live? Who and what keeps us from this? Questions that immediately unmask the professionals of the lie. Critical coherence and the critique of incoherence aid this operation.

Chapter 3

Injustice is not anonymous; it has a name and an address.

— Bertold Brecht

Situationist theory, as integral critique of the totality of the conditions of survival and of the mercantile-spectacular capitalism that necessitates them, has been confirmed in events by falsification.

One cannot fight alienation by means of alienated forms. The sabotage of this world starts with the break with the roles the system imposes on us, the sabotage of our death in life and the refusal of the roles that they have allotted and appointed to us. To speak of the Revolution in these times is “to have a corpse in one’s mouth”. We only need to look around ourselves to see a scenario that constantly reminds us of the defeat. Sabotage is thus an action that serves as a propellant against the unreality that oppresses us. A practice that has not gone unnoticed by ideological recuperation, which has transformed it into “terrorism” (the professionalization of sabotage that has done no more than reinforce the system, due to its centralist, hierarchical and militarist character). Today, what is proposed is not the creation of an armed organization of this type, but widespread attack by small affinity groups, uncontrollable by any higher organization, that come together and dissolve like the lunar tides. The tides that are born of the awareness of how bad things are and of the worsening that awaits us due to events.

In the 19th century, such a practice existed that put the incipient capitalism in check. Beyond the Luddite attacks, the “proletarian rounds” rendered their repression and recuperation, in which the embryonic unions would play a role, almost impossible due to their lack of a rigid structure and their maximum flexibility in attacks. A group of people came together, struck and disappeared into the mass, while a new group came together within it. Such widespread sabotage makes it difficult for the enemy to organize repression. Thus it transforms the attack into a universe of pleasure for the enlightened hooligan, the feelings of which are impossible to describe or communicate with the poor and banal language of words.

The game of subversion, the rules of which are written by those that participate in it, becomes an effective weapon against capitalism in all its forms.

There is much more to destroy than to build.

Chapter 4

Our epoch does not need to write poetic slogans, but to realize them.

— Situationist International

It has been demonstrated that small groups that attack do more damage than large organizations that specialize in armed struggle. The Angry Brigade continued its actions when people were arrested and the English state assumed the movement had fallen apart. The Kale Borroka (street struggle) in Euskadi, which Jarrai (the youth organization of the Basque nationalist left, NDR) recently declared uncontrollable is another example. Power has difficulty repressing and eliminating little groups that with complete security do not know each other, and the only thing that unites them is the desire for the destruction of a system that prevents them from living and condemns them to survival and uncertainty. They don’t attempt exhibitionist actions in order to make propaganda as some acronym or mark of origin. In the case of the Asturias, sabotage was a class weapon used innumerable times, particularly in labor conflicts with these enterprises: Duro Felguera, Hunosa, Naval and Ciata...(Asturian businesses and mines where sabotage was determinant in the struggles going on in the 1990’s); every weary person, regardless of her or his ideology, uses it. From the clerk who steals office supplies to the worker who damages the machine to which he is chained, passing through the use of plastic explosives like the licensed professionals of Duro Felguera. Today, the example is the burning of the ETTs (temporary employment agencies). The practice of sabotage remains limited to precise and very localized conflicts, without global perspectives, simply aiming for partial solutions with economic demands that remain within imposed limits where capitalist logic unfolds. The same holds in the case of the ETTs, an attack that goes beyond the temporality of a conflict in one enterprise, but that does not place wage slavery into question. Instead it only questions its most extreme form, not aiming at putting an end to exploitation, but rather to the ETTs. Today the conflict is global and it is not resolved through partial struggles, but through total struggle and through the refusal of this society as a whole. It is necessary to put an end to the reduction of our lives to commodities and to wage labor that wears us out, not just to ETTs. We must put an end to class society and not just fascism. Misdirecting our attention toward partial objectives only benefits the managers of our misery and those who will one day lay claim to its management., and both are among the targets for sabotage.

The widespread practice of sabotage (unhindered autonomy, maximum flexibility, self-organization, minimum risk) among like-minded individuals, opens the possibility for real communication, destroying spectacular communication, smashing the apathy and impotence of the eternal revolutionist monologue. Relationships and the possibility of contact with other people in the refusal of the spectacular role, these are transient situations that in their preparation and development carry in their essence the qualities of the revolutionary situation that will not retreat and that will suppress the conditions of survival. It does not fall into the irremediable alienating hierarchization that every specialized armed group of an authoritarian and militaristic character, to which the masses delegate their participation in the attack, carries within itself

The quantitative growth of this practice does not come to us from the hands of propagandists of the spectacle, but rather by taking a walk through the scenario of capitalism, and finding in this drift the burned ATM, the ETTs with shattered windows, the smiths changing the locks of a supermarket. These visions make our complicit smiles blossom and move us to go out that very night to play with fire with the aim of making the same smiles rise on the faces of unknown accomplices through the fellowship of destruction. The number doesn’t matter, but rather the quality of the acts: sabotage, expropriation, self-reduction... they return part of the life that is denied us back to us, but we want it all.

Comrades, the game is yours and we take courage in its daily practice. Organize it yourselves with your accomplices.

Against the old world in all its expressions, in order to leave pre-history, let’s launch and multiply attacks.

FOR THE ABOLITION OF CLASS SOCIETY AGAINST THE MARKET AND WAGE LABOR FOR ANARCHY STONES AND FIRE

[carterusm]

“I think the whole rock’n’roll thing of ‘Yeah! We must go out and bed lots of groupies and get shit-faced!’ stinks!” (Well, Why do it?-Ed)

New Musical Express 10th December 1988, Page 10 - DREAM DEMONS

From sub-Birthday Party clanking to acid fuzz-pop and now on to intense guitar aggression MY BLOODY VALENTINE have become the Noise Chameleons of the 80s. JACK BARRON dives into their slipstream and discovers that the boiling young bloods are the head of a particularly ominous sonic scab that’s surely about to burst. STEPHEN SPELLER provides the oxy.

The journalist, immobilised by a massive student demonstration in Central London, is late. A couple of miles up the road in a Kentish Town bar My Bloody Valentine are getting restless.

The band’s songwriter, frazzle-haired Kevin Shields, absent-mindedly pulls at the crater-sized hole in his jumper. For a minute his mind wanders to his favourite drug - sex - before discarding the thought in favour of his second drug of choice: vegetating.

Bilinda Butcher, who once studied dance at the Laban School before quitting to take up slipstream guitar, looks at her watch and says to bassist Deb Googe: “If the bloke doesn’t turn up soon I’ll have to go.” Meanwhile, Dublin born drumer, Colm O’Ciosoig, who if you look at him through squinted eyes bears a resemblance to Animal out of The Muppets, is recalling one of his favourite dreams.

Has a lot of dreams does Colm, they’re so vivid and fantastical he’d like to turn them into films one day. This afternoon he’s remembering his Apocalypse dream. It occurs two days before a nuclear war in Ireland. Mass confusiong reigns. In the melée Colm meets a girl and falls in love with her.

Inspired, the drummer hot-wires her family’s Rolls Royce and is then chased by government spies who believe he has committed treason.

The pursuit ends in a park by the edge of a cliff. On the green a Bacchanalian pre-Apocalypse party is going on the likes of which would make the local village priest blush if he hadn’t already disrobed his cassock and been making love to a nun nodding out on a heroin jag.

A nude posse is formed to capture the traitorous drummer who flees to the lip of the cliff. With certain death before him and eternal damnation behind him Colm calmy steps over the edge...

Drugs... Sex... Dreams...

The door of The Assembly Rooms pub slams, jerking Colm out of his reverie. The noisy intruder has the hassled demeanour of a journalist very late for an appointment. Colm, the lyricist of the firebrand song ‘(When You Wake) You’re Still In A Dream’ on My Bloody Valentine’s splendid new album, ‘Isn’t Anything’, lights a cigarette - his second favourite drug - and readies himself for the interview.

The journalist makes amends for his tardiness by heading for the pumps. As the pints are pulled he’s still amazed by the demo he sat through for an hour and a half. The ‘80s thus far has been noticeable for complete agitational apathy on the part of students. Now, though, there are Young Bloods exploding with energy and anger on the street of the capital... and it isn’t just confined to protest demos.

Young Bloods are rattling the style bars of rock music in Britain. Until recently, with the exception of The Mary Chain, the guitar might as well, in these isles, have been a hairdryer. For a number of years it has been American bands that have made all the running and found fresh ways to reinvent the trad instrument. You know these people well enough: Sonic Youth, Hüsker Dü, Swans, Dinosaur Jr, et al.

During the course of 1988, however, it has become increasingly apparent that the American noisecore brutalists have had a knock-on effect in Britain. Every week brings a Young Blood band to light that has tapped into the attitude of aggressive psychoto-delic invention pioneered by the Americans. Some we have already told you about: Loop, Spacemen 3, AC Temple, Head Of David and Playground, while others such as God, You Make My Flesh Crawl, and Godflesh are in the wings, waiting to be discovered.

The unexpected King Kongs in this pit of guitar gurus have ironically turned out to be the once-fey wraiths of indie pop, My Bloody Valentine. Their new album, ‘Isn’t Anything’, is colossal. Surging with mutant guitar tones that come from completely unconventional technique, and dappled with disembodied vocals, the record’s song structures are the aural equivalent of a bendy toy with switchblades for teeth, or The Elephant Man looking at himself in a hall of distorted mirrors.

Whether euphoric - as in the gorgeous ‘No More Sorry’ - or skin-flaying like ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’, the compositions all verge on those moments when psychoses give way to hallucinations. Or, in the blunt vernacular of the publicist, “That LP! It does yer head in.” And for once he isn’t lying.

Besides sartorial scruffiness and mutually acknowledged idols such as The Stooges and The Velvets,, what My Bloody Valentine and the Young Bloods further have in common with America’s sonic brutalists is the the f---the-max guitarpower is allied to introverted and reflective lyrics.

There are no messages, manifestos or instructions to be heard. Instead, these band’s look at their world, through occasionally dilated pupils and report back, obscurely and absurdly.

There are of course exceptions to this. Spacemen 3 have stopped trying to drag their brains out of their nostrils and now exhort and need for ‘Revolution’ on their forthcoming single. In the main, though, inner space, changing states of mind, and emotional turmoil predominate lyrically. And with, as I’ve explained, sex being the number one drug of My Bloody Valentine’s principle songwriter, Kevin Shields, it is hardly surprising that in amongst tunes dealing with suicide (’Sueistine’) and disorientation (’I Can See It But I Can’t Feel It’) there are five songs left on the ‘Isn’t Anything’ album about bonking. You’d be hard-pressed though to name them all, such is the opaqueness of the lyrics.

The tape is switched on in the pub just in time for Bilinda to say “Hello-Goodbye.”

When I tell the remaining three MBVs that their new music has come as a very pleasant shock, especially as I gave up listening to them several years ago following the saccarine ‘Sunny Sundae Smile’ pop affair, they fill in the cracks in my knowledge.

“You know there have been about four different My Bloody Valentines,” says Kevin. “When Colm and I started out in Dublin years ago we were determined not to do anything that wasn’t totally original. So we messed around with excruciating noises.”

“We wanted the next act to be along the lines of The Butthole Surfers.”, continues the drummer. “using tapes to make a total noise that would offend people. So we came up with original music. The only problem was it was boring!”

“Boring” is the most frequently used description by MBV this afternoon. It’s the litmus test they have used on their own music during their career: if it’s a snore, pack it in and find a new format. Which is exactly what they’d done when I caught an earful of the tepid wax of the early singles they released on Lazy, the label owned by the manager of The Primitives’ fly-guy Wayne Norris.

At the time, 1986/7, the Valentines forsook their noiseome experiments, which had got them labelled as Birthday Party rip-offs in Ireland, and became obsessed with coining perfect pop songs with sick lyrics.

“More than anything that was the obsession of our singer at the time, Dave.” says Kevin. “Dave now writes novels, science fiction and horror, thought he hasn’t had any published yet. The idea of composing a sweet pop song that sugar-coated some lyrical horror and sending it hurling up the charts appealed to our sense of humour. Also it was fresh after having made pure noise earlier.”

Lazy Wayne, ever the hustler, hoped to make the Valentines bona fide starts. The band had their own ideas, however, while critics were trying to squeeze them into pigeonholes like “a garage band” or “a legacy of the C86 shamblies”, neither of which fitted.

“Wayne used to tell me all the things we should do to be more professional,” says Kevin. “He said we had to make a commitment to him if we wanted to get on and off the dole. We just couldn’t agree with what he said though. We didn’t want to end up as a second rate Primitives. That was the last thing on our minds.”

Gradually it seemed that My Bloody Valentine were slipping not just into the second division but the Isthmian League of the indie scene. Their first album, ‘Ecstasy’, for example was deleted after a pressing of a mere 2,000 records. Critics and fans still failed to appreciate the evil lyrics behind the pretty song titles. The joke hadn’t worked because few people actually caught on as to what MBV were about.

“Once we’d mastered the art of writing snappy pop songs with our eyes and ears closed,” continues Kevin, “the whole project started to become boring as hell. And we reached a stage at the beginning of last year where we thought there wasn’t much point carrying on any more. Then a couple of things happened. Dave, our singer, left and with him to a certain extent this obsessive pop thing and also Creation Records expressed an interest in us.”

Home of powder-fluff cute pop, Creation wanted the Valentines for the very same lightweight songwriting the band had grown annoyed with. To his credit, Alan McGee allowed the group to forge ahead as they wanted, without restrictions, an act of faith that soon paid off with the remarkable ‘You Made Me Realise’ and ‘Feed Me With Your Kiss’ tinderboxes whose flashfire textures burned MBV’s once dodgy reputation down to a hard cinder. The latest album is a culmination of the band’s ethic of progress-via-boredom.

While MBV admit they have always been big fans of Sonic Youth, Big Black and so on, and that the Americans in turn have had a knock-on influence of the Young Bloods of Britain, pinning down exactly what makes it very distinct, on the face of it, bands gravitate together proves difficult.

“If there is a similarity it would be the one of attitude,” reckons Kevin, “The people involved don’t have any respect for the ‘correct’ way of playing the guitar but are more interested in getting new sounds out whichever way they can.

“It’s an indulgence, yes, but I think it’s important to go along with your whims. Calculation never makes for originality, it’s just limiting. Most originals are original because they have been individuals willing to follow their whims and not because they have formulated some incredibly original idea. But remember, people have been making a loud racket with guitars for years, so it’s not a revolutionary thing.”

Drug use may be prevalent among some of the groups mentioned here - the Valentines have often been linked with acid - but that, as Kevin points out, doesn’t account for the trajectory of the band’s music: “I don’t think weird music is the product of drugs distancing musicians from reality. After all, there are a million and one bands who take drugs and still play shit-horrible music.”

“If I was to try and make music that was acid-influenced it would be pretty unlistenable: it would be very fast for a start, I could only imagine taking one song and repeating it 30 times in three minutes. Maybe that’s because the acid nowadays is low on hallucinations and high on speed, compared to the ‘60s.”

If tabs aren’t the catalysts for the current monstrous waves of psychoto-delia the source for the approach of the Young Bloods must like elsewhere. And Kevin believes he knows where.

“An important ingredient that links the best bands around now is that for them 1976 and ‘77 aren’t musically relevant years,” he says. “That’s because the actual music punk bands made was really nothing compared to what came out of the ‘60s. Punk was very formularised. What it had going for it was the attitude and excitement.”

[robalchemy]

Coming Out Of The Empath Closet

Like most of these posts, I’m never really sure where to begin or how to lead in...But the title says it all; I’m an empath. So why write a blog post about this? Why make it public? Why make it a big deal? why even share it at all? Well, that last question is the biggest one I’ve been faced with most of my life. Why WOULD I share this about myself in such a close minded world? Why would anyone dare to allow the deepest parts of them out for all the world to see? It’s absolute insanity in our self-centered, closed minded, drive-through, fearful, dogmatic culture we call the western world in 2019. And I’m JUST bringing this out at the age of 35, so could you imagine trying to explain this to the school psychologists in the early 90′s? That would surely have been a one-way ticket to ALL the anti-psychotic drugs! Okay, so there’s a LOT to unpack here, so let’s just take it one spoonful at a time, yes? My biggest reason for bringing this aspect of myself out into the open is primarily for anyone else who’s in the same boat as me, but for a multitude of reasons, is perhaps conflicted by it. And believe me, I’ve been through ALL of these barriers time and time again. You never know what anyone will think. And this concept of normality and fitting in has been just pounded into us so hard for so long. Maybe you’re worried that your friends or family will think you’re crazy. Maybe you’re beginning to question your own sanity. Maybe people have TOLD you you’re crazy. Maybe people have put you down for it. Maybe people have made you feel like the absolute dumbest piece of shit that the face of the earth has ever seen for being so fake and ridiculous. Maybe religious people in your life want you to believe you’re all up in the devil. Maybe people have said it’s just a phase. Or that you’re fishing for attention. I’ve been to all of these places more times than I could recall.

And I WANT to tell you that this is all somehow not true, not real. I WANT to tell you that. But unfortunately, people’s judgments are VERY real, whether we like it or not. And so many of us can FEEL these judgments in so many ways. For me, I feel the intention other people have in conversation. I (more often than not) already know what their point is going to be before they’ve even finished the first sentence. I know when someone is lying to me. I know when someone’s trying to manipulate me. I even physically feel when someone is THINKING about me. (It feels like an extreme hot flash running up and down my spine and in my head.) So yes, judgement has, does and will happen. We can’t change that, nor is it our duty or right to change ANYONE. That’s not what any of us are here to do. So what should we do about both negative reactions or even just FEAR of negative reactions? Not a damn. Freaking. Thing. Which brings me to my second point of why I’m bringing this up: If we can’t be honest and true to ourselves, what CAN we be honest and true to? The truth here is that we all have the things and characteristics that make us US in this life. Would you be ashamed that maybe you have brown eyes? Would you shame someone else for liking ice cream? Of course not, it’s absolutely absurd! And these abilities that in truth, EVERYONE has - Are no different. These are just other characteristics of the way we are that are immutable. We can’t change them. We can’t delete them. So why not embrace them? That’s a question that would have made me VERY nervous even just months ago. In short, this is who I am. It’s who I’ve always been, since childhood. And it’s been a major factor in leading a VERY misunderstood life. Personally, I was VERY lucky to grow up in a family that was very open minded to these things. It’s not like I was identified as an empath and knew I was empathic when I was a kid. Back in the 90′s, that term was akin to ‘Witchcraft’ and late night infomercials for “JoJo’s Psychic Alliance Hotline for $5 a minute”. My Mom was strongly empathic, my sister is probably the strongest empath of any of us, and my Dad even developed some of his abilities later on in life, as well. (Although I’m probably closest with my Brother, but I really have no idea where he stands with any of this, and that’s completely okay too.) Growing up, my Mom always just described me as being very sensitive. And that really IS a very apt description. But she knew what I had from day one, whether she shared it with anyone or not. I’m not sure what my sister recognized in me at that time, but still, in some ways she could read me better than anyone. I also grew up OBSESSIVELY creative. And I haven’t changed even a little bit. This is a very common trait among empaths of all varieties - I don’t yet fully understand why, but somehow it also seems very fitting. As a creative soul, I can see possibilities that nobody else can. I can process certain kinds of abstract concepts intuitively and instantly. I can visualize almost to the level of hallucination, that’s how I always knew where to put the lines when I’m drawing. So even aside from all this empathic stuff, my brain was never wired “normally” to begin with. And growing up - The schools, psychologists and so many teachers saw this and insisted to my parents that something was wrong with me. I had to be “fixed” because back in those days, not fitting into the same box as everyone else was BAD. This was just the tip of the iceberg for a central theme in this life for me. So just for fun, I’d like to get into the specifics of some of the things I experience that maybe not EVERYONE else does. Since childhood, my main “odd” experience is that I feel the emotions and intentions of either those immediately around me, those I observe or those I interact with. This is actually the trickiest part of it all for me, because for decades, I had no idea that many of the things I was feeling weren’t mine. Can you imagine how screwed up that makes a person feel? The thing that made me aware and able to discern which emotions were and weren’t mine was...Well, it was freaking OBVIOUS once I began opening up to new perspectives. I knew I wasn’t perceiving the world incorrectly, yet my emotional reactions often did not remotely suit the circumstances I was in. I was just so used to it that it was just a part of life for me, and second guessing my own thoughts became normal. This caused me to repress it for so many years, but it never went away. It just kept getting more and more pushed down and compact over my lifetime until it reached critical mass and EVERYTHING I’d built up over this life began exploding out of me since it had nowhere else to go. I experienced this as chronic, severe long term depression and anxiety in recent years. That’s a long story unto itself that I’d rather not go too deep into, but the point is: Being THAT unhealthy and repressed nearly cost me my life. I became a borderline alcoholic, because that was the only way I knew to feel better. I also became obese. (Fun fact, in the last year, I’ve dropped ALL that weight!) And many times, I was borderline suicidal. I even went through several psychologists who were at a complete loss and fired me as a client because they couldn’t help me. Friends, THIS is what happens when we fall out of alignment with ourselves. This is why being true to ourselves goes FAR beyond a warm fuzzy sentiment. Now imagine being able to feel the intentions and emotions of anyone you direct your attention toward or interact with. Even through a screen. Now take a look around at the world we’re living in right now. It’s so disturbing and unspeakable to me that I don’t even want to go into examples, because even just tuning into the very concept of these negative emotions hits me so hard that I can feel it physically. And as much as I hate to say it, I live in Canada’s Arkansas. The part of the country I live in is Canada’s undisputed capital of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, selfishness and just fear driven hate in general. And I’ve lived here for 35 years. Just do the math on that and maybe you can begin to see how challenging it can really be just EXISTING as a person with empathic abilities. Now, the root word of ‘empathy’ is - You guessed it! So for me, this also goes the other way. When I see the VICTIMS of all this hate, I feel it exactly as they do. En masse. I can’t even begin to emphasize how strongly I feel it, and how much it hurts beyond what physical pain can offer. Because you can relieve physical pain sometimes, yes? This has created for me the challenge of even HAVING any faith or good will towards humanity when I can FEEL what we do to each other every minute of every day. Yet, in spite of all this - I’ve lived my life with an inexplicable and very deep sense of compassion and wanting to HELP this world, in spite of knowing what it’s capable of and the things we do to each other without so much as a second thought. I can’t even stomach how anyone can exist that way. On the flip side, I don’t come across genuinely highly positive people very often, but when I do - OMG WHAT A FREAKING RUSH!!!! I’ve never done cocaine, but that’s what I imagine it must feel like. Occasionally, I come across people who truly have the highest of intentions and hearts full of love and good humor. I feel it as soon as they approach me. When this happens, I get a very light headed rush, the world starts to look REALLY bright or “bleached” and the internal feeling is like a combination of excited butterflies in the stomach, an absolutely ELECTRIC surge throughout my entire body, very warm pins & needles that give me goosebumps, and I just instantly want to take this person, clone them 30 or 40 times and go to a party with only them. It is the starkest contrast I could imagine. So that’s the basic version. If we want to go even DEEPER into this rabbit hole, I would only tell you about the most recent MONTHS of my life. I can’t even begin to describe the work I’ve been doing on myself and where its taken me. (I will in the near future...) But in short, I’ve begun to accept, embrace and develop these parts of me. Well actually, they’ve kind of been developing themselves. So before, I was basically limited to the definition of a physical and emotional empath. In recent months however, I’ve been cracked so wide open that I’ve been experiencing things that I had no idea my mind was even CAPABLE of perceiving. To name just a couple - The degree of the sensitivities I’ve always had have increased ten fold. If I’m chatting with someone online, I can feel them to the point of their pulse. This is not an exaggeration. I’m willing to bet that some of my friends who are reading this right now are friends that I’ve been chatting with on messenger, and I’ve said something like “Okay, let’s change the topic because I just felt your heart rate spike and your adrenaline kick in”. (I actually feel much more than that, but I still want my friends to TALK to me, so I’ll leave it there for now!) I can feel the intentions and intensity of the energy of people around me in traffic. This tends to be not so much emotional, but rather I feel a spectrum of the quality of people’s energy from SHARP to GENTLE. Those are honestly the best words I can find. Not strong and weak, intense and mellow, but sharp and gentle. Another interesting thing I’ve noticed of late, is people will just randomly start pouring their hearts out to me. Perfect strangers, it can be just helping a customer at work or paying for gas at 7-11; And 2 sentences in, they begin rattling off their entire freaking life story. People give me EVERYTHING. Constantly. This used to happen occasionally, but in recent months, it’s been almost every day that I’m in public, often multiple times a day. This goes beyond just chatty people, it’s flat out rigorous. For me, this is kind of a trap, because once it starts - I can’t get people to stop even if I shout at them to shut up. (Not that I do, that one’s just an allusion.) I don’t understand exactly why this happens, but I have a faint idea that some part of people, probably subconsciously - Feel my receptivity and take it as an invitation to pour out everything they’re holding in. I’ve always been uncomfortable in large crowds. Hell, you don’t have to be even remotely empathic for this! Needless to say, this has also been taken to the extreme. But on the flip side, I can also feel nature every bit as strongly. Being in nature has become my drug in recent months. It takes absolutely everything in me that’s heavy, and replaces it with the most merciful rejuvenation and love that I think I’ve ever felt in this plane of existence. It’s like being beaten up at school by bullies all day, then going home and just crying in your Mom’s arms - It’s something I can’t even come close to putting into words. It’s sentient, and it feels me as I feel it. It’s beyond catharsis, it’s beyond being understood. That’s truly as close as I can get to describing it, I literally don’t have words for it. When I go walking in the ravine by my house, it feels like the trees are my oldest friends who know me better than I know myself. And they know exactly what I need and how I need it. 20 minutes among the trees does more for me than anything any human has ever been able to make me feel, with the sole exception of my wife. It’s unconditional mercy. And to think, I used to think this kind of stuff was for tree huggers...Well, maybe try actually hugging a tree, and see where that takes you! Like I said, there’s a LOT to unpack here, and I’ve only started to scratch the surface. But I can only type so much in one sitting, so I’m going to leave this post as it is here, save for a couple closing words for anyone who resonates with this... Again, the point here isn’t to show off these things or claim that I have something others don’t - We ALL have the exact same abilities to the exact same potential extent. Some of us are simply at different points along our own journey and evolution, there’s no rank to this or any sort of being above, below, ahead of or behind anyone else. We’re just all at different points of our own unique path, and no two among the approximately 8 billion people currently on this planet are the same. So truly, there’s no pissing contest here, so please don’t interpret it that way. The point is to simply SHARE for a couple purposes: To give anyone out there going through similar experiences validation and hopefully a bit of courage to embrace this aspect of their path rather than fear it, be ashamed of it or resent it. The second point is that in sharing this, I’m simply taking my own step towards being as authentic as I can be. This is simply who I am, it’s who I’ve always been. We can’t deny our truest nature and we should never be ashamed of it, and in putting this out there, I’m being true to myself so that hopefully others can be inspired to be true to themselves. Thankyou for helping me realize more of my own personal truth in sharing this with you!

[772venezuela-blog]

Special Topic Brief

Venezuelan as a Petrostate

Venezuela is home to the world's largest oil reserves. It is a perfect example of what happens when a government relies primarily on oil and natural gas as its main source of revenue, also known as a petrostate. In a petrostate, economic and political power are highly concentrated in an elite minority(Mähler, 8). Often political institutions are weak and unaccountable, and corruption is widespread. (huffingtonpost.com) There are many other countries described as petrostates including Algeria, Cameroon, Chad, Ecuador, Indonesia, Iran, Libya, Mexico, Nigeria, Oman, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.

In a petrostate, the country is are often vulnerable to what economists call Dutch Disease. The resource boom from the oil and natural gas attracts a large inflow of foreign capital. This leads to a boost in the local currency and a boost of imports, leading to labor and capital leaving other critical sectors of the economy such as agriculture and manufacturing. The other sectors of the economy that lose people and capital are thought to be an important part of a nation's economy to continue to grow and stay competitive. (Rowan & Toro, 2) As this happens unemployment rises and the country develops an unhealthy dependence on the export of natural resources. This causes the economy of the petrostate to be vulnerable in unpredictable swings in global energy prices.(Mähler, 8). Not only is there effect on the economy but there is also an effect on governance. Petrostates rely on export income instead of income taxes leading to a weak tie between the people and the state.

How Did This Happen?

Oil was discovered in Venezuela in the 1920s. Since then, poor governance has driven what used to be one of Latin America's most prosperous states into economic and political devastation. In the 1930s Venezuela had three foreign companies that controlled 98 percent of the Venezuelan oil market. The government stepped in and required that half of the oil profits go to the state. In 1958, after a succession of military dictatorships, Venezuela elected its first stable democratic government. The three major political parties signed the Punto Fijo pact, stating that oil jobs would be handed out to political parties in proportion to voting results, concentrating oil profit in the state. In the next few years, Venezuela would join the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and raise oil companies income tax to 65 percent of profits.

During the 1970s there was an oil boom. Because of conflicts in other oil-exporting countries, Venezuelan oil quadrupled in price, adding over $10 billion to state coffers. Not only was money flowing into the state, but analysts also estimate that as much as $100 billion was embezzled between 1972 and 1997 alone. During this oil boom, President Carlos Andres Perez nationalized the oil industry, creating state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela, S.A. (PDVSA) to oversee all exploring, producing, refining, and exporting of oil. Perez allowed PDVSA to partner with foreign oil companies as long as it held 60 percent equity in joint ventures and structured the company to run as a business with minimal government regulation.

In the 1980s oil prices fell. The economy plummeted and inflation sourced. This was the beginning of the rise of Hugo Chavez, a military officer, as he launched a failed coup and rose to national fame. Chavez launched the Bolivarian revolution. His platform pledged to use Venezuela’s vast oil wealth to reduce poverty and inequality. In Venezuela, they became a petrostate during the time that they were establishing themselves on a government standpoint. The country was in the process of changing its Constitution and type of leadership. In the case of Chavez, he used the wealth from Venezuela's natural resources to repress political opposition.

Venezuela has many indicators that describe a typical failing petrostate:

Oil dependence. Oil sales account for 96 percent of export earnings and as much as 50 percent of gross domestic product (GDP).

Falling production. Oil output has declined for decades, reaching a new low in 2019.

Spiraling economy. In 2018, GDP shrunk by double digits for a third consecutive year.

Soaring debt. Venezuela has missed billions of dollars in payments since defaulting in late 2017.

Hyperinflation. Annual inflation is running at more than 2.3 million percent.

Growing autocracy. President Nicolas Maduro has violated basic tenets of democracy to maintain power.

In 2014 global oil prices fell causing Venezuela’s economy to free fall. The people were already feeling the effects of a failed petrostate and unrest brewed. Maduro consolidated power through the oppression of opponents, censorship of the media and meddling in elections and was reelected in May 2018 in a race that is largely considered to be unfair and undemocratic. In 2017 Venezuela defaulted on their debt. Venezuela’s failure is a combination of uncontrolled corruption by an authoritarian government, a failed ideology of Chavismo and mismanagement of natural resources(Mähler, 15). All of this has led to a grave humanitarian crisis. There are severe shortages of basic goods, such as food and medical supplies. In 2017, Venezuelans lost an average of twenty-four pounds in body weight. Nine out of ten live in poverty. In 2018 roughly one in ten people has fled the country.

Why does this matter?

During the government of President Hugo Chávez, corruption has exploded to unprecedented levels. Billions of dollars were stolen or are otherwise unaccounted for. The dramatic rise in corruption under Chávez is ironic since he came to power largely on an anti-corruption campaign platform. During the early day’s of his presidency, the economy was booming. Oil was high and people were happy. They did not care about the corruption of its leaders and the slow loss of democratic norms. There was enough money for everyone, including enough money to line to pockets of Chavez’s political supporters. The main reason behind the corruption has been the record oil income obtained by the nation. The money went directly into Chavez’s pockets; a mediocre management team working without transparency or accountability; the ideological predilections of Chavez (Chavismo), which have led him to try to play a “messianic” role in Latin America, and even world affairs; and the policies of handouts put in place by Chavez to keep the Venezuelan masses politically loyal. (https://www.cato.org) Chavez used oil money to keep the Venezuelan people unaware and loyal to him by centralizing his control of the media, the economy, and government. These policies secured the building blocks to keep a populist like Chavez in power.

Mähler, Annegret. Oil in Venezuela: Triggering Violence or Ensuring Stability? A Context-Sensitive Analysis of the Ambivalent Impact of Resource Abundance. German Institute for Global and Area Studies (GIGA), 2009, www.jstor.org/stable/resrep07612.

Rowan, Michael, and Francisco Toro. “Death-Throes of a Petrostate.” The World Today, vol. 59, no. 3, 2003, pp. 22–24. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40476958.

[isoscelesfriction]

The Los Angeles Conundrum // Mike Davis’s “City of Quartz”

Photo by @gerrymaravilla

After hearing and reading about it for over a decade, I finally decided to pick up City of Quartz -- the fascinating and sprawling examination of Los Angeles by historian and urban theorist Mike Davis. 

As a Los Angeles native and current resident, I couldn’t turn away from Davis’s seemingly revelatory discoveries and criticisms of the city I call home. 

Below are my favorite passages. 

"It became apparent to me that a people would never abandon their means of livelihood, good or bod, capitalistic or otherwise, until other methods were developed which would promise advantages at least as good as those by which they were living” -- Job Harriman, 1911

...it is all too easy to envision Los Angeles reproducing itself endlessly across the desert with assistance of pilfered water, cheap immigrant labor, Asian capital and desperate homebuyers willing to trade lifetimes on the freeway in exchange for $500,000 ‘dream homes’ in the middle of Death Valley.

We talked about the weather for a while, when I asked them what they thought about Los Angeles, a city without boundaries, which ate the desert, cut down the Joshua and the May Pole, and dreamt of becoming infinite. They had watched it in Sal Salvador, in endless dubbed reruns of I Love Lucy and Starsky and Hutch, a city where everyone was young and rich and drove new cards and saw themselves on television. After ten thousand daydreams like this, he had deserted the Salvadorean Army and hitchhiked two thousand and five hundred miles to to Tijuana. A year later he was standing at the corner of Alvarado and Seventh Streets in the MacArthur Park district near Downtown Los Angeles, along with all the rest of yearning, hard working Central America. No one like him was rich or drove a new car - except for the coke dealers - and the police were as mean as back home. More importantly no one like him was on television; they were all invisible. 

Los Angeles (and its alter-ego, Hollywood) becomes the literalized Mahagonny: city of seduction and defeat, the antipode of critical intelligence. 

...noir has nonetheless remained the popular, and despite its intended elitism, ‘populist’ anti-myth of Los Angeles. 

“Here is an artificial city which has been pumped up under forced draught, inflated like a balloon, stuffed with rural humanity like a goose with corn...endeavoring to eat up this rapid avalanche of anthropoids, the sunshine metropolis heaves and strains, sweats and becomes pop-eyed, like a young boa constrictor trying to swallow a goat It has never imparted an urban character to its incoming population for the simple reason that it has never had any urban character to impact. On the other hand, the place has retained the manners, culture, and general look of a huge country village.” -- Morrow Mayo

Los Angeles understands its past, instead, through a robust fiction called noir.

“From Mount Hollywood, Los Angeles looks rather nice, enveloped in a haze of changing colors. Actually, in spite of all of the healthful sunshine and ocean breezes, it is a bad place - full of odd, dying people, who were born old of tired pioneer parents, victims of America - full of curious wild and poisonous growths, decadent religious cults and fake science, and wild cat enterprises, which, with their aim for quick profit, are doomed to collapse and drag down multitudes of people . . . a jungle.” -- Louis Adamic 

“You can rot here without feelings it.” -- John Rechy

Sociologically, 1940s noir was more typically concerned with gangster underclasses and official corruption than with the pathology of the middle class. 

The result feels very much like the actual moral texture of the Reagan-Bush era: a superstition of corruption that fails any longer to outrage or even interest. 

Indeed for a while the more famous of the exiles could fancy themselves Hollywood sahibs: happy white people under the palm trees, feeding themselves on an economy run by invisible servants. 

‘in which the city is at once an endless text always promising meaning but ultimately only offering hints and signs of a possible and final reality . . . like a “printed circuit” - or a freeway.’ -- Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

They have become so integrally involved in the organizations of high culture, not because of old-fashioned philanthropy, but because ‘culture’ has become an important component of the land development process, as well as a crucial moment in the competition between elites and regional centers. 

... a ‘sympathetic ecology for architecture’ and excoriated the elitism of critics who failed to consult the actual desires o the masses. 

...L.A. artists are in a desperate state, fighting over scraps, without career opportunities, funds or housing’.

As a result Black and Chicano cultural avant gardes have either been decimated or forced to retreat from their community constituencies of the co-optative shelter of the universities and corporate arts establishment.

...while the Mission Revivalism of Lummis’s generation relied upon a fictional past, the World City hoopla of today thrives upon a fictional future. 

The city is a place where everything is possible, nothing is safe and durable enough to believe in, where constant synchronicity prevails, and the automatic ingenuity of capital ceaselessly throw up new forms and spectacles

...Régis Debray once put it, ‘revolutions revolutionize counter-revolutions’

...land development is still Souther California’s most lucrative large industry with annual profits as high as 50 percent 

...conservative, pro-developer majorities control the boards of supervisors in every Southern California county except Santa Barbara. 

The Times’s dilemma, in other words, almost precisely outlines the problem of ruling-class hegemony in a postmodern city of secessionist suburbs and burgeoning barrios. 

Like Downtown, Hollywood is becoming a colony of the world economy. 

‘Community’ in Los Angeles means homogeneity of race, class and, especially, home values. 

The master discourse here - exemplified by the West Hills secessionists - is homestead exclusivism, whether the immediate issues is apartment construction, commercial encroachment, school busing, crime, taxes or simply community designation.

Slow growth, in other words, is about homeowner control of land use and much more.

The starting point is to reconstruct the white-supremacist genealogy of its essential infrastructure: the homeowners’ association. 

Some homeowners’ associations are entirely voluntary coalescences of perceived common interest; many others are mandatory enrollments (pre organized by developers) of all residents of a track or planned unit development.

...overriding purpose was to ensure social and racial homogeneity.

‘The reasons for creating of moving to a . . . minimal city was not to signal something unique about one’s demand for public goods, but to insulate one’s property from the burden of supporting public services. 

...a hypocritical attempt by the rich to use ecology to detour Vietnam-era growth around their luxury enclaves. 

“Those immortal ballads, Home Sweet Home, My Old Kentucky Home, and The Little Gray Home in the West, were not written about apartments . . . they never sang songs about a pile of receipts.” -- Herbert Hoover

...’homeowner opposition to multi-family construction,’ steming from mobilizations of the early 1970s, that has constrained the supply of land for multi-family housing.

Cal Trans engineers have warned that without a quick fix of mass transit, ‘the system isn’t going to break down, it’s going to explode’. 

As Silver explained, ‘people don’t organize to fight for something, but they organize to fight against something’.

It is no surprising that poor people, especially renters, will choose jobs over environmental quality when the two are artificially counterposed. 

The ‘Second Civil War’ that began in the hot summers of the 1960s been institutionalize into the very structure of urban space. The old liberal paradigm of social control, attempting to balance repression with reform, has long been superseded by a rhetoric of social warfare that calculates the interests of the urban poor and the middle class as a zero-sum game.

Yet white middle class imagination, absent from any first hand knowledge of inner city conditions, magnifies the perceived threat through a demonological lens.

Although architectural critics are usually oblivious to how the built environment contributes to segregation, pariah groups - whether poor Latino families, young Black men, or elderly homeless white females -- read the meaning immediately. 

...and the middle-class demand for increased spatial and social insulation. 

...public architecture is America is literally being turned inside out, in the service of ‘security’ and profit. 

Moreover, with the post-liberal shift of government expenditure from welfare to repression, carceral structures have become the new frontier of public architecture. 

‘Can you imagine the mind fuck of being locked up in a Holiday Inn?’ -- Inmate at DTLA prison

But as long as the actual violence was more or less contained to the ghetto, the gang wars were also a voyeuristic titillation to white suburbanites devouring lurid imagery in their newspapers or on television.

In 1982, for example, following a rash of LAPD ‘chokehold’ killings of young Black men in custody, [Chief Gates] advanced the extraordinary theory that the deaths were the fault of the victims’ racial anatomy, not excessive police force: ‘We may be finding that in some Blacks when [the cartoid chokehold] is applied the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do normal [sic] people.’

He was alleged to be reaching suspiciously into his pants; more importantly, he was a ‘suspected gang member’ - a category that now seemed to justify abuse or even execution. 

...it seems probable that the first generation of Black street gangs emerged as a defensive response to white violence in the schools and streets during the 1940s.

...it is not surprising that Parker’s LAPD looked upon the ‘rehabilitation’ of gang youth in much the same was as the arms industry regarded peace-mongering or disarmament treaties. 

But too often Crippin’ came to represent an escalation of intra-ghetto violence to Clockwork Orange levels (murder as status symbol, and so on) that was unknown in the days of the Slausons and anathema to everything that the Panthers had stood for. 

At a time when economic opportunity was draining away from Southcentral Los Angeles, the Crips were becoming the power resource of last resort for thousands of abandoned youth.

“Gangs are never goin’ to die out. You all goin’ to get us jobs” -- 16-year old Grape Street Crip

Although terrorism is always portrayed precisely as inarticulate male-violence, authorities expend enormous energy to protect us from its ‘ravings’, even at the cost of censorship and restriction of free speech.

‘the fighting mood of the 1960s has been replaced by a sick apathy or angry frustration’.

As the Los Angeles economy in the 1970s was ‘unplugged’ from the American industrial heartland and rewired to East Asia, the non-Anglo workers have borne the brunt of adaptation and sacrifice. 

The Latino Eastside gangs, by contrast, are still trying to catch up. Dealing largely in homegrown drugs, like PCP, amphetamines and marijuana, with relatively low turnover values in a market consisting almost entirely of other poor teenagers, they are unable to accumulate the fineries or weaponry of the Crips. They have yet to effectively join the world market.

“Left to themselves and the principles of Adam Smith, the cosortia of Medellin investors would no more see themselves as criminals than did the Dutch or English venturers into the Indies trade (including opium), who organized their speculative cargoes in much the same way . . . the trade rightly resents being called a mafia. . . It is basically an ordinary business that has been criminalized - as Colombians see it - by a U.S. which cannot manage it’s own affairs.” -- Eric Hobsbawm

While their parents may still measure the quality of life by old-country standards, the iron rations of Tijuana or Ciudad Guatemala, their children’s self-image is shaped by the incessant stimuli of L.A. consumer culture. 

...the church unavoidably assumed a central role in Latinos’ search for power.

The real issue remained empowerment versus paternalism. 

[racingtoaredlight]

Think of your car...

A car is a vehicle designed to transport a payload over a certain distance.  You might not think of yourself as payload, but for all intents and purposes you are.  Especially if you’re one of those lumpish beings that can’t think of a hobby that doesn’t involve watching illiterate humans play children’s games...a metaphorical Nero’s fiddlin’ if there ever was one...but I digress.

Something has to propel that vehicle...something called fuel...your typical car’s total mass is about 3% fuel.  When addressing any number of engineering problems, solutions typically don’t result in having to do too much in the way of radical redesigns to still be functional.

Take MUSNY’s pickup truck, that he likely backed into his parking spot like a real piece of work...you could double the suggested max payload, and it would still do its job.  Would it do it fast and nimbly?  No it would not...but it would still likely carry double that payload.

Same thing with a giant tanker.  Surprisingly, the average factor is the same...3% of the total mass is propellant.  There are some chief differences here, chiefly being the surface your transporting payloads on.  Water has much less friction than land.  And also, you can’t just drill a hole in the side of a tanker to reduce weight.

Working in air makes things interesting.  Fighter jets have about 30% total mass devoted to propellant (leaving room for armaments) while cargo planes have about 40% total mass devoted to it.  A rocket?  A rocket’s total mass is 85% fuel.

***

The Saturn V rocket...the greatest metaphorical extension of a penis ever created...for all its size and power, only delivered 4% of the original payload into orbit.

Now, you might not think of a can of Coca Cola as being a marvel of egineering, but it is.  At least the mass production of it.  Your red can of Coke is one of the most efficient production outputs in the world.  That can’s total mass, and the millions and millions of identical cans like it, is 94% “useful.”

Think of it this way...if a can of Coke’s mass hypothetically costs consumers $1, then that consumer is getting 94 cents worth of value from that can, with only 6% being needed to contain and transport that 94%.  Your typical modern rocket is actually even more efficient...the massive, MASSIVE fuel containers are 96% “useful.”

Which is critical.

***

Say you wreck your car but aren’t hurt.  You can still walk.  You can call Triple A.  You don’t need supplemental oxygen.  If you’re truly remote, you might still be able to find food or water in your surroundings.  You might need a jacket, gloves and hat if it’s snowing, but you have options.

Say your cargo ship starts to scuttle.  You have life rafts, radios, flares, Coast Guards and pirates, you can float and swim, most importantly you can still breathe.  It sucks more, but you at least still have a fighting chance.

Space is different.  You need to bring all your life support, you need reentry vehicles, AIR, food and water...and this is just to maintain your survival.  You need all the tools required to constantly maintain the operational ability of your craft.  Again, just for survival.  We’re not even talking about scientific experiment type shit yet.

All this shit has a weight.  And when rockets are as maxxed out as they can possibly be regarding the performance of payload delivery into orbit, the engineering issues become outrageously complex.

***

Rockets are working close to full-bore, lets just call it 10% short of failure.  Imagine this...you’re driving 60 mph in your car, you speed up to 66 mph and your car explodes.  Or you’re driving 60 mph in your car, you slow down to 58 mph and then all of the sudden start rolling and tumbling backwards before landing in Spain.

This is the margin of error a rocket has.  Too aggressive, ends in a fireball in the sky.  Too conservative, your payload never reaches Earth’s orbit, and ends in a fireball on the ground.

The Rocket Equation seeks to solve this issue.  It measure the thrust required to get a certain mass to beat gravity, and then get into orbit.  I’m not even going to pretend to understand how this works, but the concepts are simple to understand.  It’s about figuring how much thrust you need to move that amount of mass, while accounting for gravity and things like drag and atmospheric variables.

And it helps understand how to increase the efficacy of rockets.  One simple idea is using different, lighter materials that are hardy enough to sustain the process...things like epoxy-carbon fibers and shit like that.  Maybe graphene?  WHO KNOWS!  Another is use either a single, more efficient fuel.

The Russian Soyuz craft use a simple kerosene-oxygen fuel that isn’t great in terms of performance, but is very efficient, reliable, simple to refine, and allows for easier manufacturing of the rockets themselves.  The Saturn V rocket used two fuel stages...the first being the same kerosene-oxygen, the second stage being hydrogen-oxygen.  Today, they use a mixture of solid and gas fuels, to find that balance between efficiency and performance.

***

But even that doesn’t do much to solve the fundamental problem here.  Take the Space Shuttle...after the propellant and rocket delivery mass is accounted for, the hypothetical mission has a dry payload (payload after fuel and rocket mass is subtracted) was 120 metric tons of mass being able to get delivered into orbit.

Well, the Shuttle itself (the semi-resuable craft used to ensure the survivability and return of its crew) weighs 100 metric tons.  The actual payload able to be delivered into orbit was a scant 20 tons.

It seems funny that the difference here is a) extreme efficiency required simply to get, b) an extremely inefficient amount of payload delivered into orbit.  That’s the level of difficulty NASA and Russian scientists and engineers (everyone else just steals shit that’s already been done, /spits) have to deal with here.  The Earth’s gravity is such a challenge to overcome, such an important variable, that the labor and capital expenditures are absolutely gargantuan simply to give it a chance in the first place.

In fact, if we got back to that rocket equation I mentioned above, according to its principles, if the Earth were 50% greater in mass, we would not have the ability to get into orbit using a rocket, period.  Crazy shit to think about.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Back to the land? (NYT) If panic buying trends are any indication, many Americans are turning their attention back to the land. Many feed stores report they are selling out of baby chicks almost as fast as they can get new orders in. Our climate reporter, desperate to get into the garden, came across a similar situation when she tried to purchase seeds. With panicked shoppers cleaning out stores, even those with no gardening experience are searching for do-it-yourself YouTube videos on how to build a raised bed. Is a new victory garden movement next?

CDC issues travel advisory for hard-hit New York tri-state region (AP) President Donald Trump backed away from calling for a quarantine for coronavirus hotspots in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, instead directing Saturday night that a “strong Travel Advisory” be issued to stem the spread of the outbreak. Vice President Mike Pence tweeted that the CDC was urging residents of the three states “to refrain from non-essential travel for the next 14 days.” The notion of a quarantine had been advocated by governors, including Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, who sought to halt travelers from the heavily affected areas to their states. But it drew swift criticism from the leaders of the states in question, who warned it would spark panic in a populace already suffering under the virus.

UK lockdown measures could be in place until June (Yahoo) The UK’s nationwide coronavirus lockdown could last until June, according to one of the government’s leading scientific advisors. Professor Neil Ferguson, from Imperial College London, told The Sunday Times that the entire population could need to stay at home for nearly three months. “We’re going to have to keep these measures in place, in my view, for a significant period of time--probably until the end of May, maybe even early June. May is optimistic,” he said.

In the Coronavirus Fight in Scandinavia, Sweden Stands Apart (NYT) When the coronavirus swept into the Scandinavian countries, Norway and Denmark scrambled to place extensive restrictions on their borders to stem the outbreak. Sweden, their neighbor, took a decidedly different path. While Denmark and Norway closed their borders, restaurants and ski slopes and told all students to stay home this month, Sweden shut only its high schools and colleges, kept its preschools, grade schools, pubs, restaurants and borders open--and put no limits on the slopes. In fact, Sweden has stayed open for business while other nations beyond Scandinavia have attacked the outbreak with various measures ambitious in their scope and reach. Sweden’s approach has raised questions about whether it’s gambling with a disease, Covid-19, that has no cure or vaccine, or if its tactic will be seen as a savvy strategy to fight a scourge that has laid waste to millions of jobs and prompted global lockdowns unprecedented in peacetime.

Portugal to treat all migrants as residents to ensure health-care access (Washington Post) Portugal will treat all foreigners with open applications to stay in the country as permanent residents to ensure migrant communities have access to vital public services during the coronavirus pandemic. Health experts in Portugal expect the country’s outbreak to peak in late May. With about 5,000 confirmed cases and 100 deaths, the country has been hit far less badly than neighboring Spain, which reached a grim record Sunday of 838 dead in 24 hours.

Moscow issues stay-at-home order for all residents (Washington Post) In Russia’s most restrictive coronavirus-related measure yet, Moscow will enact a citywide quarantine starting Monday, Mayor Sergei Sobyanin announced. The stay-at-home order for all residents comes as the Russian capital’s confirmed novel coronavirus cases surpassed 1,000 over the weekend--roughly two-thirds of the country’s total. Eight people have died. Russia, spanning two continents ravaged by the coronavirus pandemic, continues to have a relatively low number of confirmed cases for its 145 million population. But the official totals are probably lower than the reality because of insufficient testing.

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi apologizes for handling of lockdown (Washington Post) Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday asked for forgiveness from his country’s poor, after a nationwide lockdown--the world’s biggest--forced tens of thousands of jobless migrant laborers to walk from cities to their home villages. Modi has faced intense criticism for the planning ahead of the lockdown decision, which was announced last week and forced the mass migration of already destitute people who were suddenly cut loose from their meager earnings. Some migrants have been walking hundreds of miles, often in large groups, even though such crowds can further the spread of the easily transmitted coronavirus. Services on passenger trains--the backbone of India’s transportation system--were suspended March 22, two days before the nationwide lockdown.

As cases explode in Iran, U.S. sanctions hinder its access to drugs and medical equipment (Washington Post) Broad U.S. sanctions are hampering Iranian efforts to import medicine and other medical supplies to confront one of the largest coronavirus outbreaks in the world, health workers and sanctions experts say. The U.S. restrictions on Iran’s banking system and the embargo on the country’s oil exports have limited Tehran’s ability to finance and buy essential items from abroad, including drugs as well as the raw materials and equipment needed to manufacture medicines domestically. The Trump administration also reduced the number of licenses it grants to companies for certain medical exports to Iran, according to quarterly reports from the Office of Foreign Assets Control, the enforcement agency of the U.S. Treasury Department. The list of items requiring special authorization includes oxygen generators, full-face mask respirators and thermal imaging equipment, all of which are used to treat patients and keep medical workers safe, doctors say.

China defends against incoming second wave of coronavirus (Reuters) A growing number of imported coronavirus cases in China, where the epidemic originated in December, risked fanning a second wave of infections when domestic transmissions had “basically been stopped”, a senior health official said on Sunday.

In South Korea, number of recovered patients is rising twice as fast as new infections (Washington Post) South Korea reported another sign that it is turning the corner in the battle against the novel coronavirus on Sunday, as the number of people deemed to have fully recovered rose more than twice as fast as the number of new infections.

Australia asks people to isolate more even as coronavirus spread slows (Reuters) Australians were asked on Sunday to further isolate themselves from the public to keep the coronavirus from spreading even as authorities said the rate of daily infections has halved in recent days. Government officials said that public gatherings must be restricted to two people and Australians should stay inside unless shopping for essentials, exercising, going to work or medical care. Those over 70 should self-isolate themselves.

[happymetalgirl]

April 2020

WELL! I have been gone awhile, very busy, and look what happens when I slow down writing about metal: the world starts to fucking fall apart. But no, in all seriousness. I’m writing this part now at the beginning of June after an already tumultuous April and May, and now I’m just making myself sit down and do this because, well, honestly, it’s been pretty hard to justify spending my time writing about music with all the fuck shit going on right now. (I can’t wait to see what July throws at us.) But again, in all seriousness, I’m not looking for any pity or sympathy for my relatively mild circumstances at all because in all honesty, my white privilege has allowed my life to be pretty okay and proceed mostly uninterrupted in the midst of everything going on.

I’m probably going to repost this part in its own post, but I feel like I have to get this out of the way before I write any more about music. I’ll start by disseminating any ambiguity on what I’ll be talking about in these paragraphs that I am intentionally bolding.

As I write this in the midst of a fucking respiratory virus pandemic, another epidemic (possibly pandemic) of racist police brutality that has always existed in a culture of unhinged toxic masculinity in my increasingly embarrassing country has exploded to unbelievable and disgusting levels against Black people and peaceful protesters in the United States, ironically in wake of protests against fucking police violence, all of which is only emboldened and encouraged by local and federal leadership that is showcasing its oppressive, totalitarian ambitions in its unprecedented attempted revocations of its citizens constitutional and human rights.

I’ll make the necessary side note that this increasingly oligarchical government subservient to the will of military and prison industry has already shown its complete disregard for human rights for decades upon decades now through its violation of human rights through offensive wars and sanctions against other countries and its dehumanization of the refugees and immigrants who its actions create.

If you haven’t already checked out of this from all the political correctness breaching your conservative bubble (good job not being that person), but you’re upset because tHiS iS sUpPoSeD tO bE a MuSiC bLoG, uh, you’re on the wrong website buddy, and the potential tipping point of a long-awaited revolution in the midst of an economic depression, a viral pandemic, and a dual crisis of grotesque police violence and evolutionary transformation of proto-fascism into fascist dictatorship is no time to go about business as usual.

BUT HOLY SHIT, ENOUGH INTRODUCTION AND ENOUGH ABOUT ME! The point of this is to spotlight what to do in the wake of all of this. First of all, I don’t have all the answers and my perspective is as limited as any person’s, so if you’re an expert on any of these matters or if you have insight from having experiences that I as a white cis male have not had, if anything I’m bringing up here could be better in any way, feel absolutely free (but not obligated) to let me know.

Okay, so lots of problems at hand. The big, all-encompassing one facing all of humanity of course is the ecological disruption caused by industrially driven human-catalyzed climate change, and the rot of everything crystallizing at this current moment feeds into exacerbating that catastrophe, the next wide-reaching issue being capitalism, whose prioritization of profit and short-term gains is incredibly ill-equipped to handle a slow emergency like climate change or a more acute emergency like a global pandemic. Here in the U.S. we have a federal government so infested with corporate corruption to maximize capital profits for the country’s most wealthy that they couldn’t even choose the obvious solution of pausing the economy and providing for its people for the duration of the pandemic in the interest of public health over the appallingly quick choice of protecting the financial interests of the corporate “donors” that help them hold their positions of power, at the risk of maybe closing the gap a tiny bit between the truly despicably wealthy and the growing number of hopelessly impoverished. So while the wealthy get protection of their assets from the slow-down of business (you know, ‘cause the pandemic), the people in most need of help because of that slow-down and plunged into spiking unemployment get shit from the people meant to represent them. And that’s just the corporate rot that rears its head as a result of a pandemic!

Even in “normal” times, capitalism in this country has built its foundation on slave labor and justifying the use of slavery through racism (even after it became illegal to outright own people as slaves). That cornerstone of free/cheap labor that this country’s economy is built on whose role was served by slavery was filled by outsourcing to countries with an easily exploitable lower class (whose conditions are often exacerbated by U.S. meddling on behalf of business interests) and prison labor made possible by mass incarceration that has targeted similarly vulnerable people and communities of color through strategic, racially profiled over-policing of minority communities trapped in poverty through historic systemic racism.

The study of that global climate change I mentioned earlier is referred to as a crisis study because there isn’t an unlimited time to do something about it, and the ever-changing conditions and pivotal events of the world effect what needs to be done to combat it (and what it is too late to do). This current crisis of police brutality is one of those types of critical moments, for climate change and social justice. Police brutality didn’t become an issue when George Floyd was murdered on May 25th 2020; it’s been an ugly facet of this multifactedly ugly country for a long time now, but its being brought to light has instigated an uprising the likes of which has not been seen in a long while, and with it, an especially insidious aggression toward it by the increasingly fascist government and its authoritarian figurehead (to the point of threatening institution of martial law and suspending first amendment rights and habeas corpus) that at this point serves only to maintain complacency for the benefit of the ruling class and to the detriment of the disproportionately non-white lower working class (treated as a slave class). Consequently this is a pivotal time that obligates widespread action and ceasing of silence from privileged people like me who have been able to get away with writing about music largely apolitically for years. This is a time when we either plunge unfathomably further into the depths of fascism at the hands of the ruling class and the silence of the less-effected or we consolidate in this moment of broad energizing to both enact substantive change on the critical issue of police brutality and set a precedent and build momentum to achieve justice for LGBTQIA+ folk, other racial minorities and marginalized groups, and make the critical changes need to avoid civilizational dissolution in the face of the imperative to mitigate our impact on global warming.

Speaking of that change and the actions that this moment implores of us all to contribute our energy to: the most immediately critical issue at our feet, to both save human lives from being taken unjustly at the hands of police brutality and to galvanize this revolution to be able to demand further justice and critical social transformation, is ending police brutality. Being an institution born out of rounding up escaped slaves and given the state-supported monopoly on violence that attracts largely those seeking to satiate sadism with the license to that monopolized violence, police culture is inherently toxic and not worth even preserving for the sake of transforming structurally. While abolishing the police is obviously too ambitious of an immediate goal, there are a lot of proposed steps to defunding and largely dismantling the police as a whole. The project Campaign Zero outlines and pushes for ten tangible reforms that would (some of which have recently been proposed in Colorado) decrease police violence, especially in the majority-Black communities that suffer from it the most. The “8 Can’t Wait” proposal that has been making rounds lately is part of Campaign Zero, and donations to these projects are of course, quite helpful and a good start for this blossoming movement. Furthermore, donations to local bail funds is especially important at this time with police making wanton arrests of peaceful protests (and also just random Black people not making any disruption) to support the people going out and protesting. Because this money of course gets siphoned into the courts, and then partially to law enforcement, it’s important to also direct funds to organizations where that money will not later be used against us, but again, keeping people able to protest is of utmost importance, since that it what is driving positive change in this moment.

Also helpful is direct support of the people on the frontlines of these protests. It is a time for privileged people to take action in solidarity and support, but not one for privileged groups to take over or “lead” the movement. Right now, this is about who is hurting the most and who is being oppressed the most, and right now that is Black people, by police, hence BLACK LIVES MATTER. Now is not a time for even underprivileged white people to use these protests’ likelihood of escalating to indulge in venting frustrations against the system by inciting police violence that puts Black people disproportionately in more danger in such situations. Now is the time to use that privilege of being less prone to racism police violence to whatever extent possible to protect the people of color protesting. And again, this isn’t about being white saviors or martyrs, this is about supporting people in the way they wish, so don’t listen to my advice over the insight and requests of what Black people and the Black community have. And by all means, fucking listen to them! Read from them! Engage in good-faith conversation with them (though don’t expect any individual Black person to give you a seminar on racism, there are ample resources that don’t demand someone devoting their precious time to you)! Learn where the limits of your perspective fail you! And for fuck’s sake, don’t just cherry pick the word of one token Black friend that happens to have some class privilege to conveniently discount the testimonies of other Black people!

Lastly, on a personal note to the metalheads that read this blog, I think this is a particularly important time for the metal community, not to center itself, but to bring itself alongside social justice in a more complete way than it has in the past. Former Opeth and current Soen drummer Martín López said last year in an interview published in Blabbermouth that the metal community is very behind the curve on sociopolitical issues, and the response to his saying that from the metal community that floods Blabbermouth comment sections basically just made the case for the exact point he was making. And it’s a shame because I think such a huge part of metal is about standing up to injustice as part of or in support of the oppressed, or at least such a huge part of the metal I gravitate toward is. Without sounding too spiritual or cheesy because I’m not a really spiritual person, I feel like when I see the injustice going on, I feel that spirit of metal in all of it on the side of the oppressed. I feel like all the grindcore and deathcore and thrash and death metal I’ve been binging lately is in the spirit of the protesters standing up to and, when they have to, fighting back against the unjustified aggression of the police, and looking back at old, certified classic albums like ...And Justice for All, Toxicity, and Chaos A.D. and more recent albums like Machine Head’s The Blackening, and Thy Art Is Murder’s Human Target, and Venom Prison’s Samsara, it’s always been about standing up to this kind of bullshit. So I think if there ever was a time since Sabbath birthed it for metal to prove that it’s as important as it makes itself out to be and as important as it is to everyone who listens to it in such a way that they read an obscure blog about it, now is that time to show that it’s not just about being an angry white guy. Now is the time to make Martín López happy by proving him wrong.

Well, in typical Happymetalboy fashion, I can’t seem to make anything brief. So, with that said, let’s talk about the metal music that came out in the good ol’ days of April 2020. Wow. 

Well, April was a pretty big month. Lots of albums coming out, the whole music industry still the throes of the pandemic, it’s a damn shame we got what might be the best album I’ve ever reviewed on this blog in the midst of all this soul-crushing stagnance and financial despair in the music world. I mean, I’m certainly very glad to be getting such a great album among other great albums at a time when music is definitely helping me to keep going as well. It just sucks knowing these artists aren’t going to be able to tour in celebration of their great artistic achievements, and the first one on this list definitely deserves to celebrate.

Oranssi Pazuzu - Mestarin Kynsi

I already reviewed the Finnish band’s fifth full-length in great detail, which I highly suggest checking out because I wrote a lot about that album and I wrote it quite enthusiastically. It feels weird in a way to make the rest of the albums on this list follow my recount of an album that I already detailed in great length to be one of the best albums I have heard in years, quite possibly the best album I’ve reviewed in this blog’s existence, but I have to make sure that it doesn’t get lost at the end of this undoubtedly long-ass post. Anyway, Oranssi Pazuzu have fucking outdone themselves on this one and in many ways, black metal in general. The band have been building their synthy, psychedelic sound for over a decade now, but Mestarin Kynsi is the crystallization of everything the band has been working toward, which I think last year’s Waste of Space Orchestra collaboration played a big part in catalyzing. The album is so immersive and in so many ways feels like it has a soul of its own, made possible by the band’s absolute chemistry and dedication to ego-lessly channeling this album’s transcendent ethos as a team rather than elevating themselves individually, and what they conjure on here is such a leap up from their already heady psychedelic black metal and out of this fucking world. Mestarin Kynsi is the kind of terrifying, yet transfixing light that pulls you in even as you know of its malevolence, because it is just too goddamn beautiful and compelling to resist. The score should be such a big deal, but I know that any time this kind of score is thrown out there it prompts all sorts of distracting question regarding the flaws of the album, but I stand by my original score. I love this album, and I don’t see anything about it that makes me think it’s any less.

10/10

Okay, now on to the unfortunate rest of April’s releases that had to follow this up.

Testament - Titans of Creation

Testament rode a pretty vibrant comeback wave with Chuck Billy’s beating cancer on 2008’s The Formation of Damnation and 2012’s Dark Roots of the Earth, but that hot steak came to an end on the rather droll effort they put out in 2016, Brotherhood of the Snake. Back when concerts were a thing, I caught them when they opened up for the rest of the stacked lineup of Slayer’s farewell tour; they put on a great show, and I was reminded of what made them, still, such a prominent force in thrash, hopeful for a rejuvenation on whatever record came next. And as much as I wish I liked this new album of theirs more, I just can’t get into it all that much for so many of the same reasons I couldn’t get into its predecessor. I’d say it has much brighter moments, but it suffers from much of the same recycling of thrash compositional tropes (with not enough elaboration) that Brotherhood of the Snake did. It’s the kind of album that at first listen will seem flavorful and engaging, but it loses it pretty quickly like a snack that isn’t that filling or easy to keep eating due to it’s overwhelming taste, despite its empty calories.

5/10

Abysmal Dawn - Phylogenesis

After six years during which I had thought they might have disbanded or been dropped from Relapse Records, Abysmal Dawn return from the shadows on Season of Mist with the tight, concise brand of modestly technical modern death metal that made them such a sell in the first place on their fifth record, Phylogenesis. Not deviating at all from what they know they do well, Abysmal Dawn stick to a direct death metal attack with no bells and whistles, relying on their speed and agility to guide them, and their strengths serve them well as they manage to highlight what makes death metal so appealing at its core.

8/10

WVRM - Colony Collapse

While not listening to Oranssi Pazuzu or straight-up depressive shit, I have had a massive hankering for filthy grindcore that has been graciously satiated in part by WVRM’s Colony Collapse. Airing heavily on the hardcore side of the genre, incorporating some slower slamming grooves and deep, dirty gutteral vocals into their otherwise true-to-the-genre grindcore, WVRM do indeed put forth a more intense slab of grindcore than your usual twenty-something minute LP, which is made possible largely by the dynamic that they inject with their willingness to incorporate so much tasty, hardcore riffage and nasty sludge.

7/10

Red - Declaration

After what I’ve now come to see as their worst album, 2017′s Gone, Red immediately bounce back onto the positive trajectory that Of Beauty and Rage set them on and back to the symphonic 2000′s alternative metal that they built their early reputation on, with their shortest, possibly most direct album to date, comprised of just ten tight tracks that focus their cathartic brand of alternative metal into surprisingly dense packages that undoubtedly include some of the best of the band’s whole career, like “All for You”, “The Evening Hate”, and the especially cathartic “The War We Made”. I can only hope every band that has stumbled so hard lately can pick themselves back up as quickly and convincingly as Red has on their aptly named seventh LP here.

8/10

August Burns Red - Guardians

I have to say, despite being a pretty standard slab of melodic 2010’s metalcore, this album has kind of grown on me a bit in the past few weeks of listening to it. The album shows that the band are doing well to keep an eye on what’s going on in metalcore, stylistically spanning old and new pretty well. And while we sometimes get cheesy Hot Topic melodicism on songs like “Lighthouse”, other tracks encapsulate old and new in the space of a single song with respectable tact. The track “Defender” for example features two metalcore breakdowns, the first of which is generic as fuck from the 2000’s, but the second is distinctly more creative and forward-thinking, showing that the band are aware of the genre’s evolution and their trajectory alongside it. I also have to point out the highlight “Dismembered Memory” is in the track list with its emotive, Gothenburg-style guitar melody mixed with some distinct Architects-inspired vocal melodies. The closing track, “Three Fountains”, also ends the album on a strong note with its powerful melodic vocals in particular. Again, most of this project is pretty unsurprising metalcore, but the band at least shows some sense of awareness of how to progress their sound, and the strength of the highlights here makes the album worth at least checking out to find them.

6/10

Benighted - Obscene Repressed

While it is a well-performed, well-produced offering, Obscene Repressed is little more than a competent modern horror/brutal death metal album whose campiness in its shots for grotesqueness and creepiness can actually end up working against it. It’s a fun enough death metal album for while it’s on with some impressive flashes of percussion in particular, but it’s memorable mostly for its goofy moments and much less for its songwriting.

6/10

Aborted - La Grande Mascarade

Well, three more songs of relentless modern brutal death metal from Aborted is surely hard to get worked up about, and that goes in the positive and negative direction. On the EP’s three tracks, the band basically just goes through the motions in a way that makes me question what the point of putting these tracks out on this EP as opposed to keeping them for the next album (and potentially grooming them further) was. I mean, I can’t complain too much, the band are solid on these cuts in all the ways we come to expect them to be, but what makes these songs unfit for the next album or really demands they be released on this EP?

6/10

Nine Inch Nails - Ghosts V: Together & Ghosts VI: Locusts

I don’t want to knock Nine Inch Nails’ more ambient works, as I do think Trent Reznor has proven he has the chops to thrive in dark ambiance, but I just couldn’t get too excited about this watered down three hours worth of dark ambiance that he put out this year. It certainly works on the baseline level that all dark ambient music operates on an generally seeks to achieve, but it really doesn’t go above and beyond anywhere and it just kind of settles for the passing grade. At the most charitable, both are the kinds of ambient albums that exist solely to provide an eerie, droning sonic background with a few notable shifts coming from song to song, but that’s not enough to get me excited for either of them.

5/10 & 6/10

The Black Dahlia Murder - Verminous

I have to say, I’ve kind of softened in my earlier perception The Black Dahlia Murder being overrated, and Verminous is an album that really helps their case. Its name is pretty apt for the band’s blackened style of melodeath in general, but the dynamic between their delicious melodic side and their muscularly heavy side on Verminous is quite possibly at its most comprehensively displayed. I know that the band’s fans don’t really see them as having any misses in their catalog, though there seems to be some consistent favoritism toward Nocturnal, but I would wager that Verminous has captured their composition at its most advanced and their sound its most savory.

8/10

MASTER BOOT RECORD - Floppy Disk Overdrive

I’ve not been keeping up too closely with the prolific MASTER BOOT RECORD project, but I do regret missing and not covering the dynamic Internet Protocol EP that was released last year. Floppy Disk Overdrive, aptly named, is a bit more of the usual overload of synthetically instrumental, chiptune-seasoned death metal that keeps me from getting too excited about new MASTER BOOT RECORD releases. Once again, the focus is on solid production of the instruments and minor tricks with the sonic aesthetic, but composition again seems to fall by the wayside, and there isn’t enough intriguing stylistic diversity to make up for it.

5/10

Caustic Wound - Death Posture

More delicious, nasty grindcore to ravage my ears with in between listens to Oranssi Pazuzu and Okkervil River. The debut album by the Seattle-based supergroup of sorts is as pummeling as I would expect given the pedigree of the members involved. Death Posture is nasty, gutteral, and relentless in all the ways anyone could want their grindcore to be. The monstrously bellowing growls in particular make me feel like I’m listening to Primitive Man playing grindcore (which is a good thing). While I have been in quite the grindcore binge lately, Death Posture is more than just your standard, straight-line-through grindcore record, taking an old-school death metal knack for dynamic accents, tasty isolated bass lines, bursts of speed, bursts of thickened walls of sound, and wailing solos. It sounds sort of like if Morbid Angel was directing Primitive Man’s deathgrind adventure, also a good thing. I definitely love this one, probably my favorite grindcore album so far this year.

8/10

Khemmis - Doomed Heavy Metal

While we (if not just I) eagerly await the Colorado act’s forthcoming Nuclear Blast debut (and follow-up to 2018′s perfect Desolation), the band offers a little compilation EP to hold us over until then. Of the six tracks, only the first is new material (and it’s a cover song), two are songs from previous non-album releases, and the other three are live tracks. The band’s cover of Dio’s “Rainbow in the Dark” transposes the iconic keyboard part onto guitar in classic Khemmis fashion, and the vocal and guitar harmonies give the already inspiring song a new sense of melancholic triumph that I have come to love so much from Khemmis. It’s definitely worth checking out for the fresh take it offers to the Dio classic. As for the rest of the EP, the one-off single “Empty Throne” feels rather B-side-level by the band’s lofty standards, as does their odd, but enjoyable melodic doom rendition of the folk tune “A Conversation with Death”. The sampling of live cuts gets one great song from each of the band’s previous LPs, and the band sounds pretty true to their studio form for the most part, the vocals on “Bloodletting” being noticeably rough though.

Compilation in the Dark/10

Me and That Man - New Man, New Songs, Same Shit, Vol. 1

The second album from Nergal’s folky satanic rock side project comes with a pretty star-studded line-up, and honestly it’s a pretty fun time and I don’t have many complaints about the concise, catchy tunes that Nergal and company are churning out. “Run with the Devil” is a brilliantly composed opener, “Burning Churches” is a catchy-as-fuck pub-type tune, and guests Ihsahn, Corey Taylor, and especially Matt Heafy showcase the versatility of their vocal styles on their respective features. It’s more a fun heresy-laden time explicitly not overthought than the usual heady blackened death metal that Behemoth pedals.

7/10

Medico Peste - ב :The Black Bile

Taking very apparent cues from black metal’s (and experimental metal’s) more esoteric figures like Deathspell Omega and even Tool, Medico Peste comes through with an at least very aesthetically intriguing listen, even if some of the compositions run kind of long without enough in the way of substantive musical ideas to last quite as long as they’re intended to. While the influences the band wears on their sleeve are at least quite respectably sonically pervasive, it can get occasionally uncanny. The main riff of “All Too Human” sounds like it could have come straight from the Ænema recording sessions, and “Numinous Catastrophe” even sounds like it pulls from Oranssi Pazuzu. But despite the influences on its sleeves, ב :The Black Bile is unique and diverse enough as a whole to sustain an exciting listen and one that I have enjoyed returning to.

7/10

Omega Infinity - Solar Spectre

I had not heard of Omega Infinity until this album, and out of the gate it really sounded like some cliché ambient black metal, but as the album unfolds, it really does reveal itself to be so much more than that. Hard to capture in a single word, the cosmos-themed album definitely captures the wide, chilling vastness of space through instrumental and compositional techniques that provide a fittingly alien, but not explicitly sci-fi, twist on the usual elements of ambient black metal, and it works wonderfully. 

8/10

Black Curse - Endless Wound

I heard a good bit of hype over this project, but I’m honestly having a hard time hearing what’s supposed to be such a big deal. We’ve got some solid performances and the occasional compositional flash of brilliance, but for the most part, Endless Wound is very standard blackened death metal with meek ambitions. Like don’t get me wrong, it’s not awful, and I don’t hate it. It just doesn’t depart nearly enough from the beaten, and crowded, path or really stand above the crowd on that path enough to get me excited. I kind of wish the band would delve more into the slower, sludgier, more savory sections of they dip their toes in, like that of “Enraptured by Decay” and the more eccentric takes on black metal dark ritualism on “Seared Eyes”. But until they really commit more to things they can do to get their head above the death metal crowd, it’s going to be hard to get excited about another Black Curse project in the near future.

5/10

Vermicide Violence - The Praxis of Prophylaxis

It was only a matter of time until the pandemic delivered unto us an at least partially coronavirus-themed medical deathcore album, which I am of course not complaining about the obnoxious, ridiculous prospect of. There is a lot of silly, gimmicky deathcore (and metal in general) out there that is pretty superficial, but also plenty that makes a lot of great use of whatever gimmick it’s applying. In this case, the natural grotesquery (if that’s a word) of medical practice does give Vermicide Violence just that little bit of extra tangibility and realness to the nasty deathcore they’re pedaling. From breakdown lines of “vaccinate your fucking kids” and “you only hear once so just buy fucking plugs” (a twist on Suicide Silence’s “You Only Live Once”) to songs about asthmatic asphyxiation, coronavirus infection, West Nile virus, and breast cancer, it’s at the very least somewhat lyrically fresh and fun for any medical metalheads to have a good time nerding out with.

6/10

Vatican Falling - WAR

So I found out about Vatican Falling through the deathcoredads meme page, don’t judge me, but I’m glad I did, because this album, WAR, is some deliciously disgusting deathcore with lots of different flavors. They’re not exactly pushing any boundaries for the genre, but WAR certainly does branch out into melodic territory more boldly and successfully than your average deathcore album, and with good results. It has its low points where some of the experimentation doesn’t work, like the annoyingly repetitive clean vocal sample on the title track, but for the most part, the band’s use of more tangible, cleaner melodies goes over well and supplements the music nicely with a sense of raised stakes. If anything, I wish they did more in that vein because the band’s deathcore grooves at the core aren’t as above average on their own. That being said, songs like “King of Vermin” and “Kill All Humans” show that the band can really raise their game at the base deathcore front and outcompete their contemporaries if they need to.

6/10

Ulcerate - Stare into Death and Be Still

Stare into Death and Be Still is the sixth album from sonically ambitious New Zealanders, Ulcerate. Continuing to push their brand of atmospheric, blackened technical death metal to further reaches of the unknown, guitarist Michael Hoggard’s fluid, multi-faceted melodic work continues to play a pivotal role in steering the atmospheric tone of the album, while Jamie Saint Merat’s impressive following of the music’s odd time signature shifts boosts the album’s energy with tasteful technicality while simultaneously not being too obnoxiously flashy and showcasing some flavorful technical drumming chops. The guitar work takes on so many different shapes and styles, but probably most often reminds me of the winding angularity of Portal with the primal humanness and ritual catharsis of later/current Behemoth, with some more ambient detours taken here and there that hearken to Isis and even more doom-oriented projects like Bell Witch. The swirling together of influences here is so seamless and immersive, and honestly some of Ulcerate’s best. This is not to discount Paul Kelland’s contributions of emotively harmonious bass lines and consistently bestial, yet also somehow soulful, death metal bellowing to the album’s sound; I think his contributions in particular are what help this album feel meaningful and human and not just like some soulless piece of experimental art with a little too much of its head up its ass. For an hour, this album feels like listening to the best aspects of several different styles of cutting-edge death metal, black metal, and doom metal rolled into one masterful super-album that still manages to strike a dreadful chord all its own. Yeah, this is a pretty damn great album.

9/10

Katatonia - City Burials

Honestly, the vast majority of this album feels like Katatonia going through the motions and just playing it safe, never really committing to any really bold performance or composition moves, just coasting off The Fall of Hearts. It certainly passes by the usual Katatonia rubric, but it certainly won’t be going down as one of the band’s most revered.

5/10

Trivium - What the Dead Men Say

I somehow missed out on the entire first half of this album being released as singles, but I sure caught all the hype surrounding the band’s ninth album leading up to its release and all the preemptive praise it was receiving, and I’m kind of glad I got to experience it as a whole without the experience of the singles because I feel like I can honestly soberly assess it and say that it’s definitely not the masterpiece it’s being hyped up to be. The band definitely have found their groove in the various melodic, proggy, thrashy alternative metal styles they play, but this album really just feels like the band are just feeling themselves, in the sense that they’re kind of playing it safe, but bold enough with what they know they do well to kind of mask that. The band’s ninth album is pretty noticeably a continuation of their eighth, The Sin and the Sentence, which had some of Trivium’s most potent alternative metalcore bangers to date, but also some of their most confusingly tepid compositions on the other side of their spectrum. What the Dead Men Say kind of just maintains the band’s trajectory on their previous album and narrows that range from high to low. The low points, like “Bleed into Me” and (to a lesser extent) “The Catastrophist”, aren’t as low, but the high points aren’t as high, and I don’t think I’ll be returning to the better parts of this album, like “The Defiant”, “Amongst the Shadows and the Stones”, and “Sickness Unto You” as much as I will the plethora of highlights from The Sin and the Sentence. Overall, it kind of just feels like Trivium coasting a bit, but the band is genuinely at that level of evolution in their sound where they have made a lot of gradual refinements over time to get here but haven’t just repeated themselves, so they can kind of get away with it. Even if it’s not my favorite Trivium album, it’s sure a hell of a lot better than anything Trapt has ever released.

7/10

[indiedarlingdujour-blog]

That Was the Year That Was – 1985

1985 As the spread of aids increases Governments round the world start screening Blood donations for AIDS. On the technology front the first .com is registered and the first version of Windows is released Ver 1.0 . Terrorists continue to perform acts of terrorism including the hijack of TWA Flight 847 and the Italian Cruise Liner "Achille Lauro ". Famine in Ethiopia is shown more on TV News in July and Live Aid concerts around the world raise many millions to help the starving in Africa and the pop industry in US joins together to sing "We Are The World".

Band Aid’s "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" was at number one, Colin Baker was Doctor Who, and "Beverly Hills Cop" was in cinemas. But as 1984 ticked into 1985, 1 January ushered in more than just a new year: it was the start of a new era, as the first mobile-phone call in the UK was made.

3 March – Just two days short of a year after the Miners’ Strike began it ended in dignified if crushing defeat.

1985: Riots in Brixton after police shooting

Riots have broken out on the streets of south London after a woman was shot and seriously injured in a house search. Armed officers raided a house in Brixton early this morning looking for a man in connection with a robbery. Crowds began to gather outside the district’s police station when news broke the police had accidentally shot the man’s mother, Cherry Groce, in her bed with apparently no warning. Local people had already been very critical of police tactics in Brixton and a mood of tension exploded into violence as night fell.

Dozens of officers dressed in riot gear were injured as they were attacked by groups of mainly black youths with bricks and wooden stakes. The rioters also set alight a barricade of cars across the Brixton Road with petrol bombs and some looted shops in nearby streets. The suspected armed robber was not home when the police raided his address and Scotland Yard described the shooting of his mother as a "tragic accident".

One of Mrs Groce’s daughters told the BBC everything happened very quickly.

"It was a loud noise that made me run down the stairs – by the time I got down there were three police dogs, police rushing everywhere and one of them had a gun," she said. Mrs Groce is being treated at St Thomas’ Hospital in central London and her family say the mother-of-six may never walk again. "She is just in a state of shock – she cannot recall with any great accuracy because it all happened so fast," said her brother Tony Young.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said it did all it could to prevent mistakes like this, but it had to recognise the increased use of firearms by criminals made errors more likely.

Britain’s first official call on a mobile

Britain’s first official call on a mobile (following a beta test in London) was made on 1 January 1985 by 24-year-old Michael Harrison, son of Vodafone chairman Sir Ernest Harrison. Michael slipped out of the family New Year’s Eve party in Surrey and drove to Parliament Square in Westminster with a Vodafone Transportable VT1 phone, also known as Nokia’s Mobira Talkman. After Big Ben had struck 12 to ring in the new year, Harrison junior dialed home and greeted his father, "Hi Dad, it’s Mike. Happy New Year. This is the first ever call on a UK mobile network."

Vodafone was first to go mobile with the New Year’s Eve call, but the head start was brief: BT Cellnet — the forerunner of today’s O2 — launched its service just days later on 10 January 1985. Entertainer Ernie Wise, best known for his double act with Eric Morecambe, promoted the network a couple of weeks later with a photo-call at London’s St Katharine Docks during which he also dialed chairman Harrison, giving rise to the popular belief it was Little Ern who made the first mobile call.

The Sinclair C5 is launched

Within the space of two months in 1985 the UK’s first mobile phone call was made; the C5 launched; and Eastenders debuted: two successes and one flop.

The idea was perhaps ahead of its time, and of the battery technology then available, but in essence was a good one: a simple, cheap (costing less than £450 delivered) electric vehicle for urban transport. Sir Clive Sinclair had dreamt of the thing for years.

But there is a world of difference between a good idea and a good product: to keep the thing cheap it had no cover, not ideal in English weather ; likewise its one battery was not man enough for hilly ground. The C5’s top-speed of 15mph (the legal maximum in the UK without a driving licence being necessitated) was the cause of much hilarity in pubs and the papers, but given London traffic moves at an average speed well below that its speed should not have been a disadvantage in the capital, apparently its first target market.

Perhaps the biggest problem the C5 had was its appearance: more like a children’s toy go-cart than a car, and with a strange driving position, it failed to attract buyers. Only around 12,000 were made before the electric car project had its plug pulled, as it were. Today we may wonder if Sinclair’s brainchild came just a little too soon.

1985 Football dominated the headlines

May 1985 was perhaps the blackest month in British football history . On the 11th May 56 people died in a horrific fire at Valley Parade, Bradford City’s ground. That tragedy was inadvertent; on May 29th more sinister actions led to the deaths of 39 football fans before that year’s European Cup Final between Liverpool and Juventus at the Heysel Stadium in Brussels.

Heysel it was later acknowledged was a far from ideal venue for such a big match: old-fashioned, parts of it said to be in a state of disrepair, and cramped for space when holding a capacity crowd as it was that night. But there would have been no problem had drink-fuelled hooligans, purportedly Liverpool fans, not decided to attack a section of Juventus supporters about an hour before kick-off after prolonged exchanges of makeshift missiles by both sides. The louts burst through scanty police lines and surged towards their targets; many of those facing the attack retreated in panic to a corner where a wall collapsed on them, killing 39 and injuring a further 200.

Against the wishes of both managers it was decided to play the game in spite of the disaster, the fear being that the violence which had followed the tragedy, Juventus fans seeking revenge for the loss-of-life, might escalate into a hand-to-hand battle in the stadium and the streets of Brussels without the diversion of a game. Liverpool lost 1 – 0 in a match played without passion, many players looking like they were on automatic pilot. Shortly afterwards the FA, backed by UEFA, banned English clubs from European competition for five years.

13 March – Rioting breaks out at the FA Cup quarter-final between Luton Town and Millwall at Kenilworth Road, Luton; hundreds of hooligans tear seats from the stands and throw them onto the pitch before a pitch invasion takes place, resulting in 81 people (31 of them police officers) being injured. The carnage continues in the streets near the stadium, resulting in major damage to vehicles and property. Luton Town win the game 1-0.

31 May – The Football Association bans all English football clubs from playing Europe until further notice in response to the Heysel riots. Thatcher supports the ban and calls for judges to hand out stiffer sentences to convicted football hooligans.

10 September – Scotland national football team manager Jock Stein, 62, collapses and dies from a heart attack at the end of his team’s 1-1 draw with Wales at Ninian Park, Cardiff, which secured Scotland’s place in the World Cup qualification playoff.

A wall collapsed on to Ian Hambridge, a 15-year-old Leeds fan, during the trouble at St Andrews on 11 May 1985. His death was overshadowed by the Bradford City fire on the same day.

Battle of the Beanfield

The Battle of the Beanfield took place over several hours on 1 June 1985, when Wiltshire Police prevented The Peace Convoy, a convoy of several hundred New Age travellers, from setting up the 1985 Stonehenge Free Festival in Wiltshire, England. The police were enforcing a High Court injunction obtained by the authorities prohibiting the 1985 festival from taking place. Around 1300 police officers took part in the operation against approximately 600 travellers.

The convoy of travellers that were heading for Stonehenge encountered resistance at a police road block seven miles from the landmark. Police claim that some traveller vehicles then rammed police vehicles in an attempt to push through the roadblock. Around the same time police smashed the windows of the convoy’s vehicles and some travellers were arrested. The rest broke into an adjacent field and a stand-off consequently developed that persisted for several hours. According to the BBC "Police said they came under attack, being pelted with lumps of wood, stones and even petrol bombs". Conversely, The Guardian states the travellers were not armed with petrol bombs and that police intelligence suggesting so "was false".

Eventually the police launched another attack during which the worst of the violence is purported to have taken place. According to The Observer, during this period pregnant women and those holding babies were clubbed by police with truncheons and the police were hitting "anybody they could reach". When some of the travellers tried to escape by driving away through the fields, The Observer states that the police threw truncheons, shields, fire-extinguishers and stones at them in an attempt to stop them.

Dozens of travellers were injured, 8 police officers and 16 travellers were hospitalised. 537 travellers were eventually arrested. This represents the largest mass arrest of civilians since at least the Second World War, possibly the biggest in English legal history. Two years after the event, a Wiltshire police sergeant was found guilty of Actual Bodily Harm as a consequence of injuries incurred by a member of the convoy during the Battle of the Beanfield.

In February 1991 a civil court judgement awarded 21 of the travellers £24,000 in damages for false imprisonment, damage to property and wrongful arrest. The award was swallowed by their legal bill as the judge did not award them legal costs.

In 1985 the festival was banned by the Thatcher government and in May the Battle of the Beanfield took place, with an estimated 1000 police ambushing a convoy of travellers on their way to Stonehenge, trashing their vehicles and doing their best to completely demoralise the hard core festival community .The week after, 38 football fans were killed in a riot at an away match in Europe which not only diverted attention away from this event , but also put the Stonehenge festival in perspective. To my knowledge, the festival never had any deaths occur, the mess made was unfortunate, but compared to the mayhem and cost that the average football match cost to the taxpayer in policing, the Henge festival was a mere pinprick. So why was so much effort made to destroy it? Total drug related hospital admissions from the festival in 84 were five ,the policing cost of the Beanfield exercise was 800.000 pounds. Value for money?.

1985 Timeline

January – The Fraud Investigation Group is set up for cases of financial & commercial fraud.

1 January – The first British mobile phone calls are made.

7 January – Nine striking miners are jailed for arson.

10 January – The Sinclair C5, a battery-assisted recumbent tricycle, designed by the British inventor Clive Sinclair is launched.

Eight people are killed by a gas explosion at a block of flats in Putney.

16 January – London’s Dorchester Hotel is bought by the Sultan of Brunei.

17 January – British Telecom announces it is going to phase out its famous red telephone boxes.

23 January – A debate in the House of Lords is televised for the first time.

29 January – Margaret Thatcher becomes the first post-war Prime Minister to be refused an honorary degree by Oxford University.

10 February – Nine people are killed in a multiple crash on the M6 motorway.

16 February – Civil servant Clive Ponting resigns from the Ministry of Defence after his acquittal of breaching section 2 of the Official Secrets Act 1911 concerning the leaking of documents relating to the sinking of the ARA General Belgrano during the Falklands War.

19 February – EastEnders, the BBC1 soap opera, goes on the air.

25 February – Nearly 4,000 striking miners go back to work, meaning that only just over half of the miners are now on strike.

3 March – The miners’ strike ends after one year.

7 March – Two IRA members are jailed for 35 years at the Old Bailey for plotting the bombing campaign across London during 1981.

11 March – Mohammed Al Fayed buys the London-based department store company Harrods.

13 March – Rioting breaks out at the FA Cup quarter-final between Luton Town and Millwall at Kenilworth Road, Luton; hundreds of hooligans tear seats from the stands and throw them onto the pitch before a pitch invasion takes place, resulting in 81 people (31 of them police officers) being injured. The carnage continues in the streets near the stadium, resulting in major damage to vehicles and property. Luton Town win the game 1-0.

19 March – After beginning the year with a lead of up to eight points in the opinion poll, the Conservatives suffer a major blow as the latest MORI poll puts them four points behind Labour, who have a 40% share of the vote.

Ford launches the third generation of its Granada. It is sold only as a hatchback, in contrast to its predecessor which was sold as a saloon or estate, and in continental Europe it will be known as the Scorpio.

11 April – An 18-month-old boy becomes the youngest person in Britain to die of AIDS.

22 April – Construction of Japanese carmaker Nissan’s new factory at Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, begins. The first cars are expected to be produced next year.

30 April – Bernie Grant, born in Guyana, becomes the first black council leader when he is elected leader of Labour-controlled London Borough of Haringey council.

2 May – The SDP–Liberal Alliance makes big gains in local council elections.

11 May – A fire engulfs a wooden stand at the Valley Parade stadium in Bradford during a football match, killing 56 people (54 Bradford City supporters and two Lincoln City supporters) and injuring more than 200 others.

A 14-year-old boy is killed, 20 people are injured and several vehicles are wrecked when Leeds United football hooligans riot at the Birmingham City stadium and cause a wall to collapse.

15 May – Everton, who have already clinched their Football League title for 15 years, win the European Cup Winners’ Cup (their first European trophy) with a 3-1 win over Rapid Vienna in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. English clubs have now won 25 European trophies since 1963. Everton are also in contention for a treble of major trophies, as they take on Manchester United in the FA Cup final in three days.

16 May – Two South Wales miners are sentenced to life imprisonment for the murder of taxi driver David Wilkie. Dean Hancock and Russell Shankland, both 21, dropped a concrete block on Mr Wilkie’s taxi from a road overbridge in November last year.

Scientists of the British Antarctic Survey discover the ozone hole.

18 May – Manchester United win the FA Cup for the sixth time in their history with a 1-0 win over Everton in the final at Wembley Stadium. The only goal of the game is scored by 20-year-old Northern Irish forward Norman Whiteside, who scored in United’s last FA Cup triumph two years ago.

29 May – In the Heysel Stadium disaster at the European Cup final in Brussels, 39 football fans die and hundreds are injured. Despite the tragedy, the match is played and Juventus beat Liverpool 1-0.

31 May – The Football Association bans all English football clubs from playing Europe until further notice in response to the Heysel riots. Thatcher supports the ban and calls for judges to hand out stiffer sentences to convicted football hooligans.

1 June – Battle of the Beanfield, Britain’s largest mass arrest and the effective end of Stonehenge Free Festivals.

2 June – In response to the Heysel tragedy four days ago, UEFA bans all English football clubs from European competitions for an indefinite period, recommending that Liverpool should serve an extra three years of exclusion once all other English clubs have been reinstated.

6 June – Birmingham unveils its bid to host the 1992 Summer Olympics, which includes plans for a new £66 million stadium.

13 June – The James Bond film A View To A Kill is released, marking the last appearance by Roger Moore as the spy after six films since 1973.

25 June – Police arrest 13 suspects in connection with the Brighton hotel bombing of 1984.

29 June – Patrick Magee is charged with the murder of the people who died in the Brighton bombing eight months ago.

4 July – 13-year-old Ruth Lawrence achieves a first in Mathematics at Oxford University, becoming the youngest British person ever to earn a first-class degree and the youngest known graduate of Oxford University.

Unemployment for June fell to 3,178,582 from May’s total of 3,240,947, the best fall in unemployment of the decade so far.

13 July – Live Aid pop concerts in London and Philadelphia raise over £50 million for famine relief in Ethiopia.

29 July – Despite unemployment having fallen since October last year, it has increased in 73 Conservative constituencies, according to government figures.

7 August – White House Farm murders at Tolleshunt Darcy, Essex; 28-year-old Sheila Caffell is reported to have shot dead her six-year-old twin sons, and also her adoptive parents Nevill and June Bamber, before turning the gun on herself. Her 24-year-old brother Jeremy, who was also adopted, alterted the police to the house after telling them that he had received a phonecall from Nevill Bamber to tell him that his sister had "gone berserk" with a rifle.

13 August – The first UK heart-lung transplant is carried out at the Harefield Hospital in Middlesex. The patient is three-year-old Jamie Gavin.

The Sinclair C5 ceases production after just seven months and less than 17,000 units.

22 August – 55 people are killed in the Manchester air disaster at Manchester International Airport when a British Airtours Boeing 737 burst into flames after the pilot aborts the takeoff.

24 August – Five-year-old John Shorthouse is shot dead by police at his family’s house in Birmingham, where they were arresting his father on suspicion of an armed robbery committed in South Wales.

September – SEAT, the Spanish carmaker originally a subsidy of Fiat but now under controlling interest from Volkswagen, began importing cars to the United Kingdom. Its range consisted of the Marbella (a rebadged version of the Fiat Panda), the Ibiza hatchback and Malaga saloon.

1 September – A joint Franco-American expedition locates the wreck of the RMS Titanic.

4 September – The first photographs and films of the RMS Titanic’s wreckage are taken, 73 years after it sank.

6 September – The Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre opens in Glasgow.

8 September – Jeremy Bamber is arrested on suspicion of murdering his adoptive parents, sister and two nephews at their Essex farmhouse last month, after police had originally believed that his sister had killed herself after shooting her parents and sons.

9 September – Rioting, mostly motivated by racial tension, breaks out in the Handsworth area of Birmingham.

10 September – The riots in Handsworth escalated, with mass arson and looting resulting in thousands of pounds worth of damage, leaving several people injured, and resulted in the deaths of two people who died when the local post office was petrol bombed. One of the fatalities was the owner of the post office.

Scotland national football team manager Jock Stein, 62, collapses and dies from a heart attack at the end of his team’s 1-1 draw with Wales at Ninian Park, Cardiff, which secured Scotland’s place in the World Cup qualification playoff.

11 September – The rioting in Handsworth ended, with the final casualty toll standing at 35 injuries and two deaths. A further two people are unaccounted for.

The England national football team secures qualification for next summer’s World Cup in Mexico with a 1-1 draw against Romania at Wembley. Tottenham midfielder Glenn Hoddle scored England’s only goal.

Enoch Powell, the controversial former Tory MP who was dismissed from the shadow cabinet 17 years ago for his Rivers of Blood speech on immigration, states that the riots in Handsworth were a vindication of the warnings he voiced in 1968.

17 September – Margaret Thatcher’s hopes of winning a third term in office at the next election are thrown into doubt by the results of an opinion poll, which shows the Conservatives in third place on 30%, Labour in second place on 33% and the SDP–Liberal Alliance in the lead on 35%.

28 September – A riot in Brixton erupts after an accidental shooting of a woman by police. One person dies in the riot, 50 are injured and more than 200 are arrested.

Manchester United’s excellent start to the Football League First Division season sees them win their 10th league game in succession, leaving them well placed to win their first league title since 1967.

29 September – Jeremy Bamber is re-arrested on his return to England after two weeks on holiday in France and charged on five counts of murder.

1 October – Neil Kinnock makes a speech at the Labour Party Conference in Bournemouth attacking the entryist Militant group in Liverpool.

Lord Scarman’s report on the riots in Toxteth and Peckham blames economic deprivation and racial discrimination.

Economists predict that unemployment will remain above the 3,000,000 mark for the rest of the decade.

5 October – Mrs Cythnia Jarrett, a 49-year-old black woman, dies after falling over during a police search of her council house on the Broadwater Farm estate in Tottenham, London.

6 October – PC Keith Blakelock is fatally stabbed during the Broadwater Farm Riot in Tottenham, London, which began after the death of Cynthia Jarrett yesterday. Two of his colleagues are treated in hospital for gunshot wounds, as are three journalists.

15 October – The SDP-Liberal Alliance’s brief lead in the opinion polls is over, with the Conservatives now back in the lead by a single point over Labour in the latest MORI poll.

17 October – The House of Lords decides the legal case of Gillick v West Norfolk and Wisbech Area Health Authority[26] which sets the significant precedent of Gillick competence, i.e. that a child of 16 or under may be competent to consent to contraception or – by extension – other medical treatment without requiring parental permission or knowledge.

24 October – Members of Parliament react to the recent wave of rioting by saying that unemployment is an unacceptable excuse for the riots.

28 October – Production of the Peugeot 309 begins at the Ryton car factory near Coventry. The 309, a small family hatchback, is the first "foreign" car to be built in the UK. It was originally going to be badged as the Talbot Arizona, but Peugeot has decided that the Talbot badge will be discontinued on passenger cars after next year and that the Ryton plant will then be used for the production of its own products, including a larger four-door saloon (similar in size to the Ford Sierra) which is due in two years.

30 October – Unemployment is reported to have risen in nearly 70% of the Tory held seats since this time last year.

31 October – The two miners who killed taxi driver David Wilkie in South Wales eleven months ago have their life sentences for murder reduced to eight years for manslaughter on appeal.

1 November – The Queen Mother commissions aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal.

Unemployment for September falls by nearly 70,000 to less than 3,300,000.

5 November – Mark Kaylor defeats Errol Christie to become the middleweight boxing champion, after the two brawl in front of the cameras at the weigh-in.

9 November – The Prince and Princess of Wales arrive in the United States of America for a visit to Ronald Reagan in Washington, D.C.

15 November – Anglo-Irish Agreement signed at Hillsborough Castle. Treasury Minister Ian Gow resigns in protest at the deal.

17 November – The Confederation of British Industry calls for the government to invest £1 billion in unemployment relief – a move which would cut unemployment by 350,000 and potentially bring it below 3,000,000 for the first time since late 1981.

18 November – A coach crash on the M6 motorway near Birmingham kills two people and injures 51.

19 November – The latest MORI poll shows that Conservative and Labour support is almost equal at around 36%, with the SDP–Liberal Alliance’s hopes of electoral breakthrough left looking bleak as they have only 25% of the vote.

22 November – Margaret Thatcher is urged by her MPs to call a General Election for June 1987, despite the deadline not being until June 1988 and recent opinion polls frequently showing Labour and the Alliance at least level with the Conservatives, although the Conservative majority has remained well into triple figures.

25 November – Department store chains British Home Stores and Habitat announce a £1.5 billion merger.

27 November – Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock suspends the Liverpool District Labour Party amid allegations that the Trotskist Militant group was attempting to control it.

29 November – A gas explosion kills four people in Glasgow.

Gérard Hoarau, exiled political leader from the Seychelles, is assassinated in London.

December – Builders Alfred McAlpine complete construction of Nissan’s new car factory at Sunderland. Nissan can now install machinery and factory components and car production is expected to begin by the summer of next year.

4 December – Scotland’s World Cup qualification is secured by a goalless draw with Australia in the playoff second leg in Sydney.

5 December – It is announced that unemployment fell in November, for the third month running. It now stands at 3,165,000.

25 December – Charitable organisation Comic Relief is launched.

26 December – Rock star Phil Lynott, formerly of Thin Lizzy, is rushed to hospital after collapsing from a suspected heroin overdose at his home in Berkshire.

The Waterside Inn at Bray, Berkshire, founded by the brothers Michel and Albert Roux, becomes the first establishment in the UK to be awarded three Michelin Guide stars, a distinction which it retains for at least twenty-five years.

Inflation stands at 6.1% – the highest since 1982 but still low compared to the highs reached in the 1970s.

Peak year for British oil production: 127 million tonnes.

The Dire Straits album, Brothers In Arms, becomes the first million selling compact disc.

The first retailers move into the Merry Hill Shopping Centre near Dudley, West Midlands. A new shopping mall is scheduled to open alongside the developing retail park in April 1986 and it is anticipated to grow into Europe’s largest indoor shopping centre with further developments set to be completed by 1990, as well as including a host of leisure facilities.

Television

1 January – Brookside is moved from Wednesdays to Mondays which means the soap can now be seen on Mondays and Tuesdays.

3 January – The UK’s last VHF television transmitters close down.

4 January – Channel 4 achieves its highest ever audience as 13.8 million viewers tune in for the final part of the mini-series A Woman of Substance.

6 January – The last 405-line transmitters are switched off in the UK.

18 January – Debut of The Practice, a twice-weekly medical drama intended to become Granada’s second soap produced for the ITV network. But viewing figures are not as healthy as had been hoped, and the series first run ends in May. It returns for a second series in 1986 before being axed.

20–21 January – Channel 4 airs Super Bowl XIX, the first time the Super Bowl is aired on British television.

20 January – American television sitcom The Cosby Show is broadcast in the United Kingdom for the first time.

23 January – A debate in the House of Lords is televised for the first time.

18 February – BBC1 undergoes a major relaunch. At 5.35 p.m., the legendary mechanical "mirror globe" ident, in use in varying forms since 1969, is seen for the last time in regular rotation on national BBC1. Its replacement, the COW (Computer Originated World, a computer generated globe) debuts at 7pm. On the same day, computer-generated graphics replace magnetic weather maps on all BBC forecasts, and Terry Wogan’s eponymous talk show is relaunched as a thrice-weekly live primetime programme. EastEnders launches the following day.

19 February – EastEnders, the BBC1 soap opera, goes on air.

28 April – The World Snooker Championship Final between Dennis Taylor and Steve Davis draws BBC2’s highest ever rating of 18.5 million viewers.

11 May – A fire breaks out at the Valley Parade stadium in Bradford during a football match between Bradford City and Lincoln City. The match is being recorded by Yorkshire Television for transmission on their Sunday afternoon regional football show The Big Match the following day. Coverage of the fire is transmitted minutes after the event on the live ITV Saturday afternoon sports programme World of Sport. BBC’s Grandstand also transmits live coverage of the fire.

29 May – Heysel Stadium Disaster televised live by BBC1; at the European Cup final in Brussels, Belgium, between Liverpool and Juventus, 39 Juventus fans are killed when a wall collapses during a riot at the Heysel Stadium.

5 June – The first episode of Bulman airs.

13 July – Live Aid pop concerts are held in Philadelphia and London and televised around the world. Over £50 million is raised for famine relief in Ethiopia.

31 July – The BBC announces it has pulled At the Edge of the Troubles, a documentary in the Real Lives strand in which filmmaker Vincent Hanna secured an interview with Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness and his wife. The announcement leads to a one-day strike by members of the National Union of Journalists, and the eventual overturning of the ban. A slightly edited version of the programme is shown in October. The controversy damages the Director-Generalship of Alasdair Milne, who eventually resigns from the post in 1987.

The War Game, made for the BBC’s The Wednesday Play strand in 1965 but banned from broadcast at the time, is finally shown on television as part of BBC2’s After the Bomb season.

August – After a series of high-profile football hooliganism and a dispute between the Football League and the broadcasters over revenue, televised league football is missing from British screens until the second half of the season. The Charity Shield and international games are the only matches screened.

1 August – The nuclear war docudrama Threads is repeated on BBC2 as part of the After the Bomb series.

13 August – ITV airs the US intergalactic whodunit Murder in Space. The film is shown without the ending, and a competition held for viewers to identify the murderer(s). The film’s concluding 30 minutes are shown a few weeks later, with a studio of contestants eliminated one by one until the winner correctly solves the mystery. There is a prize of £10,000.

30 August – Debut of Granada’s ill-fated "continuing drama series", Albion Market. The series – set in a market in Salford and intended as a companion for Coronation Street – is panned by critics and suffers from poor ratings. It is axed a year later.

3 September – BBC1’s EastEnders moves from 7.00pm to 7.30pm to avoid clashing with ITV’s Emmerdale Farm, which airs in the 7.00pm timeslot on Tuesdays and Thursdays in many ITV regions.

10 September – ITV airs the Wales vs Scotland World Cup qualifier from Cardiff’s Ninian Park. The match – played against the backdrop of escalating football hooliganism – is notable for the death of Scotland manager Jock Stein, who collapsed shortly before Scotland secured their place in the 1986 FIFA World Cup.

15 September – ITV airs Murder in Space: The Solution, in which the puzzle of the sci-fi murder mystery is finally solved.

28 September – After 20 years ITV’s Saturday afternoon sports programme World of Sport is aired for the last time.

3 October – Roland Rat, the puppet rodent who saved an ailing TV-am in 1983 transfers to the BBC. Commenting on the move, he says, "I saved TV-am and now I’m here to save the BBC."

28 October – A documentary in ITV’s World in Action series casts doubt on evidence used to convict the Birmingham Six of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings.

November – The 1,000th episode of Emmerdale Farm is celebrated with a special lunch attended by Princess Michael of Kent. Not recognising any of the cast members she later admits that she never watches the show.

9 December – 25th anniversary of the first episode of Coronation Street.

25 December – Minder on the Orient Express, a feature-length episode of the television series Minder, receives its UK television debut as the highlight of ITV’s Christmas Day schedule.

BBC1

19 February – EastEnders (1985–present) March – Comic Relief (1985–present) 1 April – Bertha the Machine (1985–1986) 15 April – Three Up, Two Down (1985–1989) September – CBBC on BBC One (1985–2012) 1 September – Howards’ Way (1985–1990) 3 September – Telly Addicts (1985–1998)

BBC2

11 January – Victoria Wood As Seen On TV (1985–1987) September – CBBC on BBC Two (1985–2013) No Limits (1985–1987)

ITV

11 January – Dempsey and Makepeace (1985–1986) 18 January – The Practice (1985–1986) 20 January – Supergran (1985–1987) 26 February – Busman’s Holiday (1985–1993) 12 April – C.A.T.S. Eyes (1985–1987) 16 April – The Wall Game (1985) 19 April – Home to Roost (1985–1990) 27 April – Crosswits (1985–1998) 13 May – Connections (1985–1990) 5 June – Bulman (1985–1987) 30 August – Albion Market (1985–1986) 23 October – Girls on Top (1985–1986) 30 August – Drummonds (1985–1987) 1 November – Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It (1985–1988) 13 November – Alias the Jester (1985–1986) 30 November – Blind Date (1985–2003) 30 December – All in Good Faith (1985–1988)

Channel 4

2 January – A Woman of Substance (1985) 6 October – Pob’s Programme (1985–1988)

Music

The biggest British musical event of 1985 was the Live Aid concert in London’s Wembley Stadium on 13 July. Held to follow-up the previous year’s charity record "Do They Know It’s Christmas?", the biggest selling single ever at the time, popular acts such as The Who, U2 and Queen performed in front of an estimated audience of 1.5 billion viewers. It raised £150 million to help famine in Ethiopia, and a similar event would happen 20 years later in 2005, with Live 8.

After the huge success of Band Aid’s "Do They Know It’s Christmas?", several more charity songs reached number 1 this year. USA for Africa, inspired by Band Aid, released "We Are the World", a song written by Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie, while David Bowie and Mick Jagger released a cover of "Dancing In The Street", the music video being premiered at Live Aid and all proceeds going to the charity. In May, a fire at a football stadium in Bradford killed 56 people, and supergroup The Crowd released a charity cover of popular football anthem "You’ll Never Walk Alone" in tribute.

British rock band Dire Straits released their album Brothers in Arms in May, one of the first ever albums to be released on Compact Disc. It went on to become a huge seller, the biggest selling album of the entire decade and as of 2008 in the top 5 biggest selling albums of all time. Four singles were released from the album, including the number 4 hit "Money for Nothing", which referenced American music channel MTV and had a groundbreaking video featuring early computer-generated imagery. When a European version of MTV launched in 1987, it was the first video ever played on the channel.

Jennifer Rush entered the top 75 in June with the power ballad "The Power of Love", which remained in the chart for months without entering the top 40. When it finally did in September, it quickly hit number 1, where it remained for five weeks and was the biggest selling single of the year. It sold over a million copies, however it would be the last single of the decade to do so, and there would not be another million-seller until 1991.

Many songs this year competed for the Christmas number one single, and the entire top 3 from 1984 re-entered the chart this year; Paul McCartney’s "We All Stand Together" at number 32, Wham!’s "Last Christmas" at number 6, and Band Aid’s "Do They Know It’s Christmas?" at number 3. There were also attempts from Bruce Springsteen with a cover of "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town", and ventriloquist Keith Harris released a cover of "White Christmas" with his green puppet Orville the Duck.

However, the Christmas number one went to Shakin’ Stevens with the song "Merry Christmas Everyone". It had been intended to be released in 1984, but was kept back a year due to the Band Aid charity single. Still a widely known Christmas song in the 21st century, it re-entered the chart in Christmas 2007 on downloads alone, at number 22.

John Rutter, hitherto best known for his popular modern carols, acknowledged his classical roots with his Requiem, which was premièred in October in Sacramento, California. Less than eight months earlier, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Requiem had its première in New York. Paul Miles-Kingston, the boy soprano who won a silver disc for his recording of the "Pie Jesu" from that work, became Head Chorister of Winchester Cathedral in the same year. The prolific Peter Maxwell Davies (who had moved to Orkney in 1971) produced one of his most popular works, Orkney Wedding, With Sunrise, notable for featuring the bagpipes as a lead instrument. Veteran Welsh composer Daniel Jones, produced his 12th symphony, at the age of 73, whilst 80-year-old Michael Tippett began work on his last opera, New Year.

Charts Number one singles

"Do They Know It’s Christmas?" – Band Aid "I Want to Know What Love Is" – Foreigner "I Know Him So Well" – Elaine Paige and Barbara Dickson "You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)" – Dead or Alive "Easy Lover" – Philip Bailey and Phil Collins "We Are the World" – USA for Africa "Move Closer" – Phyllis Nelson "19" – Paul Hardcastle "You’ll Never Walk Alone" – The Crowd "Frankie" – Sister Sledge "There Must Be an Angel (Playing with My Heart)" – Eurythmics "Into the Groove" – Madonna "I Got You Babe" – UB40 and Chrissie Hynde "Dancing in the Street" – David Bowie and Mick Jagger "If I Was" – Midge Ure "The Power of Love" – Jennifer Rush "A Good Heart" – Feargal Sharkey "I’m Your Man" – Wham! "Saving All My Love for You" – Whitney Houston "Merry Christmas Everyone" – Shakin’ Stevens

Posted by brizzle born and bred on 2015-05-23 14:11:02

Tagged: , That Was the Year That Was – 1985

The post That Was the Year That Was – 1985 appeared first on Good Info.

[theconservativebrief]

Anthony Kennedy, the longest-serving member of the Supreme Court, is reportedly considering retirement.

Kennedy has, since at least 2005, been the swing vote on many of the Court’s most ideologically charged decisions, responsible for 5-4 rulings that legalized same-sex marriage, preserved Roe v. Wade, upheld warrantless wiretapping, blew up campaign finance restrictions, overturned DC’s handgun ban, and weakened the Voting Rights Act. That position has made him one of the most powerful people in America for well over a decade now, not even counting the 18 years he shared his position as the Court’s swing voter with Sandra Day O’Connor.

But Kennedy, who turns 82 this July, is already the 14th longest-serving justice (out of 113) in the Court’s history. President Donald Trump reportedly nominated Neil Gorsuch, a former Kennedy clerk, to the Court in part to reassure Kennedy that he could trust Trump with picking his replacement. And it’s not clear that Kennedy will ever get a better time to retire, from his perspective. He’s to the left of Trump on a number of issues, but still a conservative, so he’s unlikely to be pleased with the replacement a Democratic president would pick either.

Justice Anthony Kennedy shakes hands with Neil Gorsuch after administering the judicial oath during his swearing in at the Rose Garden on April 10, 2017. T.J. Kirkpatrick/Bloomberg via Getty Images

If Kennedy does retire, the Court’s decisions on issues where he’s a down-the-line conservative — like campaign finance and corruption, most business regulation and voting cases, gun rights, religious liberty, etc. — likely won’t change. There’s already a 5-4 conservative majority on those, so conservative rulings like the ones Kennedy wrote or joined in DC v. Heller, Citizens United, or Hobby Lobby will continue apace.

What will change are rulings on issues where Kennedy has helped maintain a shaky 5-4 center-left consensus. Because of the court’s longstanding principle of stare decisis, or obeying past precedent barring a compelling reason not to do so, some liberal Court achievements are likely to stay. But a Court without Kennedy is substantially more likely to:

Overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states (and maybe the federal government too) to ban most or all abortions.

Reject challenges to capital punishment and solitary confinement.

Rule in favor of religious challenges to anti-discrimination law, and perhaps, in an extreme case, reverse some past Supreme Court rulings on gay rights.

Bar government actors from engaging in explicit race-based affirmative action.

And there are likely to be more aftershocks that are hard to anticipate this far in advance.

An America after Anthony Kennedy looks significantly different from America before. The movement against mass incarceration could run into unprecedented resistance from the Court, and the anti-abortion movement could notch its greatest victories in a half-century. (And note that because the issues affected are those with a current liberal majority, the same effects are likely to obtain if one of the Court’s four liberals — Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor — retires or passes away.)

Unless a conservative like John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, or Gorsuch announces a shocking early retirement, the next Supreme Court vacancy will give Donald Trump the power to shift jurisprudence on a range of critical issues. It could wind up being the most important part of his legacy.

Nothing is guaranteed, but if Anthony Kennedy retires under Trump, his replacement will be much likelier to join a decision overturning Roe v. Wade and giving states the ability to ban abortions as early as the first trimester.

This may take years after the replacement’s confirmation; a state would need to pass a law clearly incompatible with the Court’s existing approach to abortion rights and wait for the challenge to reach the Supreme Court before the new justice would have a chance to join a ruling. The anti-abortion movement might choose a more cautious strategy, instead chipping away at Roe with measures that fall short of outright bans. But with Kennedy gone, the votes for an outright reversal of Roe would probably be there.

Pro-life and pro-choice activists gather outside of the Supreme Court during the March for Life rally on January 19, 2018. Alex Wong/Getty Images

If Kennedy (or one of the liberals) leaves the court, UC Berkeley law dean and constitutional law expert Erwin Chemerinsky writes, “There almost certainly will be a majority to overrule Roe v. Wade and allow states to prohibit abortions.”

It’s certainly possible that Chief Justice Roberts will decline to join an anti-Roe majority due to precedent and a desire to avoid a massive public backlash, but there are reasons to think it unlikely. Roberts has on two occasions joined decisions overturning past Supreme Court precedent: one was a case on the right to counsel and how it can and cannot be waived, and the other was Citizens United, which sparked massive national outrage.

Roberts voted to overturn precedent anyway, knowing a backlash was inevitable. Indeed, in his concurrence to Citizens United, Roberts suggested that “hotly contested” issues might provide for exceptions from the principle of stare decisis and respect for precedent. Also possible is that instead of decapitating Roe in one blow, Roberts will instead “vote to kill it with 1,000 cuts rather than overturn it outright,” as UC Irvine Law’s Richard Hasen puts it.

Perhaps we’ll see another case like Whole Women’s Health (a 2016 decision where Kennedy joined the Court’s liberals in striking down Texas regulations meant to disrupt abortion provision), but this time the court sides with the state’s restrictions. Perhaps another state takes its 20-week ban to the Supreme Court, which then relaxes Roe and rules that you can bar abortions that early in a pregnancy. Bit by bit, the Court enables states to get more creative and bold in their restrictions, until one day it finally gives up the ghost and announces Roe is dead.

In the aftermath of a reversal, the current gap in abortion services between red and blue states will become even more severe. The pro-abortion rights Guttmacher Institute classifies 29 states as “hostile or extremely hostile” to abortion rights, of which all but two voted for Trump in 2016 (the exceptions are Rhode Island and Virginia). It rated only 12 as supportive, with Montana the only supportive red state.

There are already substantial gaps between states in access to abortion. A study by Guttmacher researchers found that while the average American woman aged 15 to 44 lives fewer than 11 miles from the nearest clinic, that number varies dramatically from state to state and county to county. In Mississippi, the average woman lives 68.8 miles from the nearest clinic. In North Dakota, the number is 151.6. A lot of the variation is just a function of how rural the state is, but the political environment appears to be a significant factor as well.

Overturning Roe would harden these gaps between states, and also open up a vast new market for self-induced abortions. That market already exists. Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist and writer who has conducted research on demand for abortion using Google search data, once told Vox, “I was blown away by how frequently people are searching for ways to do abortions themselves now. These searches are concentrated in parts of the country where it’s hard to get an abortion and they rose substantially when it became harder to get an abortion.”

But while “self-induced” conjures up images of wire hangers and back alleys, the form this will most likely take is greater usage of abortion pills. About a third of all abortions, and a higher share of early-term abortions, are medication abortions now. It’s possible that’s what some of the searches for “self-induced abortion” were about, anyway.

How much do you want to bet that the US market for RU-486, purchased from online pharmacies or other dubiously legal means, will explode in the aftermath of Roe falling?

Currently, there appears to be a five-justice majority on the Supreme Court for sharply limiting solitary confinement in America. Should Kennedy retire, that majority would evaporate, likely replaced with a harder-line majority that could preserve the practice.

In 2015, Anthony Kennedy filed a concurring opinion in Davis v. Ayala, a death-penalty case in which the Court (joined by Kennedy) sided against the defendant. Nevertheless, Kennedy used his concurrence to unleash a bracing jeremiad against the evils of solitary confinement, in which the defendant had been held for most of his 25-plus years in prison.

”Research still confirms what this Court suggested over a century ago: Years on end of near-total isolation exact a terrible price,” Kennedy wrote. “In a case that presented the issue, the judiciary may be required, within its proper jurisdiction and authority, to determine whether workable alternative systems for long-term confinement exist, and, if so, whether a correctional system should be required to adopt them.”

A solitary confinement cell at New York’s Rikers Island. Bebeto Matthews/AP

The implication was clear: Kennedy wanted advocates to bring a case challenging the constitutionality of long-term solitary confinement on the grounds that it constitutes cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. He basically dared them to, and suggested that if such a case reached the Court, he’d be inclined to limit the practice.

Sharon Dolovich, a law professor at UCLA and faculty director of the university’s Prison Law & Policy Program, told me in 2016 that solitary confinement was the “one major unresolved issue” in criminal justice “that is definitely going to come up” in the next few years.

It’s a long time coming. At any given moment, about 80,000 to 100,000 people are held in solitary confinement in the US; in many states, the average stint in solitary lasts years. And it’s been that way at least since the 1980s, without any federal court intervention to halt it.

”There’s so much data now — physiological data, psychological data, reentry data — there’s so much data making clear the extended physical, psychological, and emotional trauma that people suffer in extended solitary confinement, it would be so easy for the Court just to point to it all and conclude there’s an objective harm,” Dolovich said.

Jonathan Simon, a law professor and director of the Center for the Study of Law and Society at UC Berkeley, also speaking in 2016, told me that solitary confinement is on “the verge of being found unconstitutional, at least in its most excessive forms.” Just what “excessive” means there is, naturally, a matter of debate, and Simon cautions that the Court could err on the side of giving prisons too much leeway.

He noted that Ashker v. Brown, a recent case challenging solitary confinement in California that ended in a settlement rather than reaching the Supreme Court, “involved a class of inmates that had been held more than 10 years, and the settlement will still allow people to be held up to five years, and even after that they can still be held in solitary if they’re given programming and special services.” By contrast, the United Nations special rapporteur on torture has called for an absolute ban on solitary confinement lasting 15 days or more. “I’m not sure Kennedy or any justice would go nearly that far,” Simon says.

But without Kennedy on the court, a ruling going even as far as a five-year maximum becomes less likely.

Solitary confinement is not the only case where a more conservative justice could make a difference. In 2011, Kennedy wrote a 5-4 decision upholding a lower court order that California release tens of thousands of prisoners to reduce overcrowding, which the state itself admitted was unconstitutional. It was, Simon told me, “the first prisoners’ rights decision to come down in favor of the prisoner in a long time. It ended mass incarceration in California.” More decisions like that could come if Kennedy stays on the court

Kennedy is also the best hope that opponents of capital punishment have for a ruling against the practice, even though he’s often sided with conservatives in some past death penalty cases on the constitutionality of, say, using a particular lethal injection method.

Back in 2016, Simon told me that he was “somewhat optimistic” that Kennedy would join with Breyer and Ginsburg (who have already declared their belief that capital punishment is across-the-board unconstitutional), Sotomayor, and Kagan in an anti-death penalty case. “The reason … goes back to his interest in dignity,” Simon said. “The strongest of the opinions in Furman” — the 1972 case that briefly abolished capital punishment — “was William Brennan’s, and Brennan based it most directly on human dignity. He argued the Eighth Amendment bans any punishment you can’t carry out without respecting the dignity of those being punished.”

Kennedy leaned heavily on the importance of dignity in Brown v. Plata, the California prison overcrowding case. Simon even found an early Kennedy opinion from when he was a circuit court judge in the 1970s in which he quoted Brennan’s concurrence in Furman at length.

Even if Kennedy doesn’t buy a dignity argument for abolishing the death penalty, Simon said he thought Kennedy would be swayed by the issue of delays, which Breyer raised in his 2015 anti-capital punishment dissent — and which were the entire reason for the prisoner’s stay in solitary confinement that Kennedy assailed in his concurrence last year.

Inmates in the reception area of the California State Prison, Lancaster. Gary Friedman/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

”[Kennedy] came and gave a talk at Berkeley Law about a year and a half ago, and one of my colleagues was rude enough to ask him point blank whether he thought the death penalty was compatible with human dignity,” Simon told me. “Of course he declined to answer, but he said kind of cryptically, ‘Here in California you guys take so long enough to execute people that we may not even need to reach that cliff.’”

Even if Kennedy isn’t willing to go as far as abolishing capital punishment entirely, it’s likely that having him off the bench would prevent incremental steps against it from going forward. In 2008, Kennedy wrote for a 5-4 liberal majority that it was unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on people convicted merely of rape, not murder. Without him on the Court, incremental limitations of capital punishment’s scope like that become less likely.

Anthony Kennedy is hardly an uncritical supporter of affirmative action in public employment, education admissions, or other realms.

In 2003, he dissented in Grutter v. Bollinger, a case where O’Connor and the Court’s liberals ruled that the University of Michigan Law School’s racial affirmative action system was constitutional, and not an unconstitutional quota system. In 2007’s Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, he was the swing vote behind a ruling holding that Seattle, Washington, and Louisville, Kentucky’s voluntary desegregation programs were unconstitutional.

In 2009’s Ricci v. DeStefano, he ruled that New Haven, Connecticut’s Fire Department discriminated against white applicants for promotions. He wrote the controlling opinion in 2014’s Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, which upheld Michigan’s ban on affirmative action.

But he is not an implacable foe of the practice, either. In his Grutter dissent, he echoed Justice Lewis Powell, who held Kennedy’s seat before him and wrote the controlling opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, a 1978 case in which the Court held that affirmative action was constitutional but explicit quotas (“16 of the 100 students must be black”) went too far.

“There is no constitutional objection to the goal of considering race as one modest factor among many others to achieve diversity, but an educational institution must ensure, through sufficient procedures, that each applicant receives individual consideration and that race does not become a predominant factor in the admissions decision-making,” Kennedy wrote in the Grutter dissent.

Protesters rally at an Oakland park on October 8, 1977, in support of Allan Bakke, a student who sued the University of California after he was rejected admission into their medical school. Getty Images

This position of his became additionally relevant with 2016’s Fisher v. University of Texas, in which he wrote a majority opinion defending the University of Texas’s use of race in admissions. With Fisher, he effectively became the one vote holding together the Court’s majority defending affirmative action in at least some cases.

With Kennedy gone, replaced by a more stalwart conservative, it’s likely that the uneasy affirmative action consensus will buckle, and a ruling finally doing away with public affirmative action programs will come.

Arguably, Kennedy’s greatest legacy on the Court — and certainly what he hopes will be his greatest legacy — are his decisions expanding the scope of LGBTQ rights.

In 1996’s Romer v. Evans, he authored the Court’s first major pro-gay rights decision, invoking the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause in striking down a Colorado state constitutional amendment that prevented cities and towns from adopting their own bans on discrimination against gays, lesbians, or bisexuals.

Seven years later, in 2003’s Lawrence v. Texas, Kennedy wrote for a 6-3 court invalidating Texas’s ban on oral and anal sex between two men or two women. That decision overrode 1986’s Bowers v. Hardwick, a decision upholding Georgia’s sodomy law. In Lawrence, Kennedy tellingly did not use equal protection reasoning but instead found that any bans on consensual sexual behavior between adults, regardless of the genders involved, violate the due process clause’s guarantee of personal liberty. (This was similar to the reasoning the court had used in Roe and to invalidate bans on contraception in Griswold v. Connecticut.)

A decade later, in 2013, Kennedy wrote the 5-4 decision in United States v. Windsor overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act on equal protection grounds. The decision required the federal government to respect and honor same-sex marriages at the state level, while still allowing states to ban same-sex marriage if they wished. And two years after that, in 2015’s Obergefell v. Hodges, he swept away bans on same-sex marriage altogether, ending with a stirring tribute to the value of marriage that’s become a mainstay of wedding readings in the years since:

No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. As some of the petitioners in these cases demonstrate, marriage embodies a love that may endure even past death. It would misunderstand these men and women to say they disrespect the idea of marriage. Their plea is that they do respect it, respect it so deeply that they seek to find its fulfillment for themselves. Their hope is not to be condemned to live in loneliness, excluded from one of civilization’s oldest institutions. They ask for equal dignity in the eyes of the law. The Constitution grants them that right.

Gay rights supporters wave flags in front of the Supreme Court to celebrate the ruling in favor of same-sex marriage on June 26, 2015. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

It is fair, then, for gay rights advocates to worry about what could happen to the Obergefell precedent should Kennedy retire.

There are certainly some conservatives on the Court who are interested in chipping away at the ruling’s guarantees. Gorsuch, Thomas, and Alito in 2017 dissented from a ruling requiring Arkansas to list same-sex parents on their children’s birth certificates, arguing that to do so does not violate Obergefell. That, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern argued, set the stage for a legal strategy based on gradually chipping away at the right to marriage until it’s practically worthless.

“[John] Roberts would be free to rewrite Windsor and Obergefell however he wants,” Stern writes. “Roberts could remain faithful to the original text of both decisions. He could also reverse them. But the likeliest possibility is that Roberts first cuts them down to a single guarantee—the right for same-sex couples to receive a marriage license with no attendant privileges. In case after case, Roberts could vote to allow discrimination against same-sex couples but affirm their right to the license itself.”

The trouble with this argument is that we don’t actually know where Roberts stands on the precedential value of Obergefell. He didn’t register a dissent in the Arkansas case the way his conservative colleagues did; it’s possible he dissented without letting that dissent be recorded but it’s also possible he sided with the liberals.

Moreover, majorities of Americans in 44 of the 50 states now support same-sex marriage. The overwhelming public opinion shift in favor of marriage equality might make Roberts more hesitant to chip away at the right, and it also might deny the Court opportunities to take up the issue, if the popularity of same-sex marriage prevents states from trying to restrict the right in ways that would be challenged and make it to the Court.

My hunch is that LGBTQ rights is the part of Kennedy’s legacy least likely to be sacrificed should he leave the Court. But certainly a Court without Kennedy, and with a Trump-appointed successor, will be less friendly to LGBTQ causes than a Court with him around.

Original Source -> America after Anthony Kennedy

via The Conservative Brief

[jacquievandegeer]

Volksbühne!

Volksbühne Berlin Rosa Luxemburg Platz.

It has been called Berlin’s most iconic theatre.

The original slogan inscribed on the edifice was "Die Kunst dem Volke" ("Art to the people").

Frank Castorf, a famous East German director, who brought the theatre to international renown with politically charged productions, became director in 1992.

During his 25-year tenure, through mid 2017, the theater's ambitious, experimental productions, got worldwide recognition as a leading European venue.

I remember that lively.

Wunderbares projects.

I remember a documentary at the International Film festival in Rotterdam showing a cast of homeless Germans rehearsing and performing Shakespeare, it was awesome and they were the guests of honor, giving a talk back after the first showing.

From the Goethe institute website about him:

“Frank Castorf’s best theatre evenings are demanding, long, complex, loud, exalted and illogical. They reject a linear narrative and conclusive interpretations. Psychological interpretation of characters is anathema to the manager of the Berliner Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz and undisturbed acting is right next to the trivialisation of reality by art as an object of hate. For almost fifteen years now, this concentrated “anti” position has resulted in the most important contemporary theatre in Germany. “

and:

“The tremendous energy that characterises Castorf’s productions comes from the confrontation of harmony and violence. When he was a young director in the GDR, bureaucratic socialism provided the first opposition for Castorf’s anger. Banished to Anklam in the provinces, he continued to offend against the tolerated canon of hidden criticism of the system that was established in East German theatre until he was allowed to produce in the West. After Unification his revulsion at false common features, and especially of the “all’s well” politics of victorious capitalism, exploded. Nowhere in the art of the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall was the smile of the state power so fiercely confronted with the depressing reality of the system take-over as in Castorf’s theatre. “

So why was he replaced all of a sudden then?

The Buhne had become an international important platform for German Theatre under his direction. 

But all was playing in German language.

In 2015 the City of Berlin announced that Castorf would be replaced by Chris Dercon.

Click to see what the ending of an era provoked:

https://www.arte.tv/fr/videos/077015-000-A/adieu-castorf/

Belgian curator and museum director Chris Dercon never had been into theater, though he had an impressive cv in the arts.

That a museum curator should take over "the most legendary German-speaking theater" in the country caused quite a stir, to say the least!

The City decided nevertheless he was the one.

What were they thinking?

Dercon was about to make Berlin a more marketable destination for non-German-speaking tourists and the European creatives who have put down roots in trendy neighbourhoods like Neukölln, Friedrichshain and Mitte, the Volksbühne’s home.

Gentrification as excuse for making international art.

Or is it the other way around?

Dercon’s philosophy is that theatre has to cater both for “those who can think in German and those who can’t”.

He explains: “And there are many of those here. If you go to Neukölln and try to order a cappuccino in German, you might not get it.”

Scheisse.

Well, it was not going to be easy for him to make this international transformation of the Volksbuhne.

Critics feared an impending "event machine."

And Dercon forgot how the Buhne had become famous and significant for Berlin.

He forgot about the big group of fans, the Germans and Berlinners, who feared this gentrification and who at least wanted to keep the Volksbuhne more or less as it was.

The big question became:

Should Berlin's legendary Volksbühne theater cater to an international audience?

Its new director Chris Dercon thought so.

But critics worried that Berlin is losing a one-of-a-kind gem in the name of diversity.

Left-wing activists occupied the theater in September 2017.

From the Economist:

“DOCH KUNST”, or “Art after all”, read the blue banner tagged to the façade of the Volksbühne, a theatre in central Berlin. It was put up by a group of left-wing activists who occupied the building in late September. They want the theatre to be managed by a “collective”. The stunt was part of a wider protest against cultural policies which the occupiers believe favour “mass tourism” and gentrification at the expense of local artists and poorer residents.”

The protesters, who formed an artists’ collective called From Dust to Glitter, planned to occupy the building in east Berlin for three months while staging performances free of charge.

They held their first “assembly”, urging theatre lovers to show up in force and bring supplies such as toilet paper, printers and food and drink.

The appeal was so successful that police said no more supporters could be allowed in after the building reached its maximum capacity of 500 people.

With its protest action, the collective said it wanted to “send a message against the current politics” meaning the gentrification of Berlin.

And now April 2018, it is done.

Chris Dercon has stepped down.

What will become of the Volksbuhne now?

[kalachand97-blog]

New Post has been published on Globeinfrom

New Post has been published on https://globeinform.com/booze-investors-want-apps-gadgets-and-biotech/

Booze investors want apps, gadgets and biotech

Archaeological facts show human beings were making alcohol seeing that at least 7000 BC. We figured out wine greater than 6,000 years in the past. By the time the historical Egyptians entered the scene, brewers were making at the least 17 forms of beer.

Despite the fact that, it appears we aren’t executed innovating.

Booze-related startups, which usually account for a noticeable however not huge bite of task funding, endured to rack up investment within the past yr. A Crunchbase evaluation of the distance located that as a minimum dozen agencies with liquor-associated business fashions raised a round of $1 million or greater due to the fact the start of ultimate yr. Altogether, boozy groups raised more than $280 million in that duration.

If we had protected every craft brewery and microdistillery to raise capital, investment totals might be better. But the listing makes a specialty of businesses that raised angel, mission and, in a few cases, crowdfunded rounds. The majority of booze startups funded underneath those terms typically had a revolutionary generation or commercial enterprise version.

Where traders pay for the rounds

Choosing wine is a complex venture, developing a call for from drinkers and wineries alike for gear to fit a wine lover to the maximum appropriate bottle. Vivino, which operates a famous wine-rating app, established wine curation might be an appealing marketplace for traders. The agency, which claims extra than 22 million app users, closed on $25 million final 12 months. In a comparable vein, Wine Ring, a set of a rules-pushed app that matches drinkers with wines that meet their options, raised $three.Eighty-five million in angel funding last April.

Many people also want to get booze while not having to visit the shop, and startups are catering to them. The most important funding round for a liquor-associated business enterprise ultimate yr went to China-based Liquor Easy, a provider of 20-minute alcohol delivery service, which reportedly raised $61 million from Legend Capital. U.S.-based totally Drizly, meanwhile, these days closed on almost $17 million to make bigger a booze transport provider working in multiple cities. Meals shipping carriers also are edging into the gap, with Postmates trying to broaden its alcohol options.

There are also startups looking to follow advances in chemistry and biology to the art of wine creation. Ava Winery, a San Francisco-based totally startup that analyzes great wines at a molecular level and tries to chemically recreate the taste without grapes or fermentation, raised almost $three million in seed funding to make true on its promise. Biome Makers, which applies DNA sequencing to enable winemakers to identify microorganisms of their soil, grapes, and wines, closed on just over $2 million.

Booze-associated gadgetry was every other popular subject matter. Coravin, the developer of a tool for accessing a bottle of wine without pulling the cork, raised a $22.five million round in November, bringing general investment to greater than $60 million. The Burlington, Mass.-primarily based organization markets its $500 Coravin Device as a manner to enjoy a glass of wine without committing to the complete bottle. In craft beer-loving Seattle, in the meantime, PicoBrew, which sells an $800 brewing Device for making artisanal beer at home, closed on a $10.6 million Collection last spring.

If all these startups succeed in meeting their wildest expectancies, we might be searching for a future Wherein a synthetically engineered copy of a $10,000 bottle of wine is custom-decided on thru an app, added in a few minutes and uncorked, one glass at a time, for optimum consuming delight. The days, while humans have been satisfied going to the shop to buy a six-p.C., could start to look pretty primitive.

A way to Make a Mobile Phone App . The clever Telephone industry is booming. One in Individuals owns one and it is reputation is developing exponentially, as is the pill markets. Because the introduction of the iPad in 2010, Apple has bought over 25 million devices. Cellular gadgets have ended up critical elements of lives and are continuously in use for one of a kind obligations. There are differences in what they may be used for in wonderful components of the sector, in Japan browsing is greater, not unusual, while inside the United states of America humans tend to text greater and play loads of video games on them, but apps are equally popular global.

Software program applications have been firstly meant for productiveness, such as checking emails, the weather, GPS etc., but due to call for both their variety and the sort of functions rose, now there are about 500 000 apps to be had for iOS based totally devices alone. The maximum normally used structures are iOS (Apple), Blackberry, Android, Home windows, Amazon and Ovi (Nokia), these all have their very own specifically designed apps.

Because the introduction of packages, the web market has essentially changed. Having an enterprise on-line doesn’t just suggest that there is a website that can be promoted or determined through search engines like google. It’s far a huge advantage if a business or brand appears in equipment clients use on a daily basis.

Making an app

developing an app is distinctly simple and would not eat a lot of time or money either; after it has been sprung to lifestyles there may be a monthly fee that needs to be paid for website hosting, the rate of this could variety from about $10 to $100, but considering the charge of different varieties of advertisement, it can be known as a good deal. Apps for apple are probably the easiest to create, however Blackberry and Android are near at the back of.

Chillingo’s Most modern Zombie games Attack the App Store

Brace yourselves, zombie killers! You may subsequently do greater monster-smashing, zombie-bashing experience along with your reachable app gadgets after Chillingo unveiled its four Latest zombie-themed games. Test out what those games, particularly Monster Mayhem, Zombie Wonderland, Seasoned Zombie Football, and Zombie Escape, have in Keep for you.

MONSTER MAYHEM

As the keeper of the graveyard, Monster Mayhem challenges you to guard your castles from the undead that, when removed, drop coins which You can use to buy new guns, improve them, buy ammunition or even nukes which could eliminate all of the nasties in case the gate is in determined danger. Monster Mayhem is a fun-filled game, one that is addicting with creepy-lovable little zombies. Make sure to train your arms first earlier than shopping for this game because it’s the only way to win their assaults.

ZOMBIE WONDERLAND

Providing you with an appealing 3D residence with top-down perspectives, you will be playing as Chuck, a workaholic blue-collar guy who does duties in the sport before sunup: shield the Niceville residents in a residence by shooting zombies coming from all guidelines, and clean-up the monsters guts. In case you won’t crack at gunpoint and you discover mopping flooring is just as exciting as mopping zombies, then Zombie Wonderland is for you as It’s far a time-control sport with fast and furious undead.

Pro ZOMBIE Soccer

the game name itself marks it as one of the coolest zombie games in town. With a magical Football ball, you have to throw that perfect kick to break a large wave of zombies. Seasoned Zombie Soccer has interesting storyline with wonderfully designed gameplay that gives a completely unique, spanking new way of ripping the heads of the undead. If you’re into hardcore mode, a Crystal integration is brought to ensure that your rankings are recorded, plus you will get hold of craft achievements primarily based on your in sport overall performance.

ZOMBIE Getaway

A line-drawing zombie sport, Zombie Breakout offers a one-of-a-kind fashion of saving the humankind from the Attack of the mind-consuming monsters. You do not ought to manage the individual, however instead, the arena is beneath your manipulate, except the villains – zombies, of course. Your undertaking is to store as many humans as You may with the aid of line drawing them to the helicopters. every existence stored offers you rating But the panic right here is while the helicopters are already full, they fly away and you have to look forward to the following one to reach. right here you may need to perform a little zombie-bashing through the usage of bombs to explode zombies for the protection of the humans. Zombie Escape is set to be out this month, so maintain an eye on the App Keep for this, or you will omit this one-of-a-kind zombie game.

[viralhottopics]

Aung San Suu Kyi: Myanmar’s great hope fails to live up to expectations

A year after her party swept to power, the Nobel laureate faces questions over her leadership and silence on persecution

It was never meant to be this way.

The script called for the lead actor, a Nobel prize winner, to seize control of a country, bring peace where there was conflict and prosperity where there was poverty. A nation emerging from years of military dictatorship was to become a beacon of hope not only for its cowed population but also for much of a fractured and turbulent south-east Asia.

But like many political dramas especially over the past 12 months the script has not been followed by Myanmar and its de facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi.

Now, a year since one of the worlds most famous prisoners of conscience came to power in the specially created position of state counsellor, the talk is not of progress.

Instead, it is of drastically escalating ethnic conflicts that have simmered and sporadically exploded for decades; a new Rohingya Muslim insurgency that has prompted an army crackdown some say may amount to crimes against humanity; a rash of online defamation cases that have fostered a panic over freedom of speech; and a repressive legal framework that allowed the generals to jail so many still being in place. And all the while, Aung San Suu Kyi is accused of remaining mostly silent, doggedly avoiding the media.

Interviews by the Guardian with more than a dozen diplomats, analysts and current and former advisers reveal frustrations with a top-down government struggling to cope with immense challenges. Aung San Suu Kyis questionable leadership style, her inability or unwillingness to communicate a vision, and her reluctance to speak out against the persecution of minorities have raised the question of whether the popular narrative is misplaced.

And although some defend her, saying it takes time to right the wrongs of decades, others see a fundamental misunderstanding of the woman herself.

Many of the people who led the campaign [to free Aung San Suu Kyi] were more on the liberal side of the spectrum, one diplomat put it. I think shes closer to a Margaret Thatcher.

Its a stark contrast to the Aung San Suu Kyi who, during 15 years of house arrest at her lakeside villa on University Avenue in Yangon, stood on rickety tables and delivered speeches about human rights over the gate.

Aung San Suu Kyi in 2010, when she was freed from 15 years of house arrest. Photograph: STR/EPA

And she was electric, said David Mathieson, a longtime Myanmar researcher for Human Rights Watch who is now an independent consultant. She was funny. She was informative. She was principled And I think its lamentable that shes not doing the equivalent of that now.

Sole decision-maker

Five hours north by car from Yangon, Myanmars dystopian capital Naypyidaw stands surrounded by densely forested mountains.

It is here, in the so-called Abode of Kings supposedly built to insulate Myanmars generals from attack, amid a landscape of deserted 20-lane highways and grandiose hotels, that Aung Sun Suu Kyi lives her life in power.

The 71-year-old is a disciplined ruler. Her habit, established during imprisonment, is to wake before dawn and meditate in the house she shares with her pet dog and a small retinue of maids.

She has breakfast with an adviser, often Kyaw Tint Swe, a former ambassador who spent decades defending the juntas actions.

An aide, Win Htein, says Aung San Suu Kyi eats every little. The amount of food she is taking is like a kitten, he said. She doesnt eat carbohydrates. Fruit and vegetables. No pork, or mutton, or beef. Only fish.

Her few indulgences include a vast wardrobe of luxurious silk longyis and evening film viewings, musicals being her favourite. Win Htein recently gave her a copy of La La Land.

But mostly she works. And there is a lot of work.

As well as state counsellor a position created to get around the military-drafted constitution that bars her from the presidency she is foreign minister, minister of the presidents office and chair of numerous committees.Widely described as a micromanager, she pores over documents after hours. A source close to the attorney generals office says she asks to see a copy of every draft bill before it is submitted to parliament. Ministers routinely pass decisions upwards.

The problem is there are no policymakers in her cabinet, said Burmese political analyst Myat Ko.

People who know her say Aung San Suu Kyi inspires both devotion and fear. She is variously described as charming and charismatic, and sharp and authoritarian. She feels like a real leader, one diplomat said. Intelligent, quick-witted, quite funny. At the same time, he added: I would say that she has appeared to be very keen to be the sole decision-maker to have no chance of establishing rival power centres.

Echelons above her subordinates in stature, the state counsellor is often depicted as living in a bubble, surrounded by a cabal of advisers who are too nervous to convey hard truths. A Yangon-based analyst working on the peace process said bad news often does not reach her.

In meetings, she is dismissive, dictatorial in some cases, belittling, said a senior aid worker who, like many others interviewed for this story, insisted on anonymity because he works with the administration. The government, he said, has become so centralised, there is complete fear of her.

A bumpy transition

This is not the administration many hoped for when the National League for Democracy (NLD) took over the government last year following victory in the 2015 election. The circumstances of this seismic shift in Myanmar has admittedly been far from ideal for cohesive, effective government. The army has retained control over key ministries as well as the security forces. But the election and transfer of power from the previous military-backed government were smooth.

Aung San Suu Kyi leads her party into Myanmar parliament

Most transitions end badly: the Arab spring and many other examples, said Richard Horsey, a Yangon-based political analyst. At the same time, transitions are always bumpy and I think Myanmar is going through a particularly bumpy moment in its transition.

Before those bumps, the first few months brought good news for the new administration. Aung San Suu Kyi released scores of political prisoners. She announced the creation of a Kofi Annan-led advisory commission on Rakhine state, where the minority Rohingya Muslim community has been persecuted for decades. Major peace talks were held in August with armed groups. By mid-September, the US pledged to lift all sanctions.

But cracks were there from the start. The announcement of her cabinet was met with ridicule when it emerged several of her new ministers had phoney degrees.

Aung San Suu Kyi did not have much choice. The only people with experience in government were from the previous regime. But she is said to have a small network and is slow to trust people, a legacy of her house arrest and persecution.

Obsession with party loyalty soon became a theme. NLD legislators were told not to speak to the media in the run-up to the election and then were ordered not to raise tough questions in parliament.

The silence held through October, as a fresh crisis unfolded in Rakhine state, and November, when four ethnic armed groups formed a new alliance in the north.

Peace was Aung San Suu Kyis priority, she said before taking office. But conflict has escalated to unprecedented levels in Shan and Kachin states, with tens of thousands of refugees driven over the border into China.

As a Bamar Buddhist, Aung San Suu Kyi hails from the dominant ethnic group. The Lady, as she is lovingly referred to across the country, built a following across Myanmars fractured ethnicities by taking trips to the border regions since 1989, often wearing local dress.

But ethnic leaders have recently questioned the extent of her sympathies with minorities. Her government has put out statements condemning abuses by ethnic armed groups, ignoring aggressions from the military. In one case it labelled a major ethnic organisation a terrorist outfit. The peace process analyst said she has one strategy: to have good relationships with the Tatmadaw [army].

Aung San Suu Kyis squeaky-clean image had already begun to blur in 2012, when she did not speak out after a surge in sectarian violence that led to the deaths of hundreds of people, mostly Rohingya Muslims, in Rakhine state.In an apparent concession to domestic racist factions, her party blocked Muslims from running for parliament in 2015.

Many people put her ruthlessness down to political expedience and fear of an unpredictable military. Win Htein, her adviser, cited something she told him in 1988: She told me, since she decided to get involved with politics, she would change everything. Any criticism directed towards her, she wouldnt care.

Potential for genocide

The biggest moral challenge of her leadership is posed by Rakhine state, a tinderbox of tension between minority Rohingya Muslims and majority Buddhists.

The northern part of the region exploded into violence on 9 October after nine police officers were killed on the western border with Bangladesh by Rohingya armed with swords and makeshift rifles.

Aung San Suu Kyi got the news in the middle of the night. The morning after, she convened a sombre meeting with government and police officials. She was not worried, [but] she was not calm. She was upset, Win Htein recalled.

Soldiers sealed off the remote corner of the country, barring media and aid access. Tens of thousands of Rohingya, whom many in Myanmar regard as illegal Bengali immigrants from Bangladesh, fled across the border to refugee camps. They have recounted mass killings and rape, accusations which the military denies. One woman who spoke to the Guardian said troops raped her, killed her husband and seven of her children. One child survived, she said.

Aung San Suu Kyis government has angrily dismissed many of the claims as fabrications. The words fake rape were plastered over her official Facebook page. A report by a government-appointed committee cited the presence of mosques and Bengalis to dismiss the accusations. It was a clumsy response. We have had conversations about messaging, said one diplomat.

Yet the foreign ministry last week said a UN resolution to send an independent international fact-finding mission to Myanmar would do more to inflame, rather than resolve, the issues at this time.

A south Asian envoy said three months passed before Aung San Suu Kyis deputy at the foreign ministry visited the Bangladesh embassy. According to the diplomat, they offered to repatriate some Rohingya but made no reference to hundreds of thousands of others living in Bangladeshi camps since fleeing previous waves of violence.

I can say that the government is only round about a year old but we havent seen a concrete indication towards really addressing the situation as far as Rakhine state is concerned, the diplomat said. The Myanmar foreign ministry did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Shelters destroyed by fire at a camp for internally displaced Rohingya Muslims in Rakhine state. Photograph: Soe Zeya Tun/Reuters

And then a personal blow. In December, more than a dozen fellow Nobel laureates wrote an open letter to the UN security council warning of a tragedy amounting to ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. It cited the potential for genocide.

Not the change they promised

Few people who know her believe Aung San Suu Kyi is prejudiced, though they do say she is afraid of being painted as cosy with Muslims by powerful, radical Buddhist influencers.

I think she sees it sort of like older white guys in America: theyre not racists but they dont prioritise [race], said one diplomat.

But when, 10 months into her rule, one of her advisers, a prominent Muslim lawyer, was assassinated, her silence left many dumbfounded.

Ko Ni, a constitutional lawyer who helped create the state counsellor position, was shot dead on 29 January as he stood outside Yangon international airport, holding his grandson in his arms. For a month, Aung San Suu Kyi made no public comment. She did not even call the family.

It was only after she attended his memorial service at the end of February that she made her first public statement on the matter.

The immense authority retained by the military means the state counsellor has limited power over what happens in conflict areas. But even in sectors well within its purview, the government is seen to be falling short.

Foreign investment is set to plunge 30% for the year ending 31 March, according to a report in the regional business publication the Nikkei Asian Review. The downturn is attributed in part to a vague economic vision.

The NLDs parliamentary majority gives it the ability to amend and remove oppressive laws, including the notorious 66D clause in the telecommunications law that has been used to jail scores of people for Facebook posts critical of the government and army. But, instead, senior NLD officials began using it with an order to pursue some of the cases against critics coming from the highest levels of government.

By the start of 2017, at least 38 people had been charged with online defamation, some unrelated to the NLD, including two men who allegedly went on a drunken rant about Aung San Suu Kyi and one who called her puppet president, Htin Kyaw, an idiot.

Champa Patel, Amnesty Internationals regional director for south-east Asia and the Pacific, said: This is not the change the NLD promised to deliver during last years elections.

Crowds gather to hear Aung San Suu Kyi speak ahead of the 2015 Myanmar election result

Meanwhile, western diplomats continue to give Aung San Suu Kyi the benefit of the doubt. Few supported the establishment of a UN-backed commission of inquiry the highest level of probe on the Rohingya crisis.

Theres a belief by some important actors that we just need to support her to steer the country, said the analyst who works on the peace process. Thats not been successful.

Misplaced expectations

Aung San Suu Kyis aides turned down requests for an interview. Win Htein, who also works as the NLD spokesperson, praised her silence as politically astute and said media interviews were too time-consuming.

Win Htein a man in his mid-70s who sleeps with an oxygen tank has a reputation as the party disciplinarian.

Speaking at his home, a military-style dormitory for MPs in Naypyidaw, he added: Please tell those who are disappointed in Daw Aung San Suu Kyi or in us just [to] look at the history More than 27 years we have struggled. Through real hardship. So this point is too early. They have too high expectations.

So far, the government has successfully clamped down on corruption and fostered a climate of free speech, he said, adding that there is an argument for both sides for the 66D clause. He said claims that Aung San Suu Kyi was the sole decision-maker in her cabinet were rubbish.

Governance, he said, has meant constant negotiation with the army. Members of the military-backed Union Solidarity and Development party have told him they plan to challenge Aung San Suu Kyis state counsellorship as unconstitutional.

Win Hteins views on the Rohingya reflect common prejudices in Myanmar. He said the Muslim lobby exaggerates the plight of the group, even though 120,000 have been confined to camps in Rakhine state since 2012. He said the illegal immigrants are flowing into our country like a stream since many decades ago and that Islamic practices are incompatible with Buddhist beliefs.

Win Htein cannot speak for Aung San Suu Kyi. But it seemed pertinent to ask if he thought she might have private sympathy for the Rohingya.

He paused and then said: No.

Read more: http://ift.tt/2np65ql

from Aung San Suu Kyi: Myanmar’s great hope fails to live up to expectations

[nofomoartworld]

Blimey! This Exhibit on England's Influence on Culture ISN'T About London

Raf Simons AW 2003 Image courtesy of Raf Simons

With its idyllic pastures, coastal views, and post-industrial factory towns and cities like Leeds, Liverpool, and Manchester, Northern England has historically provided major inspirations for fashion, editorial photography, and even music. In a new exhibition at Open Eye Gallery, North: Identity, Photography, Fashion, the region’s influence on global fashion, street style, and popular culture gets deconstructed. Co-curated by SHOWstudio’s Editor-at-Large Lou Stoppard and fashion critic and theorist Adam Murray, North uses video, installation, photography and fashion by artists and designers including video art pioneer Mark Leckey, master fashion photographer Nick Knight, and iconoclasic creative designer Virgil Abloh to demystify the North Country.

“In 2008 I noticed that fashion editorials were explicitly referencing Northern England, coinciding with the height of model Agyness Deyn,” explains Murray to The Creators Project. “I’ve been based in the North West for 15 years and my practice and research is rooted in exploring the region in relation to photography and fashion,” adds Murray, who created the zine Preston is my Paris as an exploration of the English city’s culture. “In many ways, an exhibition on this topic is long overdue,” enthuses Stoppard. “The North has had an incredible cultural output. Just think of the global reach of the Madchester music scene, the graphics of Peter Saville, music by bands like Joy Division, The Beatles, and New Order, or the acclaim around designers, artists and image-makers who hail from the North, such as Gareth Pugh, Stephen Jones, Christopher Shannon, Mark Leckey,” explains Stoppard of the many influencers on display in North.

Jason Evans, Untitled, Manchester, 1997

The art, fashion and photography on view speaks loosely to a recurring influence the region has had on art and shaping ideas about identity—masculinity, music, domesticity, sportswear, certain landscapes and backdrops—though editorial representation. The featured street style photography and portraits by artists Brett Dee, Jamie Hawkesworth, Alasdair McLellan, and Jason Evans speak to the dawning of imaging, what Stoppard calls, “causal culture” in fashion. The influence is seen, for instance, on the runway, in Raf Simons AW 2003 “Closer” menswear collection (top). The parkas made in collaboration with the Manchester born, graphic designer Peter Saville, bare a northern street aesthetic. The Northern tradition is also on display in Simons acolyte, Virgil Abloh’s contemporary label Off-White.

Installation View: North. Identity, Photography, Fashion. Open Eye Gallery, 2017. Image by Adam Murray

“In the exhibition Lou and I have identified some iconic figures and imagery, but what the exhibition hopefully communicates is that it is groups of people that are the real influencers--sports fans, clubbers and workers,” explains Murray. “As a mass these groups are more influential than any single person could ever be.” Stoppard says, “[With] the focus on sportswear in men’s fashion today, a lot of the references that designers are currently obsessed with relate to Northern culture. But as Adam says, the influence is much broader and diverse than that,” she notes. “I think some of it relates to formative experience. So many of today’s most acclaimed creatives were teens when say, the Manchester scene was exploding.” She says, “Things that shape you when you’re young never leave you.”

Installation View: North. Identity, Photography, Fashion. Open Eye Gallery, 2017. Image by Adam Murray

The exhibition also features an installation of the interiors of a home traditionally found up north. The domestic scene speaks to the spirituality and working class nature of the subcultures that have left their marks on visual culture. The inventiveness of Northern England's subcultures speak to the lack of representation the community once endured in the mainstream—it's as if the region created its own languages for style in order to better articulate the peculiarities of its lived experience. Northern culture draws parallels to the ways in which hip-hop continues to influence fashion, pop culture, and representation nearly five decades since its birth in the working class neighborhoods of 1970s Bronx.

Stephen McCoy, From the series Skelmersdale, 1984

“The North of England has been influential internationally for centuries. It wouldn’t be going too far in saying that the Industrial Revolution changed the world, much of which originated in the North.  The role of the towns and cities in this has clearly changed, but the influence is inherent,” explains Murray. “Manufacturing and engineering may have shifted, but it has been replaced by cultural movements that are likely to remain influential for many decades to come.” For Stoppard, the exhibition feels more timely: "There’s a focus on regional divides, splits in ideas and lifestyle,” she says. “We conceived the exhibition idea long before Brexit but that has increased our drive to too look beyond the capital. You realize how huge areas of the UK can be overlooked and ‘othered.’”

North: Identity, Photography, Fashion continues through March 19 at One Eye Gallery. Click here for more information.

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