English Russia has a DIY recipe for the “Green Goddess.” Apparently it’s the real deal—not the absinthe-in-name-only stuff you can buy at a liquor store. I remember drinking some absinthe once, but to be honest I didn’t experience the decadent Baudelaire-style head trip I was promised. Maybe it was because I wasn’t drinking this hooch?
Stage One. Infusion.
Ingredients: Alcohol 80% and herbs (the most common bought in the chemist’s, in grams per 1 liter of alcohol):
Herbs:
Wormwood: 100 g
Fennel (fruit): 50 g
Anise: 50 g
Mint: 15 g
Melissa: 8 g
Chamomile: 3 g
Cumin: 10 g
Angelica: 10 g
It would be nice to add 5-10 g of hyssop, but it is difficult to find. The substance should be kept in a dark place at room temperature for 7-15 days. You can certainly speed up the process, infusing the substance for 24 hours at a temperature of 40 C, but this will worsen the result.
The craft of making absinthe ain’t easy, there are a few more steps and ingredients involved—you can follow all of ‘em here.
I guess when you’ve reached 70-years-old, and certain things come out about your past, you can brush if off a lot easier when the events in question have a vintage of 40+ years. Yesterday, the BBC reported that a previously unheard interview with Bob Dylan reveals that he was once addicted to heroin.
After a concert late one Saturday night in March 1966 Bob Dylan, while on tour in the US, boarded his private plane in Lincoln, Nebraska bound for Denver with his friend Robert Shelton.
Over the next two hours Shelton taped an interview with Dylan which he later described as a “kaleidoscopic monologue”.
At one point, the singer, who turns 70 this week, admits he had been addicted to heroin in the early 1960s.
“I kicked a heroin habit in New York City,” he confesses. “I got very, very strung out for a while, I mean really, very strung out. And I kicked the habit. I had about a $25-a-day habit and I kicked it.”
There have been rumours that Dylan was involved with heroin. But Mick Brown, a writer on The Daily Telegraph who has interviewed Dylan, says he has never heard the singer confirm the speculation.
“It’s extraordinary that he should be talking about it quite so candidly,” he remarks.
Elsewhere on the tapes, Dylan reveals he contemplated suicide after people started calling him a genius.
“Death to me is nothing… death to me means nothing as long as I can die fast. Many times I’ve known I could have been able to die fast, and I could have easily gone over and done it.”
“I’ll admit to having this suicidal thing… but I came through this time,” he says.
Shelton describes Dylan as “twisting restlessly” during the interview - animated at times, despondent at others.
Dylan, who turns 70 today also says on the tapes, regarding his songwriting talents:
“I take it less seriously than anybody. “I know that it’s not going to help me into heaven one little bit, man. It’s not going to get me out of the fiery furnace. It’s certainly not going to extend my life any and it’s not going to make me happy. You can’t be happy by doing something groovy.”
Robert Shelton’s Dylan biography, No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan, first came out in 1986 and was the result of twenty years of work. The historic tapes were discovered during research for a new revised and updated edition.
Dangerous Minds pal Ned Raggett has been bravely looking into the career and ultimate downfall of You Light Up My Life composer Joseph Brooks who committed suicide this past weekend.
Read the New York Magazine article for the full deal about why this man will not go mourned by most of humanity. But if you want a picture of deeply hilarious delusion-in-action, enjoy this collection of bits from his WTF 1978 romantic melodrama If Ever I See You Again (With Jimmy Breslin and George Plimpton, who aren’t in this selection of scenes—Shelley Hack, sadly, is immortalized forever.)
It’s been thirteen turbulent years since Tony Kaye’s controversial first feature American History X nearly finished his career. Now the man who once described himself as “the greatest English director since Hitchcock,” is continuing to confound, surprise and impress with his latest film, the powerful and uncompromising Detachment, starring Adrien Brody, Marcia Gay Harden, Christina Hendricks, Lucy Liu, James Caan, Blythe Danner, Tim Blake Nelson and William Petersen.
three weeks in the lives of several high school teachers, administrators and students as seen through the eyes of a substitute teacher.
It will hopefully be on national release soon.
When not making his excellent films and documentaries, or painting and campaiging, the bearded, Biblical-looking Kaye has been recording and gigging at various venues in LA and NY over the past few years with his own distinct and original songs, of which these are just a selection.
Poetry of the Western World Read By Celebrities and Collected by Clare Ann Matz is a fab selection of poems read by Ralf Zotigh, Wim Wenders, Dave Stewart, Billy Preston, Ian Astbury, Dario Fò, Robbie Robertson, Allen Ginsberg and Solveigh Domartain.
The video starts with Ralf Zotigh reading the Ancient Native American fable - “Today is a Good Day”:
This is followed by Wenders reading from Walt Whitman’s Inscriptions (“To A Certain Cantatrice”). Dave Stewart, erstwhile of the Eurhythmics, reads William Blake’s “Sick Rose”, then, the late Billy Preston (first silently, then with soundtrack) reads Dylan Thomas. Ian Astbury, of The Cult (and clearly no fan of Dylan Thomas!) also reads, from the same poem, “Should Lanterns Shine”. Dario Fo, Nobel-prize-winning playwright and theater-director, reads (in Italian) Andre Breton’s “Fata Morgana”. Robbie Robertson, Bob Dylan’s confrere, comes in next, reading a selection from Allen’s “Song”” (“Allen wrote this. huh?”), and has some difficulty following the syntax (“an the soul comes..”? “and the soul comes..”?). Allen himself follows (with the aforementioned reading of “Father Death Blues”). Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire “angel”, actress Solveigh Domartain, concludes the tape, returning once more to Allen’s poem - “the weight of the world is…love”.
Heard the one about the footballer, the actor, English privacy laws and Twitter? Not if you live in the UK you haven’t—or so the British legal system would like you to think. However the reality is very, very different. Things are kicking off here at the moment over the distribution of certain bits of information (which cannot be mentioned) concerning certain individuals (who cannot be named) on the Internet (where all this info is being made public regardless).
In the UK the courts can issue a thing called an “injunction.” This is in effect a gagging order that stops the press from reporting on a particular story or court case, though the injunction itself can still be reported on. It can be taken one step further with the imposition of a “super-injunction,” in which the media can not even report on the issuing of the original injunction. Recently a few new Twitter accounts have popped up that claim to spill the beans and name the names in a number of super-injunctions. Although oldstream media have been forced to remain silent on these stories, the juicy details have spread like wildfire across the Internet. You can have a look for yourself, though the names will probably not mean much to a non-Brit audience—the most popular of the Twitter accounts are InjunctionSuper, SuperInjunction, and SuperInjBuster.
Some of these claims leaking through these accounts are believed to be false, but some not. If they are true, this brings English privacy laws into massive disarray, and makes injunctions pretty useless at stopping information from reaching the public. And with the information now available, people are now voicing what many have suspected for years—that super injunctions are used not for the sake of justice but to protect the careers and public images of the rich and famous by gagging the press. Comments from senior members of the legal system only go to re-enforce the idea that they are badly out of touch with the public and the reality of social networking media. From the Telegraph interview with Lord Judge (yes, that is his name) last Friday:
“The internet had “by no means the same degree of intrusion into privacy as the story being emblazoned on the front pages of newspapers”, which “people trust more”, he said.”
But Internet access means that people in the UK can quickly and easily read about the injected stories in other countries’ media, begging the question, what’s the point of injunctions in this day and age? And so the British print media are fighting back, finding ways of getting around the court’s orders. Yesterday the Scottish Sunday Herald published the face of the footballer at the centre of the biggest super injunction row, Ryan Giggs, on its front page (injunction are apparently limited ot the English press). Giggs’ name was also mentioned in British Pariliament, meaning that that story can now be reported on in the English newspapers due to rules over “Parliamentary privilege”. MPs and the courts are now at loggerheads over whether injunctions should restrict Parilamentary privilege.
The major questions all of this brings to mind are: are we going to start seeing clampdowns on freedom of expression here on the Internet? Are new rules and measures going to be put in place to stop people from talking and writing about specific topics? Those topics may or may not be true, but should we be stopped from mentioning them? And just how exactly would these potential rules on the limiting of expression be enforced? The English courts have already issued the first ever injunction specifically for Facebook and Twitter but just how they are going to enforce these laws, in this age of WIkileaks and Anonymous, of proxies, of IP address blockers, of pay as you go dongles and multiple fake online personas, remains to be seen. Somehow I just don’t think it will be as simple as the lawyer Mark Stephens (interviewed in The Independent) believes:
“The person who has committed this contempt of court will be best advised to take their toothbrush because they will probably be going to Pentonville jail,” he said. “Their emails used to upload this information are being traced, I imagine, as we speak.”
The cat is out of the bag, as it were, or to use another mammalian metaphor, the horse has bolted. New information on the super injunction story (and the stories the super injunctions are trying to protect) is coming to light every day. To keep abreast of what’s going on you could keep tabs on the British news outlets I have linked to above (The Guardian, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Evening Standard) or ironically you might just be better off getting your info from a non-British source. Me, I’ll stick to reading the no-holds-barred Super Injunction Blog. Tough luck Mr Giggs.
Not exactly, but he might as well be talking about the so-called “Ryan plan” from beyond the grave…
The more things change, the more they… oh wait, nothing’s changed!
This video is as evergreen as it is brilliant, a “one size fits all” discourse of the futility of capitalism that lends itself to an infinite number of different blogging contexts. Today, it’s the “Ryan plan.”
