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Lost John Lennon interview surfaces: “You smash it and I’ll build around it.”
12.17.2009
10:54 pm
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An open letter in the underground press that accused the Beatles of going soft and selling out to the establishment, comparing John Lennon’s call for pacifism in “Revolution” to a BBC radio soap opera, and conferring superior revolutionary credentials on the Rolling Stones, so incensed the Beatle that he spent six hours 40 years ago giving an interview to a couple of college students offering a rebuttal that was finally published today in the pages of the New Statesman magazine.

In 1968, Maurice Hindle and a friend hitch-hiked to Surrey to meet Lennon, who picked them up personally at the train station in his Mini Cooper. Yoko Ono fed them homemade macrobiotic bread and jam. Lennon spoke nearly continuously for six hours.

He says “Revolution” was no more revolutionary than Mrs Dale’s Diary. So it mightn’t have been. But the point is to change your head - it’s no good knocking down a few old bloody Tories! What does he think he’s gonna change? The system’s what he says it is: a load of crap. But just smashing it up isn’t gonna do it.

Hindle writes “Lennon demanded Black Dwarf publish his response, which took [writer John] Hoyland to task for his “patronizing” tone, and ended with the defiant challenge: “You smash it—and I’ll build around it.”
 

 
The full interview is only available in the print edition of New Statesman magazine.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.17.2009
10:54 pm
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Christopher Mayhew Says
12.15.2009
07:35 pm
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Posted by Jason Louv
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12.15.2009
07:35 pm
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Yitzhak Ganon And The Angel Of Death
12.14.2009
05:03 pm
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And speaking of Germany trying to “transcend its gruesome past,” the New York Times relays the story of Yitzhak Ganon and his 65-year-long fear of doctors:

But when he became sick recently, his wife insisted that he visit one.  Stents were implanted to help his heart in a procedure made more risky because he was missing a kidney.  What happened to his other kidney explained his aversion to doctors, according to an account he gave Spiegel Online.

While held at the Auschwitz concentration camp, the 85-year-old Mr. Gannon told his doctors, he was the subject of an experiment by Joseph Mengele, the Nazi physician known as ?

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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12.14.2009
05:03 pm
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The Kings of Pastoral Portuguese Psych: Quarteto 1111
12.13.2009
10:20 pm
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Quarteto 1111 was a Portuguese progressive/psychedelic rock band founded in 1967 in Estoril. Singer/Keyboardist Jose Cid went on to be what I’ve seen described as the “Portuguese Elton John” though there’s no early warning of that here thankfully. Here are a couple of lovely, pastoral, weirdly produced tracks from their eponymous debut LP, a conceptual piece dealing with racism and emigration (or so they claim). Evidently the censorship-happy Salazar regime made sure it was pulled from shelves the very week it was released. Dickheads.

  
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This (unfortuntely truncated) black and white clip is for thier 1967 hit “El Rei D. Sebasti?ɬ

Posted by Brad Laner
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12.13.2009
10:20 pm
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Chicks and Vinyl
12.12.2009
10:16 pm
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Chicks and vinyl! Vinyl and chicks!

Lifelounge says, “May we present to you a gallery that is a homage to lovely ladies of the past caught mid turntable tease with vinyl in hand. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to get the timeless appeal of this subject. Enjoy.”
 
Chicks and Vinyl

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.12.2009
10:16 pm
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Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints
12.12.2009
07:04 pm
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Autonomedia’s 2010 calendar of Jubilee Saints is now available. The calendar tracks world history dates in anarchist and poetic resistance to Teh Machine. (Arthur mag’s blog regularly posts dates from the calendar, which help restore my sense of narrative on a regular basis.)

Autonomedia’s Jubilee Saints Calendar for 2010! Our 18th annual wall calendar, with artwork by James Koehnline, and text by the Autonomedia Collective.

Hundreds of radical cultural and political heroes are celebrated here, along with the animating ideas that continue to guide this project ?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.12.2009
07:04 pm
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The Rise and Fall of the Boombox
12.11.2009
02:01 pm
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A snippet from NPR’s “A Eulogy For The Boombox”:

Before there were iPods, or even CDs, and around the time cassettes let break dancers move the party to a cardboard dance floor on the sidewalk, there were boomboxes. It’s been 20 years since the devices disappeared from the streets. It’s high time to press rewind on this aspect of America’s musical history.

Back in the day, you could take your music with you and play it loud, even if people didn’t want to hear it. 150 decibels of power-packed bass blasted out on street corners from New York City to Topeka. Starting in the mid-‘70s, boomboxes were available everywhere, and they weren’t too expensive. Young inner-city kids lugged them around, and kids in the suburbs kept them in their cars.

They weren’t just portable tape players with the speakers built in. You could record off the radio, and most had double cassette decks, so if you were walking down the street and you heard something you liked, you could go up to the kid and ask to dub a copy.

They were called boomboxes, or ghetto blasters. But to most of the young kids in New York City, they were just a box.

 
Read more of A Eulogy For The Boombox by Frannie Kelley
 
(via Nerdcore)

Posted by Tara McGinley
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12.11.2009
02:01 pm
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Jukebox Hero: Jonesy’s Jukebox returns online
12.10.2009
10:14 pm
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When I moved to Los Angeles from New York in 1991, one of the first things I noticed right off the bat (besides the 99 Cents Only stores, the vast number of strip malls and the LA Weekly ads for butt cheek implants) was how great L.A. radio was. Notice I wrote was... as in past tense.

Cut to 2009 and the radio landscape in the City of Angels is getting kinda lame. If you’re not into the far right talk of Dr. Laura, the all reggaeton, all the time stations or Britney Spears, you’re pretty much out of luck these days. When Indie 103.1 morphed into the Latin format of El Gato earlier this year, it really felt like the final nail in the coffin for L.A. rock radio. High-profile rock DJs like Henry Rollins and Sex Pistol Steve Jones were cut adrift from their loyal listening audiences and there was sadness in the streets.

But now rock fans, rejoice, for Jonesy is back! Jonesy’s Jukebox is operational again, but this time on the Internet, streaming live for one hour a day on the www.iamrogue.com website run by producer Ryan Kavanaugh.

Now L.A.‘s finest DJ can spin for the rest of the world. I, for one, certainly will be listening.

Below: Young Mr. Jones and some of his mates swearing on live television in 1976:

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.10.2009
10:14 pm
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The Eye Idols of Tell Brak
12.09.2009
08:44 pm
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This creeps me the hell out. It’s an “eye idol” dug up in Nagar, Syria. It’s like a paleolithic Yip-Yip.

?

Posted by Jason Louv
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12.09.2009
08:44 pm
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Hitler’s Skull: Russia Weighs In
12.09.2009
06:35 pm
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The controversy over Hitler’s remains kicked up (again) last fall when American DNA analysis revealed a sliver of skull fragment to be actually that of a woman’s.  Yesterday, though, Russia’s chief archivist of the Federal Security Service (FSB) dismissed such a claim.  Along with the skull fragment, the fragment of jaw preserved in the Lubyanka—Russia’s secret police HQ—is all that truly remains of the F?ɬ

Posted by Bradley Novicoff
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12.09.2009
06:35 pm
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