What a great band name! I was curious as to whether these guys could live up to their moniker, but thankfully their uber-lo-fi psyche-folk sound is every bit as good as their name would suggest. In fact they have a name for their sound too, they have lovingly christened it “shitgaze.” I think that name is a bit misleading though—to me their sound conjures up images of Neil Young smoking crack instead of weed, and burning out from too much Nintendo.
Psychedelic Horseshit is comprised of Matt Whitehurst and Rich Johnston. Coming from the jam band scene of Columbus, Ohio, they have released numerous CD-rs in the past, as well as official releases on the Siltbreeze and Woodsist labels. They’ve just been picked up by the UK’s FatCat (home of Animal Collective) and their next full length, entitled Laced, will be with us on the 16th of May. You can listen to (and pre-order) the album on the Fat Cat website.
In the run up to the album release the band are running a campaign called “Shitty Sundays” where every Sunday, from now til mid-May. they will be giving away a group of tracks as a free download. The first zip file (available here) contains a bizarre “DJ mix” of the album’s title track “Laced” and a couple of shorter psyche-friendly skits. Yes, this is quite odd music, but if you like your country and folk with a twist, or if you just like odd music (period) then this band is definitely worth checking out. Purely in the interest of research, here is some more Psychedelic Horseshit:
The US and EU have spoken out over the detention of artist and activist Ai Weiwei, in China. Police detained the 53-year-old at Beijing Airpport, on Sunday morning, as he was going through immigration. No one has been able to contact Ai Weiwei since.
It has also been reported that 8 of his studio workers were arrested at the artist’s studio in the north-west Beijing. They were questioned for several hours and then released. According to Art Lyst:
The police visited the studio several times last week in an attempt to intimidate the artist and his supporters.Dozens of police officers also raided the hotel rooms of supporters of Tan Zuore on Wednesday morning in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province. They were there to testify on behalf of Tan Zuore a well-known writer and human-rights advocate on trial, charged with subversion. The group had also been planning an event, in June to commemorate the anniversary of the massacre of civilians by government forces, during the Tiananmen Square protests.
Mark Toner of the US State Department called for the artist’s immediate release, and added, “We obviously continue to be deeply concerned by the trend of forced disappearances, extralegal detentions, arrests and convictions of human rights activists for exercising their internationally recognised human right for freedom of expression.”
Britain’s Foreign Secretary, William Hague said, “I call on the Chinese government to urgently clarify Ai’s situation and wellbeing, and hope he will be released immediately.”
He also said, “The development of independent civil society and application of human rights under the rule of law are essential prerequisites for China’s long-term prosperity and stability.”
The Guardian reports that the EU delegation to China is concerned by the increasing use of arbitrary detention against human rights defenders, lawyers and activists:
Citing Ai’s case, it added: “We call on the Chinese authorities to refrain from using arbitrary detention under any circumstances.”
France and Germany earlier appealed for the artist’s release. “Ai Weiwei being taken away is not surprising to us; we just didn’t think it would happen now. I don’t think he had expected that either ... Let’s hope for the best,” said Pu Zhiqiang, a human rights lawyer.
Pu said he had agreed to represent the artist if anything happened to him, but added that he had not been able to discuss the issue with Ai’s family yet. “The police had not given any kind of notice to the family – we can’t start the procedures. Even if they detain some kind of street thug, they have to give a notice within certain time, but for Ai Weiwei there is no information,” he added.
Ai has repeatedly clashed with authorities over his outspoken criticism. Friends are particularly alarmed by the length of his detention and the scope and co-ordination of the police operation. Officers have removed dozens of items, including documents and computers, from the artist’s studio.
His wife, Lu Qing, told Reuters: “This time it’s extremely serious. They searched his studio and took disks and hard drives and all kinds of stuff, but the police haven’t told us where he is or what they’re after. There’s no information about him.”
Liu Xiaoyuan, a human rights lawyer, told Reuters: “I hope he doesn’t have to face trial or be jailed,” he said. “But sometimes the things you don’t wish to happen could happen.”
Weiwei was due to visit London for an exhibition at the Lisson Gallery next month, a spokesperson for the gallery said: “We are dismayed by developments that again threaten Weiwei’s right to speak freely as an artist and hope that he will be released immediately.”
However, Ai Weiwei is not the only Chinese artist to have been detained, as the Guardian reports:
The Chinese Human Rights Defenders (CHRD) network said four artists from Beijing were detained on 24 March after a performance art event in the Chinese capital where some pieces touched on the crackdown and the “jasmine revolution”. An anonymous appeal for protests akin to the Middle East uprisings, which was posted on an overseas website, appears to have sparked the campaign against critics.
Artists Huang Xiang, Zhui Hun and Cheng Li were criminally detained for “causing a disturbance” by officers from Songzhuang police station and Guo Gai was also taken away, probably because he had taken pictures during the exhibition, CHRD said.
No one could be reached for comment at the Taihu detention centre, where the four are reportedly held. An employee at Songzhuang police station said: “I don’t know about the situation,” then added: “Actually, it is not convenient to talk about it.”
CHRD, which has been keeping a tally of the number of detentions, says in total about a dozen people have disappeared and 26 criminally detained in the latest sweep, with five released on bail. Another three have been formally arrested and one has been sent to re-education through labour.
Asked about concerns for the whereabouts and safety of those reported missing, the foreign ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, told a regular press briefing last week: “China’s judicial authorities work independently. China, as a country under the rule of law, protects its citizens’ basic rights and freedoms – including freedom of expression – but citizens while exercising their rights have an obligation to abide by the law and should not bring harm to the public interest.”
Bebop jazzmen Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter are greeting each other with
“Bell man! where have you been?”
Dizzy Gillespie and Benny Carter demonstrate the art of the bebop greeting as featured in Life magazine, October 11, 1948.
The bebop greeting is an esoteric jazz tradition going back to the bop dens of ancient Egypt (home of the Pharaoh of Sanders). Initiates have passed these bebop handshakes, mudras and mantras down over the centuries and they were a highly kept secret until revealed in the mid-twentieth century by unscrupulous jazzbos who clearly had no understanding of the old ways. The bebop greetings Benny and Dizzy are demonstrating in these photos are not authentic bebop ritual. If they were, both men would be subject to immediate elimination by the society of jazzassassins, a ninja-like organization originated by Rahsaan Roland Kirk and formerly known as the saxassassinators.
Dizzy and Benny are giving the shout “Eel-ya-da” which sounds like
bebop triplet notes.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker just can’t get a break. Only in office a few months, already he seems to posses a bottomless pit of sleazy, stupid things that he’s done that are making it, you might say, a little hot for him.
On the eve of his buddy Judge David Prosser getting his ass kicked all over the electoral map, word has leaked out of a new scandal that’s taking shape in Madison: It seems that the ne’r do well. loser drunkard progeny of one of Walker’s biggest donors, Jerry Deshane, was given a plum state job.
Just in his mid-20s, Brian Deschane has no college degree, very little management experience and two drunken-driving convictions.
Yet he has landed an $81,500-per-year job in Gov. Scott Walker’s administration overseeing environmental and regulatory matters and dozens of employees at the Department of Commerce. Even though Walker says the state is broke and public employees are overpaid, Deschane already has earned a promotion and a 26% pay raise in just two months with the state.
How did Deschane score his plum assignment with the Walker team?
It’s all in the family.
This is what happens when you vote for Republicans…
Can you imagine being a high school teacher worried about having your benefits cut or losing your job and hearing about some idiot rich kid with TWO DUIs getting a job at the taxpayer tit for over $80k a year and getting a fucking 16% raise in just eight weeks? Rep. Brett Hulsey, a Democrat from Madison said of party boy Deschane: “It doesn’t look like he’s ever had a real job.”
No, but he’s got a real rich daddy... Did he even have to write a resume or fill out a job application? I kinda doubt it, don’t you?
And in related news, a second WI Republican, Sen. Randy Hopper is likely going to face a recall election. You may recall Hopper as the fellow who left his wife for someone half his age who also got a government job well above the standard pay scale. Wisconsin Democrats and labor supporters have previously collected 145% of the necessary signatures needed to recall another Republican senator, Dan Kapanke. I don’t think either of these gentlemen will see out the end of the summer in their current offices. Nor will their buddy Scott Walker be in any position to give them sweetheart jobs when the voters sack them, because those days are over. Walker’s being watched for ANY slip up at this point and although for sure he’s DUMB, he’s not so dumb that he can’t read the writing on the wall. (Can you imagine what it must feel like to be Scott Walker? What a god-damned buffoon!)
This is getting sooooo gooood. I can’t wait for tomorrow’s vote in Wisconsin. Republican schadenfreude? Count me in, I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve…
Not content to simply um… improvise dubious (and easily verified) “facts” about American history, a few weeks ago, MN Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann also made up shit about her own family tree in an effort to appear “more Iowan” to voters in the state where she was born. Chris Rodda, author of Liars for Jesus writes at Op Ed News:
[At] the Rediscover God in America conference in Iowa, Michele Bachmann, like the other potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates who spoke at this conference, lavished praise on their fellow speaker, Christian nationalist pseudo-historian David Barton. Bachmann also revealed that her involvement in the history revisionism game goes back even further than her association with Barton. As a student at Oral Roberts University, she met John Eidsmoe, and worked as a research assistant on his 1987 book, Christianity and the Constitution. Eidsmoe is another Christian nationalist history revisionist, whose Christianity and the Constitution book predates the first edition of Barton’s book The Myth of Separation by a year. In fact, some of Barton’s lies are adaptations of Eidsmoe’s lies and half-truths, a number of which are debunked in my book. But I had no idea that Bachmann had been involved with Eidsmoe or his book until she talked about it at the Rediscover God in America conference, or that it was Eidsmoe who introduced her to Barton’s material.
But Bachmann’s admiration of history revisionists wasn’t the thing that really caught my attention in her speech at the conference. It was her detailed account of her family history, aimed at emphasizing her Iowa roots to this audience of Iowans. It was when Bachmann said she was a 7th generation Iowan, descended from Norwegians who immigrated to Iowa in the 1850s, that I started paying attention, simply because it would be mathematically impossible for a woman in her mid-fifties to be the 7th generation descended from people who immigrated in the 1850s unless each of their direct ancestors from every generation had had a child when they were still a child themselves. After catching this one obvious lie, I just couldn’t resist doing a little fact checking on the rest of Bachmann’s story. What I found was that Bachmann’s version of her family’s history was as much a work of fiction as anything found in one of David Barton’s books. She wants the people of Iowa to see her as one of them, so she simply changed her family history.
That’s right she just made it all up. Facts? She don’t need no stinking facts! She’s Michele Bachmann, ain’t she?
This woman is stupid and shameless, a winning combination in Republican presidential primaries. The people would cast a vote for this idiot will never even hear about this anyway, so what does she have to lose with a lil’ white lie?
Thanks to the lovely rose petal known as “Lady” for setting the Women’s Movement back 100 years with her song “Yankin’.” YouTuber Ninjaturtleadeel nails it with:
“H Caiiint een Lahhh Ah Fuk BettA WheN Ahm Drankin” she’s referring to the struggles she faces day to day that this capitalistic society puts her through and how sex and drinking is her only reliable outlet to remind her of the freedom and comforts she once had while growing up…and she’s embarking on something completely new by expressing her confidence in her vaginal muscle skills. We’re witnessing the birth of the new Mother Teresa.
Completely over the top, utterly ridiculous video for the 2011 National Day of Prayer. Like what is the message here supposed to be? That Christians can somehow stave off the Apocalypse and natural disasters by praying? I thought the end of the world and Jesus coming back were the whole point? Now I’m confused.
And what’s with the shitty bombastic music? Was “Carmina Burana” too expensive to license so they went for a cheapo knock-off instead? Note that the White House (where “that Obama” lives) and San Francisco (an American stand-in for Sodom and Gomorrah perhaps) have the ominous lightning flashes but the little church (which I presume resides somewhere in Sarah Palin’s “real America”) is bathed in a cone of holy light… Lame, but these things always are… Can’t these fucking assholes hurry up and be raptured already?
The funny part (if there is one) about all of the Christian apocalyptic madness of the current age is to consider how silly and dated this sort of superstitious insanity is going to look 100 years from now. Mark my words, after all of us are dead, there will be an ironic cult for Kirk Cameron movies and the Left Behind books. They’ll be collectibles from a less enlightened time for hipsters in the 22nd century.
As more and more McDonald’s are staying open 24-hours a day—apparently there is insatiable, around the clock mania for processed meat products marketed by clowns—the fast food chain is hiring for 50,000 full and part time jobs, an average of between three and four positions for each location. As USA Today, ostensibly with a straight face and sans any irony whatsoever, reports:
Turnover slowed the past few years because of the weak economy, the company says. McDonald’s sees this event as an opportunity to attract employees in a tough job market.
It is also trying to shed the negative connotation of employment at the fast-food chain, once dubbed “McJobs.” McDonald’s says about half of the company’s franchise owners and more than 75% of its managers started in entry-level jobs at McDonald’s.
“A McJob is one with career growth and endless possibilities,” the company said.
The article reports that McDonald’s held a hiring event in their Western region location in 2010. Over 60,000 people applied for 13,000 jobs. I guess when it’s all that stands between you, your family and starvation, a fucking McJob must look pretty damn good. Funny how that works…
Interested parties can apply online or in person at a McDonald’s restaurants on April 19.
DV8 Physical Theater was formed in 1986 by dancer and choreographer, Lloyd Newson. Over the past twenty-five years, DV8 has produced 16 internationally successful dance pieces and 4 award-winning films for television.
From the start Newson’s work has been controversial. In 1990, the Sunday Mirror denounced DV8’s television production, Dead Dreams of Monochrome Men, a piece inspired by the career of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, as a “Gay Sex Orgy on TV”. Such “rabid headlines” gave the program an unexpected boost. It also revealed Newson’s considerable intelligence at work behind DV8’s provocative performances. As he explained in an interview with Article 19
One of the things about DV8’s work is it is about subject matter, for a lot of people who go and see dance it is not about anything and DV8 is about something. I think the other thing that is important is the notion of humour and pathos, of tragedy, of multiple emotions and responses to my work –I’ve been so tired over the years of watching so much dance on one level, it may be very pretty, but it just goes on and on, it’s pretty nice, pretty much the same and pretty dull really, a lot of it.
So my big concern is to try and present images through movement and to talk about the whole range of social and psychological situations.
In 2004, DV8 made The Cost of Living, for Channel 4 television. Based on a longer performance piece, The Cost of LIving was devised by Newson and the dancers, who range from “extremely able-bodied to a man with no legs,” David Toole whose incredible performance challenges our perceptions about ability and adds to the film’s “critique of society’s obsession with image.” As Newson explained in 2004:
The Cost of Living is very much about those people who don’t fulfill the market value, in the sense of playing on the words the cost of living in terms of the financial issue and looking at what happens through experience as you live do you lose your naiveté? As you live do you lose a lot? Or does experience assist you?
What I’m interested in [with] this piece is: do you become cynical and bitter as the cost of living, or do you not? So we’ve got lots of different characters; those who play the more embittered ones, we have the notion of Stepford [Wives] the idea that it’s important for all of us to join the club, whether it be dressing well, being attractive, being successful, and if we can’t be really successful financially or in terms of fame or celebrity, at least we can be normal.
But what happens to those people who don’t fit into any of those categories?
So there are lots of different parallels – dance is a beautiful parallel. So much of dance is about the youthful, beautiful, slender, able-bodied performers. Dance I think is a great form to talk about these issues. It’s a bit like a beauty contest, in fact we have a beauty contest or a physical contest, so underneath all the smiles and attractive bodies on front covers of magazines we want to know what else is going on; who has had the tucks, who is hiding their faults.
Some people can’t hide them as much as others, we have a disabled performer in the company, we have a very large, fat dancer, and on a very obvious visual level they look very different to us.
So what about those people on a psychological level who may be able to hide their physical imperfections, but [cannot hide] their psychological imperfections and why is it so important that we have this ‘Prozac face’? I used to refer to dance as being the Prozac of the art forms. So that is what the piece is about – it’s about those who aren’t perfect and who can’t pretend, those who don’t fit in because they don’t play the game.
There is also the notion throughout the piece about rules. We have a big LED board that has displays about certain rules. The whole set is made of what appears to be fake grass and the board reads like a sign in a park, or a traffic sign “keep off the grass”, also at times it tells the audience and the performers what to do. Do they obey those rules? They’re some of the ideas we’re playing with really, who sets the rules who follows the rules.
