The Secret History of the Vocoder

“Of all the World War II cryptology experts I interviewed,” Tompkins writes, “none was aware of the vocoder’s activities in the clubs, rinks, and parks of New York City … Of all the hip-hop civilians I interviewed, none was aware of the vocoder’s service in any war...”

Bolano at Isola di Rifiuti

"Hamlet and La Vita Nuova, in both works there’s a youthful breathing. For innocence, says the Englishman, read immaturity. On the screen there’s only laughter, silent laughter that startles the spectator as if he were hearing his own last gasps. “Anyone can die” means something different than “Anyone would die.” A callow breathing in which it’s still possible to discover wonder, play, perversion, purity. “Words are empty” . . . “If you put that gun away we might be able to negotiate” . . . On a average of three hours’ sleep a night the author writes these threats by the side of a pool at the beginning of the month of October. Innocence almost like the image of Lola Muriel that I’d like to destroy. (But you can’t destroy what you don’t possess.) An urge, at the cost of nervous collapse in cheap rooms, propels poetry toward something that detectives call perfection. Dead-end street. A basement whose only virtue is its cleanliness. And yet who has been here if not La Vita Nuova and Hamlet. “I write by the pool at the campground, it’s October, there are more and more flies now and fewer and fewer people; by the time we’re halfway through the month there’ll be no one left and the cleaning service will stop coming; the flies will take over until the end of the month, maybe...”

Must the 'Big Smoke' Always Get Its Way?

Karen Anderson, the mayor of Hudson's Hope, thinks that the decision-makers behind the latest push for the Site C Dam haven't fully considered the costs that they are asking the people in her community to bear. "We don't feel that we should be ruining our valley, and our part of the province, in order to sell energy to the United States," she said. "They take our oil, they take our gas, they take our power now, you know? We don't get anything back from it, really." Bruce Lantz, the mayor of Fort St. John, is more pragmatic about the political calculus informing the decision. "If they [Liberals] lost every vote in northeastern B.C. because of Site C, they'd lose 22,000 votes," he said in an interview with The Georgia Straight's Matthew Burroughs last year. "If you put a major project elsewhere in the province, you could lose that many votes in an eight-block radius. So this is kind of an area that is acceptable losses, maybe, in terms of votes. And, of course, the communities are split. And I think that the deep thinkers in Victoria have figured that this is a good way to go."

1970 Interview with Laura Nyro

“The pop music of the ‘50s communicated those times ... these times are smashing and a lot of truth is being sought out, because you can’t live without truth . . . you can’t live, you can only survive, and I feel that there is a renaissance about it all now...

"The world is going through a moral revolution and, sometimes I feel like a mirror in a storm—a mirror that’s smashed against the earth. I don’t read newspapers, but I know what’s going on.”

YouTube - Peggy Lee--Is That All There Is?

thanks WH for hipping me to APOLLO GHOSTS

An ode to the hard-scrabble city of Nanaimo, BC, Mount Benson divulges the dark secrets of this luckless Vancouver Island town, a demystification on par with revealing the Masonic Handshake. Is the song Wakesiah just a tribute to a street above a former coal mine or really about a former lover? How dangerous can it be to swim in Witchcraft Lake? Who are the Sons of Norway? Is this all actually a ploy to reveal why former eccentric mayor, Frank Ney, wore pirate suits and rode in bathtubs across the Strait of Georgia?

Man-eating squid off Nanaimo?

An outdoor magazine article that said a diver was killed by giant Humboldt squid is being questioned by the diving community, which says it could negatively harm Nanaimo’s dive tourism industry.

The article, titled ‘Attack of the Giant Squid’, appeared in the January-February edition of Western Sportsman.

The story focused on how dangerous the large sea creatures are and included a reference to a diver off Nanaimo being “attacked by several squid and dragged to his death.”

Local divers, including Mayor John Ruttan say it could hurt Nanaimo’s growing reputation as a diving destination...

Iraq slaughter NOT an aberration

The WikiLeaks video is not an indictment of the individual soldiers involved -- at least not primarily. Of course those who aren't accustomed to such sentiments are shocked by the callous and sadistic satisfaction those soldiers seem to take in slaughtering those whom they perceive as The Enemy (even when unarmed and crawling on the ground with mortal wounds), but this is what they're taught and trained and told to do. If you take even well-intentioned, young soldiers and stick them in the middle of a dangerous war zone for years and train them to think and act this way, this will inevitably be the result. The video is an indicment of the U.S. government and the war policies it pursues...

a happy 80th to composer • Robert Ashley • who has a new collection of writings/scores out...

PERFECT LIVES (excerpts)

out this month: Danny Trejo in Machete