Sunday, February 25, 2007

Same Stooges. Different World. Finer Wine.

Music

Same Stooges. Different World. Finer Wine.

Steve Forrest/Insight-Visual, for The New York Times

Iggy Pop at the All Tomorrow’s Parties music festival in Minehead, England.


Published: February 25, 2007

THERE are the Stooges, from Ann Arbor, Mich., accidental inventors of punk, in the summer of 1970, on nationwide television. And there’s Iggy Pop, their singer: bare torso and sausage-casing jeans, silver gloves, dog collar, chipped front tooth.

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Multimedia

Audio "1969" (mp3)
Audio "I Wanna Be Your Dog" (mp3)
Audio "No Fun" (mp3)
Audio "Down on the Street" (mp3)
Audio "TV Eye" (mp3)

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Forum: Popular Music

Steve Forrest/Insight-Visual, for The New York Times

Iggy Pop backstage at a music festival in Minehead, England, in December. His only vice nowadays? A few glasses of Bordeaux, he says.

The song is “TV Eye,” and they have gotten wickedly good at their primitive groove — as good as they will ever get. Iggy weaves in and out of the beat: one second borne by the music, one second abstracted from it. Suddenly he does a violent knock-kneed dance and slips into the audience, gone except for his wounded-animal noises.

“There goes Iggy, right into the crowd,” says the host of the special NBC program “Midsummer Rock.” It’s Jack Lescoulie, an announcer on the “Today” show, the Al Roker of his day. In his late 50s he looks like the anti-Stooge: professional, good-natured, well fed, well insured.

After a commercial break we see Iggy crawling on the stage. “Since we broke away for our message, Iggy has been in the crowd and out again three different times,” Mr. Lescoulie says. “They seem to be enjoying it, and so does he.” The camera centers on a scrum of teenagers looking downward. Iggy surfaces, hoists himself up so he’s standing on shoulders, and remains aloft, pointing forward like the prow of a ship. Next he’s scooping something out of a jar, wiping it on himself, flinging it around. “That’s peanut butter,” Mr. Lescoulie says, incredulous.

I’M going to be straight,” Iggy Pop said recently, talking about that film, which circulated for years in certain circles and is now of course available on YouTube. “I was more than a little high.”

He was often more than a little high. But these days Iggy Pop, a k a Jim Osterberg, is ferociously grounded. He swims and practices a form of tai chi, and his only vice, he says, is a few glasses of Bordeaux. Coming up on his 60th birthday, he bears signs of age: creased and ropy, he limps from cartilage lost in his right hip, and can’t hear well over ambient noise.

For the first time in 34 years, however, he and the members of his onetime band are putting out a new record: “The Weirdness,” which will be released by Virgin on March 6. (Careful historians will say 37 years: this is the version of the Stooges that made “Fun House,” around the time of the peanut butter concert — the brothers Ron and Scott Asheton on guitar and drums and Steve Mackay on tenor saxophone.)

In the intervening years they too have changed. As has the world around them.

Once upon a time Iggy and the Stooges defined themselves against the Lescoulies of the world: they were outrageous, truculent, elemental. But these days it seems there are more Iggys than Lescoulies. Everyone’s subversive, everyone’s perverse. What can the Stooges be, if not a band that defines itself against the rest of the world? What happens when they’re old and experienced, and punk attitudes, already in their third generation, have infiltrated so many corners of the culture? How do they climb back into that frame of mind?

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BREAKING up” doesn’t exist anymore. A band only has extended periods of downtime.

The Stooges’ downtime was a little more down than others. Ron Asheton used to say that Iggy had become too self-involved for the Stooges to play together again. Scott Asheton pursued Iggy at various points over the last 10 years, and the answer was always no. “I wasn’t going to go backwards,” Iggy explains now. “And I wasn’t going to do anything to what I thought was a great band.”

At some point, however, the incentives just became too powerful: prime gigs at the best rock festivals in the world, both the best-paid and the most creatively run.

Plus, what else was there to do? Scott Asheton, who lives in Florida, had been working in construction. His brother, Ron, had been in a series of bands that hadn’t made a stir, still living in his boyhood home on the west side of Ann Arbor, where the band had its first rehearsals. (All three went to Ann Arbor High together.)

Iggy needed the Ashetons just as much. “We managed to stay in a band together during a protracted period of failure,” he said of those early days, gigging and making records and living in a filthy house. “No rewards. No approval. No money. These are really the only guys I know. That doesn’t mean, ‘Oh, shucks, I like them so much.’ I mean, we lived together.”

Besides, “I’d hit a wall playing alone, in my solo music,” he said. “I was just at wit’s end about what to do — bands, songwriting, everything.”

He invited the Ashetons to work on a few songs with him for his album “Skull Ring” in 2003. A week after they convened, the Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival floated the idea of a Stooges reunion show. (They did the show; Iggy wouldn’t say how much they were offered, though he does say that the Stooges now get paid much better than he did for concerts during his solo career.) And the bassist Mike Watt came on board, once of the Minutemen, to take the place of Dave Alexander, who died in 1975.

Before they all headed into the studio, Mr. Watt flew to Florida to go over the new songs, and Iggy gave him a lesson about finding his “inner stupidity.”

Today's Videos

SOFT BALLET meets Hirasawa Susumu

System of a Down-Hypnotize

Buck-Tick - Zangai (PV)

Cake - Motorcade of Generosity TV Special 1993

David Bowie - 1984/Dodo

The Only Ones - Another Girl Another Planet Music Video

BALZAC - "The Silence of the Crows" (Promo Video)

Iggy Pop and The Stooges - Tv Eye - AOL Sessions

Jethro Tull - Wind Up / Locomotive Breath

melvins - tv studio 1984!

dead kennedys - hyperactive child (in studio)

Aburadako live in 1983 (part 1)

Cake - I Will Survive

Monday, February 19, 2007

Mum's car after a drunk smashed into us






The Drunk was going around 50 in a 35 zone. Crossed 2 lanes of stopped traffic to the left turning lane (hit one car while doing this). Went straight & crashed his Dodge Ram Truck into my Mum's Prius - death on impact. The drunk continued finally stopping after smashing his truck into the face of a man stopped for the red light (this guy was going the opposite direction of the drunk). Total of seven cars were involved. Two people were sent to the hospital & one death. This was the drivers 3rd DUI, he had no injuries & tried to flee the scene.
The drunk is serving one year each for the two people he sent to the hospital (I was one of them). 2 years for killing my Mum - minus 8 months for taking the deal (It didn't go to trial he pled guilty). Then they 1/2 that for good behavior (he doesn't have to work for it they give it to him). So he's in prison for 1 year 8 months if he doesn't screw up.
So kids if you ever want to get revenge on someone – DO IT DRUNK! Perfect excuse – dang I was drunk I didn’t mean to do it! Shit as long as you don’t injure other people you probably only get 8 months (that’s with 2 DUI’s already).

Monday's Videos

CAKE - Comfort Eagle and Stickshifts and Safetybelts (Live)

CAKE Music Video "War Pigs" New song!

Elastica: Connection 1

Elastica: Connection 2

Media Youth Vs. Penicillin

The Slits - Babylon Is Corrupt

Gun Club - St. John`s Divine

Bunny Wailer - Jump Jump

The Clash In Munich- Complete Control & Hate and War

Live @ Slim's - The Pillows - Little Busters

Lene Lovich: Bird Song

Black Uhuru at Reggae Sunsplash 1984

REM "Losing My Religion" Live in France

Iggy Pop "Nightclubbing"

Chisato - Cyber Rose

Janis Joplin w. Big Brother and the Holding Company

CULTURE - International Herb

Divine: Walk Like A Man

Saturday, February 17, 2007

Buck-Tick live 1987-2005

Buck-Tick - Hyper Love 1987 Live

Buck Tick - Just One More Kiss [NHK Live Xmas '88]

Buck-Tick - Sexual XXXXX Live! 1988?

Buck-Tick - Aku no hana live @ Club Citta Kawasaki 1990

buck tick - die (live 1993)

BUCK-TICK1995POPJAM

Buck Tick "Gessekai" TV Live in July '98

BUCK-TICK2000BLITZDAMACY ??BLIT????

BUCK-TICK - DRESS live 2001

Buck-Tick - Long Distance Call (Live)2003

Buck-Tick - Devil & Freud - Jupiter Live 2004

Buck-Tick - Goblin 13th Floor With Diana Live 2005

Atsushi Sakurai-Sacrifice (live 2004)

Atsushi Sakurai-Yellow Pig (live 2004)

Buck-Tick Officail Web site


Sakurai Atsushi Official Web Site

Native American populations share gene signature

Native American populations share gene signature

  • 00:01 14 February 2007
  • NewScientist.com news service
  • Roxanne Khamsi
The proportion of people with the 9RA gene marker (indicated in red) is high throughout the Americas (image: Royal Society/Schroeder et al)
The proportion of people with the 9RA gene marker (indicated in red) is high throughout the Americas (image: Royal Society/Schroeder et al)

A distinctive, repeating sequence of DNA found in people living at the eastern edge of Russia is also widespread among Native Americans, according to a new study.

The finding lends support to the idea that Native Americans descended from a common founding population that lived near the Bering land bridge for some time.

Kari Schroeder at the University of California in Davis, US, and colleagues sampled the genes from various populations around the globe, including two at the eastern edge of Siberia, 53 elsewhere in Asia and 18 Native American populations. The study examined samples from roughly 1500 people in total, including 445 Native Americans.

The team looked for a series of nine repeating chunks of DNA, known as 9RA, which falls in a non-coding region of chromosome 9.

They found the 9RA sequence in at least one member of all the Native American populations tested, such as the Cherokee and Apache people. The two populations in eastern Siberia, where the Bering land bridge once connected Asia to North America, also tested positive for the 9RA sequence.

The 9RA sequence did not appear in any of the other Asian populations examined in the study, including those from other parts of Siberia, from Mongolia or Japan.

Multiple migrations?

According to Schroeder, the high prevalence of this gene marker among native populations of North and South America - and its absence in most of Asia - lends strong support to the idea that Native Americans can trace their ancestry to a common founding population.

The 9RA mutation probably occurred in an ancestral population located at the eastern edge of Siberia, which subsequently migrated over the Bering land bridge, Schroeder says (watch how the land bridge was gradually submerged as see levels rose). There may have been multiple migrations from this founding population, occurring thousands of years apart, she adds.

"How many times did people cross the Bering land bridge? That would be a very difficult question to answer," says Jeffrey Long at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, Michigan, US, who contributed to the new study.

Other experts have previously suggested that Native Americans do not share a common ancestry because of the linguistic and dental differences among populations.

Journal reference: Biology Letters (DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2006.0609)

Friday, February 16, 2007

ULTRAVOX (from Fact magazine)

ULTRAVOX

Although they are one of the most important British art rock bands, Ultravox have always been ignored or sneered at in the UK. But with re-mastered versions of their first three LPs just re-released, featuring extra tracks and sleeve notes, K-Punk reckons it’s long past time to rescue their legacy as synthetic rock pioneers...

It is the Mark II version of Ultravox, fronted by Midge Ure, which tends to be remembered and dismissed as a moment of 1980s indulgence and pomposity. That judgement is unfair – the impact of the Ure-led Ultravox on techno and house, for instance, should not be underestimated - but it is the first three Ultravox albums, recorded when the band were led by John Foxx, that have been most scandalously neglected.

Foxx was more than the band’s singer. He conceived of Ultravox not as a rock band but a design concept, and he meticulously co-ordinated all aspects of the band’s production – image and words as well as sound – to produce a consistent ‘sonic fiction’. Foxx’s striking sleeve designs are as important as the music (as Peter Saville told me in the interview in last issue’s FACT, Foxx’s cover art for ‘Systems of Romance’ was an important influence on his own work for Factory).


The first self-titled Ultravox LP, released in 1977, is like art rock on punk amphetamines. Tracks like ‘Wide Boys’ and ‘Satday Night in the City of the Dead’ are lurid vignettes of a late 1970s London lurching into social collapse. Brian Eno produced the LP, and early Roxy were a clear reference point, their shiny plastic surfaces Velvets-slashed and Dolls-scuzzed for ‘77 (it is interesting to compare what Japan did with similar co-ordinates on their first album). Ultravox were too arty, too conceptual, to be punk-fashionable, and the album would be no more than a particularly fascinating souvenir of ‘77 were it not for its closing track, 'My Sex.'

'My Sex' is like cyber-theorist Donna Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto nigh-on a decade ahead of time, and better - Ballard's condensed novels further compressed and spliced with Burroughs/ Warhol in a simulation of a post-social(ist) ex-human POV. The vocal - tentative, thin, distant - is less sung than (newsreel) reported, a radio-signal beamed back from the near-future. And the music - a sparse, plaintive, Satie-electric piano fugue - plays like nostalgia from an era (then) yet to come - the lost/ last sounds of the human echoing in the abandoned brutalist precincts of an alternate 1980s.

Kraftwerk had patented the emotionless in pop. But their Robots were Asimov-SF: smoothly efficient industrial machines, oddly quaint, almost old-fashioned, redolent of the Fritz Lang twenties. ‘My Sex’ is cyber-punk to Kraftwerk’s Science Fiction: Foxx's sex/ sect were messily cyborgian, grafts not quite taken, machine-human, Ballard-abstract collages rather than smooth fusions: “My sex is … suburban photographs/ skyscraper shadows/ on/ a carcrash overpass.”

The second Ultravox LP – ‘ha! ha! ha!’ - is a much harsher proposition. It is like ‘For Your Pleasure’ graffitied by Francis Bacon and collage-hacked by John Heartfield and ‘White Light/ White Heat’ cut-and-pasted with apocalyptic-speculative newspapers from ’77. Songs - ‘The Frozen Ones’, ‘Distant Smile’, ‘Fear in the Western World’, ‘Artificial Life’ – are hideous Steadman-distorted polaroids of a decadent metropolis. Moments of glacial calm are suddenly jump-started by an amphetamine-agitated electro-punk that forever teeters on the edge of total disarray, lurching now and then into an atonal collapse that - because of Billy Currie’s frenzied strings and abstrakt electronics - is more Penderecki than Pistols. After this, the desolate beauty of ‘Hiroshima Mon Amour’ - Resnais and Duras rescored as mutant synthezoid jazz – seems genuinely, eerily post-atomic.

1978’s ‘Systems of Romance’ sees the Ultravox sound re-branded yet again. ‘Systems…’ is more closely aligned with a post-Bowie, pre-New Romantic disco-rock sound than any of the previous albums. Robin Simon’s guitar has a similar liquid metallic quality reminiscent of Carlos Alomar’s, and Connie Plank’s production smoothly integrated electronics with conventional instrumentation much in the way that Eno had on ‘Low’. But Foxx sounds more like a post-traumatic Lennon than Bowie. The Beatles are a definite, if subterranean, presence here, and one of the innovative features of ‘Systems…’ is its recovery and reinvention of psychedelia: there’s an (unused) template for a future-shock rock here that takes up from where the Beatles left off, rather than lazily rehashing them.

The track ‘Slow Motion’ is the outstanding example of this new, electronic pyschedelia. ‘Slow Motion’ describes those moments when successive time melts (away) into longing, producing an affect somewhere between yearning and bliss. This is one of Foxx’s signature moods: a feeling in which all definite edges and boundaries smooth away, ‘blurring [your] face and conversation’. ‘Systems of Romance’ explores psychedelic topographies again in ‘When You Walk Through Me’ (the drum pattern of which, Warren Cann subsequently admitted, was stolen from ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’) and in the identity-migration scenarios of ‘Can’t Stay Long’ and ‘Someone Else’s Clothes’: “check out some memories I don’t recognize.”

‘Dislocation’ is the inverse of this: the dark psychedelia of mental disintegration, from a Poe coma-zone of catatonia and amnesia, between wakefulness and sleep, life and undeath. Rock is not so much refitted as superceded here, its instrumentation replaced by ominous electronic textures: ‘Dislocation’’s insistent repeating figure, like an android spine being played as percussion, is in reality a heavily treated, FXed sound from Currie’s ARP synth.

‘Quiet Men’ is disco-rock, another of Foxx’s condensed sonic-fictions. The quiet men – those who observe, but don’t act – were Foxx’s vision of alien(ated)-anonymity as liberation. (The concept was inspired by Foxx’s buying of a second-hand grey suit, which he would wear as an art experiment in invisibility, a deliberate attempt to merge with the crowd.)

‘Systems of Romance’ produced a template for synthetic rock that Gary Numan, Duran Duran and others would follow. In Chicago and Detroit, the future producers of techno and house also listened attentively. This was rock from the future, all the more compelling at a time – now - when groups reheating twenty-five year old ideas are being sold to us as new.

Words: K-Punk
Check: http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org/

The Punk Rock Years


The Punk Years - #1 - Wham Bam Thank You Glam (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #1 - Wham Bam Thank You Glam (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #1 - Wham Bam Thank You Glam (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #2 - Year Zero (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #2 - Year Zero (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #2 - Year Zero (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #3 - 1977 Never Get To Heaven (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #3 - 1977 Never Get To Heaven (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #3 - 1977 Never Get To Heaven (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #4 - Take Three Chords (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #4 - Take Three Chords (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #4 - Take Three Chords (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #5 - A Riot of Our Own (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #5 - A Riot of Our Own (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #5 - A Riot of Our Own (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #6 - Typical Girls (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #6 - Typical Girls (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #6 - Typical Girls (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #7 - RidiculeIsNothingToBeScaredOf (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #7 - RidiculeIsNothingToBeScaredOf (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #7 - RidiculeIsNothingToBeScaredOf (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #8 - Punx Not Dead (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #8 - Punx Not Dead (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #8 - Punx Not Dead (part 3/3)

The Punk Years - #9 - Independents Days (part 1/3)

The Punk Years - #9 - Independents Days (part 2/3)

The Punk Years - #9 - Independents Days (part 3/3)

Friday, February 09, 2007

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