Hiya,

Don't have very long to post to day, better get on with it.
Here's a link to Limited News. This is a guerrilla type site with lots of rants against & actual leaks from News Limited.
I found out about this last night on the ABC's Media Watch which used the site to source one of their stories. Very cool; have to find some time to actually read it.
Speaking of TV (which I only watched for ten 1/2 last night - swear) - there's what looks to be a great show tonight on SBS, called The way the music died. It's about the effect of big business on the music industry or how, eventually, the ratio of dollar value to musical content produces the horror of Britney Spears. As importantly it looks at how this is causing a massive fall in music sales. Yet despite all the talk of 'the way the music died' I hope they look at how prevalent indie labels are & all the good music coming out of them. They had a clip of someone like LL Cool J (it wasn't - but somebody like him - Usher, somebody like that) saying 'I gotta getaway from this game...get back to the music' like he was in touch with music in the first place. Well, actually, LL was (Usher, never), now he's just something like a phenomenon - bleagh. What I mean is, unless they focus on the indies, to me, it's kind of a joke - all these very rich artists saying - oh-no, the music's no good any more & oh-no, there's no more money! Hmm, that may be a very personal rant.
Anyway, this week's reading. Ideology, media, police & government colluding on tacit racism? What a surprise. That Stuart Hall article is so angry, ah the glory days of the 70s. I think it was the 70s, that reading is from Policing the crisis , right?
Hey look at this - Jahsonic has everything, man, even Stuart Hall. Cool.
The Mickler article didn't surprise me either. It's funny, we get lots of news-service faxes at Triple-Zed - from Reuters, Government press-releases, etc. - What we get most of, & never, ever use are 'local crime' releases from the police - which I know, as Mickler points out, find their way with little or no editing into many 'news' bulletins. Piping hot news with next to no preparation time!
The state of play is a little different now than the mid-90s. There are obviously still cases of 'moral panics' - but not as many & these are more cleverly disguised. Some of the most obvious vilification is in the collusion of the press & federal government to defame ATSIC. We talked in the tute about the representations of Geoff Clarke & 'Sugar' Ray Robinson as corrupt & in the former case, a rapist & how the media deploys these as metonyms of blackness.
This links in with the furor surrounding ATSIC itself. I can't find the Australian feature article on a shady deal between a southern land-council & bid developers, but I found some interesting things in the archive of Four Corners transcripts. Haven't found exactly what I'm looking for yet but there is this edition on ATSIC's leadership crisis & this one on 'the problem of violence' in black communities. That's a thorny one: Is this white people constructing blackness as a 'problem'? In this case I don't think so - I'm not going to get into it here - I wonder if there are people who would have a problem with me saying this. There was this one about attempts by powerful white interests to undermine native title in Western Australia. Bizarre - I can't find it in 4 years worth of archives - but I know I saw a story about a corrupt Northern land council embezzling millions of dollars. That really is taboo territory for lefties - partly why Four Corners chose to tackle it, I think. I wonder what the future holds for Australia's indigenous population. To me these speculations have always been grim; another thing to feel guilty about. I had another thought about what I might like to do a research proposal on: Depictions of terror. I always felt that the Western Media got it wrong with S11 - Such a clear message to the West: You bankers - pay for what you've done. Not to mention the largely forgotten fact of the attack on the Pentagon.
All of this was brought back to my mind by the very recent massacre at the school in Belsan. I've never thought that somebody prepared to perform an act like that does so because of simple 'evil'. I always want to look deeper. I just saw a post that made me very angry: Some morally unpright individual said the following -

Those responsible, those who supported it, those who had previous knowledge, and those related to them should all be eliminated. These "people" only understand force.

Violence begetting more violence. Why did young Chechens choose to kill and be killed in Russia? It would clearly be too complex for that poster to relate this act to the ugly war that Russia has been waging, largely as a means of looking tough, against the people of Chechnya.
It seemed such a terrifying and uncompromising act by those young Chechens - even in the face of this brutality I feel a strong compassion for those who believe they have nothing left but the capacity to reach out and hurt those who have left them with nothing.
It further seems like another act of brutal stupidity by Russian forces attempting to shut it down (seems - I haven't looked at the facts in enough detail) & Vladimir Putin seems to be a very scary man.
I'm having the hardest time finding stories online today. I had to go and get a hard copy of the story 'Truth dies at Beslan as Kremlin gags angry press' (Australian, Media Section, p20, 9.9.04) which was left out of the Australian online (CONVENIENTLY! It's a conspiracy!). Not that there are a lack of stories about the Russian government canning its journalists. This is just the latest story: Forced resignation for the editor of a top editor from a big Russian newspaper relating to his 'graphic' coverage of the Beslan massacre. They actually included some pictures with the story that I only just looked at - they are horrendous - but, then again, they weren't going to be much else, were they?
The owner of the paper, a Russian metals magnate, friendly with the Kremlin, deposed his editor, who has been responsible for turning the Izvestia newspaper from a "grey Soviet rag" into - well they don't say - presumably something hardhitting and colourfully gory. I guess the Kremlin want to turn it back.
I saw another very moving thing, yesterday.

Stories From The City is a raw, visceral look at the events of 9/11 and the ensuing week, as seen through the eyes ofeveryday New Yorkers who documented it with their video cameras. The film documents the political clashes in public parks, spontaneous candlelight vigils, singing in the streets and the tireless volunteerism of the rescue efforts. The film features never-before-seen footage, from pedestrians trapped in nearby lobbies during the horrific twin collapses, to Bill Clinton’s visit with grieving families two days after the attack, to the shaky return of businessmen to Wall Street the following Monday.

Tragedy strikes & Americans hit the streets with their video cameras...Anyway - we've seen all that before, haven't we? Yet the description, above, despite including all the usual guff mentions some things which were really intense.
The first I knew about s11 was waking up to it on Television. My first thought was 'that makes so much sense - but the Americans are going to extract a terrible vengeance', sounds kind of contrived, actually, but that was it, pretty much word for word. Apparently some New Yorkers had the same thought I did & hit the streets to tell people how wrong this would be. There are several different pieces of footage capturing massive arguments in public places about who was really culpable for the tragedy. Most of these took place on Sept 12th. Even Americans aren't all bad, huh?

Hmm, dark. Actually I have to do some research on Boom Bip, seeing as how I'm interviewing the guy tomorrow.
Yeah, this guy.
Here's his home on Lex records (yay Lex! -I should say that every day).
Here, also, is his home on Mush records. Both Mush & Lex are avant-hiphop labels. Mush is slightly darker & more towards the trad. underground end. Lex is the child of Warp. Boom has released on all three labels, in fact.
He's a producer who originally turned up (at least for me) with Portland, Oregon, avant-hop collective Anticon. It was on this (now out of print) record The anticon giga-single. The link is to a UK review. Actually, the review is one of the most spot on I've read in ages - Read this and understand so much. Props to it as well for the Sage Francis rave. Sage is god & he's coming back to Oz - yay - but more on that later. Anyway - as the review says - The giga-single, despite all its flaws was massively influential. So many of the artists I love now are on that disc, including Boom Bip.
It's funny, Mush, god bless their cotton hoodies put up so many reviews of their artists - this is heartwarming & informative. Nearly every Boom Bip review seems to resort to the vocabulary of tripped-out psychedelia (oh look, - there I go too) to describe his music. This is fair enough tho. His beats have always been wierd as well & the word for his production: Atmosphere. His tunes are warm, too, not (mostly) dark like many of his compatriots on Warp. See especially his solo debut
Seed to sun. By the way, it looks even better up close, but isn't that artwork just beautiful. Done, as all Lex art is, by EH Questionmark.
Whoa, so out of time, but here's some good reading, a Pitchfork media interview with Boom Bip while he was on the US leg of his big 2002 tour - good info.

Ciao for now.