Biggest Useless Twat Of The Century?

[Cat Stevens]

nickmanho.blogspot.com/2008/04/town-full-of-losers.html

[cripes]

Yep...with the primary today and all....everyone knows that Bruce and Philly are like *this*...I guess Bruce is more ashamed of Jersey than ever since they went with Hillary.

I want Paul Simon to endorse Bar...write him a song...'Mama pajama Obama Obama'...maybe get Los Lobos to help get the Mexican vote.

[manho]

be great for barack if elvis costello wrote a song for hillary.

[cripes]

Oh great....now I have this imaginary Elvis Costello Hillary song in my head.

"A-Oh oh oh Hillary...I work in a distillery...A oh oh oh......'

[manho]

Drown out their discord

I rocked against racism 30 years ago. Now the far right is wooing voters we have to do it again

Tom Robinson
The Guardian,
Saturday April 26 2008

Three decades ago an unwelcome shock hit the London flat I shared with five people. The 1977 GLC elections were under way, and through the letterbox came - not three, but four manifestos. For the first time we had the choice of voting left, centre, right or Nazi.

Nowadays the punk era is seen as a raucous and faintly insanitary blip on the continuum of pop history, but I remember it as a time of flux and desperate uncertainty. There were riots, brutality and a government falling apart at the seams, while the disaffected, dispossessed and extremists of every hue were seizing their chance for a piece of the action. Just because things happened to pan out one particular way doesn't mean any of it was inevitable.

The National Front's bid for electoral respectability kicked us all up the arse sufficiently to demonstrate against it in Wood Green and Lewisham. It also galvanised tens of thousands of people to descend on London for Rock Against Racism's famous Carnival Against the Nazis in 1978.

Punk rock's biggest ally - and a key influence on Joe Strummer and John Lydon - had been roots reggae. Nowhere was this better reflected than at Rock Against Racism concerts where bands such as Misty In Roots, Matumbi and the Cinnamons would headline on the same bill as aspiring punk and new wave bands, including my own.

For those of us who grew up with the music of James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder and Bob Marley, the proposition of Rock Against Racism was blindingly obvious. It successfully squared the circle of appealing to a mass audience while remaining genuinely of the left. RAR's sharp visuals and focused message wouldn't be equalled again until Live Aid.

On April 30 1978 we marched from Trafalgar Square to Hackney, east London meeting only token opposition on the way. Behind the scaffolding stage in Victoria Park there was no VIP area, corporate hospitality or even a changing room. RAR had hired a big enough PA to reach 20,000 people; on the day, four times that number turned up.

Looking back, I'm proud my band shared a stage with the Clash but also with perhaps the finest British band of the late 70s, Steel Pulse. The precision rhythms and razorsweet vocals of their single Ku Klux Klan - performed in white robes and hoods - provided an iconic moment for the day.

It would be nice to think that the Anti-Nazi League and Victoria Park carnival played their part in the NF's dismal showing at the 1979 election and subsequent implosion. For whatever reasons, Britain has become a much more tolerant society - at least superficially - over the intervening decades.

But this week an unwelcome shock hit the London semi I share with my family. The 2008 elections for London mayor are under way, and through the letterbox came a 32-page booklet on this year's candidates and parties. Alongside Paddick, Livingstone and Johnson are an illiberal sprinkling of political chancers such as The English Democrats, Christian Choice and Ukip.

In pride of place at the front of the pamphlet is the British National party. "Remember London the way it used to be - clean, friendly and safe?" asks its candidate. Hmmm - when was that exactly? Certainly not the 1970s. Jefferson's aphorism about the price of freedom being eternal vigilance may be a truism, but it's never been truer.

And that's why the 30th anniversary of the Carnival Against the Nazis actually matters. Since 2002 the RAR mantle has been worn by Love Music Hate Racism, which is staging an enormous event spread over three stages tomorrow in Victoria Park.

Rock Against Racism lives on.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[manho]

Pop By George, Britpop was never like this

Billy Bragg's celebration of Englishness takes in everything from folk to punk to, er... rockabilly
Kitty Empire
Sunday April 27, 2008
Observer

Looking For a New England
Barbican, London EC2

Most Observer readers would probably feel a little uncomfortable holding up bits of paper to form a flag of St George at a gig. But that's precisely what the audience does tonight, albeit in a very coy, English sort of way. Looking For a New England is a celebration of St George's Day curated by Billy Bragg - Essex foghorn, Red Wedger and, now, Progressive Patriot, as his 2006 treatise on Englishness styled him.

Bragg is on a mission to reclaim Englishness from the far right by celebrating the radical tradition from the Diggers to the Clash. Tonight, his auxiliary weapons include humour, tea and a guest bill of music that spans shivery folk and rockabilly. 'St George was an immigrant worker who hitched a ride back here with the Crusaders,' Bragg points out early on. You leave more confused about his vision of Englishness than when you went in, but three thought-provoking hours pass very agreeably.

By far the most rigorous of Bragg's supports is Rachel Unthank and the Winterset. Rachel and Becky Unthank are two Northumbrian sisters with voices like bawdy ghosts, abetted by fiddle, accordion and a pianist fond of diving inside the piano lid to prang the strings. Obviously, they begin their St George's Day set with a Scottish song, 'Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk'.

'I Wish, I Wish' is another spectral female lament that chills the beer in the audience's cups, plunging the evening back to a time when England was at least a greener, if not a more pleasant land. Best of all is 'Sea Song', a tune borrowed from Robert Wyatt, which features on the Winterset's most recent album, The Bairns. Billy Bragg joins them for 'The New St George', a song by Richard Thompson. 'Great English songwriters,' notes Rachel Unthank, unwittingly recalling Al Murray's pub landlord.

Sandwiched in between the Winterset and Camden rockabillies Kitty, Daisy and Lewis is Tom Clarke, lead singer of the Enemy. Bragg admits the urchin-like rocker might be a fish out of water in tonight's polite company, but he praises Clarke's 'strong sense of place'. (The Enemy are from Coventry, aggressively so.)

You suspect Bragg actually sees in Clarke a younger version of himself. The Enemy's 'This Song is About You' (which he doesn't actually play tonight) features girls pushing prams before their time, as does Bragg's own anthem, 'A New England'. 'You're Not Alone' (which Clarke does play) was inspired by touring the post-industrial cities of England and Scotland. Performing solo with acoustic guitar, the big-voiced Clarke cuts a more appealing figure than he normally does. But he goes and spoils it all by playing a song about Sophie Lancaster, the girl murdered for being a goth. It's prosaic and unfinished.

Scotland creeps in again and again tonight. During his set, Bragg plays a Dick Gaughan song, 'Both Sides the Tweed', with the Winterset, which celebrates the amity between the two nations. Talking as much as he plays, Bragg cannot disguise his admiration - envy, really - for the devolved Scotland under the SNP. It's not the only notional inconsistency. For all their talent, verve and style, it's hard to discern how a family of American-style Fifties throwbacks - siblings Kitty, Daisy and Lewis and their double bass- and guitar-playing parents - fit into St George's Day. Granted, rockabilly is related to skiffle (and everyone knows John Lennon was in a skiffle band before the Beatles). Perhaps Bragg just knows double bassist Ingrid Weiss from her days drumming for punk band the Raincoats?

The confusion becomes acute when they play a Hawaiian number, complete with ukulele and lei. 'What's Honolulu got to do with England?' comes a quizzical heckle. Bragg has an answer to that: the Hawaiian flag has a Union Jack in the upper right-hand corner.

'What does St George have to do with England? He was Lebanese! What's Jerusalem got to do with England?' he exclaims, warming to his subject. It's a theme that continues all night. You name it, it's English - the logic seems to run, much like it does on Al Murray's show. You can only conclude that Bragg's vision of Englishness is muddled, in part because Englishness is itself a muddle. Bragg's vision is both progressive (like Scotland's) and inclusive (Hawaiians welcome), but most of all, it is his own. The night ends with an ensemble singalong of 'Swing Low' - a black spiritual that has somehow become the national anthem of rugby.

Armed with an emerald green guitar of terrific range, the solo Bragg mixes old favourites such as 'Sexuality' and 'Greetings to the New Brunette' with more recent songs. 'England, Half English' sets to music the night's inconsistencies, with its plate of 'Marmite soldiers washed down with a cappuccino'. In between, he lays out a more coherent version of how Englishness needs to proceed. We need to protect freedom of speech, and the right of habeas corpus. We need a Bill of Rights, one that enshrines the right of a Muslim woman to wear the niqab. 'But she has to allow Salman Rushdie to pen The Satanic Verses.'

He ends with 'A New England'. 'I don't want to change the world/ I'm not looking for a new England,' chant the audience. 'I've changed my mind about the premise of that song,' Bragg admits.

For all the bonhomie, the absence of British Asian or Anglo-Afro-Caribbean performers at this celebration of Englishness is never properly addressed. Kitty, Daisy and Lewis, by contrast, end their jaunty set with a ska number. They're joined by veteran Jamaican trumpeter Eddie 'Tan Tan', once of Aswad. He gives perhaps the most passionate account of Englishness all night, bigging up the London he adopted in the Sixties. 'This heaven is my heaven,' he exclaims. You can't help but conclude that Bragg's St George's Day celebration would have been enriched by more input from adoptive Englanders, bringing the event more in line with his own beliefs.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008

[owen]

we're tired of your bullshit geldof

Africa is giving nothing to anyone -- apart from AIDS

'Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation,' writes Kevin Myers.

Thursday July 10 2008

No. It will not do. Even as we see African states refusing to take action to restore something resembling civilisation in Zimbabwe, the begging bowl for Ethiopia is being passed around to us, yet again. It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today.

So why on earth should I do anything to encourage further catastrophic demographic growth in that country? Where is the logic? There is none. To be sure, there are two things saying that logic doesn't count.

One is my conscience, and the other is the picture, yet again, of another wide-eyed child, yet again, gazing, yet again, at the camera, which yet again, captures the tragedy of . . .

Sorry. My conscience has toured this territory on foot and financially. Unlike most of you, I have been to Ethiopia; like most of you, I have stumped up the loot to charities to stop starvation there. The wide-eyed boy-child we saved, 20 years or so ago, is now a priapic, Kalashnikov-bearing hearty, siring children whenever the whim takes him.

There is, no doubt a good argument why we should prolong this predatory and dysfunctional economic, social and sexual system; but I do not know what it is. There is, on the other hand, every reason not to write a column like this.

It will win no friends, and will provoke the self-righteous wrath of, well, the self-righteous, letter-writing wrathful, a species which never fails to contaminate almost every debate in Irish life with its sneers and its moral superiority. It will also probably enrage some of the finest men in Irish life, like John O'Shea, of Goal; and the Finucane brothers, men whom I admire enormously. So be it.

But, please, please, you self-righteously wrathful, spare me mention of our own Famine, with this or that lazy analogy. There is no comparison. Within 20 years of the Famine, the Irish population was down by 30pc. Over the equivalent period, thanks to western food, the Mercedes 10-wheel truck and the Lockheed Hercules, Ethiopia's has more than doubled.

Alas, that wretched country is not alone in its madness. Somewhere, over the rainbow, lies Somalia, another fine land of violent, Kalashnikov-toting, khat-chewing, girl-circumcising, permanently tumescent layabouts.

Indeed, we now have almost an entire continent of sexually

hyperactive indigents, with tens of millions of people who only survive because of help from the outside world.

This dependency has not stimulated political prudence or commonsense. Indeed, voodoo idiocy seems to be in the ascendant, with the next president of South Africa being a firm believer in the efficacy of a little tap water on the post-coital penis as a sure preventative against infection. Needless to say, poverty, hunger and societal meltdown have not prevented idiotic wars involving Tigre, Uganda, Congo, Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea etcetera.

Broad brush-strokes, to be sure. But broad brush-strokes are often the way that history paints its gaudier, if more decisive, chapters. Japan, China, Russia, Korea, Poland, Germany, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 20th century have endured worse broad brush-strokes than almost any part of Africa.

They are now -- one way or another -- virtually all giving aid to or investing in Africa, whereas Africa, with its vast savannahs and its lush pastures, is giving almost nothing to anyone, apart from AIDS.

Meanwhile, Africa's peoples are outstripping their resources, and causing catastrophic ecological degradation. By 2050, the population of Ethiopia will be 177 million: The equivalent of France, Germany and Benelux today, but located on the parched and increasingly protein-free wastelands of the Great Rift Valley.

So, how much sense does it make for us actively to increase the adult population of what is already a vastly over-populated, environmentally devastated and economically dependent country?

How much morality is there in saving an Ethiopian child from starvation today, for it to survive to a life of brutal circumcision, poverty, hunger, violence and sexual abuse, resulting in another half-dozen such wide-eyed children, with comparably jolly little lives ahead of them? Of course, it might make you feel better, which is a prime reason for so much charity. But that is not good enough.

For self-serving generosity has been one of the curses of Africa. It has sustained political systems which would otherwise have collapsed.

It prolonged the Eritrean-Ethiopian war by nearly a decade. It is inspiring Bill Gates' programme to rid the continent of malaria, when, in the almost complete absence of personal self-discipline, that disease is one of the most efficacious forms of population-control now operating.

If his programme is successful, tens of millions of children who would otherwise have died in infancy will survive to adulthood, he boasts. Oh good: then what?I know. Let them all come here. Yes, that's an idea.

[e-mail]

[cripes]

'Hiya honey--howsa bout you show me where you're circumcised?'

[manho]

"It is nearly 25 years since Ethiopia's (and Bob Geldof's) famous Feed The World campaign, and in that time Ethiopia's population has grown from 33.5 million to 78 million today."

forget the condom, we should send each ethiopian family a tv and a sofa. works for us.

[cripes]

Brian Eno & David Byrne Reveal Album Details

Brian Eno and David Byrne have revealed details on their upcoming release ‘Everything That Happens Will Happen Today’.

27 years in the making, the electronic gospel album will be released through the website everythingthathappens.com.

[manho]

yeah, eno fits the bill. like, apart from twiddling those knobs on the first roxy album what has he ever done?

[manho]

"I guess you could say I'm an intellectual."

[manho]

"It goes way beyond what one considers to be fashion. It's more of a concept, really."

[Some king]

"That's the Brian Eno curse, I think a lot of bands fall down on that, they get the concept first. Travis, for instance, poor lads, those kinds of bands always get stuck with Brian Eno pulling out a deck of cards saying "play it like it's orange."

- Noel Gallagher

[cripes]

(Jefferson) Starship travels with Weavers, Guthrie, Seeger


Paul Kantner is sitting outside Caffe Trieste in North Beach and won't let the guy take his empty espresso cup. He might want the sludge, he says, lighting another Camel.

Kantner is a daily fixture at the sidewalk cafe, when he is not on the road with his band, Jefferson Starship. "This is a great corner," he says. "This is one of the great corners in the universe. Things go on and go by. You run into any number of people."

Passers-by stop and exchange words with him. Regulars pull up a chair and sit down. One older guy checks Kantner's empty coffee cup and brings him a fresh espresso. Kantner is more than welcome on the metal folding chairs outside the venerable Grant Avenue coffeehouse.

[manho]

let's hope he had all his money invested in lehman brothers shares.

[dino]

thats the perfect portrait of rock'n'roll retirement

i wonder what cafe boby would stay waiting for an expresso cup

[manho]

"thats the perfect portrait of rock'n'roll retirement"

problem is the cunt won't retire.

[manho]

"i wonder what cafe boby would stay waiting for an expresso cup"

[dino]

oppure il Bar Mario, insieme a Ligabue??