Lux Interior dies at 60

By August Brown
9:39 PM PST, February 4, 2009
Lux Interior, the singer, songwriter and founding member of the pioneering New York City horror-punk band the Cramps, died Wednesday. He was 60. Interior, whose real name was Erick Lee Purkhiser, died at Glendale Memorial Hospital of a heart condition, according to a statement from his publicist.

With his wife, guitarist "Poison" Ivy Rorschach, Interior formed the Cramps in 1976, pairing lyrics that expressed their love of B-movie camp with ferocious rockabilly and surf-inspired instrumentation.

The band became a staple of the late '70s Manhattan punk scene emerging from clubs such as Max's Kansas City and CBGB, and was one of the first acts to realize the potential of punk rock as theater and spectacle.

Often dressed in macabre, gender-bending costumes onstage, Interior evoked a lanky, proto-goth Elvis Presley, and his band quickly became notorious for volatile and decadent live performances.

The Cramps recorded early singles at Sun Records with producer Alex Chilton of the band Big Star and had their first critical breakthrough on their debut EP "Gravest Hits."

Read it all on LA Times

Download my favourite Cramps' song: Bikini Girls with Machine Guns

Mat made of moss stays alive with the help of bath water

A new bathmat made of moss is kept alive by the water that drips from your body as you dry.

The mat contains a total of 70 pieces of ball, island and forest moss measuring 2.4in (6cm) each in diameter.
It feels soft underfoot and does not smell when it gets damp.
Each piece of moss is cut into a foam frame, which prevents the moss from spreading or growing out of control.
Its designer, Nguyen La Chanh, from Switzerland, says the mat is very relaxing and needs little care.
She said: "The idea was to find a new way of having your plants inside.
"Not only plants in pots quietly standing in the corner of a living room but alive plants, evolving in the house.
"I think this mat would appeal people who miss a corner of nature in their appartment - perhaps if they live in an urban environment, far from parks and nature areas.
"It's relaxing, feels lovely and soft under the feet and doesn't need much care."
Miss Nguyen is looking for financial backing so she can mass produce the mat for less than the £220 it cost her to make.

Found on http://www.telegraph.co.uk

They want peace

Ohmmmmmmmm

My desk is a random mess. From where I am now, I can reach bananas, nuts, a magnetic poetry kit, creams, chocolate, bits of hardware, bread, books, two computers, chewing gum and so forth. I don’t mind my own mess. I know underneath all this the table is clean. I know I can eat the fruits cos they’re washed. It’s messy but clean.

But I live with 5 other people, and they have various degrees of awareness of personal hygiene, I would say ranging from 0 to 10, all shades. I used to go mad after a hard days work, getting home to find food crumbles all over every surface, dishes to be washed, and the remains of pasta glued to the stove, so pretty. Yes, the house changed. It’s our “new” housemate. Now I use this auspicious situation as an opportunity to practice my compassion, something I have very little most of the time.

Everything was going fine, and slowly I started to feel compassion was a constant companion. Yes, the old problems were too little. Who cares if the kitchen is filthy, innit? At least I have a nice kitchen... right...

Easy said than done, and much easier said after two long holidays. I arrive from Brazil and my “new” housemate is eating pasta in the kitchen. We smile and talk about our holidays briefly while I gather some food to take upstairs. He finishes eating, cleans his mouth on the kitchen towel we use to dry dishes and hangs it on the chair. I stare at him, my stomach turning upside down. I have to go. Bye. OMG. I think of all the things I dried with those towels. I stop thinking. Where is my compassion? Where is my sledgehammer? Compassion? Sledgehammer? Compassion? Sledgehammer?

Compassion? Sledgehammer?

Sledgehammer?

Yay, that's my hood! :)

London from above at night 1
London from above at night 2
http://www.jasonhawkes.com/

The Semmelweis Reflex

Mob behavior found among primates and larval hominids on undeveloped planets, in which a discovery of important scientific fact is punished rather than rewarded. Named after Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis, ...physician who discovered the cause of puerperal fever, a now-obsolete disease which, in Semmelweis's primitive era, yearly killed a vast number of women in childbirth. Semmelweis was fired from his hospital, expelled from his medical society, denounced and ridiculed widely, reduced to abject poverty and finally died in a madhouse.

Timothy Leary, The Game of Life @ Deoxy

Hack your brain - How to hallucinate with ping-pong balls and a radio

From http://www.boston.com

Google search finds missing child

A nine-year-old girl, allegedly kidnapped by her grandmother, has been found using a mobile phone signal and Google Street View.

[...]

This requirement has led to GPS capability in most new mobile phones in the US.

Rose Maltais took the child during an arranged visit, say authorities
"This is very useful, although we can only use it in emergency situations such as when a person is missing or lost, or a life is in danger," said chief Anderson.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7820984.stm

I know what you're thinking...

PSYCHIC WARFARE from 1981-2008
“I never liked to get into debates with the skeptics, because if you didn’t believe that remote viewing was real, you hadn’t done your homework.”
--Major General Edmund R Thompson

The year I was born, in 1981, the US Government decided magick was real. Well, the “US Government” is of course an abstraction—specifically, Congressional Research Service was commissioned to do a report on psychic phenomena and offered the following conclusion:
“Recent experiments in remote viewing and other studies in parapsychology suggest that there exists an ‘interconnectiveness’ of the human mind with other minds and with matter. This interconnectiveness would appear to be functional in nature and amplified by intent and emotion.”

That sounds like a pretty accurate description of magick to me. Score one for the weirdos, right?

Read it all on Brainsturbator

Codex Alimentarius

Success Story

School Nightmare

Read Deschooling Society
by Ivan Illich

Chained Babelfish Translator

http://deoxy.org/forum/chainbabelfish.pl

Flanger - electronic jazz

I now travel through London with my headphones on and the world seems such a nice place. These guys often make me bang my head against things: Flanger

Listen to it on last.fm

Download Midnight Sound

Download Outer Space/Inner Space

Download Templates

YMCK - Japanese 8 bit bossa

Yeah, I'm now some kind of vegetable, mindless clicking away, downloading music until I'm certain I won't have time to listen to it.
I found so much good stuff today, I'm starting to think this mindless clicking has some life and brain of it's own. Here's one of the best finds, from my friend Tak. It's a japanese 8 bit bossa band called YMCK. Hope you like it. Merry Xmas.

Download YMCK's Family Music

Or get all the albums!

Listen to it on last.fm

Desire

It's our failure to understand the simplicity of the natural state
that gets us into trouble. No conceptual structure will describe the true
nature of an emotion. We experience it the way we do because we don't
understand its essential nature. Once we do, the emotion tends to
dissolve.

Then we're not repressing the emotion, but neither are we encouraging
it. We are simply looking clearly at what is taking place. If we set a
cloudy glass of water aside for a while, it will settle by itself and
become clear. Instead of judging the experience of desire, we look
directly at its nature, what is known as "liberating it in its own
ground." Then it simply dissolves.

Each negative emotion, or mental poison, has an inherent perfection
that we don't recognize because we are so accustomed to its appearance as
emotion. Just as poison can be taken medicinally to effect a cure, each
poison of the mind, worked with properly, can be transformed to its
wisdom nature and thus enhance our spiritual practice.

If while in the throes of desire, you simply relax, without moving
your attention, that space of the mind is called discriminating wisdom
You don't abandon desire; instead you reveal its wisdom nature.

Read it all on www.sacred-texts.com

Bucky Fuller & his World Game: Intro to Saving Planets

The first World Game was all on paper. It was 1961 when Fuller announced the concept, noting modestly that he’d been doing it since 1927. Although the dense “Fact Books” that got handed out to students were indeed generated by a computer database, for the most part Bucky’s version of the World Game was something students did on paper, using the figures and facts provided.
This is the first element I’d like to update: What facts do you trust? Who are the real authorities? Any thinking human would be suspicious of being handed a document that literally claims to tell you everything that is true about the Earth, whether that document is titled “An Objective Report by a Supercomputer” or “The Holy Bible.” Teaching people the basic source-synthesis methods behind doing their own research should be a logical opening lesson for any World Game. Give kids the tools to build their own picture of the world. Perhaps rather than handing out “world factbooks,” we could hand out blank templates where kids could research and fill in their own data and conclusions.
This is the question Bucky posed to students: “how can we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?”

Read more on Brainsturbator

Follow the Little ball

Mike Patton's song for Madonna.

Midlife Crisis - Faith no More

Go on and wring my neck
Like when a rag gets wet
A little discipline
For my pet genius
My head is like lettuce
Go on dig your thumbs in
I cannot stop giving in
I'm thirty-something

Sense of security
Like pockets jingling
Midlife crisis
Suck ingenuity
Down through the family tree

You're perfect, yes, it's true
But without me you're only you (you're only you)
Your menstruating heart
It ain't big enough for two

It's a midlife crisis.. It's a midlife crisis..

What an inheritance
The salt and the dockry
Morbid self attention
Bending my pinky back
A little discipline
A donor by habit
A little discipline
Rent an opinion

Sense of security
Holding blunt instrument
Midlife Crisis
I'm a perfectionist
And perfect is a skinned knee

You're perfect, yes, it's true
But without me you're only you (you're only you)
Your menstruating heart
It ain't big enough for two

ya ya ya ya

It's a midlife crisis...
It's a midlife crisis...

You're perfect, yes, it's true
But without me you're only you (you're only you)
Your menstruating heart
It ain't big enough for two

Sweet fifteen - Pete Doherty before drugs (?)

The sounds of gargled water and strangled shouts from John Lennon clashing with church organs and distorted guitars

By Ben Leach
The improvised recording was made in 1967 and was played just once in public. But it was never released because three of the Fab Four thought it was too adventurous.
It is said to be composed of a series of shrieks and psychedelic sounds - far away from the melodious recordings with which the Beatles are associated.
But speaking on a BBC Radio 4 arts programme to be broadcast this week McCartney said that the public would get a chance to listen to the track.
"It does exist," McCartney told John Wilson, the presenter of Front Row.
He added that he still has a master tape of the recording and suspects that "the time has come for it to get its moment".
"I like it because it's the Beatles free, going off piste," he added.
The track was put together on 5 January 1967, in between working on the vocals for the song Penny Lane.
Since it was recorded 40 years ago the track has achieved almost mythical status for Beatles fans.
It is reported to include the sounds of gargled water and strangled shouts from John Lennon which clash with church organs and distorted guitar.
"It will help reaffirm McCartney's claim to have been the most musically adventurous of all the Beatles," said Mr Wilson.
"He told me he would love to release the track. All he needs now is the blessing of Ringo Starr, Yoko Ono and George Harrison's widow Olivia."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk