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Marcel

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Posts posted by Marcel

  4. Posted

    I live for slipperies!
    Slice them, peel them, dry them until they're cracker dry and store them well. Add to to stews and soups for earthy flavour. The smell of drying slipperies IS my childhood!

    My first hunt of the season this weekend. I'm sleepless with excitement.

    • Like 4

  8. Posted

    Not all Amanitas are poisonous, but it's a genus you don't want to experiment with. There are Amanita vernicoccora which, as far as I know, don't exist in Australia. They're edible, but fuck me, they look so much like Death Caps that it makes me shiver to think that you could eat them.

    And as for the original mushroom posted here, it is likely to be something of the Macrolepiota genus, but just be aware of Chlorophyllum molybdites, which look a lot like Parasol mushrooms, but are quite toxic. They're much more common than Macrolepiotas too, at least in the Sydney area.

    • Like 1

  9. Posted

    It's an interesting question, and it's been the backbone of art theory for the last 150 years. I know that dirty feeling that comes from tech aided music making, but I take a Barthesian perspective on these things. Whether something qualifies as music or not (or art, or literature, or whatever) has nothing to do with the author. The audience is what makes it music. (And audience can be as simple as the maker.)

    I used to live in New York many years ago and for a while I worked as a photographer's assistant. I'd occassionaly work for this guy who spent his whole life refining an elaborate multiple exposure technique that meant he could layer 6 or so seperate images onto one sheet of film, all in camera. The images were disgusting and boring, but that's almost beside the point. The agonising thing was how every time he presented or exhibited these images he would barrage his audience with the fact that this was a complicated technique that didn't use photoshop. Did anyone care? No. Anyone could replicate this technique on photoshop in 20 seconds. To hold on so frantically to the technical component of your art is somewhat delusional. Especially when that technique was THE ONLY thing of note in this guy's images.

    It's similar with music. It might not be as fun to make music when the machine makes it super easy, and it certainly does rob the ego out of the music, but I'm hard pressed to agree that that fact alone doesn't make it music if the listener thinks that it is.

    • Like 2

  10. Posted · Edited by Marcel

    Sure, so where's your link, Proust?

    Here's a Halif / Psylo collaboration that we played around with a month or two ago.

    https://soundcloud.com/tk-stone/the-teacher-tepalom-tk-stone

    Hey! That's awesome, guys! Reminds me of late Soft Machine stuff, post Robert Wyatt. I can almost hear an atonal soprano sax solo about to start towards the end!

    My noodles are no where near as accomplished or sophisticated as that, but here are the few that I've put up on Soundcloud. (There are more, but none that I feel are finished yet.)

    https://soundcloud.com/aieamits

  11. Posted

    Great thread.

    My background is in video and performance art, so I've always played around with sound, but not in any real "musical" way until about a year ago.

    Just a few months ago I got one of the new Squier Vintage Modified Jaguar basses. The Squier factory screwed up big time and has started making exceptionally good instruments. It's incredible. All the bass forums are raving about it. I have a few bass friends who say that it plays and sounds nicer than their American custom Fender basses, at a quarter of the price. It also has both a P and a J pick up arrangement, which is nice and versatile.

    I have a nice and big Roland 200w bass amp that sounds more like it has 500w to it. Lovely tone.

    I have a little Korg microkeys 2 octave midi keyboard which has changed everything for me. I can plug it into my iPad too and have nearly everything I need with me when playing live.


    Speaking of the iPad... Man, what an amazing tool! I thoroughly recommend the app Loopy. It's like a looping/phrase sampler pedal but WAAAY more versatile. And it only costs about $5! I use it with my bass guitar going into the ipad as well as the midi keyboard and have heaps of fun. There's an amp modelling app I use called JamUp which is phenomenal. And a nice Reason-ish app called NanoStudio, with lots of great synth sounds. There's even a Kaosilator app made by Korg which, by all accounts, is exactly the same as the real thing, for under $20.

    Maybe you guys should start posting links to Soundcloud so that we can hear your stuff?

  19. Posted · Edited by Marcel

    I'm not sure if this has been posted yet, but it's out-fucking-rageous.

    link: http://www.rollingst...a-joke-20121213

    rsLogo.png

    Outrageous HSBC Settlement Proves the Drug War is a Joke

    Taibblog

    by: Matt Taibbi

    larry-600x400-1355426614.jpg

    Assistant US Attorney General Lanny Breuer

    Ramin Talaie/Getty Images

    If you've ever been arrested on a drug charge, if you've ever spent even a day in jail for having a stem of marijuana in your pocket or "drug paraphernalia" in your gym bag, Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Lanny Breuer has a message for you: Bite me.

    Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who's ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank, opting instead for a "record" financial settlement of $1.9 billion, which as one analyst noted is about five weeks of income for the bank.

    The banks' laundering transactions were so brazen that the NSA probably could have spotted them from space. Breuer admitted that drug dealers would sometimes come to HSBC's Mexican branches and "deposit hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, in a single day, into a single account, using boxes designed to fit the precise dimensions of the teller windows."

    This bears repeating: in order to more efficiently move as much illegal money as possible into the "legitimate" banking institution HSBC, drug dealers specifically designed boxes to fit through the bank's teller windows. Tony Montana's henchmen marching dufflebags of cash into the fictional "American City Bank" in Miami was actually more subtle than what the cartels were doing when they washed their cash through one of Britain's most storied financial institutions.

    Though this was not stated explicitly, the government's rationale in not pursuing criminal prosecutions against the bank was apparently rooted in concerns that putting executives from a "systemically important institution" in jail for drug laundering would threaten the stability of the financial system. The New York Times put it this way:

     

    Federal and state authorities have
    HSBC, the London-based bank, on charges of vast and prolonged money laundering, for fear that criminal prosecution would topple the bank and, in the process, endanger the financial system.

     

    It doesn't take a genius to see that the reasoning here is beyond flawed. When you decide not to prosecute bankers for billion-dollar crimes connected to drug-dealing and terrorism (some of HSBC's Saudi and Bangladeshi clients had terrorist ties, according to a Senate investigation), it doesn't protect the banking system, it does exactly the opposite. It terrifies investors and depositors everywhere, leaving them with the clear impression that even the most "reputable" banks may in fact be captured institutions whose senior executives are in the employ of (this can't be repeated often enough) murderersand terrorists. Even more shocking, the Justice Department's response to learning about all of this was to do exactly the same thing that the HSBC executives did in the first place to get themselves in trouble – they took money to look the other way.

    And not only did they sell out to drug dealers, they sold out cheap. You'll hear bragging this week by the Obama administration that they wrested a record penalty from HSBC, but it's a joke. Some of the penalties involved will literally make you laugh out loud. This is from Breuer's announcement:

     

    As a result of the government's investigation, HSBC has . . . "clawed back" deferred compensation bonuses given to some of its most senior U.S. anti-money laundering and compliance officers, and agreed to partially defer bonus compensation for its most senior officials during the five-year period of the deferred prosecution agreement.

     

    Wow. So the executives who spent a decade laundering billions of dollars will have to partially defer their bonuses during the five-year deferred prosecution agreement? Are you fucking kidding me? That's the punishment? The government's negotiators couldn't hold firm on forcing HSBC officials to completely wait to receive their ill-gotten bonuses? They had to settle on making them "partially" wait? Every honest prosecutor in America has to be puking his guts out at such bargaining tactics. What was the Justice Department's opening offer – asking executives to restrict their Caribbean vacation time to nine weeks a year?

    So you might ask, what's the appropriate financial penalty for a bank in HSBC's position? Exactly how much money should one extract from a firm that has been shamelessly profiting from business with criminals for years and years? Remember, we're talking about a company that has admitted to a smorgasbord of serious banking crimes. If you're the prosecutor, you've got this bank by the balls. So how much money should you take?

    How about all of it?How about every last dollar the bank has made since it started its illegal activity? How about you dive into every bank account of every single executive involved in this mess and take every last bonus dollar they've ever earned? Then take their houses, their cars, the paintings they bought at Sotheby's auctions, the clothes in their closets, the loose change in the jars on their kitchen counters, every last freaking thing. Take it all and don't think twice. And then throw them in jail.

    Sound harsh? It does, doesn't it? The only problem is, that's exactly what the government does just about every day to ordinary people involved in ordinary drug cases.

    It'd be interesting, for instance, to ask the residents of Tenaha, Texas what they think about the HSBC settlement. That's the town where local police routinely pulled over (mostly black) motorists and, whenever they found cash, offered motorists a choice: They could either allow police to seize the money, or face drug and money laundering charges.

    Or we could ask Anthony Smelley, the Indiana resident who won $50,000 in a car accident settlement and was carrying about $17K of that in cash in his car when he got pulled over. Cops searched his car and had drug dogs sniff around: The dogs alerted twice. No drugs were found, but police took the money anyway. Even after Smelley produced documentation proving where he got the money from, Putnam County officials tried to keep the money on the grounds that he could have used the cash to buy drugs in the future.

    Seriously, that happened. It happens all the time, and even Lanny Breuer's own Justice Deparment gets into the act. In 2010 alone, U.S. Attorneys' offices deposited nearly $1.8 billion into government accounts as a result of forfeiture cases, most of them drug cases. You can see the Justice Department's own statistics right here:

    p31-600-1355428265.jpg

    Justice DepartmentIf you get pulled over in America with cash and the government even thinks it's drug money, that cash is going to be buying your local sheriff or police chief a new Ford Expedition tomorrow afternoon.

    And that's just the icing on the cake. The real prize you get for interacting with a law enforcement officer, if you happen to be connected in any way with drugs, is a preposterous, outsized criminal penalty. Right here in New York, one out of every seven cases that ends up in court is a marijuana case.

    Just the other day, while Breuer was announcing his slap on the wrist for the world's most prolific drug-launderers, I was in arraignment court in Brooklyn watching how they deal with actual people. A public defender explained the absurdity of drug arrests in this city. New York actually has fairly liberal laws about pot – police aren't supposed to bust you if you possess the drug in private. So how do police work around that to make 50,377 pot-related arrests in a single year, just in this city? Tthat was 2010; the 2009 number was 46,492.)

    "What they do is, they stop you on the street and tell you to empty your pockets," the public defender explained. "Then the instant a pipe or a seed is out of the pocket – boom, it's 'public use.' And you get arrested."

    People spend nights in jail, or worse. In New York, even if they let you off with a misdemeanor and time served, you have to pay $200 and have your DNA extracted – a process that you have to pay for (it costs 50 bucks). But even beyond that, you won't have search very far for stories of draconian, idiotic sentences for nonviolent drug crimes.

    Just ask Cameron Douglas, the son of Michael Douglas, who got five years in jail for simple possession. His jailers kept him in solitary for 23 hours a day for 11 months and denied him visits with family and friends. Although your typical non-violent drug inmate isn't the white child of a celebrity, he's usually a minority user who gets far stiffer sentences than rich white kids would for committing the same crimes – we all remember the crack-versus-coke controversy in which federal and state sentencing guidelines left (predominantly minority) crack users serving sentences up to 100 times harsher than those meted out to the predominantly white users of powdered coke.

    The institutional bias in the crack sentencing guidelines was a racist outrage, but this HSBC settlement blows even that away. By eschewing criminal prosecutions of major drug launderers on the grounds (the patently absurd grounds, incidentally) that their prosecution might imperil the world financial system, the government has now formalized the double standard.

    They're now saying that if you're not an important cog in the global financial system, you can't get away with anything, not even simple possession. You will be jailed and whatever cash they find on you they'll seize on the spot, and convert into new cruisers or toys for your local SWAT team, which will be deployed to kick in the doors of houses where more such inessential economic cogs as you live. If you don't have a systemically important job, in other words, the government's position is that your assets may be used to finance your own political disenfranchisement.

    On the other hand, if you are an important person, and you work for a big international bank, you won't be prosecuted even if you launder nine billion dollars. Even if you actively collude with the people at the very top of the international narcotics trade, your punishment will be far smaller than that of the person at the very bottom of the world drug pyramid. You will be treated with more deference and sympathy than a junkie passing out on a subway car in Manhattan (using two seats of a subway car is a common prosecutable offense in this city). An international drug trafficker is a criminal and usually a murderer; the drug addict walking the street is one of his victims. But thanks to Breuer, we're now in the business, officially, of jailing the victims and enabling the criminals.

    This is the disgrace to end all disgraces. It doesn't even make any sense. There is no reason why the Justice Department couldn't have snatched up everybody at HSBC involved with the trafficking, prosecuted them criminally, and worked with banking regulators to make sure that the bank survived the transition to new management. As it is, HSBC has had to replace virtually all of its senior management. The guilty parties were apparently not so important to the stability of the world economy that they all had to be left at their desks.

    So there is absolutely no reason they couldn't all face criminal penalties. That they are not being prosecuted is cowardice and pure corruption, nothing else. And by approving this settlement, Breuer removed the government's moral authority to prosecute anyone for any other drug offense. Not that most people didn't already know that the drug war is a joke, but this makes it official.

     

    • Like 6

  20. Posted

    I'm still super keen but won't be able to make any weekends this year. Bummer!

    I miss you guys! I wore my EGA shirt to bed last night and dreamed of EGA and realised this morning that EGA was a year ago and that's when I met a lot of you lovely people. I wanna catch up soon! You're all good people!

    • Like 3

  23. Posted

    Two things about which I'm shocked, and no one else seems to have noticed:

    1) This whole thing is about cats, and not va-jay-jay.

    2) Psylo and Incog are bonding.

    That is all.

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