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People say I ‘discovered’ or ‘made’ certain bands, but I never really think of it like that. I don’t have a series of notches on my bedpost. They discovered themselves really, or some record company or manager did, and what I did was what I’m paid to do - play their records on the radio. I didn’t discover The Undertones or Joy Division - they made magnificent records and I played them because I loved them. The fact that most other people were not playing them is the thing, but you’d have to ask them why that was. I think I helped listeners discover the bands, and if one more person has the chance to see Misty In Roots because they heard them on one of my shows, then I’m happy about that.

I don’t tend to mix with bands. I’m too shy or respectful, and I don’t think I would know what to say. I don’t know very much about their history. Also, there’s that thing about not wanting to lower my admiration of them, which I might do if I met them, and I feel they’d certainly have a lower impression of me.’

The graphic novel, available in its entirety online or in PDF, reimagines Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, and places the characters in modern but no-less politically tumultuous Iran.

From the website: Since the Revolution in 1979, Iranians have coped with an increasingly repressive regime. Attempts for greater social and political freedoms have resulted in brutal crackdowns by the hardline government. The ensuing apathy and significant boycott of the 2005 presidential elections led to the election of the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Four years later Iran has become increasingly alienated and its people more polarized than ever before. The campaign of former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Moussavi galvanized voters hoping for change, especially among the youth – two thirds of Iran’s population is younger than 32. On June 12th 85% of eligible voters cast their ballots and what happened next changed Iran forever…

(via buyhercandy: alohanico: thetwelfth)

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The worker who sleeps with BlackBerry within touching distance, the girl sitting alone in the cafe but texting furiously while waiting for a friend, the woman on the bus on her mobile telling a friend that the test was negative for chlamydia, the solo traveller who Skypes home most nights from the hostel in Borneo, and the TV personality who tells you via Twitter that right now he is running a bath.

These are all symptoms of the death of our ability to be alone

…

We are not just relinquishing our alone time, but we are gleefully sacrificing it, and doing so for multiple data streams, and even so our employer can contact us around the clock. Is the 11pm call from the boss better than nothing, silence, being disconnected - and perhaps missing out?

"Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them."

Roald Dahl (and Hemingway) on writing

“One of the vital things for a writer who’s writing a book, which is a lengthy project and is going to take about a year, is how to keep the momentum going. It is the same with a young person writing an essay. They have got to write four or five or six pages. But when you are writing for a year, you go away and have to come back. I never come back to a blank page; I always finish about halfway through. To be confronted with a blank page is not very nice.

“But Hemingway, a great American writer, taught me the finest trick when doing a long book, which is, he simply said in his own words, “When you are going good, stop writing.” And that means that if everything’s going well and you know exactly where the end of the chapter’s going to go and you know just what the people are going to do, you don’t go on writing and writing until you come to the end of it, because when you do, then you say, well, where am I going to go next? And you get up and you walk away and you don’t want to come back because you don’t know where you want to go.

“But if you stop when you’re going good, as Hemingway said…then you know what you are going to say next. You make yourself stop, put your pencil down and everything, and you walk away. And you can’t wait to get back because you know what you want to say next and that’s lovely and you have to try and do that. Every time, every day all the way through the year. If you stop when you are stuck, then you are in trouble!”

(via unicornology: hwee: mutations: stayforthecredits)

Daryl Prondoso is cranky and talented and he kind of bowled me over when I looked through his design portfolio [ieyeaye]. The thing that strikes me is that he and Fiona Yap [sacred peanut], a Semi-Permanent-vetted graphic designer, both studied at the University of Western Sydney. Socially speaking they’re kind of removed from the inner west where the indie kids have appropriated the creative hotspot image, but their work completely outshines anything I’ve seen coming out of Newtown or Surry Hills. Clearly it’s time to go (further) west! As Daryl writes in one blog entry,

two kids from the shitty side of town go against all odds and make something good out of their lives - but I think that it’s a testament to the work we put into the project, and proof that there’s more to Western Sydney than domestic abuse and junkies.

You can also see his work at IdN Creators.

Trying not to quote the entire thing was difficult.

In many ways, the Internet is providing a next generation public sphere. Unfortunately, it’s also bringing with it next generation divides. The public sphere was never accessible to everyone. There’s a reason that the scholar Habermas talked about it as the bourgeois public sphere. The public sphere was historically the domain of educated, wealthy, white, straight men. The digital public sphere may make certain aspects of public life more accessible to some, but this is not a given. And if the ways in which we construct the digital public sphere reinforce the divisions that we’ve been trying to break down, we’ve got a problem.

(via anthropophagous)

roamin:

Boing Boing/Richard Metzger

“In 1975, when I was nine years old, I discovered Lou Reed from reading about him in CREEM magazine. It was probably the very first rock magazine that I ever bought. The article, titled “Let Us Now Praise Famous Death Dwarves”really captured my young attention. It was the coolest thing I’d ever read. The author, Lester Bangs, conjured up a spectacularly ghoulish portrait of a totally disheveled, wasted and just plain old mean Lou Reed even as he hurled drunken druggy insults right back at him throughout the entire interview. The writing was sublime.

I’m not saying I realized this when I was nine, btw, but even that young, I knew I was reading the unfiltered thoughts and opinions of someone who seemed to know about, and feel passionately about, a heck of a lot of really cool things. In his writing on rock and roll, he could really convey strong emotions. Bangs didn’t hesitate to let you know where he stood on groups like Yes and Emerson Lake and Palmer (that would be two thumbs down) but when he loved a record or a group, his rhapsodic gonzo prose was worthy of being compared to Jack Kerouac, Tom Wolfe or Hunter S Thompson. Sometimes his writing was even better when he hated a group!”

Lester Bangs Interview | Lester Bangs, King of the Noise Boys | Let Us Now Kill White Elephants

and again from norweigan wood

There just happen to be people like that. They’re blessed with this marvellous talent, but they can’t make the effort to systematise it. They end up squandering it in little bits and pieces. I’ve seen my share of people like that. At first you think they’re amazing. Like, they can sight-read some terrifically difficult piece and do a damn good job playing it all the way through. You see them do it, and you’re overwhelmed. You think, ‘I could never do that in a million years.’ But that’s as far as they go. They can’t take it any further. And why not? Because they won’t put in the effort. Because they haven’t had the discipline pounded into them. They’ve been spoiled. They have just enough talent so they’ve been able to play things well without any effort and they’ve had people telling them how great they are from the time they’re little, so hard work looks stupid to them. They’ll take some piece another kid has to work on for three weeks and polish it off in half the time, so the teacher figures they’ve put enough into it and lets them go on to the next piece. They never find out what it means to be hammered by the teacher; they lose out on a certain element required for character building. It’s a tragedy.

—Murakami

I wish I’d read Norweigan Wood a year ago when I needed it most, rather than at the tail end of a deeply frustrating period of personal growth.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. That’s the world of hicks and slobs. Real people would be ashamed of themselves doing that.

The years nineteen and twenty are a crucial stage in the maturation of character, and if you allow yourself to become warped when you’re that age, it will cause you pain when you’re older.

‘You know what girls are like,’ he said. ‘They turn twenty or twenty-one and all of a sudden they start having these concrete ideas. They get super realistic. And when that happens, everything that seemed to sweet and lovable about them begins to look ordinary and depressing.’

Sure they sound trite when taken out of context, but it would have been good to have something to cling to when stewing in the emotional pits of late adolescence. The last quote is particularly apt, especially if you add to the realistic line ‘also bad-tempered and deeply anti-social’. This isn’t to say, as my 21st birthday creeps over the horizon, that I’ve totally pulled myself together and things will be super dandy from now onwards (oh it’s not) but at least I’m not so foggy-headed about Life and Everything In It. etc.