In the fall of 1980, the Grateful Dead played a series of shows att he Radio City Music Hall in New York City (venues considerably smaller than they had grown accustomed to) for the purpose of filming and recording. The group opened these concerts with a special acoustic set at which Jerry Garcia and Bob Weir played acoustic guitars, Brent Mydland played piano, drummers Bill Kreutzmann and Mickey Hart played reduced kits, whilst Phil Lesh stuck to his electric bass.

The acoustic set preceded their standard two electric sets; the first time since 1970 and the acoustic music deliberately harks back to the band's origins in the folk, bluegrass, and country groups:

The October 30 and 31 performances were edited into a home video release--Dead Ahead in 1981 and then remastered as a music video on DVD in 2005.

Paul Outerbridge was a designer and illustrator in New York before turning to photography in the 1920s. His early work, influenced by Paul Strand, consisted primarily of still-life abstractions of ordinary objects such as cups, light bulbs, milk bottles, machine parts, and eggs.

In 1925, having established himself as an innovative advertising photographer and graphic designer, he moved to Paris and worked for the French edition of Vogue magazine. He became friends with the artists and photographers Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Berenice Abbott.

In 1929 Outerbridge returned to New York and set up a country studio where he began to do challenging work in carbro color photography. Achieving mastery quickly, he became a successful commercial color photographer and worked in earnest on his color nude studies.

More climate change denialism in the Wall Street Journal There's no need to panic about global warming because there no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy. It resurfaced in the The Australian. The argument is critiqued here.

The bit I liked the best was the policy idea: that we do nothing for the next several decades:

A recent study of a wide variety of policy options by Yale economist William Nordhaus showed that nearly the highest benefit-to-cost ratio is achieved for a policy that allows 50 more years of economic growth unimpeded by greenhouse gas controls. This would be especially beneficial to the less-developed parts of the world that would like to share some of the same advantages of material well-being, health and life expectancy that the fully developed parts of the world enjoy now. Many other policy responses would have a negative return on investment. And it is likely that more CO2 and the modest warming that may come with it will be an overall benefit to the planet.

The War on the Internet event, which was co-hosted by EFA and the Australian Greens, was held at Trades Hall in Melbourne on 21st January 2012. It featured:

Jacob Applebaum - leading computer security researcher and hacker
Bernard Keane - 'Crikey' journalist and author
Scott Ludlam - Senator for Western Australia and Greens spokesperson for Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy
Suelette Dreyfus - author and researcher on whistleblowing

This is a video of the talk by Suelette Dreyfus:

War on the Internet event #2 - Suelette Dreyfus from Electronic Frontiers Australia on Vimeo.

Her text Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier is a 1997 book that is researched by Julian Assange. It describes the exploits of a group of Australian, American, and British black hat hackers during the late 1980s and early 1990s, among them Assange himself. The book is freely available in electronic form.

Captain Beefheart & Magic Band perform 'Electricity' on the beach at Cannes in 1968:

'Electricity' is from the Safe as Milk album (1967). I've just started listening to Strictly Personal (1968). I'm finding it fascinating, in spite of all the layering of the extraneous sound effects like heartbeats and excessive use of psychedelic-era clichés like out-of-phase stereo panning and flanging) by Bob Krasnow, the producer.

In Recharge Your Design Batteries John O'Reilly & Tony Linkson is designed to inspire you to look in new directions for radical solutions and invites you to hone entirely new skill sets.

Tactics include: writing must-have lists and storytelling scenarios; compiling visual scrapbooks, drawing in sketchbooks and journaling daily; establishing a blog with a regular creative challenge; launching your own cute product line; collecting color and texture swatches and constructing atmospheric mood boards; experimenting with still and video cameras and recording experiences and environments; sourcing ephemera and found objects from flea-markets to build and display inspirational collections; volunteering and working pro-bono; and taking day trips and longer excursions to discover archival resources

The Closing of Winterland is a 4 CD live album of the Grateful Dead's New Year's Eve show 1978. The concert was also released as a 2 disc DVD. The title derives from the fact that it was the last concert in San Francisco's Winterland Arena, which was shut down shortly thereafter in 1979.

It marks the marks the closing of a historic San Francisco music landmark. The Dead celebrated the Closing as an approximately five hour long party (complete with breakfast with the audience at dawn) and invited some guests

The set list itself was intriguing from the unusual opening salvo of Sugar Magnolia, Scarlet Begonias, and Fire on the Mountain to the third set’s stratospheric cruise through such notable fan favorites as Dark Star, The Other One, Wharf Rat, St. Stephen, and Good Lovin’.

According to Nate Cochrane in The National Times in 2005, and after two years of legal wrangling, Australian Federal Court judge Brian Tamberlin, since retired, handed down a guilty verdict against Stephen Cooper and his ISP Comcen for Cooper's website MP3s4Free.com linking to allegedly infringing music. Tamberlin ruled that merely linking to potentially infringing content was itself illegal, and this rule has informed the decisions of media companies generally when reporting such issues ever since.

The US US House Bill 3261 Stop Online Piracy Bill, or SOPA goes further, as it cracks down on internet piracy and counterfeit goods with what critics say are draconian penalties. It proposes that search engines blackball sites alleged to have infringed on copyright and for internet service providers to bar users from getting access to them. It does this in a way that undercuts a new security standard that thwarts malicious redirects of web traffic, which often go to criminal and phishing sites.

The Bill asserts that this kind of crackdown to combat the theft of U.S. property, will prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Silicon Valley disagrees. The proposed congressional legislation they argue poses a stark, existential threat to the core architecture of the free and open Internet.

I've always been impressed by Colin Cahon's North Otago landscapes.

The distinguishing feature of this series is their generalised nature. Detail has been all but eliminated from this painting and the landscape reduced to horizontal bands (or fields) of colour. These are designed to evoke an emotional and contemplative response. The specifics of locality are less important than the symbolic content embodied by the landscape.

This is a favourite image of mine from the remaining body of work that have of Townsend Duryea. Remaining because his studio was destroyed by fire in 1875 along with Duryea’s entire collection of 50,000 glass plate negative. One of the best records of early colonial Adelaide was lost.

This is a stark image and in such a contrast to the standard trade views produced for clients that celebrated the clearing of the land to make way for farming and grazing.

In Other Histories: photography and Australia Helen Ennis says that the standard art histories do not consider any photographs from the colonial period, despite the importance of photography within visual culture during the second half of the nineteenth century.

When photography is introduced it is usually in relation to modernism (Max Dupain’s iconic image, Sunbaker is illustrated); feminism (with an illustration by Ponch Hawkes) and postmodernism that involved constructed imagery (represented by Anne Zahalka, Fiona Hall and Bill Henson). What is lacking is an account of the significance of photography in colonial Australia or bringing any new scholarship on colonial photography to light, even though there is a dearth of deep, object-based research into photography from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

So I've been digging around a bit in what has been uncovered and made public about photography in colonial South Australia:

The inescapable historical reality is the imperialist and colonialist underpinnings of 19th century settler Australia and so the interaction between Indigenous and settler Australians is therefore central to any understanding of specific local conditions and circumstances.

Bowie's Station to Station is his tenth album and it was made before the experimental Berlin trilogy of Low, "Heroes", and Lodger. It is seen as an album of collapse

Bowie's persona this time around was the Thin White Duke and mood is one of existential crisis. He'd become a paranoid coke freak, but the album pulls together more elements of his ever-changing style (epic ballads, disco to synthesized avant pop than any other. It's a a collection of songs not a concept album.