Divine - World-of-Newave.info http://answers.world-of-newave.info/divine.htm Latest news and articles about Divine en-us Copyright (c)2004-2008.§/Newave SARL. All rights reserved. webmaster@world-of-newave.com (Webmaster) Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:40:43 GMT Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:40:43 GMT Newave Lisa XML Engine v1.0 - http://www.world-of-newave.info/about.htm 60 http://www.world-of-newave.info/images/wi8831.gif World-of-Newave.info - Knowledge and Informational Database http://www.world-of-newave.info/ 88 31 {LIBRARIES > WEBLOGS} - Readers Overwhelm Europe?s New Digital Library http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/libraries/library-and-information-science/weblogs/readers-overwhelm-europe-s-new-digital-library-20081137912.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/libraries/library-and-information-science/weblogs/readers-overwhelm-europe-s-new-digital-library-20081137912.htm Thu, 20 Nov 2008 19:23:12 GMT PC Magazine - “Europe’s heritage went digital Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.” Librarystuff.Net Readers Overwhelm Europe?s New Digital Library {new window}   Www.Librarystuff.Net - PC Magazine - “Europe’s heritage went digital Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante’s “Divine Comedy” and Beethoven’s 9th Symphony just a mouse click away.”
Readers Overwhelm Europe’s New Digital Library | Library Stuff {...} PC Magazine - Europe's heritage went digital Thursday when the European Union launched an online library putting famous works such as Dante's Divine Comedy {...}
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Category: Reference > Libraries > Library and Information Science > Weblogs

]]> Reference > Libraries > Library and Information Science > Weblogs {ISSUES > BIAS AND BALANCE} - Newsweek publishes article on purported debate over whether "Obama [is] the Antichrist" http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/newsweek-publishes-article-on-purported-debate-20081178228.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/society/issues/business/media/bias-and-balance/newsweek-publishes-article-on-purported-debate-20081178228.htm Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:24:13 GMT In a November 15 Newsweek article headlined "Is Obama the Antichrist?" senior editor Lisa Miller treated as newsworthy purported debate among some "conservative Christians" over whether President-elect Barack Obama is "the Antichrist." In doing so, Miller gave credibility to the views of RaptureReady.com editor and founder Todd Strandberg who has, among other things, smeared gays and lesbians, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For example, Strandberg has written that Rev. Jerry Falwell correctly blamed 9-11 on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, [and] People for the American Way," and in January of 2006, Strandberg wrote that "Satan is the true god of the Hajj," the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a central part of Islamic faith. In a November 18 post, Washington Monthly blogger Steve Benen wrote of Miller's piece: "When bizarre, fringe publications speculate openly about who may or may not be the Antichrist, it's easy to dismiss. When Newsweek publishes a 600-word piece on those who wonder about Obama being the Antichrist, one really has to wonder what on earth the editors were thinking." Benen later stated: "I can appreciate the fact that there are a handful of very odd people in the world, some of whom believe the Book of Revelation foretold Obama's election. Strange people can be led to believe strange things. That's not a reason for Newsweek to publish articles about their inanity." In the Newsweek article, Miller reported: Strandberg says Obama probably isn't the Antichrist, but he's watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means "fasten your seat belts." Obama's win pushed the index to 161. In addition to failing to mention Strandberg's smears, Miller did not note that an October 31 Salt Lake Tribune article reported that, "In his 22 years working on Rapture Ready, Strandberg has seen an 'avalanche' of anti-Christ suggestions, including Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Obama doesn't fit the bill, he says, but he could be a type of 'anti-Christ,' which simply means too many people see him as a replacement for Jesus." Strandberg has also made repeated anti-GLBT, anti-Muslim, and anti-progressive statements over the years. For example: In a September 24, 2001, commentary, Strandberg agreed with Falwell's statement that "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way" "helped [9-11] happen": One of the most asked questions of the past couple weeks has been, "Was this terrorist attack a Judgment from God?" I would put the answer as being most likely - Yes. Jerry Falwell, once again, brought embarrassment to the cause of Christ when he first correctly laid the blame at the feet of immoral groups in America, but then he cowardly retreated when the press put fire to his feet. Here is what Falwell said on The 700 Club: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'" Here is what Falwell later told ABC News: "I do not believe they endanger America. I misspoke totally and entirely." In Jerry Falwell's world it would appear truth depends greatly on how the liberal media views your theology. I've said it in the past, because this man has a gift for repeatedly putting his foot in his own mouth, I think he should decline from making public statements. In a January 16, 2006, commentary discussing reports of mass deaths and injuries during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj, Strandberg stated that "Satan is the true god of the Hajj." From Strandberg's piece: Considering that mass death stampedes are a rarity, their frequency in Mina defies logical explanation. I don't recall hearing of a regular body clean up after partygoers celebrate the New Year in Times Square, New York, or after national sports championships. It could be noted that these events even have an added danger because of widespread alcohol consumption. I firmly believe the devil is the reason Islamic pilgrims are trampled to death with such strange regularity. Because Satan is the true god of the Hajj, one would think he would want the pilgrimage to be a smoothly run operation. The ironic twist of having people die during the stoning ritual apparently is just too tempting for Satan and his host of fallen angels to pass up. In response to the latest loss of life, the Saudis have announced plans for further modifying the site in the coming years to allow some 500,000 pilgrims an hour to carry out the stoning. I think they could expand that number to a million, and people will still be going home in body bags. Nothing will change until Muslims realize something is fundamentally wrong with their whole belief system. In a September 24, 2001, commentary, Strandberg wrote that, "Instead of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks being a huge black eye to Islam, to my amazement, I'm seeing the resulting PR campaign as being used as a net positive. Muslim web sites are seeing heavy traffic, mosques are opening their doors to the public, and Islamic clerics are being invited to interfaith prayer services." He later stated: "Despite the overwhelming contradictions between Islam and Christianity the Antichrist will someday join together all faiths into one super religion that will have him as the supreme leader. The oddity that Islam did not suffer the common backlash of hatred that normally follows any similar type of incident indicates to me the Harlot Church of Revelation must not be too far off." In a November 19, 2001, commentary, Strandberg embraced Rev. Franklin Graham's statement that, "We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion." Strandberg wrote, "I was quite surprised to read these comments made by Franklin Graham. I wasn't amazed at all by the remarks themselves. I agree totally with him that Islam is an evil and wicked religion. My astonishment was that he stood by his comments." In a January 21, 2002, commentary titled "Is AIDS A Curse From God?" Strandberg wrote, "I know science doesn't see in terms of the supernatural, but it does seem inescapable to me that AIDS is an unrelenting scourge, and there doesn't appear to be anything man can do about eradicating it through normal medical means." He continued, "Maybe it's time we started looking at it as being a judgment from the All Mighty. It is common knowledge that 95 percent of the time the virus is spread through some type of immoral act. Men simply refuse to hear any talk about sin being the primary root of this plague." In a November 10 commentary discussing Obama's November 4 election victory, Strandberg wrote that "it's unlikely that Obama will be the antichrist" but later said that Americans, in electing Obama, chose to move more rapidly "towards the end." Strandberg added, "[I]t's time for prophecy-minded Christians to fasten their seat belts": At this point, I think it's unlikely that Obama will be the antichrist. The beast of Revelation will come out Europe, and he will be a man of profound political skills. What makes Obama potentially important to the end time is not the fact that he will be the most socially liberal president in our nation's history; I think his prophetic significance will center on how he handles our relationship with the state of Israel. [...] The global financial crisis is rapidly pushing the world towards the one-world economic system the Bible predicts. Later this month, several key nations are going to come together for another strategy summit. I don't mean to pick on Obama before he has even taken office. I believe we are so close to the tribulation hour, there is a good reason to be apprehensive about policies he will seek to implement. During the campaign, I thought it was strange that one man could be friends with so many people with radical political views. Prophetic events have progressed along so far, the only real choice we had between John McCain and Barack Obama in the election was the speed at which we would choose to move towards the end. Now that America has selected the more rapid option, it's time for prophecy-minded Christians to fasten their seat belts. I don't see anything shocking in last week's election. I do believe strongly that a dark demonic cloud has swept over the land, but this is how we should expect the end times to play out. And, I foresee more negative events to come. The only thing that worries me is the Christians who fail to see the danger that comes from prophecy being fulfilled in our day. In his October 20 commentary warning his readers that Democrats could win a congressional "super-majority" in the November 4 elections, Strandberg wrote that "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] is the representative of America's Sodom and Gomorrah: San Francisco. I doubt the gay lobby will have any trouble getting her support." He later listed "just five" of the "very long list of liberal proposals that they [Democrats] would love to see become part of the law of the land," including: - Union supremacy - Unions have been in decline for several decades. One of the key reasons is that they have a negative impact on business productivity. In a highly competitive world, unionized firms tend to fall behind. Democrats love unions because they are a good way to control large blocks of people with promises of government incentives. - Medicare for all - The U.S. is already facing a calamity from the future entitlements promised to the baby boom generation. That bill will amount to $44 trillion. The idea of expanding the scope of Medicare makes me wonder if the Democrats are part of a secret plan to bankrupt this nation. - Homosexual rights - Gays already have equal rights. The next step in this moral slide would be to make this sin protected from rebuke. In many European nations, it is a hate crime to quote the Bible's view of homosexuality. He then wrote: "One of the disadvantages of being close to the time of the rapture is that we may witness some rather shocking changes in our form of government. If liberals are swept into super-majority power, there will be nothing to bar them from enacting these proposals. We can take comfort in knowing we will soon be rescued by a special Someone who will stand solidly for liberty and righteousness." In a November 27, 2006, commentary, Strandberg criticized Pastor Rick Warren for allegedly saying during a trip to Syria that "he could find no persecution there of Christians or Jews. He also said he could find no evidence of extremism or terrorism in Syria." Strandberg wrote that Warren had responded to WorldNetDaily.com founder Joseph Farah's criticism of statements Warren made during his Syria trip by saying, "As a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Oxford Analytica, I might know as much about the Middle East as you." Strandberg wrote, "I found this remark hilarious because in defending himself he admits to being a member of two organizations that are known for being anti-Christ and supportive of a one-world government." Strandberg later stated: If Warren understood Bible prophecy, he might not be in such hot water. Some day, Syria will be part of a surprise attack against Israel. His trip can only help embolden Israel's enemy into making its move. Any leader who rejects prophecy runs the risk of becoming an active player in Satan's end-time plan. Warren is currently promoting a global peace plan, which is the same ploy the Antichrist will use to deceive the world. In an undated post on his website titled "Satan's Little Helpers" that has been there since September 26, 2000, Strandberg warns readers that, while Satan can use dictators to control countries that have them, "In the 'free world,' Satan has found the liberal media makes for an effective tool for guiding and controlling society." Strandberg later stated: "When Jesus Christ returns to earth, He'll cast the liberal media into the pit of darkness. In hell, members of the media won't be harassed by us Christians, so they'll have the freedom to follow whatever news stories they choose." From Strandberg's piece: Although Satan has a host of demonic angels throughout the world, there is one area to which the devil finds himself mostly restricted. Satan and company are spiritual beings, which makes them incapable of acting in this physical realm. Satan's little helpers must be of flesh and bone. so this is where the need for human organizations comes in. In the nations where the devil has dictators in command, he can use them directly to control those countries. In the "free world," Satan has found the liberal media makes for an effective tool for guiding and controlling society. [...] The liberal media will be a substantial player in end-time events. When the Antichrist finally does come to power, the liberal media will be tripping over itself to report his every word. The values that the press currently portrays will perfectly match the values of the forthcoming Antichrist. It will be love at first sight. The liberal media's final act will be to broadcast the hatred of the Jews and nonconforming Christians. Even today, these two groups are constantly reported about a negative bias [sic]. As we draw closer to the tribulation, the negative media coverage will only increase. When Jesus Christ returns to earth, He'll cast the liberal media into the pit of darkness. In hell, members of the media won't be harassed by us Christians, so they'll have the freedom to follow whatever news stories they choose. They will be able to cover topics like, "Why is hell so hot?" or "Does a snowball really stand a chance down here?" I'm sure the liberal media, at that time, will conclude that hell is a racist and homophobic place, and the burning sulfur will certainly be noted as destructive to hell's environment. Finally, in the Frequently Asked Questions section of his website, Strandberg has written the following about Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Question: How can I recognize a cult? From the answer: Just for example, let's look briefly at the Jehovah's Witnesses. They believe that Jesus was a good man, but not that He is the Son of God. They also place divine authority on sources other than the Bible. Furthermore, they believe that they acquire salvation through their good works. These beliefs obviously indicate that Jehovah's Witnesses is a cult. But, a religion does not have to meet all of the above criteria to be considered a cult; just one characteristic will do it. Many mainstream denominations are deceiving people by not teaching the truth. But God does not make exceptions to His Word. Question: What is Mormonism? From the answer: Mormonism is a cult that, like most cults, is sprinkled with enough truth to just hint at the truth of the Bible while missing it entirely. Again, we have a religion that denies the deity of Jesus Christ. In this faith, He is relegated to being a mere mortal, a true offspring of Elohim and an equal to Lucifer, another of Elohim's offspring. According to the Mormon Doctrine, "Every man who reigns in celestial glory is a god to his dominions;" "There was never a time when there were not Gods and worlds;" and, "Each god, through his wife or wives, raises up a numerous family of sons and daughters." So, every man is equal to Jesus in that he has the opportunity to become a god and have dominion over his people. From Miller's November 15 Newsweek article headlined "Is Obama the Antichrist?": On Nov. 5, Todd Strandberg was at his desk, fielding E-mails from around the world. As the editor and founder of RaptureReady.com, his job is to track current events and link them to biblical prophecy in hopes of maintaining his status as "the eBay of prophecy," the best source online for predictions and calculations concerning the end of the world. Already Barack Obama had drawn the attention of apocalypse watchers after an anonymous e-mail circulated among conservative Christians in October implying that he was the Antichrist. Former "Saturday Night Live" ingénue Victoria Jackson fueled the fire when, according to news reports, she wrote on her Web site that Obama "bears traits that resemble the anti-Christ." Now Strandberg was receiving up-to-the-minute news from his constituents in Illinois. One of the winning lottery numbers in the president-elect's home state was 666 -- which, as everyone knows, is the sign of the Beast (also known as the Antichrist). "It is very eerie, and I take it for a sign as to who he really is," wrote one of Strandberg's correspondents. [...] Before Christ comes again, those who are saved will ascend to heaven, according to this end-times theology, in a huge, upward whoosh called the Rapture. Strandberg is so certain that the Rapture is coming, he's bought a number of Internet addresses in addition to RaptureReady: AntiAntichrist, Tribulationus and RaptureMe. In the event that RaptureReady crashes during the apocalypse, anyone who needs an update will, with a simple Google search, be able to get one. Strandberg says Obama probably isn't the Antichrist, but he's watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means "fasten your seat belts." Obama's win pushed the index to 161. Mediamatters.Org Newsweek publishes article on purported debate over whether "Obama [is] the Antichrist" {new window}   Mediamatters.Org - In a November 15 Newsweek article headlined "Is Obama the Antichrist?" senior editor Lisa Miller treated as newsworthy purported debate among some "conservative Christians" over whether President-elect Barack Obama is "the Antichrist." In doing so, Miller gave credibility to the views of RaptureReady.com editor and founder Todd Strandberg who has, among other things, smeared gays and lesbians, Islam, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. For example, Strandberg has written that Rev. Jerry Falwell correctly blamed 9-11 on "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, [and] People for the American Way," and in January of 2006, Strandberg wrote that "Satan is the true god of the Hajj," the pilgrimage to Mecca that is a central part of Islamic faith. In a November 18 post, Washington Monthly blogger Steve Benen wrote of Miller's piece: "When bizarre, fringe publications speculate openly about who may or may not be the Antichrist, it's easy to dismiss. When Newsweek publishes a 600-word piece on those who wonder about Obama being the Antichrist, one really has to wonder what on earth the editors were thinking." Benen later stated: "I can appreciate the fact that there are a handful of very odd people in the world, some of whom believe the Book of Revelation foretold Obama's election. Strange people can be led to believe strange things. That's not a reason for Newsweek to publish articles about their inanity." In the Newsweek article, Miller reported: Strandberg says Obama probably isn't the Antichrist, but he's watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means "fasten your seat belts." Obama's win pushed the index to 161. In addition to failing to mention Strandberg's smears, Miller did not note that an October 31 Salt Lake Tribune article reported that, "In his 22 years working on Rapture Ready, Strandberg has seen an 'avalanche' of anti-Christ suggestions, including Tony Blair and Bill Clinton. Obama doesn't fit the bill, he says, but he could be a type of 'anti-Christ,' which simply means too many people see him as a replacement for Jesus." Strandberg has also made repeated anti-GLBT, anti-Muslim, and anti-progressive statements over the years. For example: In a September 24, 2001, commentary, Strandberg agreed with Falwell's statement that "the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way" "helped [9-11] happen": One of the most asked questions of the past couple weeks has been, "Was this terrorist attack a Judgment from God?" I would put the answer as being most likely - Yes. Jerry Falwell, once again, brought embarrassment to the cause of Christ when he first correctly laid the blame at the feet of immoral groups in America, but then he cowardly retreated when the press put fire to his feet. Here is what Falwell said on The 700 Club: "The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way - all of them have tried to secularize America - I point the finger in their face and say, 'You helped this happen.'" Here is what Falwell later told ABC News: "I do not believe they endanger America. I misspoke totally and entirely." In Jerry Falwell's world it would appear truth depends greatly on how the liberal media views your theology. I've said it in the past, because this man has a gift for repeatedly putting his foot in his own mouth, I think he should decline from making public statements. In a January 16, 2006, commentary discussing reports of mass deaths and injuries during the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca known as the Hajj, Strandberg stated that "Satan is the true god of the Hajj." From Strandberg's piece: Considering that mass death stampedes are a rarity, their frequency in Mina defies logical explanation. I don't recall hearing of a regular body clean up after partygoers celebrate the New Year in Times Square, New York, or after national sports championships. It could be noted that these events even have an added danger because of widespread alcohol consumption. I firmly believe the devil is the reason Islamic pilgrims are trampled to death with such strange regularity. Because Satan is the true god of the Hajj, one would think he would want the pilgrimage to be a smoothly run operation. The ironic twist of having people die during the stoning ritual apparently is just too tempting for Satan and his host of fallen angels to pass up. In response to the latest loss of life, the Saudis have announced plans for further modifying the site in the coming years to allow some 500,000 pilgrims an hour to carry out the stoning. I think they could expand that number to a million, and people will still be going home in body bags. Nothing will change until Muslims realize something is fundamentally wrong with their whole belief system. In a September 24, 2001, commentary, Strandberg wrote that, "Instead of the Sept 11 terrorist attacks being a huge black eye to Islam, to my amazement, I'm seeing the resulting PR campaign as being used as a net positive. Muslim web sites are seeing heavy traffic, mosques are opening their doors to the public, and Islamic clerics are being invited to interfaith prayer services." He later stated: "Despite the overwhelming contradictions between Islam and Christianity the Antichrist will someday join together all faiths into one super religion that will have him as the supreme leader. The oddity that Islam did not suffer the common backlash of hatred that normally follows any similar type of incident indicates to me the Harlot Church of Revelation must not be too far off." In a November 19, 2001, commentary, Strandberg embraced Rev. Franklin Graham's statement that, "We're not attacking Islam but Islam has attacked us. The God of Islam is not the same God. He's not the God of the Christian or Judeo-Christian faith. It's a different God and I believe it is a very evil and wicked religion." Strandberg wrote, "I was quite surprised to read these comments made by Franklin Graham. I wasn't amazed at all by the remarks themselves. I agree totally with him that Islam is an evil and wicked religion. My astonishment was that he stood by his comments." In a January 21, 2002, commentary titled "Is AIDS A Curse From God?" Strandberg wrote, "I know science doesn't see in terms of the supernatural, but it does seem inescapable to me that AIDS is an unrelenting scourge, and there doesn't appear to be anything man can do about eradicating it through normal medical means." He continued, "Maybe it's time we started looking at it as being a judgment from the All Mighty. It is common knowledge that 95 percent of the time the virus is spread through some type of immoral act. Men simply refuse to hear any talk about sin being the primary root of this plague." In a November 10 commentary discussing Obama's November 4 election victory, Strandberg wrote that "it's unlikely that Obama will be the antichrist" but later said that Americans, in electing Obama, chose to move more rapidly "towards the end." Strandberg added, "[I]t's time for prophecy-minded Christians to fasten their seat belts": At this point, I think it's unlikely that Obama will be the antichrist. The beast of Revelation will come out Europe, and he will be a man of profound political skills. What makes Obama potentially important to the end time is not the fact that he will be the most socially liberal president in our nation's history; I think his prophetic significance will center on how he handles our relationship with the state of Israel. [...] The global financial crisis is rapidly pushing the world towards the one-world economic system the Bible predicts. Later this month, several key nations are going to come together for another strategy summit. I don't mean to pick on Obama before he has even taken office. I believe we are so close to the tribulation hour, there is a good reason to be apprehensive about policies he will seek to implement. During the campaign, I thought it was strange that one man could be friends with so many people with radical political views. Prophetic events have progressed along so far, the only real choice we had between John McCain and Barack Obama in the election was the speed at which we would choose to move towards the end. Now that America has selected the more rapid option, it's time for prophecy-minded Christians to fasten their seat belts. I don't see anything shocking in last week's election. I do believe strongly that a dark demonic cloud has swept over the land, but this is how we should expect the end times to play out. And, I foresee more negative events to come. The only thing that worries me is the Christians who fail to see the danger that comes from prophecy being fulfilled in our day. In his October 20 commentary warning his readers that Democrats could win a congressional "super-majority" in the November 4 elections, Strandberg wrote that "Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi [D-CA] is the representative of America's Sodom and Gomorrah: San Francisco. I doubt the gay lobby will have any trouble getting her support." He later listed "just five" of the "very long list of liberal proposals that they [Democrats] would love to see become part of the law of the land," including: - Union supremacy - Unions have been in decline for several decades. One of the key reasons is that they have a negative impact on business productivity. In a highly competitive world, unionized firms tend to fall behind. Democrats love unions because they are a good way to control large blocks of people with promises of government incentives. - Medicare for all - The U.S. is already facing a calamity from the future entitlements promised to the baby boom generation. That bill will amount to $44 trillion. The idea of expanding the scope of Medicare makes me wonder if the Democrats are part of a secret plan to bankrupt this nation. - Homosexual rights - Gays already have equal rights. The next step in this moral slide would be to make this sin protected from rebuke. In many European nations, it is a hate crime to quote the Bible's view of homosexuality. He then wrote: "One of the disadvantages of being close to the time of the rapture is that we may witness some rather shocking changes in our form of government. If liberals are swept into super-majority power, there will be nothing to bar them from enacting these proposals. We can take comfort in knowing we will soon be rescued by a special Someone who will stand solidly for liberty and righteousness." In a November 27, 2006, commentary, Strandberg criticized Pastor Rick Warren for allegedly saying during a trip to Syria that "he could find no persecution there of Christians or Jews. He also said he could find no evidence of extremism or terrorism in Syria." Strandberg wrote that Warren had responded to WorldNetDaily.com founder Joseph Farah's criticism of statements Warren made during his Syria trip by saying, "As a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Oxford Analytica, I might know as much about the Middle East as you." Strandberg wrote, "I found this remark hilarious because in defending himself he admits to being a member of two organizations that are known for being anti-Christ and supportive of a one-world government." Strandberg later stated: If Warren understood Bible prophecy, he might not be in such hot water. Some day, Syria will be part of a surprise attack against Israel. His trip can only help embolden Israel's enemy into making its move. Any leader who rejects prophecy runs the risk of becoming an active player in Satan's end-time plan. Warren is currently promoting a global peace plan, which is the same ploy the Antichrist will use to deceive the world. In an undated post on his website titled "Satan's Little Helpers" that has been there since September 26, 2000, Strandberg warns readers that, while Satan can use dictators to control countries that have them, "In the 'free world,' Satan has found the liberal media makes for an effective tool for guiding and controlling society." Strandberg later stated: "When Jesus Christ returns to earth, He'll cast the liberal media into the pit of darkness. In hell, members of the media won't be harassed by us Christians, so they'll have the freedom to follow whatever news stories they choose." From Strandberg's piece: Although Satan has a host of demonic angels throughout the world, there is one area to which the devil finds himself mostly restricted. Satan and company are spiritual beings, which makes them incapable of acting in this physical realm. Satan's little helpers must be of flesh and bone. so this is where the need for human organizations comes in. In the nations where the devil has dictators in command, he can use them directly to control those countries. In the "free world," Satan has found the liberal media makes for an effective tool for guiding and controlling society. [...] The liberal media will be a substantial player in end-time events. When the Antichrist finally does come to power, the liberal media will be tripping over itself to report his every word. The values that the press currently portrays will perfectly match the values of the forthcoming Antichrist. It will be love at first sight. The liberal media's final act will be to broadcast the hatred of the Jews and nonconforming Christians. Even today, these two groups are constantly reported about a negative bias [sic]. As we draw closer to the tribulation, the negative media coverage will only increase. When Jesus Christ returns to earth, He'll cast the liberal media into the pit of darkness. In hell, members of the media won't be harassed by us Christians, so they'll have the freedom to follow whatever news stories they choose. They will be able to cover topics like, "Why is hell so hot?" or "Does a snowball really stand a chance down here?" I'm sure the liberal media, at that time, will conclude that hell is a racist and homophobic place, and the burning sulfur will certainly be noted as destructive to hell's environment. Finally, in the Frequently Asked Questions section of his website, Strandberg has written the following about Jehovah's Witnesses and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints: Question: How can I recognize a cult? From the answer: Just for example, let's look briefly at the Jehovah's Witnesses. They believe that Jesus was a good man, but not that He is the Son of God. They also place divine authority on sources other than the Bible. Furthermore, they believe that they acquire salvation through their good works. These beliefs obviously indicate that Jehovah's Witnesses is a cult. But, a religion does not have to meet all of the above criteria to be considered a cult; just one characteristic will do it. Many mainstream denominations are deceiving people by not teaching the truth. But God does not make exceptions to His Word. Question: What is Mormonism? From the answer: Mormonism is a cult that, like most cults, is sprinkled with enough truth to just hint at the truth of the Bible while missing it entirely. Again, we have a religion that denies the deity of Jesus Christ. In this faith, He is relegated to being a mere mortal, a true offspring of Elohim and an equal to Lucifer, another of Elohim's offspring. According to the Mormon Doctrine, "Every man who reigns in celestial glory is a god to his dominions;" "There was never a time when there were not Gods and worlds;" and, "Each god, through his wife or wives, raises up a numerous family of sons and daughters." So, every man is equal to Jesus in that he has the opportunity to become a god and have dominion over his people. From Miller's November 15 Newsweek article headlined "Is Obama the Antichrist?": On Nov. 5, Todd Strandberg was at his desk, fielding E-mails from around the world. As the editor and founder of RaptureReady.com, his job is to track current events and link them to biblical prophecy in hopes of maintaining his status as "the eBay of prophecy," the best source online for predictions and calculations concerning the end of the world. Already Barack Obama had drawn the attention of apocalypse watchers after an anonymous e-mail circulated among conservative Christians in October implying that he was the Antichrist. Former "Saturday Night Live" ingénue Victoria Jackson fueled the fire when, according to news reports, she wrote on her Web site that Obama "bears traits that resemble the anti-Christ." Now Strandberg was receiving up-to-the-minute news from his constituents in Illinois. One of the winning lottery numbers in the president-elect's home state was 666 -- which, as everyone knows, is the sign of the Beast (also known as the Antichrist). "It is very eerie, and I take it for a sign as to who he really is," wrote one of Strandberg's correspondents. [...] Before Christ comes again, those who are saved will ascend to heaven, according to this end-times theology, in a huge, upward whoosh called the Rapture. Strandberg is so certain that the Rapture is coming, he's bought a number of Internet addresses in addition to RaptureReady: AntiAntichrist, Tribulationus and RaptureMe. In the event that RaptureReady crashes during the apocalypse, anyone who needs an update will, with a simple Google search, be able to get one. Strandberg says Obama probably isn't the Antichrist, but he's watching the president-elect carefully. On his Web site, he has something called the Rapture Index, a calculation based on signs and prophecy of the proximity of the end. According to Strandberg, any number over 160 means "fasten your seat belts." Obama's win pushed the index to 161.
Media Matters - Newsweek publishes article on purported debate over whether "Obama [is] the Antichrist" {...} In a Newsweek article headlined "Is Obama the Antichrist?" senior editor Lisa Miller treated as newsworthy purported debate among some "conservative Christians" over whether President-elect Barack Obama is "the Antichrist." In doing so, she gave credibility to the views of RaptureReady.com editor and founder Todd Strandberg, who has, among other things, smeared gays and lesbians, Islam, progressives, Jehovah's Witnesses, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. {...}
Published: November 18, 2008, 8:24 pm - Indexed: November 19, 2008, 10:20 am - Page Size: 35KB
Category: Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance

]]> Society > Issues > Business > Media > Bias and Balance {EUROPE > COMPUTERS AND INTERNET} - Apple sued over Jesus Phone 'hairline cracks' http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/business-and-economy/computers-and-internet/apple-sued-over-jesus-phone-hairline-cracks-20081127220.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/business-and-economy/computers-and-internet/apple-sued-over-jesus-phone-hairline-cracks-20081127220.htm Mon, 17 Nov 2008 19:11:17 GMT Divine handset exhibits flaws of the flesh A New Yorker has sued Apple over hairline cracks known to appear in the Jesus Phone.? Theregister.Co.Uk Apple sued over Jesus Phone 'hairline cracks' {new window}   Www.Theregister.Co.Uk - Divine handset exhibits flaws of the flesh A New Yorker has sued Apple over hairline cracks known to appear in the Jesus Phone.?
Apple sued over Jesus Phone 'hairline cracks' ? The Register {...}
Published: November 17, 2008, 7:11 pm - Indexed: November 18, 2008, 10:46 am - Page Size: 23KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > Business and Economy > Computers and Internet

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > Business and Economy > Computers and Internet {VIDEO GAMES > G} - Halo Wars Story Interview http://articles.world-of-newave.info/games/video-games/news-and-reviews/g/halo-wars-story-interview-20081113722.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/games/video-games/news-and-reviews/g/halo-wars-story-interview-20081113722.htm Mon, 17 Nov 2008 17:39:15 GMT Graeme Divine speaks to us about the story and campaign of Halo Wars. Gamespot.Com Halo Wars Story Interview {new window}   Www.Gamespot.Com - Graeme Divine speaks to us about the story and campaign of Halo Wars.
GameSpot Video: Halo Wars Story Interview {...} Video Games - GameSpot is the world's largest source for PC, PlayStation 2, Xbox, GameCube, PSP, DS, Wii, GBA, PS2, PS3, PlayStation 3, and Xbox 360 video game news, cheats, reviews and more! {...}
Published: November 17, 2008, 5:39 pm - Indexed: November 18, 2008, 8:50 am - Page Size: 78KB
Category: Games > Video Games > News and Reviews > G

]]> Games > Video Games > News and Reviews > G {NEWS > BREAKING NEWS} - Gallery: The Best Fictional Doomsday Devices http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/gallery-the-best-fictional-doomsday-devices-20081112916.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/news/breaking-news/gallery-the-best-fictional-doomsday-devices-20081112916.htm Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:00:00 GMT : America's love affair with the doomsday device is a turbulent one. First popularized in comic books and James Bond movies, then lampooned by Austin Powers, we love them because their ridiculousness makes us feel safe — like the exhilarating false danger of a roller coaster. Now heightened audience cynicism has forced world-ending devices into the realm of camp, and except for a new breed of superhero movies, they've largely been replaced by natural disasters or apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios in Hollywood films. The opening of Quantum of Solace on Friday is making us nostalgic for the junk science and catastrophic fear that make fictional doomsday devices fun. From earth-shattering fusion reactors to catastrophic earthquake machines to planet-destroying space stations, here's a list of some of our favorite extinction-bringing devices from film, television and videogames. Be sure to share your own favorites in the comments. Left: The Doomsday Machine — Dr. Strangelove (film) The aptly named "Doomsday Machine" was one of the uncredited stars of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Its purpose? Delivering a retaliatory nuclear strike on all mankind in the event of an attack on Soviet soil. All it took was a broken radio and one bomb-riding cowboy to set it off. : In 1979's Moonraker, James Bond went into space. Seriously. In his defense, the goal was to destroy the Moonraker space station. This apocalyptic orbital platform was designed to poison mankind by releasing orbs full of lethal toxins into Earth's atmosphere. Agent 007 destroyed the orbs (with lasers, no less), and the planet was spared.: It's hard to say what made Beneath the Planet of the Apes creepier: the "Divine Bomb," a misplaced nuclear warhead capable of destroying Earth, or the radioactive mutants who worshiped it. Either way, the Divine Bomb gets its moment in the sun when a dying Charlton Heston flips the switch, thereby destroying ... er ... everything.: Leave it to the military to need rescuing from its own doomsday device. In 2003's The Core, the "Deep Earth Seismic Trigger Initiative," or Destini, became the aforementioned device. Though designed as a weaponized earthquake machine, Destini threatens the planet by screwing up Earth's magnetic field. Ironically, nuke-wielding scientists provide the solution.: Elaborate doomsday devices often rely on sketchy science. Take Dr. Octavius' highly volatile fusion reactor from Spider-Man 2. Not only was this "artificial sun" self-sustaining, but capable of indefinite growth by consuming everything around it (i.e., the world). Strangely enough, its Achilles' heel was a dunk in a nearby river.: This iconic space station from the first Star Wars trilogy was no moon. In fact, it was a planet-shaped superweapon designed to destroy planets. After a whizz-bang demo on Alderaan, it was clear the Death Star spelled certain doom for any planet dweller. But then there was that exposed exhaust port ?: By the time Futurama's sci-fi satire hit the scene, creator Matt Groening had the doomsday-device shtick down. Case in point: the Spheroboom. This highly explosive space/time-bending device isn't just the prized jewel of the show's mad scientist, professor Farnsworth. It also destroys anyone/anything not wearing a "Doom-proof Platinum Vest.": The titular ring-shaped world of the Halo videogame series is more than an architectural feat. When activated, the megastructure is capable of destroying all sentient life in the universe. In Halo 2, puzzled gamers discovered that stopping this harbinger of the apocalypse was as simple as turning it off. Wired.Com Gallery: The Best Fictional Doomsday Devices {new window}   Www.Wired.Com - : America's love affair with the doomsday device is a turbulent one. First popularized in comic books and James Bond movies, then lampooned by Austin Powers, we love them because their ridiculousness makes us feel safe — like the exhilarating false danger of a roller coaster. Now heightened audience cynicism has forced world-ending devices into the realm of camp, and except for a new breed of superhero movies, they've largely been replaced by natural disasters or apocalyptic sci-fi scenarios in Hollywood films. The opening of Quantum of Solace on Friday is making us nostalgic for the junk science and catastrophic fear that make fictional doomsday devices fun. From earth-shattering fusion reactors to catastrophic earthquake machines to planet-destroying space stations, here's a list of some of our favorite extinction-bringing devices from film, television and videogames. Be sure to share your own favorites in the comments. Left: The Doomsday Machine — Dr. Strangelove (film) The aptly named "Doomsday Machine" was one of the uncredited stars of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove. Its purpose? Delivering a retaliatory nuclear strike on all mankind in the event of an attack on Soviet soil. All it took was a broken radio and one bomb-riding cowboy to set it off. : In 1979's Moonraker, James Bond went into space. Seriously. In his defense, the goal was to destroy the Moonraker space station. This apocalyptic orbital platform was designed to poison mankind by releasing orbs full of lethal toxins into Earth's atmosphere. Agent 007 destroyed the orbs (with lasers, no less), and the planet was spared.: It's hard to say what made Beneath the Planet of the Apes creepier: the "Divine Bomb," a misplaced nuclear warhead capable of destroying Earth, or the radioactive mutants who worshiped it. Either way, the Divine Bomb gets its moment in the sun when a dying Charlton Heston flips the switch, thereby destroying ... er ... everything.: Leave it to the military to need rescuing from its own doomsday device. In 2003's The Core, the "Deep Earth Seismic Trigger Initiative," or Destini, became the aforementioned device. Though designed as a weaponized earthquake machine, Destini threatens the planet by screwing up Earth's magnetic field. Ironically, nuke-wielding scientists provide the solution.: Elaborate doomsday devices often rely on sketchy science. Take Dr. Octavius' highly volatile fusion reactor from Spider-Man 2. Not only was this "artificial sun" self-sustaining, but capable of indefinite growth by consuming everything around it (i.e., the world). Strangely enough, its Achilles' heel was a dunk in a nearby river.: This iconic space station from the first Star Wars trilogy was no moon. In fact, it was a planet-shaped superweapon designed to destroy planets. After a whizz-bang demo on Alderaan, it was clear the Death Star spelled certain doom for any planet dweller. But then there was that exposed exhaust port ?: By the time Futurama's sci-fi satire hit the scene, creator Matt Groening had the doomsday-device shtick down. Case in point: the Spheroboom. This highly explosive space/time-bending device isn't just the prized jewel of the show's mad scientist, professor Farnsworth. It also destroys anyone/anything not wearing a "Doom-proof Platinum Vest.": The titular ring-shaped world of the Halo videogame series is more than an architectural feat. When activated, the megastructure is capable of destroying all sentient life in the universe. In Halo 2, puzzled gamers discovered that stopping this harbinger of the apocalypse was as simple as turning it off.
See the latest multimedia and applications including videos, animations, podcasts, photos, and slideshows on Wired.com {...}
Published: November 13, 2008, 5:00 am - Indexed: November 15, 2008, 12:12 pm - Page Size: 37KB
Category: News > Breaking News

]]> News > Breaking News {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Jonathan Jones: Daunting, dazzling - and doomed; why have painters been drawn to the Tower of Babel? http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/jonathan-jones-daunting-dazzling-and-doomed-why-2008112598.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/jonathan-jones-daunting-dazzling-and-doomed-why-2008112598.htm Tue, 11 Nov 2008 00:13:48 GMT He was a tourist in Rome, seeing the sprawling ruins wormholed by time. He probably heard shots at the Forum: its crumbling stones, overgrown with long grass, were popular with hunters. The Colosseum, meanwhile, with its oval facade and labyrinth of tunnels and buttresses, struck him as having the scale of a city. And over the river, the building site that was to become St Peter's Basilica was so gargantuan, it added to his idea of cities as deranged architectural enterprises.Pieter Brueghel made a painting on ivory while he was in Rome, of a stupendous building. It is now lost. Later, back home in Flanders in 1563, he responded to Rome's sights, using the Colosseum as his model. The result was a great painting that today hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Beside a blue sea, a medieval town, with its clapboard houses, church spires, red rooftops and plump little people, has settled comfortably into a wide green plain. It is a vision of cosiness and habit - but this town has cancer. That does seem an appropriate image: this colossal tower grows without constraint, without purpose, its scale revealed by the little houses below, whose ordinariness makes visible its extraordinariness. Seven arcaded tiers ascend from a fat, round base. A road spirals round, swarming with workers, cranes, little houses like parasites. In its gaping heights, ribs of stone are exposed and dark doors lead into its core. Still more storeys are being created, a second tower emerging from the first. An outsized, out-of-control plaything, this building seems determined to swallow the world. The Tower of Babel is a vision of architecture as anthill madness. As the British Museum's exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality reveals, Brueghel is not the only artist driven to imagine this fabulous building. Towers of Babel proliferate in this show, be they painted with miniaturist precision or exploding in apocalyptic doom; there's even one made of shoes, in a 2001 painting by Michael Lassel. Martin van Heemskerk's, however, is square, in keeping with old sources he studied, but his attempt to visualise what the tower was "really" like does not stop him showing its top smashed apart by divine lightning. In an anonymous Dutch painting - one of a series that riff on Brueghel - the city that surrounds the tower is on fire, the summit of the hubristic edifice menaced by an eerie light coming through the storm clouds. Perhaps the strangest is by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scholar whose light, airy spiral looks prophetically modern, like a blueprint for a skyscraper. These fascinating images are attempts to illustrate the greatest story ever told about a building. The tale is in the Bible. After the Flood, the descendents of Noah spread over the earth, and resolved to build a city and a tower, whose top reached "unto heaven". The Lord was not too pleased. For if people can do this, "nothing will be restrained from them". He smote their hubris, scattered them abroad and confounded their language: until then, everyone had spoken the same tongue, but now a multitude of tongues confused them and they gave up building their city and their tower. The story of the Tower of Babel stands at the heart of how we imagine architecture. This myth hovers over every tall building; behind all criticism of skyscrapers lurks the spectre of Babel, smote for its hubris. It is a great myth but the British Museum's show reveals it is a true story. The real Tower of Babel is the first thing you see as you enter the show - or rather you see its footprint. In an aerial photograph taken by Georg Gerster in 1973, the dark square mark of the tower's foundations, and that of the staircase that ascended it, can be seen in bright dust near the fertile Euphrates. This is the site of the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq. That black square was left by a huge ziggurat, a tower whose width diminishes as it rises, invented by the architects of ancient Mesopotamia. The Bible even gets the material right: it was built of fired bricks. You can see one on display marked with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BC. His Babylon was a place to inspire dreams, a daunting, dazzling city. You can see that from the reliefs of lions and a magical dragon that loom over a model of the city's grandiose Ishtar Gate. If the Tower of Babel is an imaginary version of a real building in Babylon, the Ishtar Gate - dedicated to the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war - is solid and real. In the late Victorian age archaeologists found the lost city of Babylon near Baghdad, and a team of German archaeologists excavated it in the early 1900s. If you visit Berlin's Pergamon Museum, you can see the massive blue gate they found. This show compares the myths of Babylon with the real city revealed by such archaeologists. Exhibitions with this type of postmodern premise can be frustrating, especially when they don't include the most famous images: Brueghel's Tower is not here, nor is Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast, although it's not far away, at the National Gallery. So why does this exhibition still manage to be so compelling? Because the reality is as beautiful as the myths. A dragon of glazed bricks, with a snake's head, lion paws and eagle talons, strides through deep blue space, just one of many strange beasts that decorated the city gates and processional ways. You can look from Dutch paintings of the tower to a model showing how archaeologists reconstructed the real-life ziggurat, already a very old architectural design by the sixth century BC.Ziggurats were built as stairways to heaven. A god could come down to earth via this tower, and priests could go up to sacrifice direct to the gods. But if this was so, why was it rendered as an arrogant, hubristic tower that offended God? Because in the sixth century BC, the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and took its king and other people hostage, and this event is remembered in the Bible as one of the deepest oppressions of God's chosen people. Like the Tower of Babel, the "Babylonian Captivity", related in the Book of Daniel and Psalms, is rooted in history. The Jews saw Babylon as a city of sin, pride and luxury. It appears again and again in the Bible, its desolation prophesied by Isiah and personified in the Book of Revelations as the Whore of Babylon. The show features Albrecht Dürer's hallucinatory vision of the Whore of Babylon, along with William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar crawling on the ground, reduced to grass-eating madness, his punishment according to the Book of Daniel. These images bring to life the static artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia that are shown beside them, such as the clay tablets beautifully incised with cuneiform letters. Myth illuminates reality - and that reality lives on in our world far more than we appreciate. Astrology, for example, is a Babylonian invention. Here you can see how the Babylonians invented the zodiac and how it was taken up by Islamic and European stargazers, and led to astronomy. At the end of the show, the damage done to the archaeological site in the Iraq war is documented. The British Museum protested at the use of the site for a military base - the helicopters landing in the middle of such a precious site, the soldiers vandalising it in search of souvenirs. The images are chilling, as eerie and apocalyptic as anything in the show.? Babylon: Myth and Reality is at the British Museum, London WC1 (020-7323 8181), from Thursday to March 15.ArtExhibitionsHeritageMuseumsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Guardian.Co.Uk Jonathan Jones: Daunting, dazzling - and doomed; why have painters been drawn to the Tower of Babel? {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - He was a tourist in Rome, seeing the sprawling ruins wormholed by time. He probably heard shots at the Forum: its crumbling stones, overgrown with long grass, were popular with hunters. The Colosseum, meanwhile, with its oval facade and labyrinth of tunnels and buttresses, struck him as having the scale of a city. And over the river, the building site that was to become St Peter's Basilica was so gargantuan, it added to his idea of cities as deranged architectural enterprises.Pieter Brueghel made a painting on ivory while he was in Rome, of a stupendous building. It is now lost. Later, back home in Flanders in 1563, he responded to Rome's sights, using the Colosseum as his model. The result was a great painting that today hangs in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Beside a blue sea, a medieval town, with its clapboard houses, church spires, red rooftops and plump little people, has settled comfortably into a wide green plain. It is a vision of cosiness and habit - but this town has cancer. That does seem an appropriate image: this colossal tower grows without constraint, without purpose, its scale revealed by the little houses below, whose ordinariness makes visible its extraordinariness. Seven arcaded tiers ascend from a fat, round base. A road spirals round, swarming with workers, cranes, little houses like parasites. In its gaping heights, ribs of stone are exposed and dark doors lead into its core. Still more storeys are being created, a second tower emerging from the first. An outsized, out-of-control plaything, this building seems determined to swallow the world. The Tower of Babel is a vision of architecture as anthill madness. As the British Museum's exhibition Babylon: Myth and Reality reveals, Brueghel is not the only artist driven to imagine this fabulous building. Towers of Babel proliferate in this show, be they painted with miniaturist precision or exploding in apocalyptic doom; there's even one made of shoes, in a 2001 painting by Michael Lassel. Martin van Heemskerk's, however, is square, in keeping with old sources he studied, but his attempt to visualise what the tower was "really" like does not stop him showing its top smashed apart by divine lightning. In an anonymous Dutch painting - one of a series that riff on Brueghel - the city that surrounds the tower is on fire, the summit of the hubristic edifice menaced by an eerie light coming through the storm clouds. Perhaps the strangest is by Athanasius Kircher, a 17th-century scholar whose light, airy spiral looks prophetically modern, like a blueprint for a skyscraper. These fascinating images are attempts to illustrate the greatest story ever told about a building. The tale is in the Bible. After the Flood, the descendents of Noah spread over the earth, and resolved to build a city and a tower, whose top reached "unto heaven". The Lord was not too pleased. For if people can do this, "nothing will be restrained from them". He smote their hubris, scattered them abroad and confounded their language: until then, everyone had spoken the same tongue, but now a multitude of tongues confused them and they gave up building their city and their tower. The story of the Tower of Babel stands at the heart of how we imagine architecture. This myth hovers over every tall building; behind all criticism of skyscrapers lurks the spectre of Babel, smote for its hubris. It is a great myth but the British Museum's show reveals it is a true story. The real Tower of Babel is the first thing you see as you enter the show - or rather you see its footprint. In an aerial photograph taken by Georg Gerster in 1973, the dark square mark of the tower's foundations, and that of the staircase that ascended it, can be seen in bright dust near the fertile Euphrates. This is the site of the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq. That black square was left by a huge ziggurat, a tower whose width diminishes as it rises, invented by the architects of ancient Mesopotamia. The Bible even gets the material right: it was built of fired bricks. You can see one on display marked with the name of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled Babylon in the sixth century BC. His Babylon was a place to inspire dreams, a daunting, dazzling city. You can see that from the reliefs of lions and a magical dragon that loom over a model of the city's grandiose Ishtar Gate. If the Tower of Babel is an imaginary version of a real building in Babylon, the Ishtar Gate - dedicated to the Mesopotamian goddess of love and war - is solid and real. In the late Victorian age archaeologists found the lost city of Babylon near Baghdad, and a team of German archaeologists excavated it in the early 1900s. If you visit Berlin's Pergamon Museum, you can see the massive blue gate they found. This show compares the myths of Babylon with the real city revealed by such archaeologists. Exhibitions with this type of postmodern premise can be frustrating, especially when they don't include the most famous images: Brueghel's Tower is not here, nor is Rembrandt's Belshazzar's Feast, although it's not far away, at the National Gallery. So why does this exhibition still manage to be so compelling? Because the reality is as beautiful as the myths. A dragon of glazed bricks, with a snake's head, lion paws and eagle talons, strides through deep blue space, just one of many strange beasts that decorated the city gates and processional ways. You can look from Dutch paintings of the tower to a model showing how archaeologists reconstructed the real-life ziggurat, already a very old architectural design by the sixth century BC.Ziggurats were built as stairways to heaven. A god could come down to earth via this tower, and priests could go up to sacrifice direct to the gods. But if this was so, why was it rendered as an arrogant, hubristic tower that offended God? Because in the sixth century BC, the Babylonians conquered Jerusalem and took its king and other people hostage, and this event is remembered in the Bible as one of the deepest oppressions of God's chosen people. Like the Tower of Babel, the "Babylonian Captivity", related in the Book of Daniel and Psalms, is rooted in history. The Jews saw Babylon as a city of sin, pride and luxury. It appears again and again in the Bible, its desolation prophesied by Isiah and personified in the Book of Revelations as the Whore of Babylon. The show features Albrecht Dürer's hallucinatory vision of the Whore of Babylon, along with William Blake's depiction of Nebuchadnezzar crawling on the ground, reduced to grass-eating madness, his punishment according to the Book of Daniel. These images bring to life the static artefacts of ancient Mesopotamia that are shown beside them, such as the clay tablets beautifully incised with cuneiform letters. Myth illuminates reality - and that reality lives on in our world far more than we appreciate. Astrology, for example, is a Babylonian invention. Here you can see how the Babylonians invented the zodiac and how it was taken up by Islamic and European stargazers, and led to astronomy. At the end of the show, the damage done to the archaeological site in the Iraq war is documented. The British Museum protested at the use of the site for a military base - the helicopters landing in the middle of such a precious site, the soldiers vandalising it in search of souvenirs. The images are chilling, as eerie and apocalyptic as anything in the show.? Babylon: Myth and Reality is at the British Museum, London WC1 (020-7323 8181), from Thursday to March 15.ArtExhibitionsHeritageMuseumsguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Jonathan Jones: Daunting, dazzling - and doomed; why have painters been drawn to the Tower of Babel? | Art and design | The Guardian {...} Why have painters been so drawn to the Tower of Babel? Jonathan Jones finds the answer {...}
Published: November 11, 2008, 12:13 am - Indexed: November 11, 2008, 1:06 pm - Page Size: 82KB
Category: Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media

]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Sean O'Hagan talks to Scott Walker http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/sean-o-hagan-talks-to-scott-walker-2008117367.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/sean-o-hagan-talks-to-scott-walker-2008117367.htm Sun, 09 Nov 2008 00:04:28 GMT Scott Walker was an only child and a nomadic one. His father, a geologist, travelled throughout America and the young Noel Scott Engel never had time to settle for long in one place. Born in Ohio in 1943, he lived in Texas for a time and then in California. 'I never made friends that easily,' he says, sounding not at all regretful. 'I don't mind being on my own because when you're on your own a lot as a child, your imagination grows. That is still the case with me.'Wrapped up in his solitude, Walker can work on the lyrics of a single song for several years. On his last album, The Drift, a track called 'Cue' took six years to complete. 'It was the toughest song to write, but my most successful song lyrically,' he says, his mid-Atlantic tones soft but clear, his eyes half hidden beneath the peak of his ever-present baseball cap. 'It's sharp, it's angular, it all just chimes right. In that song, everything is exactly as I want it.' 'Cue', though, even by Scott Walker's recent standards, is a difficult song. The lyrics are dense and elliptical, the pace funereal and the atmosphere one of creeping anxiety. He delivers it in that doomy, semi-operatic tone that has long replaced the melodramatic flourish of his early solo albums. Featuring a chorus of wailing voices straight out of Dante's Inferno, it is not a song you would turn to for solace or uplift. It is, in fact, another of Scott Walker's musical excursions to hell. Can he appreciate why some of us find his later work wilfully impenetrable, too far out, in fact, to take in. 'Well, I never think that way,' he says, sighing. 'I think it sounds pretty normal so I'm kind of shocked when people say it's too much. For me,' he says, laughing, 'it's never far out enough.' We are sitting in the bright, airy living room of his manager's spacious house in London's leafy Holland Park, the place where Scott Walker chooses to suffer through the few interviews he grants these days. While no longer as reclusive as he once was - Mojo magazine once called him 'pop's own Salinger' - he remains one of music's most famous loners. 'I'm not a recluse,' he says at one point when I ask him what he does when he is not making music. 'I'm definitely not that. I have friends and I go to dinner. I like people, but sometimes I can't wait to get away and be on my own again. I am solitary, though. I need to be for my work. That's the deal.' Next week, he will break cover when the Barbican theatre hosts an ambitious series of concerts called Drifting and Tilting: the Songs of Scott Walker. The 70-minute programme will comprise eight songs taken from The Drift and 1995's equally challenging Tilt. Scott will be there each night, but not on stage, not singing. 'I'll help mix the live sound,' he says. 'I got spooked years ago about performing and never repaired the damage.' In his place will be a succession of guest vocalists including Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Dot Allison, Gavin Friday and classical baritone Grant Doyle. A 40-piece orchestra will also be in attendance alongside Walker's studio group and a contemporary dance troupe. 'It will be a tightrope walk,' he says. 'There is never enough time to prepare these things, but if it's going to be a train wreck, it will certainly be an interesting one. There will be one or two surprises, too.' Those surprises will not, alas, include performances of any of his older songs. There will be no 'Big Louise', in all its swooning sadness, no 'We Came Through' in all its galloping cavalry clatter, no 'Rosemary' or 'Jackie' in all their lovelorn glory. No Jacques Brel covers either, nor Walker Brothers hits. 'When we began discussing the event, it was taken as a given that Scott would not be singing and that none of his older work would feature,' says his friend and collaborator Michael Morris, co-director of Artangel, the arts company which specialises in ambitious, site-specific events. 'The performances will be dictated by the songs which are semi-operatic. The show will take the form of a semi-staged song cycle, almost like a lieder recital but a bit more dramatic. We're hoping,' adds Morris, 'that the audience doesn't clap between songs.'In person, Scott Walker does not look like a living legend. His clothes are casual - faded jeans, denim jacket, trainers - and his manner diffident but charming. Throughout the interview, he sits perched, thin and bird-like, on the edge of a huge, floral-patterned sofa as if, at any moment, he might take flight. He looks much younger than his 65 years but his eyes, when I catch a glimpse of them beneath that pulled-down baseball cap, have a flickering intensity that speaks of deep unease. It is hard to imagine that he was ever a heart-throb who induced mass hysteria. For a moment, though, back in the mid-Sixties, the Walker Brothers, who weren't brothers at all, were known as 'America's Beatles'. 'Oh, it was amazing at first,' he says, smiling, 'but a little goes a long way. I was not cut out for that world. I love pop music, but I didn't have the temperament for fame.'On their most famous song, and second No 1, 1966's 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore', he sang the prophetic lines: 'Loneliness is a cloak you wear, a deep shade of blue is always there'. He could have been describing his future self, both his personality and his music. The song was teenage heartbreak writ large and remains perhaps the most dramatic example of a certain strain of mid-Sixties pop melodrama, wherein everything - the music, the delivery, the production - was overloaded. It possesses what Johnny Marr would later describe as 'that gothic and beautiful gloom that was as much about England in the Sixties as was "Day Tripper"'.The group imploded in 1967, with Scott frustrated to the point of breakdown by the formula into which their songs had fallen. His aversion to fame, and the fan hysteria that came with it, sent him running for the hills. He spent a week in a monastery in 1966, and the following year, there were reports that he had attempted suicide. The Scott Walker who emerged on the solo albums that followed was a different kind of pop star, a crooner who veered between mainstream, Jack Jones-style balladeering and middle European angst. His hero was the Flemish chansonnier Jacques Brel, whose music he had been turned on to by a German Bunny Girl he had picked up at a party in the Playboy Club on Park Lane. 'I don't listen to Brel that much now,' he says, 'but in those days, hearing him sing was like a hurricane blowing through the room.' By 1969's Scott 4, on which his own songwriting finally came to the fore, his themes were darker and a quote from Camus graced the sleeve: 'A man's work is nothing but his slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.' The pop idol had metamorphosed into an arbiter of existential angst. 'It has always been a certain kind of European writer who has captivated me,' he says. 'It started when I was a drop-out from high school in California and read Sartre, who I don't care for much now, but back then he had a huge impact on my way of thinking about the world. And Kafka, of course. Those writers were my main sources alongside the European films I saw in the Sixties in an art cinema on Wilshire Boulevard, Bergman and Kurosawa and the like.' Those solo records have influenced several generations of pop mavericks from Marc Almond and David Sylvian in the Eighties to the Divine Comedy a decade later. Jarvis Cocker is a fan and persuaded Walker to produce Pulp's 2001 album, We Love Life. Most recently, Alex Turner's other project, the Last Shadow Puppets, released their debut album, The Age of Understatement, which, despite its title, was a homage to Walker's orchestrated emotional melodramas.He wrote Scott 4, he says, 'on drink', and fell into depression when it failed to sell like its predecessors. 'I snapped,' he says. 'The pressure was everywhere and, in my crazy imagination, I thought, "I'd better keep doing this just to stay in the game."' In desperation, he reformed the Walker Brothers, and the band had chart success again with the single 'No Regrets'. But his heart was not in it, at least until they went into the studio to record Nite Flights, their valedictory album from 1978, on which he let loose the full force of his teeming imagination.At its centre is an extraordinary song called 'The Electrician', a symphonic ode to S&M that would not have sounded out of place on a Pasolini soundtrack. In the recent documentary film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, an animated Brian Eno enthused about Nite Flights' sonic experimentation, while castigating the conservatism of most contemporary pop music. 'We haven't got any further than this,' he sighed. 'It's a disgrace.' The album still sounds otherworldly and futuristic. After it, though, came six years of silence and, with 1984's Climate of Hunter album, the beginning of the enigma that is Scott Walker Mk3. Gone was the musical extravagance of old, replaced by a minimalist sound that bordered on ambience. Only half the songs had actual titles. On the first line of the opening track, 'Rawhide', he sang: 'This is how you disappear.' Then he disappeared again. Tilt was 10 years in the making, The Drift another 11. They both sound, in their emotional and tonal extremity, like nothing else in contemporary music.'A lot of what I do is waiting,' he says. 'I begin always with the lyrics and they seem to take some considerable time. They have become more angular of late and now come in blocks of words. It's just a different way of writing. When I see the page and the lyrics, I see soldiers in a field. There's a lot of white space which represents me in a sense. It's an abstract way of putting it, but I see it that way visually.'His songs, he says, are clear to him, but he does not like having to explain or analyse them. He admits, though, that his recent music requires a certain amount of effort and patience from the listener. 'I try to avoid cliché. I want to make it sound like nothing I have ever heard before,' he says, his low Californian drawl still detectable after a 40-year exile in Europe. 'All that guitar-based rock stuff - I just feel like I've heard it before so many times. It goes on and on and never seems to end. It's just the same narrow ground being worked over. It would drive me mad to have to work within those parameters.' So he has gone the other way - into texture and dissonance. The music he makes with strangely tuned strings and off-key piano chords, is, he says, 'always dictated by the lyrics', which tend to be obscure and, at times, wilfully nonsensical. His songs often seem to be haunted by the darker narratives of the last century, by war, disease, displacement and genocide. 'Cue', for instance, seems to be about a bacterial plague carried by the 'flugleman' of the song's subtitle, a viral pestilence that spreads 'through the dormant wards and nurseries... in the lung-smeared slides and corridors'. In the documentary, the most revealing insight into his work comes from his orchestrator, Brian Gascoigne (brother of Bamber), who says: 'He believes, and I take issue with this, that to convey a very strong emotion in the music, you have to be feeling it when you're making it. That couldn't be true because the people who are playing Bruckner and Mahler every night would be basket cases... after three of four hours in the studio, he is a basket case because he lives the thing with such emotion.' How would Scott Walker describe his singular artistic sensibility? 'Essentially, I'm really trying to find a way to talk about the things that cannot be spoken of,' he says. 'I cannot fake that or take short cuts. There is an absurdity there, too, of course, and I hope that people pick up on that. Without the humour, it would just be heavy and boring. I hope,' he says, once more, 'people get that. If you're not connecting with the absurdity, you shouldn't be there.' Scott Walker's late music, in its evocation of anxiety and horror, may, as Michael Morris suggests, be more comparable with the paintings of Francis Bacon than with any musical contemporary. His songs, if they can still be called that, are as far from the drift of contemporary pop as one could possibly imagine. 'Oh, I have long since stopped worrying about fitting in in any way,' he says, laughing. 'I'm an outsider, for sure. That suits me fine. Solitude is like a drug for me. I crave it.' Why, though, does it take so long to make a record, write a song? 'A certain amount of it is about making it difficult for myself. I'm not interested in traditional narrative, say, or in having pat endings to the songs. I want the sense in my music of a constant moving forward into an open future.' Of late, though, his music often seems to be drifting towards the last final, awful silence. 'Perhaps,' he says, 'perhaps.' Does he ever, I ask, miss the old days, when his songs lasted three minutes, had verses and choruses and were easier to write? He laughs. 'Not really, no. I mean, back then, I could write a song like "Big Louise" in an evening. That would be good sometimes and, you know, I would do that if the lyrics demanded it.' Could he ever see that happening again? 'No. I write a different kind of song these days. There's not a lot of harmony and there aren't the thick textures I used to use. It's generally just big blocks of sound, raw and stark. A big emotional noise.' Another silence. 'Essentially, I am attempting the impossible over and over, trying to find a way to say the unsayable. For some reason,' he says, laughing, 'that just seems to take a lot longer.' ? Drifting and Tilting: the Songs of Scott Walker is at the Barbican, London EC2 from Friday November 14 to Sunday November 16Scott Walker: A lifeBorn Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio, in January 1944. Learns to play bass and under the name Scotty Engel cuts a few singles that flop.1964 Forms the Walker Brothers in LA with John Maus and Gary Leeds. Move to London and chart No 1 with 'Make It Easy on Yourself'.1966 No 1 with 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore'.1967 The Walker Brothers split. Scott releases four solo albums in three years. 1975 The Walker Brothers reunite for three albums. 1984 Solo album, Climate of Hunter, critically acclaimed.1995 Releases album Tilt2000 Curates the Southbank Centre's Meltdown festival. 2006 Album The DriftA documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, is released.Pop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Guardian.Co.Uk Sean O'Hagan talks to Scott Walker {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - Scott Walker was an only child and a nomadic one. His father, a geologist, travelled throughout America and the young Noel Scott Engel never had time to settle for long in one place. Born in Ohio in 1943, he lived in Texas for a time and then in California. 'I never made friends that easily,' he says, sounding not at all regretful. 'I don't mind being on my own because when you're on your own a lot as a child, your imagination grows. That is still the case with me.'Wrapped up in his solitude, Walker can work on the lyrics of a single song for several years. On his last album, The Drift, a track called 'Cue' took six years to complete. 'It was the toughest song to write, but my most successful song lyrically,' he says, his mid-Atlantic tones soft but clear, his eyes half hidden beneath the peak of his ever-present baseball cap. 'It's sharp, it's angular, it all just chimes right. In that song, everything is exactly as I want it.' 'Cue', though, even by Scott Walker's recent standards, is a difficult song. The lyrics are dense and elliptical, the pace funereal and the atmosphere one of creeping anxiety. He delivers it in that doomy, semi-operatic tone that has long replaced the melodramatic flourish of his early solo albums. Featuring a chorus of wailing voices straight out of Dante's Inferno, it is not a song you would turn to for solace or uplift. It is, in fact, another of Scott Walker's musical excursions to hell. Can he appreciate why some of us find his later work wilfully impenetrable, too far out, in fact, to take in. 'Well, I never think that way,' he says, sighing. 'I think it sounds pretty normal so I'm kind of shocked when people say it's too much. For me,' he says, laughing, 'it's never far out enough.' We are sitting in the bright, airy living room of his manager's spacious house in London's leafy Holland Park, the place where Scott Walker chooses to suffer through the few interviews he grants these days. While no longer as reclusive as he once was - Mojo magazine once called him 'pop's own Salinger' - he remains one of music's most famous loners. 'I'm not a recluse,' he says at one point when I ask him what he does when he is not making music. 'I'm definitely not that. I have friends and I go to dinner. I like people, but sometimes I can't wait to get away and be on my own again. I am solitary, though. I need to be for my work. That's the deal.' Next week, he will break cover when the Barbican theatre hosts an ambitious series of concerts called Drifting and Tilting: the Songs of Scott Walker. The 70-minute programme will comprise eight songs taken from The Drift and 1995's equally challenging Tilt. Scott will be there each night, but not on stage, not singing. 'I'll help mix the live sound,' he says. 'I got spooked years ago about performing and never repaired the damage.' In his place will be a succession of guest vocalists including Jarvis Cocker, Damon Albarn, Dot Allison, Gavin Friday and classical baritone Grant Doyle. A 40-piece orchestra will also be in attendance alongside Walker's studio group and a contemporary dance troupe. 'It will be a tightrope walk,' he says. 'There is never enough time to prepare these things, but if it's going to be a train wreck, it will certainly be an interesting one. There will be one or two surprises, too.' Those surprises will not, alas, include performances of any of his older songs. There will be no 'Big Louise', in all its swooning sadness, no 'We Came Through' in all its galloping cavalry clatter, no 'Rosemary' or 'Jackie' in all their lovelorn glory. No Jacques Brel covers either, nor Walker Brothers hits. 'When we began discussing the event, it was taken as a given that Scott would not be singing and that none of his older work would feature,' says his friend and collaborator Michael Morris, co-director of Artangel, the arts company which specialises in ambitious, site-specific events. 'The performances will be dictated by the songs which are semi-operatic. The show will take the form of a semi-staged song cycle, almost like a lieder recital but a bit more dramatic. We're hoping,' adds Morris, 'that the audience doesn't clap between songs.'In person, Scott Walker does not look like a living legend. His clothes are casual - faded jeans, denim jacket, trainers - and his manner diffident but charming. Throughout the interview, he sits perched, thin and bird-like, on the edge of a huge, floral-patterned sofa as if, at any moment, he might take flight. He looks much younger than his 65 years but his eyes, when I catch a glimpse of them beneath that pulled-down baseball cap, have a flickering intensity that speaks of deep unease. It is hard to imagine that he was ever a heart-throb who induced mass hysteria. For a moment, though, back in the mid-Sixties, the Walker Brothers, who weren't brothers at all, were known as 'America's Beatles'. 'Oh, it was amazing at first,' he says, smiling, 'but a little goes a long way. I was not cut out for that world. I love pop music, but I didn't have the temperament for fame.'On their most famous song, and second No 1, 1966's 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore', he sang the prophetic lines: 'Loneliness is a cloak you wear, a deep shade of blue is always there'. He could have been describing his future self, both his personality and his music. The song was teenage heartbreak writ large and remains perhaps the most dramatic example of a certain strain of mid-Sixties pop melodrama, wherein everything - the music, the delivery, the production - was overloaded. It possesses what Johnny Marr would later describe as 'that gothic and beautiful gloom that was as much about England in the Sixties as was "Day Tripper"'.The group imploded in 1967, with Scott frustrated to the point of breakdown by the formula into which their songs had fallen. His aversion to fame, and the fan hysteria that came with it, sent him running for the hills. He spent a week in a monastery in 1966, and the following year, there were reports that he had attempted suicide. The Scott Walker who emerged on the solo albums that followed was a different kind of pop star, a crooner who veered between mainstream, Jack Jones-style balladeering and middle European angst. His hero was the Flemish chansonnier Jacques Brel, whose music he had been turned on to by a German Bunny Girl he had picked up at a party in the Playboy Club on Park Lane. 'I don't listen to Brel that much now,' he says, 'but in those days, hearing him sing was like a hurricane blowing through the room.' By 1969's Scott 4, on which his own songwriting finally came to the fore, his themes were darker and a quote from Camus graced the sleeve: 'A man's work is nothing but his slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.' The pop idol had metamorphosed into an arbiter of existential angst. 'It has always been a certain kind of European writer who has captivated me,' he says. 'It started when I was a drop-out from high school in California and read Sartre, who I don't care for much now, but back then he had a huge impact on my way of thinking about the world. And Kafka, of course. Those writers were my main sources alongside the European films I saw in the Sixties in an art cinema on Wilshire Boulevard, Bergman and Kurosawa and the like.' Those solo records have influenced several generations of pop mavericks from Marc Almond and David Sylvian in the Eighties to the Divine Comedy a decade later. Jarvis Cocker is a fan and persuaded Walker to produce Pulp's 2001 album, We Love Life. Most recently, Alex Turner's other project, the Last Shadow Puppets, released their debut album, The Age of Understatement, which, despite its title, was a homage to Walker's orchestrated emotional melodramas.He wrote Scott 4, he says, 'on drink', and fell into depression when it failed to sell like its predecessors. 'I snapped,' he says. 'The pressure was everywhere and, in my crazy imagination, I thought, "I'd better keep doing this just to stay in the game."' In desperation, he reformed the Walker Brothers, and the band had chart success again with the single 'No Regrets'. But his heart was not in it, at least until they went into the studio to record Nite Flights, their valedictory album from 1978, on which he let loose the full force of his teeming imagination.At its centre is an extraordinary song called 'The Electrician', a symphonic ode to S&M that would not have sounded out of place on a Pasolini soundtrack. In the recent documentary film Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, an animated Brian Eno enthused about Nite Flights' sonic experimentation, while castigating the conservatism of most contemporary pop music. 'We haven't got any further than this,' he sighed. 'It's a disgrace.' The album still sounds otherworldly and futuristic. After it, though, came six years of silence and, with 1984's Climate of Hunter album, the beginning of the enigma that is Scott Walker Mk3. Gone was the musical extravagance of old, replaced by a minimalist sound that bordered on ambience. Only half the songs had actual titles. On the first line of the opening track, 'Rawhide', he sang: 'This is how you disappear.' Then he disappeared again. Tilt was 10 years in the making, The Drift another 11. They both sound, in their emotional and tonal extremity, like nothing else in contemporary music.'A lot of what I do is waiting,' he says. 'I begin always with the lyrics and they seem to take some considerable time. They have become more angular of late and now come in blocks of words. It's just a different way of writing. When I see the page and the lyrics, I see soldiers in a field. There's a lot of white space which represents me in a sense. It's an abstract way of putting it, but I see it that way visually.'His songs, he says, are clear to him, but he does not like having to explain or analyse them. He admits, though, that his recent music requires a certain amount of effort and patience from the listener. 'I try to avoid cliché. I want to make it sound like nothing I have ever heard before,' he says, his low Californian drawl still detectable after a 40-year exile in Europe. 'All that guitar-based rock stuff - I just feel like I've heard it before so many times. It goes on and on and never seems to end. It's just the same narrow ground being worked over. It would drive me mad to have to work within those parameters.' So he has gone the other way - into texture and dissonance. The music he makes with strangely tuned strings and off-key piano chords, is, he says, 'always dictated by the lyrics', which tend to be obscure and, at times, wilfully nonsensical. His songs often seem to be haunted by the darker narratives of the last century, by war, disease, displacement and genocide. 'Cue', for instance, seems to be about a bacterial plague carried by the 'flugleman' of the song's subtitle, a viral pestilence that spreads 'through the dormant wards and nurseries... in the lung-smeared slides and corridors'. In the documentary, the most revealing insight into his work comes from his orchestrator, Brian Gascoigne (brother of Bamber), who says: 'He believes, and I take issue with this, that to convey a very strong emotion in the music, you have to be feeling it when you're making it. That couldn't be true because the people who are playing Bruckner and Mahler every night would be basket cases... after three of four hours in the studio, he is a basket case because he lives the thing with such emotion.' How would Scott Walker describe his singular artistic sensibility? 'Essentially, I'm really trying to find a way to talk about the things that cannot be spoken of,' he says. 'I cannot fake that or take short cuts. There is an absurdity there, too, of course, and I hope that people pick up on that. Without the humour, it would just be heavy and boring. I hope,' he says, once more, 'people get that. If you're not connecting with the absurdity, you shouldn't be there.' Scott Walker's late music, in its evocation of anxiety and horror, may, as Michael Morris suggests, be more comparable with the paintings of Francis Bacon than with any musical contemporary. His songs, if they can still be called that, are as far from the drift of contemporary pop as one could possibly imagine. 'Oh, I have long since stopped worrying about fitting in in any way,' he says, laughing. 'I'm an outsider, for sure. That suits me fine. Solitude is like a drug for me. I crave it.' Why, though, does it take so long to make a record, write a song? 'A certain amount of it is about making it difficult for myself. I'm not interested in traditional narrative, say, or in having pat endings to the songs. I want the sense in my music of a constant moving forward into an open future.' Of late, though, his music often seems to be drifting towards the last final, awful silence. 'Perhaps,' he says, 'perhaps.' Does he ever, I ask, miss the old days, when his songs lasted three minutes, had verses and choruses and were easier to write? He laughs. 'Not really, no. I mean, back then, I could write a song like "Big Louise" in an evening. That would be good sometimes and, you know, I would do that if the lyrics demanded it.' Could he ever see that happening again? 'No. I write a different kind of song these days. There's not a lot of harmony and there aren't the thick textures I used to use. It's generally just big blocks of sound, raw and stark. A big emotional noise.' Another silence. 'Essentially, I am attempting the impossible over and over, trying to find a way to say the unsayable. For some reason,' he says, laughing, 'that just seems to take a lot longer.' ? Drifting and Tilting: the Songs of Scott Walker is at the Barbican, London EC2 from Friday November 14 to Sunday November 16Scott Walker: A lifeBorn Noel Scott Engel in Hamilton, Ohio, in January 1944. Learns to play bass and under the name Scotty Engel cuts a few singles that flop.1964 Forms the Walker Brothers in LA with John Maus and Gary Leeds. Move to London and chart No 1 with 'Make It Easy on Yourself'.1966 No 1 with 'The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore'.1967 The Walker Brothers split. Scott releases four solo albums in three years. 1975 The Walker Brothers reunite for three albums. 1984 Solo album, Climate of Hunter, critically acclaimed.1995 Releases album Tilt2000 Curates the Southbank Centre's Meltdown festival. 2006 Album The DriftA documentary Scott Walker: 30 Century Man, is released.Pop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
Sean O'Hagan talks to Scott Walker | Music | The Observer {...} In a rare interview, Scott Walker tells Sean O'Hagan why he's happy to be a loner {...}
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]]> Regional > Europe > United Kingdom > News and Media {EDUCATION > BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY} - I was just wondering what you thought of the last Divine C ... http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/education/colleges-and-universities/north-america/united-states/utah/brigham-young-university/i-was-just-wondering-what-you-thought-of-the-last-2008111925.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/reference/education/colleges-and-universities/north-america/united-states/utah/brigham-young-university/i-was-just-wondering-what-you-thought-of-the-last-2008111925.htm Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:22:04 GMT Posted on Mon 3 Nov 2008. Follow the link for the full question & answer. Theboard.Byu.Edu I was just wondering what you thought of the last Divine C ... {new window}   Theboard.Byu.Edu - Posted on Mon 3 Nov 2008. Follow the link for the full question & answer.
"Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises." - Samuel Butler {...}
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Category: Reference > Education > Colleges and Universities > North America > United States > Utah > Brigham Young University

]]> Reference > Education > Colleges and Universities > North America > United States > Utah > Brigham Young University {NORTH AMERICA > RENTALS} - Very spacious and private master suite (los altos) $1420 http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/rentals/very-spacious-and-private-master-suite-los-altos-2008118355.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/north-america/united-states/california/metro-areas/san-francisco-bay-area/business-and-economy/real-estate/rentals/very-spacious-and-private-master-suite-los-altos-2008118355.htm Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:34:48 GMT Becomes available: December 1st. Special arrangement can be made if you need a room sooner. Month-to-month lease; minimum 2-month stay This master suite offers stunning views, plentiful space (total of 715 sq ft), essential privacy and divine serenity. The suite constitutes of the following sections: a bedroom (225 ft2), a high vaulted ceiling living room (155 ft2) and a loft on the second level (100 ft2, which could serve as a small office). Attached are a very large size bathroom (170 ft2 with two sinks and a tub with jets) and a spacious walk-in closet (65 ft2). The suite is a part of a large house, the suite takes a separate wing of the house with no shared walls with any other living rooms) guarantees its privacy. You will have full sharing privileges of a huge modern kitchen, dining room, two distinct living rooms with fireplaces, two very large patios overlooking the forest and laundry facilities. The house is located high in the hills, in one of the most prestigious locations of the Bay area. The unique architectural design of the house creates a feeling of privacy regardless of the sharing household situation. If you appreciate nature, living in this house will provide unparallel experience. You could wake up with the beautiful views of milky clouds covering the Bay area and the rising sun above (see the slide show). The bird chirping makes up the sound effects of the peaceful beginning of the day. And if you are not an early morning person, you can enjoy the sight of the glimmering lights of the Bay area. If you love serenity and quiet, clean, spacious and comfortable home, you may want to consider seeing it. The house is ideal place for fans of hiking (trails just across the street and beautiful natural space preserves in the neighborhood) and bicycling (the famous Page Mill Rd). A preview of the house and the master suite is available by clicking on the following link: http://www.slide.com/r/cD8PhHkfrD-gQ3vi02rXwoY_yieuq5lN?previous_view=112&mail1=0&action_details=9:0 The monthly rent is $ 1420 for unfurnished suite. Security deposit is required. You would also have a financial responsibility for a portion of monthly bills for utilities, Internet and house cleaning. People currently sharing the house are professionals of both genders, very friendly, healthy, highly educated and considerate. We respect each other’s privacy and keep common rooms very clean and noise levels down. Smoking is not allowed on the premises. No pets policy. For more details and appointment, please send e-mail visualizingu@yahoo.com Sfbay.Craigslist.Org Very spacious and private master suite (los altos) $1420 {new window}   Sfbay.Craigslist.Org - Becomes available: December 1st. Special arrangement can be made if you need a room sooner. Month-to-month lease; minimum 2-month stay This master suite offers stunning views, plentiful space (total of 715 sq ft), essential privacy and divine serenity. The suite constitutes of the following sections: a bedroom (225 ft2), a high vaulted ceiling living room (155 ft2) and a loft on the second level (100 ft2, which could serve as a small office). Attached are a very large size bathroom (170 ft2 with two sinks and a tub with jets) and a spacious walk-in closet (65 ft2). The suite is a part of a large house, the suite takes a separate wing of the house with no shared walls with any other living rooms) guarantees its privacy. You will have full sharing privileges of a huge modern kitchen, dining room, two distinct living rooms with fireplaces, two very large patios overlooking the forest and laundry facilities. The house is located high in the hills, in one of the most prestigious locations of the Bay area. The unique architectural design of the house creates a feeling of privacy regardless of the sharing household situation. If you appreciate nature, living in this house will provide unparallel experience. You could wake up with the beautiful views of milky clouds covering the Bay area and the rising sun above (see the slide show). The bird chirping makes up the sound effects of the peaceful beginning of the day. And if you are not an early morning person, you can enjoy the sight of the glimmering lights of the Bay area. If you love serenity and quiet, clean, spacious and comfortable home, you may want to consider seeing it. The house is ideal place for fans of hiking (trails just across the street and beautiful natural space preserves in the neighborhood) and bicycling (the famous Page Mill Rd). A preview of the house and the master suite is available by clicking on the following link: http://www.slide.com/r/cD8PhHkfrD-gQ3vi02rXwoY_yieuq5lN?previous_view=112&mail1=0&action_details=9:0 The monthly rent is $ 1420 for unfurnished suite. Security deposit is required. You would also have a financial responsibility for a portion of monthly bills for utilities, Internet and house cleaning. People currently sharing the house are professionals of both genders, very friendly, healthy, highly educated and considerate. We respect each other’s privacy and keep common rooms very clean and noise levels down. Smoking is not allowed on the premises. No pets policy. For more details and appointment, please send e-mail visualizingu@yahoo.com
Very spacious and private master suite {...}
Published: November 3, 2008, 6:34 am - Indexed: November 3, 2008, 10:00 am - Page Size: 7KB
Category: Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate > Rentals

]]> Regional > North America > United States > California > Metro Areas > San Francisco Bay Area > Business and Economy > Real Estate > Rentals {EUROPE > NEWS AND MEDIA} - Gospel according to Antony and the Johnsons http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/gospel-according-to-antony-and-the-johnsons-2008119941.htm http://articles.world-of-newave.info/regional/europe/united-kingdom/news-and-media/gospel-according-to-antony-and-the-johnsons-2008119941.htm Sun, 02 Nov 2008 00:03:17 GMT Antony and the Johnsons/ LSOBarbican, London EC2Antony Hegarty isn't what you'd call the complete performer, I think it's fair to say, though he is in fine voice - and what a voice, crystalline and plaintive, filling the sedate Barbican Hall tonight. But no, he could be in his own bedsit - the light off, singing in the dark. Yes, the dark! He is performing - you can just about see the odd flailing arm - but he's lost in himself, as though he's just got back from an unsuccessful night out and is consoling himself with a couple of weepy ballads before bed. The audience, after giving him a rapturous welcome, is reverent and watchful. No one thinks it odd that Antony is singing in the dark. He is the one. Behind him, the London Symphony Orchestra (and a small handful of Johnsons) labour studiously in their own little pools of light. Antony, large and ungainly (but hardly the Elephant Man - let's see him for goodness sake!), is wearing something long and diaphanous over his day clothes. Are those tracksuit bottoms? 'I got kissed by a turtle dove ... ' he sings, his hands enacting some private torment. Your heart goes out to him.We're three songs in before a chink of grey dawn appears. He stands merely shadowed now, black hair parted, his skin pallid, his expression effortful as he glides into 'Cripple and the Starfish', a majestic and poignant anthem about the unhelpful blindness of love in an abusive relationship. It's about having your fingers cut off and them growing again, like a starfish. It's about coming back for more. The strings are a little busier, the woodwind twiddling with menace. It's quite beautiful.The crowd, having sat through two unfamiliar works (this concert is one of a handful of autumn dates in which the band are previewing their third studio album, The Crying Light, due next January), responds with the sort of wildness you reserve for having something to be wild about. Antony, more at home now - or perhaps still at home, but in the glow of an open fridge - sings a flawless 'For Today I Am a Boy' from his flawless I Am a Bird Now album, his hands stroking the air. Apart from a murmured 'thank you' he is silent between songs, which ebb and flow with their own mini-dramas. Visually, you might want for more. Antony - alabaster in the half-light, like a statue of one of the bulkier Greek goddesses - is full of grace, but I'm afraid not in a physical way. My eyes roam the stage for novelty: the bass players banging their instruments during a rare tribal passage; the conductor shutting someone up with a sudden gesture. I did wonder how much of Hegarty's austere, visceral quality would survive the might of the London Symphony Orchestra tonight - or rather the arrangements of New York boy-wonder composer Nico Muhly, whose esoteric atonal 'soundscapes' (he has a day job working for Philip Glass) have been skittering round my iPod this week. 'He paints the sky with his work,' Hegarty has said, though I was still dimly expecting tapes of running bath water or someone frying eggs in a strong wind. There is the odd drone (at one point effectively reducing the three chords of a lovely new song, 'Another World', to one) but the orchestra is restrained joy itself. 'I fell in love with a dead boy,' Antony sings, with understandable concern, his arms reaching for the clouds, dry ice drifting like mist over a wet lawn.For most of us, Antony Hegarty swooped out of nowhere when he won the Mercury Prize in 2005 for the Bird album - descending from heaven itself, it seemed, judging by the terms in which his startling, tremulous vocal style (lauded to the skies as 'ethereal', 'sublime', 'transcendent') came to be described. Was this the 'Gay Messiah' as prophesied by Rufus Wainwright, 'reborn from 1970s porn'? He didn't quite fit the bill. He's not Freddie Mercury, or indeed Rufus, who cheerfully ends his own shows looking like he's stepped out of an Ann Summers window display.He is compelling, though: an androgynous, goth-haired, gentle man-boy giant who arrived with a starry siblinghood of disciples - Wainwright himself, Lou Reed ('When I first heard Antony I knew I was in the presence of an angel'), Björk, Boy George, arty pranksters Devendra Banhart and Yoko Ono all smitten collaborators. His sexual mystery and stoic aura of suffering, his New York drag-punk apprenticeship (though he was born in Chichester, West Sussex), his homage to fallen Warholian sirens Divine and Candy Darling, seemed calculated to excite an adoring gay following. But the Church of Antony is broader than that. His intimate, radiant songs may be autobiographical, with their cross-gender issues and talk of guilt or pain or hopes of growing up to be a beautiful woman ('I feel the power in me'), but they also speak more generally of struggle, suggest less specific sorts of hope. They have the core self-belief of devotional music - psalm-like sometimes, but more often gospelly and soulful, capturing the spirit of Nina Simone (Antony's big heroine), her jazzy vocal dips, her dignity; even, somehow, her moral authority. If Hegarty is not the light, he seems at least to have seen it. For his encore he finds his tongue and an endearing sense of humour to tell us the rambling story of a New York transvestite prostitute who used to throw tins of catfood at passing cars, but who drowned in the Hudson River. Antony named his band for her (she was called Marsha P Johnson) and wrote her a song, which he now sings. 'River of sorrow, don't swallow this time ... ' Now that is sublime.? Kitty Empire is awayAntony and the JohnsonsPop and rockguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds Guardian.Co.Uk Gospel according to Antony and the Johnsons {new window}   Www.Guardian.Co.Uk - Antony and the Johnsons/ LSOBarbican, London EC2Antony Hegarty isn't what you'd call the complete performer, I think it's fair to say, though he is in fine voice - and what a voice, crystalline and plaintive, filling the sedate Barbican Hall tonight. But no, he could be in his own bedsit - the light off, singing in the dark. Yes, the dark! He is performing - you can just about see the odd flailing arm - but he's lost in himself, as though he's just got back from an unsuccessful night out and is consoling himself with a couple of weepy ballads before bed. The audience, after giving him a rapturous welcome, is reverent and watchful. No one thinks it odd that Antony is singing in the dark. He is the one. Behind him, the London Symphony Orchestra (and a small handful of Johnsons) labour studiously in their own little pools of light. Antony, large and ungainly (but hardly the Elephant Man - let's see him for good