didgebaba - Network

I was 15 and watched music video programs on TV. I lived in a village on the rural Darling Downs about 200 km west of Brisbane. My family...

I was 15 and watched music video programs on TV. I lived in a village on the rural Darling Downs about 200 km west of Brisbane.

My family sustained itself from the restaurant that was situated in the old general store that was attached to our house. From Thursday night to Sunday lunch the entire focus of the household (including my two grandmothers) was feeding and entertaining up to 70 people at a time (but usually between 15 and 25). Food, music, wines and the occasional spliff were offered up in the old shopfront.

Meanwhile in the house behind it my brother, sister and myself lived our lives. I was the oldest of the children. I did some chores and occasionally worked as a servitör out the front (without pay).

My conscious life was however filled with other things. Smash Hits magazine and the various music programs on TV fed my love of music. Because my (pretty permissive anyway) parents worked all weekend, I could pretty much do whatever I wanted from the age of 13. This included watching late night television from the only channel we could get in our remote home.

Late one evening on Rock Arena, (a weekly Australian music television show broadcast by the ABC from 23 February 1982 until 31 January 1989) I saw Alphaville. Life changing. European noir punk synth aesthetics entered my reality.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bpb4I6sSj80&feature=shared

In 1961, Coltrane began pairing Workman with a second bassist, usually Art Davis or Donald Garrett. Garrett recalled playing a tape for...

In 1961, Coltrane began pairing Workman with a second bassist, usually Art Davis or Donald Garrett. Garrett recalled playing a tape for Coltrane where "I was playing with another bass player. We were doing some things rhythmically, and Coltrane became excited about the sound. We got the same kind of sound you get from the East Indian water drum.

One bass remains in the lower register and is the stabilizing, pulsating thing, while the other bass is free to improvise, like the right hand would be on the drum. So Coltrane liked the idea." Coltrane also recalled: "I thought another bass would add that certain rhythmic sound. We were playing a lot of stuff with a sort of suspended rhythm, with one bass playing a series of notes around one point, and it seemed that another bass could fill in the spaces." According to Eric Dolphy, one night: "Wilbur Ware came in and up on the stand so they had three basses going. John and I got off the stand and listened."

Coltrane employed two basses on the 1961 albums Olé Coltrane and Africa/Brass, and later on The John Coltrane Quartet Plays and Ascension. Both Reggie Workman and Jimmy Garrison play bass on the 1961 Village Vanguard recordings of "India" and "Miles' Mode"

https://youtu.be/hSViN6lwGKU?feature=shared

The UA definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly all 39 Australian universities, states that criticism of Israel can be antisemitic...

The UA definition of antisemitism, adopted by nearly all 39 Australian universities, states that criticism of Israel can be antisemitic “when it calls for the elimination of the State of Israel”.

It draws heavily on the widely-condemned International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition, which has been opposed by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/student-general-meeting-demands-usyd-drop-specious-definition-antisemitism-cut-ties-israel

Drive by

Drive by

Former White House lawyers, diplomatic protocol officers and foreign affairs experts have told the Guardian that Donald Trump’s receipt of...

Former White House lawyers, diplomatic protocol officers and foreign affairs experts have told the Guardian that Donald Trump’s receipt of overseas gifts and targeted investments are “unprecedented”, as the White House remakes US foreign policy under a pay-for-access code that eclipses past administrations with characteristic Trumpian excess.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/17/trump-foreign-gifts-plane-gulf-states

I hitchhiked the Leh - Manali "highway" at the end of October 1996 (from Leh, to Manali just before it closed for the winter). It...

I hitchhiked the Leh - Manali "highway" at the end of October 1996 (from Leh, to Manali just before it closed for the winter). It took three days to travel 428 kms, mostly with Kashmiri truckdrivers (that is travel time, as we did spend a few days in Keylong - the last stop before the descent down from the Himalaya plateau. But that is another story). For 100 km before the Pan Camp we travelled in the back of a truck. It was so dusty we had to tie cloths around our faces.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGEndcJQhcQ&ab_channel=FreeDocumentary

Blatant and flagrant corruption:US Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same...

Blatant and flagrant corruption:

US Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media the same day that President Donald Trump unveiled bruising new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained Wednesday by ProPublica.

https://www.propublica.org/article/pam-bondi-trump-media-stock-tariffs

A dictator and a moron. What could possibly go wrong?

A dictator and a moron. What could possibly go wrong?

Fly Corruption Airways...It'll get you there on time.

Fly Corruption Airways...It'll get you there on time.

1963, from the David Attenborough series Zoo Quest Bali.Eight year old girls (apparently) dance to gamalan.

1963, from the David Attenborough series Zoo Quest Bali.

Eight year old girls (apparently) dance to gamalan.

Bob Dylan and the Beats: A 1965 Supper of RevolutionsIn the smoky, intellectual crucible of San Francisco’s North Beach circa 1965, Bob...

Bob Dylan and the Beats: A 1965 Supper of Revolutions

In the smoky, intellectual crucible of San Francisco’s North Beach circa 1965, Bob Dylan—just 24 and already mythic—found himself at Vesuvio Café across from City Lights Booksellers, breaking bread with the titans of the Beat Generation. Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher-poet and guardian of the counterculture flame, hosted the gathering. Allen Ginsberg, bearded prophet of “Howl,” sat beside his lover Peter Orlovsky, while Peter’s brother Julian, ever a spectral figure on the Beat periphery, completed this constellation of dissenters. It was more than dinner—it was a convergence of poetic epochs: Dylan’s electric lyricism mingling with the raw howl of post-war existentialism.

That evening—documented in a rare photo by Ettore Sottsass, better known for postmodern design than street photography—wasn’t merely social. It marked a torch-passing moment. Ferlinghetti had just published A Coney Island of the Mind (1958) and remained a cultural lighthouse. Ginsberg, freshly returned from a soul-searching pilgrimage through India and Japan, where he’d sat with monks and chanted mantras, was beginning to see Dylan as a successor of sorts—one who could distill Whitman, Blake, and the blues into three-minute revolutions. Dylan, recently electrified at Newport (July 25, 1965), was now straddling Greenwich Village folk and the acid-soaked horizons of Haight-Ashbury.

Their conversations wandered—from Kerouac’s quiet decline in Florida to the war in Vietnam, from LSD as sacrament to the power of verse on vinyl. San Francisco, once the port of gold seekers, had become the port of seekers of a different gold: truth, rebellion, and new American mythologies. This meeting wasn’t captured by the press in headlines—but its ripple would echo through Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde (1966) and Ginsberg’s later spoken word recordings. It was, in spirit, the secret summit of twentieth-century American counterculture.

David Attenborough field recording from Bali in 1963.https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdaD2xnhuBo&feature=shared

David Attenborough field recording from Bali in 1963.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=tdaD2xnhuBo&feature=shared

Are you afraid of everything?

Are you afraid of everything?

The French study of 15,000 people shows men emit 26% more pollution due to eating red meat and driving...

The French study of 15,000 people shows men emit 26% more pollution due to eating red meat and driving more

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/14/car-use-and-meat-consumption-drive-emissions-gender-gap-research-suggests

And then Donald said to his fairy godmother, "if I can have only one wish, I want more money.....more money than I've ever had...

And then Donald said to his fairy godmother, "if I can have only one wish, I want more money.....more money than I've ever had before "

The fairy godmother replied "That is perfect, but we need to have something worth the same in return...whata ya got ya mug?"

War isn't even ideological anymore. It is waged for profit and nothing else.

War isn't even ideological anymore. It is waged for profit and nothing else.

Born in Marseille in 1896, Antonin Artaud emerged as a towering yet tormented figure in the evolution of modern theatre and philosophy....

Born in Marseille in 1896, Antonin Artaud emerged as a towering yet tormented figure in the evolution of modern theatre and philosophy. Descended from a Greek lineage and plagued early by neurological afflictions, Artaud began writing under the influence of Symbolist poetry and the Surrealists, with whom he aligned briefly before fracturing from André Breton’s circle around 1926. Paris in the interwar years served as the crucible of his early experiments—Artaud collaborated with directors like Charles Dullin and Georges Pitoëff and acted in seminal films, including Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), where his haunted visage underscored his obsession with spiritual suffering and metaphysical revolt.

By the 1930s, Artaud had articulated his radical vision in The Theatre and Its Double (1938), a collection that remains foundational to avant-garde performance. In it, he expounded the “Theatre of Cruelty,” an elemental call for theatre to purge, assault, and awaken both performer and spectator by bypassing language in favor of raw gesture, sound, and visceral ritual. His 1936 pilgrimage to Mexico, where he studied the Tarahumara people and their peyote rites, marked a spiritual turning point, deepening his preoccupation with magic and myth. But madness began to encroach. Following a breakdown in 1937 while in Ireland, he was institutionalized for nearly nine years, confined to asylums in Rodez and Ivry-sur-Seine, where he underwent over 50 electroshock treatments under the supervision of Dr. Gaston Ferdière.

Despite his suffering, Artaud’s final years were astonishingly productive. He filled notebooks with drawings, glossolalia, and stream-of-consciousness texts, constructing a new language to express his cosmic agonies and ecstatic visions. He died in 1948 in Ivry, aged 51. Posthumously, his work has shaped generations—from Jerzy Grotowski to Peter Brook—cementing his place as a prophet of the modern stage, forever poised between delirium and divinity.

Zakir Hussain & Rakesh Chaurasia | EtnoKraków/Rozstaje 2015 | Crossroads Festival & Euroradio EBUIn the powerful. In the...

Zakir Hussain & Rakesh Chaurasia | EtnoKraków/Rozstaje 2015 | Crossroads Festival & Euroradio EBU

In the powerful. In the fix.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=O2K0ptoYpuc&feature=shared