AC/DC played the Queensland Sport and Athletics Centre in Nathan, Brisbane last night, Saturday February 27 2010, as part of their Black Ice world tour. Here's a couple of the videos already on YouTube:
The denial of contemporaneity to the Islamic world can sometimes proceed from the best intentions, as when invited experts cite and discuss the Holy Koran and the Sayings of the Prophet as the ultimate and armatural texts for present-day political choices. This approach creates the impression that Islamic civilisation has made no further contribution to the history of thought since the 7th century; it also negates the role of secular philosophies in the evolution of the Muslim or Arab political consciousness. For instance, this writer cannot recall a single reference, in mainstream-channel discussions during the last 17 months, to Ali Shariati, the political visionary and critic of consumption capitalism whose teachings provided the stimulus for the first, 1978 phase of the Iranian Revolution. Or to the historian of science and gnosis, Seyyed Hossein Nasr; or the Egyptian secular revolutionary, Gamal Abdel Nasser, or the Algerian socialists Ahmed Ben Bella and Houari Boumediene. The Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi is usually mentioned only in the context of the Lockerbie case or dismissed as a maverick; his contribution to post-colonial praxis goes unremarked. These and many other thinkers and political figures from the world of Islam have been consigned to oblivion by the global media; the modernities they symbolise, their conceptions of freedom, justice and the scope of human possibility, are rendered invisible.Hoskote has also been strongly critical of attacks on cultural expression by religious mobs and bigoted police:
The outrageous arrest of Chandramohan, a final-year fine arts student at the Maharaja Sayajirao University, Baroda, on May 9, has confirmed that the only right that is taken seriously in India today is the right to take offence. The right to take offence is not a fundamental right guaranteed by the Constitution, but all the same, it is the most easily enforced of all rights. All you need is a local demagogue with a taste for publicity, a few rampaging goons, policemen who favour the violent over the reasonable, and a lower judiciary that is reluctant to defy the mob.And also here:
Chandramohan, who was taken into custody by the Baroda police without a proper warrant, after he had been roughed up by a gang of Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP) activists, has been charged with public obscenity and an attempt to incite communal disharmony. The images to which such turbulent opposition has been mounted show a woman, perhaps a goddess, birthing a man (which is no more fearful than the Lajja-gouri of Hindu sacred art), and a crucifix with a penis (this, an obvious homage to Robert Mapplethorpe). Both images retrieve the passionate human dramas that lie at the core of sacred narratives. Both images insist upon the artist’s right to revisit inherited lore, to reinvent images and narratives, to integrate the sacred as an element of secular experience.
The Bajrang Dal and Vishwa Hindu Parishad activists who attacked the Garden Art Gallery in Surat, on January 29, appear to have taken destructive criticism to its extreme. Labouring under the delusion that the Hindu pantheon required defence against artistic blasphemy, these ruffians destroyed eight works by distinguished contemporary Indian painters including M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara and N.S. Bendre, and the younger Kolkata artist, Chittrovanu Mazumdar. This manifestation of a terrifyingly illiberal tendency, which has come to dominate our public life, flagrantly challenges the Constitutional right to the freedom of expression. Conversely, it champions the self-arrogated right to take violent offence at affronts, real or imagined, to belief or identity.
The Surat outrage follows the model set by the Sambhaji Brigade's rampage through Pune's Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute on January 5. Far from being aberrations, these incidents are continuous with a shameful series of violations of artistic and scholarly freedom in the recent past. These precedents include the vilification campaign launched by various Hindu-majoritarian organisations, during 1996, against Husain for his alleged portrayal of a nude Saraswati; the disruption of the Pakistani vocalist, Ghulam Ali's Mumbai concert by the Shiv Sena, in 1998; the demonstrations by Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) auxiliaries in Varanasi, which forced Deepa Mehta to stop work on her film, Water, in 2000; and the withdrawal of an exhibition by Pakistani artists at Mumbai's Sakshi Gallery in 2001, under Sena pressure.
Has the diva lost her diva-ness? Watch this video and judge for yourself. I vote yes.
The Philistine phase of the digital age is almost over. The aggregators and the plagiarists will soon have to pay a price for the co-opting of our content. But if we do not take advantage of the current movement toward paid-for content, it will be the content creators, the people in this hall, who will pay the ultimate price and the content kleptomaniacs will triumph.
There's been a rash of uncredited tweets in the news lately. Here's @beautiful_alone's from last week in City News http://yfrog.com/4emxqcj
Thanks City News for printing my tweet without crediting me: http://yfrog.com/4emxqcj (via @erikveland). Hmpf. 'twitter fanatic' my arse.The Brisbane City News is part of Quest Community Newspapers, which is owned by News Limited, News Corporation's Australian arm.
@ErikVeland @beautiful_alone Thanks for reading @BrisCityNews tell all your friends to pick up a copy each Thursday!
Not sure if there has been a previously proven case, but defamation on Twitter is possible. Clearly some forget that.
This work comes out of 18 months of art therapy
sessions with Cathy Condon a Coolum artist/art therapist. The sessions
delved deeply into the layers of my consciousness and produced a year’s
worth of experimental works one of which was in this cross style.
After sifting through the mammoth amounts of information that came
through my sessions, crosses came up time and again.Crosses
have a symbolism that predates the familiar Christian crucifix and it
is these kinds of crosses that I am interested in. For me the cross is
an important symbol of the centring of the universe, the ability of
humanity to fix things in place using mind and hands, to find meaning
in the patterns of nature (like the southern cross) and the potency of
the spirit world (the power of the use of symbols). The process of
producing each cross is a synthesis of these above traits, with each
brush stroke and block of colour a meditation on these themes.
