The World Association of Newspapers (WAN), the industry body that represents 18,000 newspapers worldwide, has issued a strongly-worded rebuke of FIFA after football's governing body pulled out of talks aimed at resolving a dispute over press coverage at this summer's World Cup. As the WAN press release indicates: "FIFA has banned publication of World Cup photos through the Internet, including on thousands of newspaper web sites, during matches and has severely limited the number that can be published, regardless of time limits. It has also introduced editorial restrictions on how photographs can be used in print publications." FIFA's rationale is that it needs to impose such limits on the information flow from matches in order to protect its commercial contracts with licensees. For the WAN, the football body's stance is "an interference in editorial freedom and independence and a clear breach of the right to freedom of information." It is also a slap in the face to publications that have made football 'the people's game' over many decades. It seems that rather than the custodian of football, FIFA has become its landlord, building on our common land and renting it out to the highest bidder. No wonder more and more fans are turning their back on this corporate kickabout in favour of the 'punk football' of teams such as FC United of Manchester.
Just back from a trip to Amsterdam, where the newly embedded Victor S and I took in a gig by The Earlies at the Paradiso and sampled the wares of the city's only artisanal brewery, Brouwerie 't IJ (full details on our next podcast). The Paradiso is the third deconsecrated church I have been to that is now being used as a nightclub/live music venue: the first was Birmingham's answer to Le Corbeau, the Moseley Dance Centre back in 1994 (Doop by Doop was top of the charts!); the second was Mass in Brixton, where 808 State played a wicked live set in 2000. The Paradiso is probably the most impressive of the three, although The Earlies and support act Merz (back from contractual limbo), were snuck away in the small hall upstairs, rather than in the fabulous main arena. Other well-known music venues in former churches include Belfast's Empire Music Hall and the Limelight nighclubs of London (now a Walkabout) and New York, uber hip in the 80s. The conversion of synagogues into venues for sweaty musical abandon is also a well-documented tradition: The well-known 1930s dance, the Big Apple, is said to have originated in an abandoned synagogue that had been turned into a juke joint; Wood's Minstrel Hall, a converted synagogue just off Broadway, featured minstrel shows between 1862 and 1881, and was possibly the venue for the first ever musical comedy, Harrigan and Hart's 'Mulligan Guard Picnic' (1878). By contrast, there doesn't appear to be a single example of a mosque being converted into a venue for music and dancing (at least not one that is documented in English on the worldwide web). Googling "nightclub, 'converted mosque'" instead brings up a series of articles about radical cleric Abu Hamza, recently jailed in the UK for seven years for racial hatred and incitement to murder, who worked as a nightclub bouncer in Brighton in the early 1980s(!)
It was well worth braving the sleet and snow last night to see Editors at Vooruit in Ghent. They were as good live as on record. The hour-long set included almost every track from 'The Back Room' (opening with 'Lights', closing with third encore, 'Someone Says'), as well as some (strong-sounding) new material. The light show wasn't quite as good as Bloc Party at Halles de Schaarbeek, but the music was better (at least when it came to the headline act, the Mitchell Brothers, who supported the Bloccers, were way better than Brakes, last night's warm-up, whose quirkiness was irksome rather than charming. Trying to address a Flemish-speaking crowd in French probably didn't win them many friends either).
A cute 'on this day in history' piece from The Guardian archives today. It concerns a man who decided to add an obscene message to his employer's sticks of Torquay rock. There's something frightfully quaint and old-fashioned about the whole tale, from sugar boiler Michael Leigh's insertion of the word 'balls' (about as mild a swear word as you can get. The very punk rock term, 'bollocks' - it was 1977 after all - wouldn't fit in the rock), to the fact that most of the 'tarnished' product was given away. Today, it would probably be marketed to within an inch of its shelf life with an ad campaign featuring Vinnie Jones or some other cartoon villain. Sometimes you have to think that Sam Tyler's better off back in the Seventies.
Appalling, but still kind of funny: The Svenga Boys have come up with what will surely be the World Cup anthem in England this summer: "Who do you think you are kidding, Mr. Klinsmann?". On the Svenga Boys site you can also vote for which celebrity/ies you would like to perform the 'official' version of the song. I'd love to hear Ricky Hatton and Andy Fordham belting it out over the airwaves come June and July.
Last week a federal judge in the US state of Georgia jailed 31 activists for between one and six months for their nonviolent protest against the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation (WHINSEC), the US army training facility formerly known as the School of the Americas, which has long been linked to human rights abuses in Latin America. After Abu Ghraib you would think that the US would be keen to show the world its opposition to the use of torture by shutting down WHINSEC or at least opening it up to greater public scrutiny through an independent investigation of its activities over the years. After all, even 24, the ultimate 'the end justifies the means' TV drama of recent years, is losing its popular appeal.
As a podding muppet myself, here is a list of the sites I used to help get The Thousand Beer Show on the road. Peter Forret gives an excellent, step-by-step guide to podcasting with Blogger and SmartCast here. We recorded the show on an iPod with a Belkin mic attachment before editing it using Quicktime 7 Pro. I converted the .wav file to mp3 using a program called Audacity. The mp3 file was uploaded to the Internet Archive for hosting using a piece of creative commons software named ccPublisher. And very easy to use it was too.
The first episode of The Thousand Beer Show, my podcast with Victor S from Apostate Windbag is now online. Subtitled 'pop, politics and pintage', the show is dedicated to three of our favourite pursuits. Topics of discussion in the pilot podcast include... The NME's 100 greatest British albums and reader's awards polls; the result of the Canadian general election; The Streets remixing Bloc Party; taste tests of three Belgian beers; horses: should we work with them or eat them?; the golden days of 'inane socialism'; alt pop trends in the US, UK and Canada. As an added bonus there is an interruption from a pussy cat. To access the feed go to The Thousand Beer Show blog or check the Internet Archive. Ricky Gervais has enough awards already, help us break his record!
Eight days before the Winter Olympics start not everyone in Turin is ready... This photo was taken yesterday at Turin Airport where a couple of workmen were also still painting the Olympic Rings on the terminal building. They had finished the outline of about three and a half of them as I walked past!
According to a report in today's issue of Flemish newpaper Het Laatste Nieuws, Jo Lernout, co-founder of speech-recognition technology company Lernout & Hauspie (L&H), one of the most notorious failures of the dotcom bubble era, is now managing a chocolate factory in the Philippines. The plant makes pralines and chocolate figures from imported Callebaut chocolate. These are then sold in franchised kiosks at 25 high-end supermarkets around the country. Lernout has no stake in the business, which is called Annie's Belgian Chocolates: he receives a monthly salary paid by a consultancy based in Belgium.
Reminiscing about the curious signs that were displayed at public swimming baths when I were a lad in the UK (rules such as 'no ducking, no bombing, no heavy petting' illustrated with quaint black and white drawings), I naturally assumed that it would be easy enough to track down a picture of one of these signs on the web. I was wrong. Surely there are some renegades from Wikipedia willing to devote their time to developing an online museum of municipal signage, a space dedicated to cataloguing street signs and publicly-displayed notices, railway station tannoy announcements and other paraphernalia of everyday life from around the world? I'm sure there are plenty of film-makers, historians, local authorities, and idly curious folk who would find such a resource to be a gift that keeps on giving. By the by, for an entertaining discussion of the concept of 'petting' (an old-fashioned term even in the 1970s), take a look at The Sneeze.
Proving that politics never loses its capacity to surprise, President Bush has now stated that "America is addicted to oil" and has set a goal of, by 2025, replacing three-quarters of the US's oil imports from the Middle East, with biodiesel and other 'clean energy' sources cited as key. Reminds me very much of when Thatcher went 'Green'. Still, if he can kick booze with only the power of prayer, maybe Dubya can kick his (and our) oil dependency too! (;-)
