Saturday, March 29, 2008

Tetsuro Tanaka: Sit in day



Tetsuro Tanaka's sit in days take place on the 29th of every month, marking the date of his sacking on 29 June 1981. Friends and visitors gather out side the factory gate to have coffee and a chat, and to show support for his long struggle for reinstatement.

Filmmaker Maree Delofski's (Maree) feature length documentary 'Tanaka-san Will Not Do Callisthenics' is nearly complete and will be ready for showing later this year!

Friday, March 28, 2008

Oldest recording deciphered!

The audio excavation could give a new primacy to the phonautograph, once considered a curio, and its inventor, Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a Parisian typesetter and tinkerer who went to his grave convinced that credit for his breakthroughs had been improperly bestowed on Edison.

The recording was made on April 9, 1860, on a phonautograph, a machine designed to record sounds visually, not to play them back. But the phonautograph recording, or phonautogram, was made playable — converted from squiggles on paper to sound — by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.

Lawrence Berkeley scientists used optical imaging and a “virtual stylus” on high-resolution scans of the phonautogram, deploying modern technology to extract sound from patterns inscribed on the soot-blackened paper almost a century and a half ago. The scientists belong to an informal collaborative called First Sounds that also includes audio historians and sound engineers



1860 recording:

Monday, March 24, 2008

Peace sign turns fifty

March from London to Aldermaston

Starting on Easter Friday 1958 the Aldermaston March attracted thousands of all ages (I was 14). Organised by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) the banners of the march introduced a new peace sign to the world ... the most used peace sign alongside Picasso's dove.



The sign was copied by peace activists across the world (early on in US peace and student marches it was often replaced mistakenly by the Mercedes Benz sign, although perhaps the appropriation of logos of large manufacturers for anti-war purposes might not be a bad idea)

The CND sign was created by Gerald Holtom a designer and former World War II conscientious objector from West London.

The march started at Trafalgar Square and ended outside the Aldermaston atomic weapons factory some 80 Kilometres away. Marchers slept overnight at schools and churches along the away and some of the earliest "protest songs" were sung by groups of folksingers, songs like H-Bombs Thunder.

Friday, March 14, 2008

Monday, March 10, 2008

Chris Kempster: Songs of Henry Lawson


After two years work the Second Edition of Chris Kempster's book 'The Songs of Henry Lawson' has been published. It was launched at the Port Fairy Folk Festival with a very successful concert (audience 1000) and will be launched again At the National Folk Festival in Canberra over the Easter weekend. The New edition adds forty pages to the original collection with the new tunes that have been written for Lawson verse over the past 29 years. The new edition is priced at $35

Friday, March 07, 2008

Wollongong: Bert Lloyd Centenary Concert

Mark Gregory

John Spillane, John Broomhall and Dave De Santi

Avalanche

Pete Bennett band

Southbound Train


Wongawilli

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Katoomba ... nic nacs

Depression glass
post-depression tea towel