>>Nostalgia For Infinity

REALITY 86′d from KICK TO KILL on Vimeo.

There’s not a huge amount to say about this one; it’s an hour-long documentary following Black Flag on their final tour in 1986, including various pieces of live footage (you get ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’, ‘In My Head’, ‘Loose Nut’, ‘Drinking & Driving’ and ‘Louie Louie’), plus the same for Gone and Painted Willie who accompanied Black Flag on tour, interspersed with assorted interviews of punk kids and confused-looking locals, horseplay and bullshit. It’s cool to see the live footage and get a snapshot of how these bands entertained themselves whilst on tour (answer: just like everyone else with no money does). The volume is pretty low and inconsistent so be sure to crank it up.

Three bands and crew (a combined total of 13 individuals), 2 Dodge Ram extended cab vans, one equipment truck, one PA system traverse the continental US for six months. A road documentary shot from the inside of the last Black Flag tour ever (the 1986 “In My Head” US tour.) Greg Ginn along with Henry Rollins, Cel Revulta, and Anthony Martinez comprise the final line up of the band. Featuring behind the scenes proceedings and live performances from Black Flag, Painted Willie, and Gone (Ginn’s side project, then featuring Sim Cain and Andrew Weiss (later of the Rollins Band) . David Markey was along for the entire trip as the drummer / singer for Painted Willie (with Phil Newman & Vic Makauskas), documenting the six month tour with his Super-8 camera as it happened. Also features roadie Joe (“Planet Joe”) Cole, soundmen Davo Claasen and Dave “Ratman” Levine, and the tour manager who kept it all together, Mitch Bury. A crucial turning point in American underground rock. The end of the line for a trail blazing American band.

Shot in 1986 and completed by director David Markey in 1991 for We Got Power Films, approx. 62 min, Super 8 film.

Enjoy.

Have you heard of the Pharma Hack? It’s a fairly widespread problem among PHP-driven websites, particularly those powered by WordPress or Joomla. I’m a WordPress user myself, and Nostalgia For Infinity, the Wrecktheplacefantastic bandsite and Arcadian Rhythms are all powered by the platform.

About a fortnight ago AJ, one of the writers for Arcadian Rhythms, noticed that some of our Google search results were a bit odd. The links themselves were fine but using the preview function (where you get a screenshot of the page to the right of the search results) revealed a ton of spam content. Another AR writer, Spann, who works in SEO, had a look and quickly realised that this was 1.) not good, and 2.) we had been pharma hacked.

After a bit of research from Spann he discovered that there was a vulnerability in the WordPress theme we use, Arras, that allowed code to be injected into the site via a file called timthumb.php. It’s not a malicious file itself – it’s supposed to enable thumbnail resizing via sites like Flickr, I believe – but the outdated version used in Arras was deeply insecure.

The onus was now on me to identify the exact nature of the problem and fix it. I decided to write up what I went about doing in the hopes that it might be of use to some other poor bastard who is frantically googling the symptoms they’re seeing, as the nature of the hack I fixed was not identical to the other guides I read (though I will of course link to these, especially as they contain all of the technical instructions on how to go about doing what I did).

I’m not really in the mood to write this all up as a nice friendly blog post, so what I will do is provide a bulleted list of what I did and the order in which I did so. At the end of the post I’ll link to everything I found useful so you can find out how to do what I mention, or learn more about why. Where I can remember the relevant links, I’ll also include them in the list.

Sorry this is a bit lazy. I want to be helpful but I have other things to write that are a lot more interesting than this!

» Read the rest of this entry «

HELLO THERE. WE HEARD U NEED THIS.
DON’T WORRY, WE LOVE YOU.
EVERY PART OF YOU BELONGS TO YOU.

[ILU-486]

So in parts 1 and 2 I listed a bunch of stuff that I liked. In part 3 I will reveal my actual favourite record(s) of the year, and run through some of the other releases that almostmaybecoulda made it into the main attraction…

» Read the rest of this entry «

In part 1 I wrote about a bunch of my favourite records from last year. Well, here are a bunch more. They are still not in any particular order and I wouldn’t rate the following above or below the ones you read about yesterday. I am only playing favourites in a very general sense.

Tomorrow, you’ll get to read about my actual favourite release of 2011, and I’ll also throw in a bunch of honourable mentions, partly because they were really good and partly because I’m self-conscious about the fairly narrow generic focus of parts 1 and 2. I do listen to more stuff that isn’t pop-punk or post-emo, promise.

—

» Read the rest of this entry «

Once again I won’t even try to pretend that this is an objective list of any kind. Hell, even out of the shit I like I would probably have written a different list towards the end of December, or if I’d left it another few weeks. Still, here’s a round-up of my favourite twenty records as of late January to mid-February 2012…

(Yeah, I’m running late with this. If I’m honest I had to force myself to write it. Apparently I prefer the present to looking back. Could be I’m finally moving on from all that nostalgia and sentimentality that characterises me… nah, just kidding. My picks will make it pretty clear that that is not the case.)

» Read the rest of this entry «

Del.icio.us links for February 12th through February 19th:

» Read the rest of this entry «

The low-budget genre director Ed Wood is much-beloved of fans of so-bad-they’re-good films, particularly those involving cheap monsters and wonky flying saucers. The man was so widely recognised for his complete lack of filmmaking talent that he was posthumously awarded with a Golden Turkey Award for being the worst director ever. The only comparable artist I can really think of is Wesley Willis, whose dedication to writing the same terrible song over and over again was deeply admirable and, let’s face it, really fucking funny.

Did Ed Wood recognise how bad a director he was? I couldn’t say. What I can say is that whatever one thinks of his meagre talents, he left behind a legacy much richer and broader than a dozen directors who were merely competent. Human beings like to celebrate the bad. We enjoy the beautiful failures. We enjoy the ugliness that results.

So what better name for an aggressive, raw and determinedly D.I.Y. band than Ed Wood? I admit, it took me a little while to really think about why the band might have taken the name, but hasn’t punk rock always been about people doing what they want to do and to hell with the critics? Punk rock and hardcore have always had an emphatic fuck-you inherent in everything they do, and you can’t get a fuck-you more emphatic than a thirty-year career spent making terrible films in complete defiance of taste or competency.

So yeah, that’s enough about the band’s name and a deceased director, fun as the comparison might be. Ed Wood the band hail from Portsmouth and formed back in October 2010; they’ve just gotten done touring parts of the UK and released The Violent Years to coincide with said tour. They also toured back in 2011 and released a 7-track demo around that time. Two of the demo tracks reappear here in re-recorded form – ‘It’s Just a Ride’, retitled ‘Just a Ride’, and ‘Blood Money’ – while the other three tracks on The Violent Years are all new. The production is a considerable step up. I’m quite happy listening to shoddy recordings–downloading obscure crusty anarcho punk rock in the 90s will do that to you–but it’s preferable to hear recordings that reflect the energy and solidity of a live performance rather than sounding like they were recorded in one of the crypts of which Ed Wood the director was so fond.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Del.icio.us links for February 11th:

I am sorry to say that Postalicious appears to only be retrieving the most recent 10 bookmarks from my Delicious.com account. I can’t see why this is and I’m not aware of anyone else having the same issue. I will try and figure it out, but in the meantime, you can find my full collection of saved links at Delicious.com itself.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Shellshock Rock is a punk rock documentary with an interesting history and provenance. Shot between 1978 and 1979, it’s a surprisingly affectionate record of the Belfast punk scene of the time. Now, it’s tricky for me to talk about this era with any degree of authenticity as I wasn’t born until ’82, but everything I’ve read or watched about the period suggests to me that punk rock was not taken seriously or treated with much respect by anyone who could be considered part of the British establishment of the time. This, of course, included people working in TV. Ian Glasper’s Burning Britain memorably features one early 80s UK punk band talking about a TV crew coming to do a piece on them. The crew asked the band to pose for a few shots and look as dangerous as possible, tried to provoke them into saying outrageous things and talking about their glue habits, and didn’t attempt to ask what the band or its members actually thought or cared about. Essentially, punk rock was regarded as a zoo to be approached with a sort of derisive fear.

So when Shellshock Rock director John T. Davis secured Arts Council funding to shoot a documentary of punk rock in Belfast, it is little surprise to learn that he was initially regarded with some suspicion. Fortunately he had already made some connections with the punk scene through previous work as a photographer and demonstrating his knowledge of music and his interest in 60s garage rock and proto-punk. In time he was accepted by the local scene and shot footage at a variety of Belfast shows and venues.

The production values of Shellshock Rock are low – I want to clarify this early on. Arts Council funding does not equate to large sums of money and surviving copies of this 50-minute documentary appear lower quality than, say, Another State of Mind (the ’84 tour documentary following Youth Brigade and Social Distortion on tour in their shitty yellow school bus). The budget was not great and the crew was, I imagine, John T. Davis plus whichever friendly sorts wanted to help him.

» Read the rest of this entry «