Brian Jackson is running for the Ontario Liberal Party in the Ontario provincial election, in the Oxford riding. Wikinews’ Nick Moreau interviewed him regarding his values, his experience, and his campaign.
Stay tuned for further interviews; every candidate from every party is eligible, and will be contacted. Expect interviews from Liberals, Progressive Conservatives, New Democratic Party members, Ontario Greens, as well as members from the Family Coalition, Freedom, Communist, Libertarian, and Confederation of Regions parties, as well as independents.
Companies in the United States are shedding more jobs, pushing the country’s unemployment rate to a 26-year high of 9.8%.
The US Labor Department said on Friday that employers cut 263,000 jobs in September, with companies in the service industries — including banks, restaurants and retailers — hit especially hard. This is the 21st consecutive month of job losses in the country.
The United States has now lost 7.2 million jobs since the recession officially began in December 2007. The new data has sparked fears that unemployment could threaten an economic recovery. Top US officials have warned that any recovery would be slow and uneven, and some have predicted the unemployment rate will top 10% before the situation improves.
“Continued household deleveraging and rising unemployment may weigh more on consumption than forecast, and accelerating corporate and commercial property defaults could slow the improvement in financial conditions,” read a report by the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook, predicting that unemployment will average 10.1% by next year and not go back down to five percent until 2014.
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, said that “it’s a very fragile and tentative recovery. Policy makers need to do more.”
“The number came in weaker than expected. We saw a lot of artificial involvement by the government to prop up the markets, and now that that is starting to end, the private sector isn’t yet showing signs of life,” said Kevin Caron, a market strategist for Stifel, Nicolaus & Co.
Also on Thursday, the US Commerce Department said factory orders fell for the first time in five months, dropping eight-tenths of a percent in August. Orders for durable goods — items intended to last several years (including everything from appliances to airliners) — fell 2.6%, the largest drop since January of this year.
The US government has been spending billions of dollars — part of a $787 billion stimulus package — to help spark economic growth. There have been some signs the economy is improving.
The Commerce Department said on Thursday that spending on home construction jumped in August for its biggest increase in 16 years. A real estate trade group, the National Association of Realtors, said pending sales of previously owned homes rose more than 12 percent in August, compared to August 2008.
A separate Commerce Department report said that consumer spending, which accounts for more than two-thirds of US economic activity, rose at its fastest pace in nearly eight years, jumping 1.3 percent in August.
Other reports have provided cause for concern. A banking industry trade group said Thursday the number of US consumers making late payments, or failing to make payments, on loans and credit cards is on the rise. A survey by a business group, the Institute for Supply Management, Thursday showed US manufacturing grew in September, but at a slower pace than in August when manufacturing increased for the first time in a year and a half.
Stock markets reacted negatively to the reports. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 41 points in early trading, reaching a level of 9467. This follows a drop of 203 points on Thursday, its largest loss in a single day since July. The London FTSE index fell 55 points, or 1.1%, to reach 4993 points by 15.00 local time.
More than 50 programmers, scientists, students, hobbyists and fans of the A.L.I.C.E. chat robot gathered in Guildford, U.K. on Friday to celebrate the tenth birthday of the award winning A.I. On hand was the founder the Loebner Prize, an annual Turing Test, designed to pick out the world’s most human computer according to an experiment laid out by the famous British mathematician Alan Turing more then 50 years ago. Along with A.L.I.C.E.’s chief programmer Dr. Richard S. Wallace, two other Loebner prize winners, Robby Garner and this year’s winner, Rollo Carpenter, also gave presentations, as did other finalists.
The University of Surrey venue was chosen, according to Dr. Wallace, not only because it was outside the U.S. (A.L.I.C.E.’s birthday fell on the Thanksgiving Day weekend holiday there, so he expected few people would attend a conference in America), but also because of its recently erected statue of Alan Turing, who posed the famous A. I. experiment which inspired much of the work on bots like A.L.I.C.E. University of Surrey Digital World Research Centre organizers Lynn and David Hamill were pleased to host the event because it encourages multi-disciplinary interaction, and because of the Centre’s interest in interaction between humans and computers.File:ALICE Birthday Cake.jpg
Dr. Wallace gave a keynote address outlining the history of A.L.I.C.E. and AIML. Many people commented on the fact the he seemed to have moved around a lot in the last ten years, having lived in New York, Pennsylvania, San Francisco, Maine, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, while working on the Alicebot project. The A.L.I.C.E. and AIML software is popular among chat robot enthusiats primarily because of its distribution under the GNU free software license. One of Dr. Wallace’s PowerPoint slides asked the question, “How do you make money from free software?” His answer: memberships, subscriptions, books, directories, syndicated ads, consulting, teaching, and something called the Superbot.
Rollo Carpenter gave a fascinating presentation on his learning bot Jabberwacky, reading from several sample conversations wherein the bot seemed amazingly humanlike. Unlike the free A.L.I.C.E. software, Carpenter uses a proprietary learning approach so that the bot actually mimics the personality of each individual chatter. The more people who chat with Jabberwacky, the better it becomes at this kind of mimicry.
In another interesting presentation, Dr. Hamill related present-day research on chat robots to earlier work on dialog analysis in telephone conversations. Phone calls have many similarities to the one-on-one chats that bots encounter on the web and in IM. Dr. Hamill also related our social expectations of bots to social class structure and how servants were expected to behave in Victorian England. He cited the famous Microsoft paperclip as the most egregius example of a bot that violated all the rules of a good servant’s behavior.
Bots have advanced a long way since philanthropist Hugh Loebner launched his controversial contest 15 years ago. His Turing Test contest, which offers an award of $100,000 for the first program to pass an “audio-visual” version of the game, also awards a bronze medal and $2000 every year for the “most human computer” according to a panel of judges. Huma Shah of the University of Westminster presented examples of bots used by large corporations to help sell furniture, provide the latest information about automotive products, and help customers open bank accounts. Several companies in the U.S. and Europe offer customized bot personalities for corporate web sites.
Even though Turing’s Test remains controversial, this group of enthusiastic developers seems determined to carry on the tradition and try to develop more and more human like chat bots.Hugh Loebner is dedicated to carry on his contest for the rest of his life, in spite of his critics. He hopes that a large enough constituency of winners will exist to keep the competition going well beyond his own lifetime. Dr. Wallace says, “Nobody has gotten rich from chat robots yet, but that doesn’t stop people from trying. There is such a thing as ‘bot fever’. For some people who meet a bot for the first time, it can pass the Turing Test for them, and they get very excited.”
Dogs and cats are more like humans than you think. Like their human owners, they suffer from dental problems, can suffer from depression and get afflicted with diseases of old age like heart disease and arthritis. If you have a pet at home, scheduling routine visits to your local animal hospital is a good idea. Qualified vets can diagnose diseases and life-threatening conditions at the onset. By treating any condition early on, the pet owner can save the considerable expenses for treatment if the condition worsens.
Pets need vaccinations and de-worming from time to time. In case the animal suffers from obesity, diabetes, or heart disease, the vet can recommend dietary changes and other restrictions to improve the health and wellness of your animal.
A common disease among young puppies is canine distemper. Distemper is a highly contagious viral disease that is spread through the air and from the respiratory secretions of dogs suffering from the virus. This disease can be fatal. As soon as you bring your new puppy home, if the pup has not yet been vaccinated, it is highly recommended that you make an appointment with your vet for vaccination from this deadly disease and other infectious diseases.
Another viral disease that commonly afflicts dogs is parvovirus. Fatality rates for this disease are high. In spite of costly medical treatment at an animal hospital many pet dogs succumb to this viral disease. Your vet would recommend early vaccination against parvovirus for your pet. With routine vaccinations, your pet can be protected from a series of diseases with high mortality rates.
Ticks and fleas spread diseases among dogs and cats. Dog to dog contact can result in the spread of many diseases like mange, kennel cough, ringworm and canine influenza. To diagnose and treat your animal, take your pet to the animal hospital for regular wellness checks. Some animals do not show the symptoms of the disease until it is very late. Your vet can detect disease early on and save your animal undue suffering and excessive expenses for the owner.
If you have just bought home a new pet, consult with your vet at the animal hospital about the most suitable preventative program for your animal to include the core vaccinations, parasite control and prevention of heartworm. Your dog should not come into contact with sick animals. If your dog is sick, keep it away from other animals and humans and take it to the animal hospital. Odenton pet owners can find best preventive care programs for their pets at local vet offices.
Animal hospital Odenton – When looking for an animal hospital, Odenton pet owners can rely on the medical care and other services at Gambrills Veterinary Center.
Six-year-old Thomas David Horne from the United Kingdom has died and eleven other British tourists were injured Friday when their plane crashed in Canaima National Park in Venezuela. They were on a sight seeing tour of the world’s tallest waterfalls, the Angel Falls.
The single engine, nine-seater Cessna 208 Caravan, lifted off shortly before the end of the runway, lost power, and then surged briefly before plummeting into the Venezuelan jungle in front of the 3,200 ft falls.
“It started to take off and we sensed it was losing power. Then it seemed to get it back and lifted off just 200 metres before the end of the runway. Then it dived into the trees,” reported Makeli Freire, a park tour guide.
Three of the injured sustained serious injuries, while the others suffered mainly broken bones. Thomas Horne, who sustained serious head injuries, died on the way to a local hospital. The pilot, co-pilot and tour guide were among the injured. Everyone on board was flown to Ciudad Bolívar, the capital city of Venezuela’s Bolívar state, where they were treated for their injuries. Among the injured were Thomas’s mother and father Jane and David who were among those who had broken bones. They were British tourists finishing up a two week holiday to Venezuela.
“The young boy died as he was being flown to hospital. His parents are both physically OK but are completely distraught over the loss of their son,” said Maiker Puga, of the Ciudad Bolivar clinic.
Liz and her husband Keith Grainger and S. Phillips, also British tourists, were also injured in the crash. The names of the three other British tourists and the three person crew who were injured have not been released at this time.
The plane tour was offered by First Choice, a division of TUI Travel PLC who extended their “heartfelt sympathy to family and friends during this deeply sad time.” LTA airline has suspended further flights until the investigation is concluded.
June Holman, Thomas’s aunt who was not on holidays said, that “there is nothing worse than losing a loved one, especially not a young child with their whole life ahead of them. The thoughts of us all are with his parents Jane and Dave at this very sad time.”
Accidents are fourth in the list of causes of death in the United States. Motor-car accidents constitute one fourth of all that occur. Under such circumstances, people ought to be aware of the immediate steps that need to be taken whenever anyone is involved in an accident, far-removed from any contact with a doctor or a hospital. People who frequently drive the country roads will be well-advised to provide their : cars with a first-aid kit containing at least some adhesive tape, bandages, cotton, tourniquets, and the other essentials that are helpful in stopping hemorrhage and thus saving a life. Remember, however, that the immediate services of a competent doctor are better than any amount of first aid by those not specially trained in care of wounds and injuries.
1. Keep the injured person lying down in a comfortable position, his head level with his body, until you know whether the injury is serious.
2. Look for hemorrhage, stoppage of breathing, poisoning, wounds, burns, fractures, and dislocations. Be sure you locate every injury. Remove enough clothing to determine the extent of the injury. Rip the seams if necessary. Attempts to remove the clothes in the usual manner may cause unnecessary suffering or may aggravate injury. Serious bleeding, stoppage of breathing, and poisoning must be treated immediately before anything else is done.
3. Send someone to call a physician or an ambulance.
4. Keep calm and do not be hurried into moving an injured person I unless absolutely necessary.
5. Never give water or other liquid to an unconscious person.
6. Keep onlookers away from the injured.
7. Make the patient comfortable and keep him cheerful, if possible.
8. Don’t let the patient see his own injury.
Shock
Any person severely injured may develop shock, and treatment must be started immediately to prevent shock, if possible. This involves:
1.Prevention of hemorrhage by application of pressure.
2. Maintaining body temperature by covering the patient with a blanket but not applying heat.
3. Increasing the flow of blood to vital organs by tilting the body so that the blood tends to flow to the upper portions, raising the foot of the stretcher or bed from twelve to eighteen inches.
4. Except when there is abdominal injury, giving fluids in small amounts and frequently, preferably as hot as can be taken comfortably.
5. Administering artificial respiration as described later, if necessary, to restore breathing.
Dressing And Bandages
Do not use absorbent cotton directly over a wound or bum because it sticks and is hard to remove. Do not use adhesive tape, electrician’s tape, collodion, or similar materials directly on a wound. Apply sterilized gauze squares or bandage compresses to wounds. Bandages are not applied directly over wounds, which should always be covered first with a dressing.
Wounds
Do not touch any wound with the hand, mouth, clothing, or any unclean material. Apply a sterile dressing or compress and bandage snugly in place. When bleeding is present, apply a dressing as soon as available; press firmly. Make sure that bleeding is stopped before moving the patient. Tourniquets are dangerous, and should not be used if bleeding can be checked readily otherwise. Whenever there is serious bleeding get a physician as soon as possible to take responsibility for care of the patient.
Puncturing Wounds
Always secure a physician, who will not only treat the wound itself but may give tetanus antitoxin for prevention of lockjaw.
Powder Burns
Explosion of gunpowder usually carries burned powder and dirt into the skin. Make sure that the patient is seen by a physician. The value of tetanus antitoxin in such cases cannot be over-emphasized.
Infected Wounds
Apply wet dressings, consisting of three heaping tablespoonfuls of ordinary salt, or twice this amount of Epsom salts, in each quart of water. Change wet dressing often enough to keep hot, and apply continuously for an hour. Repeat every three to four hours until the patient is turned over to a physician.
Wounds Of Abdomen
Keep the patient lying quietly on his back. Move patients with wounds of the abdomen carefully. When intestines protrude from wound, keep patient on back with a coat or pillow under the knees. Don’t try to push the intestine back in. Cover with a sterile dressing and keep moist.
Animal Bites
Wash the wound thoroughly to remove saliva. Use a gauze compress and a thick solution of soap and water to scrub the wound. Rinse it with clean running water and apply a sterile dressing. Consult a physician at once. Do not kill the biting animal except to protect others from danger. Have biting animals examined by competent veterinarians to determine whether or not they have rabies.
Snake Bites
Make the victim lie down and keep quiet. Tie a constricting band firmly around the limb just above the bite, to restrict the spread of the poison. Sterilize a sharp knife or razor blade with a match flame, iodine, or alcohol. Make a cross-cut incision about one-quarter-inch long through each fang mark. Apply suction with a suction cup or syringe; apply suction by mouth if a mechanical device is not available. Call a doctor as promptly as possible. Antivenin serum should be given by someone experienced, if it is available.
Foreign Bodies In Wounds
If a foreign body like a splinter, a piece of glass or metal is near the surface, apply an antiseptic to the skin. Sterilize a knife, needle, or tweezers by passing through a flame; use this to remove foreign body. Encourage a little bleeding by gentle pressure on the wound. After bleeding has stopped apply a sterile compress.
Foreign Body In The Eye
Never rub the eye. Never touch it until you have washed your hands thoroughly. Never be rough with the eye. Never try to remove a foreign body from the eye with a toothpick, match, knife blade, or any instrument.
Pull down the lower eyelid and see if the foreign substance is on the surface of the lower lid. If visible, it can be removed by touching it with a comer of a clean hand kerchief. Grasp the eyelashes of the upper lid gently between the thumb and forefinger. Have the patient look upward, and pull the upper eyelid upward and downward over the lower eyelid. This may dislodge a foreign body, so that it will be washed away by the tears. Wash the eye with a solution of boric acid (a half teaspoonful to a drinking glass of boiled water). If foreign bodies are still present, make sure that the patient has attention from a physician.
Nosebleed
Have patient sit up with head thrown slightly back, breathing through mouth. Apply cold wet compresses over the nose. Tell person with nosebleed not to blow nose for a few hours. Press the nostril on the bleeding side firmly against the middle portion for four or five minutes. If these measures do not stop the bleeding in a few minutes, call a physician. Try putting sterile gauze pack back in the nostril, leaving the end out so it can be easily removed.
Internal Bleeding
Keep the patient lying on his back as flat as possible. Turn the head to one side for vomiting or coughing. Keep the patient warm. Get a physician at the earliest possible moment.
The majority of our customers who order stretch wrap call it shrink wrap and these are people who use the product daily. What hope is there for those who are not regular users of these products? And for that matter, who cares?
Well if you need one or the other, you should care and just about every industrial, commercial or distribution company uses these products. The last thing you need is to order a product that won’t work for your application, especially in these time sensitive days. These are two very different products used for very different applications.
Let’s clear up the confusion. Shrink wrap film is made from polyolefin plastic, while stretch wrap is made from polyethylene plastic. Shrink wrap is generally used to protect a single product, such as the plastic over toys at the toy store or CD’s when you first buy them. Shrink wrap gets its tight seal through a heating process. The product is wrapped and heated with a hairdryer-like tool or put through a heat tunnel. Shrink wrap can also be used for bundling products together, such as bottles of soda. In some cases, shrink wrap is used for palletizing although it is far less common that stretch wrap for this application.
Stretch wrap is generally used to hold boxes on a pallet for transport. Stretch wrap is pulled around the load and stretched. The plastic has a memory and wants to return to its original size. This “elastic band effect” holds the load tight.
Generally stretch wrap comes in 12”, 15” and 18” sizes for hand wrapping and 20”-60” sizes for machine applications. Shrink wrap is available in most even number sizes between 4-20” and is generally “center-folded”, that is the film is folded over itself to form two layers. The product is inserted between the two layers and sealed on the remaining three sidesScience Articles, then shrunk by heat.
India is being considered as “the next big thing” in real estate with many Israeli companies lining up for major investments there, a media report here said.
The latest addition to the growing list of possible investors in the Indian real estate sector is US tycoon Shaya Boymelgreen who recently bought Azorim Investment in Israel for USD 500 million from IDB Holding Corp Ltd.
India is being considered as “the next big thing” in real estate with many Israeli companies lining up for major investments there, a media report here said.
The latest addition to the growing list of possible investors in the Indian real estate sector is US tycoon Shaya Boymelgreen who recently bought Azorim Investment in Israel for USD 500 million from IDB Holding Corp Ltd.
He is joining hands with Nochi Dankner, a prominent Israeli businessman who briefed him over the prospects in the Indian market, busines daily ‘Globes’ reported.
The two entrepreneurs are in contact and considering a number of joint investments in India, the daily said adding that Azorim Investment CEO David Lev is due to visit India in a few days in this regard.
Meanwhile, Big Shopping Centers (2004) Ltd has already set up an Indian subsidiary, Big India, with a local partner who owns 40 per cent of the joint venture, the report said.
Big India bought two half-acre plots on which it plans to build commercial centres at an investment of USD 40 million.
Another company, Elbit Medical Imaging Ltd. chairman Motti Zisser declared early this year that he planned to invest in India.
The company plans to build three commercial centres in India, which will become an important component of the company’s real estate assets.
“India now resembles the real estate market in Eastern Europe ten years ago. Elbit Medical accumulated great experience in Eastern Europe, and it sees India as an excellent business opportunity,” company sources told the business daily.
Alony Hetz Property and Investments Ltd. controlling shareholder Natan Hetz also recently announced plans to invest USD 100 million with partners in Indian ventures.
Gazit-Globe Ltd., controlled by chairman Chaim Katzman, and Ocif Investments and Development Ltd. controlled by Doron Aviv and Dafna Harlev, are also interested in investing in IndiaScience Articles, it added.
John Vanderslice has recently learned to enjoy America again. The singer-songwriter, who National Public Radio called “one of the most imaginative, prolific and consistently rewarding artists making music today,” found it through an unlikely source: his French girlfriend. “For the first time in my life I wouldn’t say I was defending the country but I was in this very strange position…”
Since breaking off from San Francisco local legends, mk Ultra, Vanderslice has produced six critically-acclaimed albums. His most recent, Emerald City, was released July 24th. Titled after the nickname given to the American-occupied Green Zone in Baghdad, it chronicles a world on the verge of imminent collapse under the weight of its own paranoia and loneliness. David Shankbone recently went to the Bowery Ballroom and spoke with Vanderslice about music, photography, touring and what makes a depressed liberal angry.
DS: How is the tour going?
JV: Great! I was just on the Wiki page for Inland Empire, and there is a great synopsis on the film. What’s on there is the best thing I have read about that film. The tour has been great. The thing with touring: say you are on vacation…let’s say you are doing an intense vacation. I went to Thailand alone, and there’s a part of you that just wants to go home. I don’t know what it is. I like to be home, but on tour there is a free floating anxiety that says: Go Home. Go Home.
DS: Anywhere, or just outside of the country?
JV: Anywhere. I want to be home in San Francisco, and I really do love being on tour, but there is almost like a homing beacon inside of me that is beeping and it creates a certain amount of anxiety.
DS: I can relate: You and I have moved around a lot, and we have a lot in common. Pranks, for one. David Bowie is another.
JV: Yeah, I saw that you like David Bowie on your MySpace.
DS: When I was in college I listened to him nonstop. Do you have a favorite album of his?
JV: I loved all the things from early to late seventies. Hunky Dory to Low to “Heroes” to Lodger. Low changed my life. The second I got was Hunky Dory, and the third was Diamond Dogs, which is a very underrated album. Then I got Ziggy Stardust and I was like, wow, this is important…this means something. There was tons of music I discovered in the seventh and eighth grade that I discovered, but I don’t love, respect and relate to it as much as I do Bowie. Especially Low…I was just on a panel with Steve Albini about how it has had a lot of impact.
DS: You said seventh and eighth grade. Were you always listening to people like Bowie or bands like the Velvets, or did you have an Eddie Murphy My Girl Wants to Party All the Time phase?
JV: The thing for me that was the uncool music, I had an older brother who was really into prog music, so it was like Gentle Giant and Yes and King Crimson and Genesis. All the new Genesis that was happening at the time was mind-blowing. Phil Collins‘s solo record…we had every single solo record, like the Mike Rutherford solo record.
DS: Do you shun that music now or is it still a part of you?
JV: Oh no, I appreciate all music. I’m an anti-snob. Last night when I was going to sleep I was watching Ocean’s Thirteen on my computer. It’s not like I always need to watch some super-fragmented, fucked-up art movie like Inland Empire. It’s part of how I relate to the audience. We end every night by going out into the audience and playing acoustically, directly, right in front of the audience, six inches away—that is part of my philosophy.
DS: Do you think New York or San Francisco suffers from artistic elitism more?
JV: I think because of the Internet that there is less and less elitism; everyone is into some little superstar on YouTube and everyone can now appreciate now Justin Timberlake. There is no need for factions. There is too much information, and I think the idea has broken down that some people…I mean, when was the last time you met someone who was into ska, or into punk, and they dressed the part? I don’t meet those people anymore.
DS: Everything is fusion now, like cuisine. It’s hard to find a purely French or purely Vietnamese restaurant.
JV: Exactly! When I was in high school there were factions. I remember the guys who listened to Black Flag. They looked the part! Like they were in theater.
JV: Yes, I believe it. But even emo kids, compared to their older brethren, are so open-minded. I opened up for Sunny Day Real Estate and Pedro the Lion, and I did not find their fans to be the cliquish people that I feared, because I was never playing or marketed in the emo genre. I would say it’s because of the Internet.
DS: You could clearly create music that is more mainstream pop and be successful with it, but you choose a lot of very personal and political themes for your music. Are you ever tempted to put out a studio album geared toward the charts just to make some cash?
JV: I would say no. I’m definitely a capitalist, I was an econ major and I have no problem with making money, but I made a pact with myself very early on that I was only going to release music that was true to the voices and harmonic things I heard inside of me—that were honestly inside me—and I have never broken that pact. We just pulled two new songs from Emerald City because I didn’t feel they were exactly what I wanted to have on a record. Maybe I’m too stubborn or not capable of it, but I don’t think…part of the equation for me: this is a low stakes game, making indie music. Relative to the world, with the people I grew up with and where they are now and how much money they make. The money in indie music is a low stakes game from a financial perspective. So the one thing you can have as an indie artist is credibility, and when you burn your credibility, you are done, man. You can not recover from that. These years I have been true to myself, that’s all I have.
DS: Do you think Spoon burned their indie credibility for allowing their music to be used in commercials and by making more studio-oriented albums? They are one of my favorite bands, but they have come a long way from A Series of Sneaks and Girls Can Tell.
JV: They have, but no, I don’t think they’ve lost their credibility at all. I know those guys so well, and Brit and Jim are doing exactly the music they want to do. Brit owns his own studio, and they completely control their means of production, and they are very insulated by being on Merge, and I think their new album—and I bought Telephono when it came out—is as good as anything they have done.
DS: Do you think letting your music be used on commercials does not bring the credibility problem it once did? That used to be the line of demarcation–the whole Sting thing–that if you did commercials you sold out.
JV: Five years ago I would have said that it would have bothered me. It doesn’t bother me anymore. The thing is that bands have shrinking options for revenue streams, and sync deals and licensing, it’s like, man, you better be open to that idea. I remember when Spike Lee said, ‘Yeah, I did these Nike commercials, but it allowed me to do these other films that I wanted to make,’ and in some ways there is an article that Of Montreal and Spoon and other bands that have done sync deals have actually insulated themselves further from the difficulties of being a successful independent band, because they have had some income come in that have allowed them to stay put on labels where they are not being pushed around by anyone.
The ultimate problem—sort of like the only philosophical problem is suicide—the only philosophical problem is whether to be assigned to a major label because you are then going to have so much editorial input that it is probably going to really hurt what you are doing.
DS: Do you believe the only philosophical question is whether to commit suicide?
JV: Absolutely. I think the rest is internal chatter and if I logged and tried to counter the internal chatter I have inside my own brain there is no way I could match that.
DS: When you see artists like Pete Doherty or Amy Winehouse out on suicidal binges of drug use, what do you think as a musician? What do you get from what you see them go through in their personal lives and their music?
JV: The thing for me is they are profound iconic figures for me, and I don’t even know their music. I don’t know Winehouse or Doherty’s music, I just know that they are acting a very crucial, mythic part in our culture, and they might be doing it unknowingly.
DS: Glorification of drugs? The rock lifestyle?
JV: More like an out-of-control Id, completely unregulated personal relationships to the world in general. It’s not just drugs, it’s everything. It’s arguing and scratching people’s faces and driving on the wrong side of the road. Those are just the infractions that land them in jail. I think it might be unknowing, but in some ways they are beautiful figures for going that far off the deep end.
DS: As tragic figures?
JV: Yeah, as totally tragic figures. I appreciate that. I take no pleasure in saying that, but I also believe they are important. The figures that go outside—let’s say GG Allin or Penderetsky in the world of classical music—people who are so far outside of the normal boundaries of behavior and communication, it in some way enlarges the size of your landscape, and it’s beautiful. I know it sounds weird to say that, but it is.
DS: They are examples, as well. I recently covered for Wikinews the Iranian President speaking at Columbia and a student named Matt Glick told me that he supported the Iranian President speaking so that he could protest him, that if we don’t give a platform and voice for people, how can we say that they are wrong? I think it’s almost the same thing; they are beautiful as examples of how living a certain way can destroy you, and to look at them and say, “Don’t be that.”
JV: Absolutely, and let me tell you where I’m coming from. I don’t do drugs, I drink maybe three or four times a year. I don’t have any problematic relationship to drugs because there has been a history around me, like probably any musician or creative person, of just blinding array of drug abuse and problems. For me, I am a little bit of a control freak and I don’t have those issues. I just shut those doors. But I also understand and I am very sympathetic to someone who does not shut that door, but goes into that room and stays.
DS: Is it a problem for you to work with people who are using drugs?
JV: I would never work with them. It is a very selfish decision to make and usually those people are total energy vampires and they will take everything they can get from you. Again, this is all in theory…I love that stuff in theory. If Amy Winehouse was my girlfriend, I would probably not be very happy.
DS: Your latest CD is Emerald City and that is an allusion to the compound that we created in Baghdad. How has the current political client affected you in terms of your music?
JV: In some ways, both Pixel Revolt and Emerald City were born out of a recharged and re-energized position of my being….I was so beaten down after the 2000 election and after 9/11 and then the invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan; I was so depleted as a person after all that stuff happened, that I had to write my way out of it. I really had to write political songs because for me it is a way of making sense and processing what is going on. The question I’m asked all the time is do I think is a responsibility of people to write politically and I always say, My God, no. if you’re Morrissey, then you write Morrissey stuff. If you are Dan Bejar and Destroyer, then you are Dan Bejar and you are a fucking genius. Write about whatever it is you want to write about. But to get out of that hole I had to write about that.
DS: There are two times I felt deeply connected to New York City, and that was 9/11 and the re-election of George Bush. The depression of the city was palpable during both. I was in law school during the Iraq War, and then when Hurricane Katrina hit, we watched our countrymen debate the logic of rebuilding one of our most culturally significant cities, as we were funding almost without question the destruction of another country to then rebuild it, which seems less and less likely. Do you find it is difficult to enjoy living in America when you see all of these sorts of things going on, and the sort of arguments we have amongst ourselves as a people?
JV: I would say yes, absolutely, but one thing changed that was very strange: I fell in love with a French girl and the genesis of Emerald City was going through this visa process to get her into the country, which was through the State Department. In the middle of process we had her visa reviewed and everything shifted over to Homeland Security. All of my complicated feelings about this country became even more dour and complicated, because here was Homeland Security mailing me letters and all involved in my love life, and they were grilling my girlfriend in Paris and they were grilling me, and we couldn’t travel because she had a pending visa. In some strange ways the thing that changed everything was that we finally got the visa accepted and she came here. Now she is a Parisian girl, and it goes without saying that she despises America, and she would never have considered moving to America. So she moves here and is asking me almost breathlessly, How can you allow this to happen—
DS: –you, John Vanderslice, how can you allow this—
JV: –Me! Yes! So for the first time in my life I wouldn’t say I was defending the country but I was in this very strange position of saying, Listen, not that many people vote and the churches run fucking everything here, man. It’s like if you take out the evangelical Christian you have basically a progressive western European country. That’s all there is to it. But these people don’t vote, poor people don’t vote, there’s a complicated equation of extreme corruption and voter fraud here, and I found myself trying to rattle of all the reasons to her why I am personally not responsible, and it put me in a very interesting position. And thenSarkozy got elected in France and I watched her go through the same horrific thing that we’ve gone through here, and Sarkozy is a nut, man. This guy is a nut.
DS: But he doesn’t compare to George Bush or Dick Cheney. He’s almost a liberal by American standards.
JV: No, because their President doesn’t have much power. It’s interesting because he is a WAPO right-wing and he was very close to Le Pen and he was a card-carrying straight-up Nazi. I view Sarkozy as somewhat of a far-right candidate, especially in the context of French politics. He is dismantling everything. It’s all changing. The school system, the remnants of the socialized medical care system. The thing is he doesn’t have the foreign policy power that Bush does. Bush and Cheney have unprecedented amounts of power, and black budgets…I mean, come on, we’re spending half a trillion dollars in Iraq, and that’s just the money accounted for.
DS: What’s the reaction to you and your music when you play off the coasts?
JV: No! I want to be! I would love to be, because then that means I’m really part of some fiery debate, but I would say there’s a lot of depressed in every single town. You can say Salt Lake City, you can look at what we consider to be conservative cities, and when you play those towns, man, the kids that come out are more or less on the same page and politically active because they are fish out of water.
DS: Depression breeds apathy, and your music seems geared toward anger, trying to wake people from their apathy. Your music is not maudlin and sad, but seems to be an attempt to awaken a spirit, with a self-reflective bent.
JV: That’s the trick. I would say that honestly, when Katrina happened, I thought, “okay, this is a trick to make people so crazy and so angry that they can’t even think. If you were in a community and basically were in a more or less quasi-police state surveillance society with no accountability, where we are pouring untold billions into our infrastructure to protect outside threats against via terrorism, or whatever, and then a natural disaster happens and there is no response. There is an empty response. There is all these ships off the shore that were just out there, just waiting, and nobody came. Michael Brown. It is one of the most insane things I have ever seen in my life.
DS: Is there a feeling in San Francisco that if an earthquake struck, you all would be on your own?
JV: Yes, of course. Part of what happened in New Orleans is that it was a Catholic city, it was a city of sin, it was a black city. And San Francisco? Bush wouldn’t even visit California in the beginning because his numbers were so low. Before Schwarzenegger definitely. I’m totally afraid of the earthquake, and I think everyone is out there. America is in the worst of both worlds: a laissez-fare economy and then the Grover Norquist anti-tax, starve the government until it turns into nothing more than a Argentinian-style government where there are these super rich invisible elite who own everything and there’s no distribution of wealth and nothing that resembles the New Deal, twentieth century embracing of human rights and equality, war against poverty, all of these things. They are trying to kill all that stuff. So, in some ways, it is the worst of both worlds because they are pushing us towards that, and on the same side they have put in a Supreme Court that is so right wing and so fanatically opposed to upholding civil rights, whether it be for foreign fighters…I mean, we are going to see movement with abortion, Miranda rights and stuff that is going to come up on the Court. We’ve tortured so many people who have had no intelligence value that you have to start to look at torture as a symbolic and almost ritualized behavior; you have this…
DS: Organ failure. That’s our baseline…
JV: Yeah, and you have to wonder about how we were torturing people to do nothing more than to send the darkest signal to the world to say, Listen, we are so fucking weird that if you cross the line with us, we are going to be at war with your religion, with your government, and we are going to destroy you.
DS: I interviewed Congressman Tom Tancredo, who is running for President, and he feels we should use as a deterrent against Islam the bombing of the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
JV: You would radicalize the very few people who have not been radicalized, yet, by our actions and beliefs. We know what we’ve done out there, and we are going to paying for this for a long time. When Hezbollah was bombing Israel in that border excursion last year, the Hezbollah fighters were writing the names of battles they fought with the Jews in the Seventh Century on their helmets. This shit is never forgotten.
DS: You read a lot of the stuff that is written about you on blogs and on the Internet. Do you ever respond?
JV: No, and I would say that I read stuff that tends to be . I’ve done interviews that have been solely about film and photography. For some reason hearing myself talk about music, and maybe because I have been talking about it for so long, it’s snoozeville. Most interviews I do are very regimented and they tend to follow a certain line. I understand. If I was them, it’s a 200 word piece and I may have never played that town, in Des Moines or something. But, in general, it’s like…my band mates ask why don’t I read the weeklies when I’m in town, and Google my name. It would be really like looking yourself in the mirror. When you look at yourself in the mirror you are just error-correcting. There must be some sort of hall of mirrors thing that happens when you are completely involved in the Internet conversation about your music, and in some ways I think that I’m very innocently making music, because I don’t make music in any way that has to do with the response to that music. I don’t believe that the response to the music has anything to do with it. This is something I got from John Cage and Marcel Duchamp, I think the perception of the artwork, in some ways, has nothing to do with the artwork, and I think that is a beautiful, glorious and flattering thing to say to the perceiver, the viewer of that artwork. I’ve spent a lot of time looking at Paul Klee‘s drawings, lithographs, watercolors and paintings and when I read his diaries I’m not sure how much of a correlation there is between what his color schemes are denoting and what he is saying and what I am getting out of it. I’m not sure that it matters. Inland Empire is a great example. Lynch basically says, I don’t want to talk about it because I’m going to close doors for the viewer. It’s up to you. It’s not that it’s a riddle or a puzzle. You know how much of your own experience you are putting into the digestion of your own art. That’s not to say that that guy arranges notes in an interesting way, and sings in an interesting way and arranges words in an interesting way, but often, if someone says they really like my music, what I want to say is, That’s cool you focused your attention on that thing, but it does not make me go home and say, Wow, you’re great. My ego is not involved in it.
DS: Often people assume an artist makes an achievement, say wins a Tony or a Grammy or even a Cable Ace Award and people think the artist must feel this lasting sense of accomplishment, but it doesn’t typically happen that way, does it? Often there is some time of elation and satisfaction, but almost immediately the artist is being asked, “Okay, what’s the next thing? What’s next?” and there is an internal pressure to move beyond that achievement and not focus on it.
JV: Oh yeah, exactly. There’s a moment of relief when a mastered record gets back, and then I swear to you that ten minutes after that point I feel there are bigger fish to fry. I grew up listening to classical music, and there is something inside of me that says, Okay, I’ve made six records. Whoop-dee-doo. I grew up listening to Gustav Mahler, and I will never, ever approach what he did.
DS: Do you try?
JV: I love Mahler, but no, his music is too expansive and intellectual, and it’s realized harmonically and compositionally in a way that is five languages beyond me. And that’s okay. I’m very happy to do what I do. How can anyone be so jazzed about making a record when you are up against, shit, five thousand records a week—
DS: —but a lot of it’s crap—
JV: —a lot of it’s crap, but a lot of it is really, really good and doesn’t get the attention it deserves. A lot of it is very good. I’m shocked at some of the stuff I hear. I listen to a lot of music and I am mailed a lot of CDs, and I’m on the web all the time.
DS: I’ve done a lot of photography for Wikipedia and the genesis of it was an attempt to pin down reality, to try to understand a world that I felt had fallen out of my grasp of understanding, because I felt I had no sense of what this world was about anymore. For that, my work is very encyclopedic, and it fit well with Wikipedia. What was the reason you began investing time and effort into photography?
JV: It came from trying to making sense of touring. Touring is incredibly fast and there is so much compressed imagery that comes to you, whether it is the window in the van, or like now, when we are whisking through the Northeast in seven days. Let me tell you, I see a lot of really close people in those seven days. We move a lot, and there is a lot of input coming in. The shows are tremendous and, it is emotionally so overwhelming that you can not log it. You can not keep a file of it. It’s almost like if I take photos while I am doing this, it slows it down or stops it momentarily and orders it. It has made touring less of a blur; concretizes these times. I go back and develop the film, and when I look at the tour I remember things in a very different way. It coalesces. Let’s say I take on fucking photo in Athens, Georgia. That’s really intense. And I tend to take a photo of someone I like, or photos of people I really admire and like.
DS: What bands are working with your studio, Tiny Telephone?
JV:Death Cab for Cutie is going to come back and track their next record there. Right now there is a band called Hello Central that is in there, and they are really good. They’re from L.A. Maids of State was just in there and w:Deerhoof was just in there. Book of Knotts is coming in soon. That will be cool because I think they are going to have Beck sing on a tune. That will be really cool. There’s this band called Jordan from Paris that is starting this week.
DS: Do they approach you, or do you approach them?
JV I would say they approach me. It’s generally word of mouth. We never advertise and it’s very cheap, below market. It’s analog. There’s this self-fulfilling thing that when you’re booked, you stay booked. More bands come in, and they know about it and they keep the business going that way. But it’s totally word of mouth.
A gold mine collapse in Copiapó, Atacama Region, Chile has trapped 33 miners since last Thursday. Another collapse occurred on Saturday, that provoked temporary suspension of the rescue works.
Rescue efforts were first focused on a ventilation shaft, but attempts to reach the miners failed. Rescuers have been drilling into the mine since Sunday. “The situation is very complex, the mine continues to have collapses because there is a geological fault-line,” said Sebastián Piñera, President of Chile, who “pledged to do everything possible to get to the trapped miners,” but acknowledged he was pessimistic.
There is no certainty that the miners, who are trapped about 400 meters (1300 feet) below the ground, are still alive.
