nbsp;http://www.list.co.uk/article/15393-pete…

Just heard news that Mick Harvey (whose Intoxicated Man album is a staple here at the Revelatorium) is to depart the Bad Seeds. Here’s the official statement:

“For a variety of personal and professional reasons I have chosen to discontinue my ongoing involvement with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. After 25 years I feel I am leaving the band as it experiences one of its many peaks; in very healthy condition, and with fantastic prospects for the future. I’m confident Nick will continue to be a creative force and that this is the right time to pass on my artistic and managerial role to what has become a tremendous group of people who can support him in his endeavours both musically and organizationally. It was a fantastic experience to finish my touring days in the band with the recent shows in Australia and the unique events that took place in conjunction with All Tomorrow’s Parties, especially Mt. Buller, which was one of the many highlights of my involvement with the band throughout the years. I shall continue working on the Bad Seeds back catalogue re-issues project over the coming year and look forward to the new opportunities I shall be able to accommodate as a result of my changed circumstances.”

Mick Harvey, 22nd January 2009

The JK Ensemble’s Inauguration Special playlist from yesterday. Can I get a hallelujah?

A CHANGE IS GONNA COME - SAM COOKE - COOKE - PORTRAIT OF A LEGEND 1951-1964 - ABKCO RECORDS - ABKCO RECORDS

TO BE YOUNG, GIFTED AND BLACK - NINA SIMONE - SIMONE/IRVINE - THE VERY BEST OF NINA SIMONE: SUGAR IN MY BOWL 1967-1972 - BMG - 07863 67635 2

NO MORE AUCTION BLOCK FOR ME - PAUL ROBESON - TRAD - ON MY JOURNEY - SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS RECORDINGS - SFW CD 40178

WE SHALL OVERCOME - CHARLIE HADEN - TRAD - STEAL AWAY - VERVE - 314 527 249 2

A LINCOLN PORTRAIT - CARL SANDBURG, NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC & ANDRE KOSTELANETZ - COPLAND - THE COPLAND COLLECTION - SONY CLASSICAL - 8287 6852 392

ROAD MOVIES - LELIA JOSEFOWICZ & JOHN NOVACEK - ADAMS - ROAD MOVIES - NONESUCH - 7559 79699 2

KEEP YOUR HAND ON THE PLOW - MAHALIA JACKSON - TRAD - GOSPELS, SPIRITUALS & HYMNS - COLUMBIA - C2K 65594

EYES ON THE PRIZE - BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN - WE SHALL OVERCOME - WE SHALL OVERCOME - COLUMBIA - 82876830742

AMERICA THE BEAUTIFUL (MEDLEY) - CHARLIE HADEN AND THE LIBERATION MUSIC ORCHESTRA - WARD/MCFARLAND.JOHNSON/JOHNSON/COLEMAN - NOT IN OUR NAME - UNIVERSAL - 0602 498282 488

I HAVE A DREAM - THE REV. DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING, JNR. - NA\ - IN SEARCH OF FREEDOM - POLYGRAM SPECIAL MARKETS - 314 520 330 2

AMAZING GRACE - ARETHA FRANKLIN - TRAD - AMAZING GRACE - ATLANTIC - 2 906 2

WALK TALL - CANNONBALL ADDERLEY - ZAWINUL/MARROW - THE BEST OF CANNONBALL ADDERLEY: THE CAPITOL YEARS - CAPITOL JAZZ - CDP 7 95482 2

PEOPLE GET READY - THE IMPRESSIONS - MAYFIELD - DEFINITIVE IMPRESSIONS - MCA RECORDS - CDKEND 923

REDEMPTION SONG - BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS - MARLEY - UPRISING - ISLAND RECORDS - 846 211 2

I WISH I KNEW HOW IT WOULD FEEL TO BE FREE - BILLY TAYLOR - TAYLOR - BLUE MOVIES - BLUE NOTE - 7243 8577 4829

A CHANGE IS GONNA COME - BILL FRISELL - COOKE - HISTORY, MYSTERY - NONESUCH - 7559 79943 7

Lovely reviews. Sorry about the naked lunch moment…

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Revelator-P…

Several years ago HP film critic Tara Brady lent me a copy of Theodore Roszak’s 1991 novel Flicker. At Sean Murray’s insistence, I’ve finally begun it. The blurb says it all:

“A macabre detective story and an occult tale of medieval heresy, an apocalyptic thriller and a secret history of film, Flicker is a richly evocative study of the dark side of human genius.”

Roszak is not just a fiendish storyteller, he’s also Professor Emeritus of History at California State University and author of The Making of a Counter Culture and The Cult of Information: A Neo-Luddite Treatise on High-Tech, Artificial Intelligence & the True Art of Thinking.

Here’s a fascinating KQED interview from 2006, reflecting on the neo-con nightmare through the prism of his book World Beware! American Triumphalism in an Age of Terror. It’s a subject that might be a little easier to contemplate in light of the day that’s in it, but lest we forget…

 http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R602231000

On the eve of President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration, here’s our recent interview with old friend and Redemption Song author Niall Stanage, who covered the 2008 presidential campaign for the New York Observer and the Sunday Business Post.

Check out his website: http://niallstanage.com/

It was the ride of his life. Ex Hot Presser and Sunday Business Post correspondent Niall Stanage was the only Irish journalist who managed to negotiate his way onto Barack Obama’s campaign jet, covering this year’s US presidential election for the New York Observer. The experience is chronicled in his first book Redemption Song (An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign), published by the Liberties Press mere weeks after the Illinois senator’s dramatic rise to the White House.

The gladitorial nature of the American presidential race is always addictive in a way that can never be true of the Irish politicial scrum, which offers about as much glamour as following a bunch of used car salesmen around the country in the back of a hi-ace van, but this year’s contest was even more fevered than usual. Consider the three major players: a right-wing war hero who withstood torture and internment in the Hanoi Hilton and refused early release on account of military code. The cuckolded but hawkish wife of an ex-president. An oratorically gifted, young and black Democratic contender.

“The sheer novelistic value of Hillary vs Obama, that was just so intense to a lot of people,” Stanage admits, home for a pre-Christmas publicity blitz. “The first woman candidate, former first lady, all the weird psychological dynamics that were part of her marriage and the baggage that she had, versus the young, charismatic candidate, much more of our generation than anyone who had gone before. And when the primary was over some of that intensity did dissipate for quite a while, until the final stages of the Obama V McCain point.”

This year the election stakes were at their highest since the Civil Rights era. A country fatigued and traumatised from Iraq, the Guantanemo Bay and Abu Ghraib atrocities, the collapse of the economy, plus growing infringements on civil liberties at home and abroad, responded with one of the highest ballot counts in history.

“The stakes were huge,” Stanage says. “Four years before, a narrow majority had given Bush the benefit of the doubt, and then the wheels kind of fell off in a whole lot of ways, in Iraq but also domestically, and I think that people were really concerned about that. And for those left of centre, I do think there was a real sense of having something very precious about America destroyed or at least seriously besmirched by Bush.

“The almost mythical America that you and I would have perceived even in Ireland from old Springsteen records or Jack Kerouac books, Muhammad Ali or Martin Luther King, that whole vision of America had been put in very serious peril. Patriotism had become the property of the right wing, and when Obama won I think there was that sense of, ‘Actually, that America is not dead.’ That a black family could become first family of the United States 45 years after Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, I mean, it’s an astonishing process.”

For Stanage, one of the most eye-opening aspects of the campaign was how much it depended on grass roots graft. Even the president of the United States has to sometimes hold assembly in draughty community halls and spend hours fund-raising over the phone.

“And I think the charming – if that’s not too twee a term – thing about American politics, and the way the primaries work in particular, is that you have guys who organised the caucus for Obama in Ohio, or women taking an ad out for five dollars in the local paper and saying, ‘We support Obama.’ This huge office gets decided in really small ways. Like the New Hampshire primary, I mean, in a way it’s totally insane that places that small and that unrepresentative of the United States have such a huge pull, but on the other hand, the great thing in defence of it is you can literally go to your friend’s living room and see people auditioning for what used to be called the leader of the free world. And there’s something really moving about the way that can happen.”

The tone of Redemption Song was too broad to lend itself to a verité approach, but there were off-the-record moments that illustrated the ways in which Obama’s campaign differed from your standard Bob Roberts voter-registration drive.

“Yeah, I mean, one of the things about following a campaign is you get lots of interesting information that you can never prove, and it’s not even scandalous stuff,” Stanage admits. “On a purely flippant level, according to the Secret Service agents, Obama would be out on his own and then Michelle would come out for a couple of nights, particularly in the early days of the campaign, and the agents would get awkward because Obama and Michelle would basically start snogging or whatever in an elevator, with the Secret Service agents standing there. Or she had this habit of mockingly saying to the agents, ‘Has he been good?’ They are a very physically affectionate couple, unusually so, certainly by the standard of politicians.”

What are the chances – a First Couple who are still fucking. Each other. Even more unlikely, Stanage came away with something of an admiration for Obama’s sardonic chief strategist David Axelrod.

“Axelrod is a former journalist, and I don’t think any of my peers would argue that we genuinely liked the guy,” he says. “He had his own interests to propagate of course, but I don’t think we were being taken for a ride. I think Axelrod, in that slightly melancholic way, was unusually classy for someone under that level of pressure in his dealings with people.

“Hillary Clinton’s people, particularly at the start of the campaign, were convinced they had it in the bag and were therefore often quite unpleasant to deal with, and you wonder to what extent does that filter through to the coverage itself. I think Hillary’s people thought, ‘We know who’s for us and against us in the press and so we’ll just keep things under control and steamroller to the nomination.’ And because Axelrod was running to some extent an insurgent campaign, whether because of character or tactical imperatives, they did make more of an effort to be more co-operative with the press.

“You would, particularly being on the campaign trail and staying in the same hotels, meet people in the elevators and stuff, and you might talk about the campaign with the understanding that you’re not going to quote what they said, but when I say that, it perhaps gives the impression that people are giving you some incredible inside scoop. It’s just that everyone in this huge and weird circus is totally obsessed with what’s going on, whether they’re campaign aides or journalists or the candidates themselves, and the rest of the world kind of falls away slightly in that environment.”

Were there any impromptu benders to blow off the pressure and fatigue?

“One of the unfortunate things is that the demands of the internet age have I think hindered that to a greater extent than it would have been. At one phase there was a tendancy by both male and female reporters and photographers to start checking out the local lapdancing clubs at the various towns than they would arrive in.

“Did you read The Boys On The Bus by Timothy Crouse? I think it was he who pointed out that one of the reasons journalism’s such an odd profession is because it’s full of shy megalomaniacs. There’s a lot of truth to that. There’s all sorts of weird dynamics that take place with journalists, but all of us who were covering it realised pretty quickly that it was something special. I hope that I write for the rest of my life, and I hope I live a long life, but one of the reasons I’m glad I did write the book is that I don’t think I’ll see anything like that again, because so many things have to fall in place for a guy to come from where he came from to become president of the United States – and to find yourself covering it.”

Redemption Song (An Irish Reporter Inside the Obama Campaign) is published by the Liberties Press.

An immaculate promo for Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoQVRyh5a…

Last night’s marathon Revelatorium screening of Edge of Darkness left our brains sprouting small black flowers. It takes a special kind of genius to make a nail-biting nuclear paranoia drama out of the notion that human beings are malevolent bugs destined to be fevered off the face of the planet. As for the late Bob Peck – what an actor.

Here’s last year’s Rolling Stone story on the arch architect of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock.

 http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/sto…

‘My Mother Among the Flowers’, recorded and scored by Mr Acko, with a little help from assorted Rama orchestra personnel. Hear it at: http://www.myspace.com/johntherevelatorn…

Find of the week: a DVD copy of the cult 1985 BBC eco/conspiracy classic series Edge of Darkness, eight quid in George’s Arcade. The film remake, starring Mel Gibson and Ray Winstone, is due out this year.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_dar…

 http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/classic/edge/