DJ International

It was just a matter of time, before underground podcasts took over the reigns from pirate radio and became a forum for some of the finest underground DJs around the globe. There's a site with some podcasts from Paris that blow any old-schoolers mind. Paris being the hub for African Pop there are some great mixes of rare 45s from that continent. They also just released two podcasts with incedible Salsoul and Afro Funk from the 70s. There are other podcasts where music resurfaces, that's near impossible to fin, like the Brazilian rare grooves on Avolta or MP3 and Realplayer bootlegs of DJ sets by legends like Tony Humphreys on Kiss FM, Frankie Knuckles at New York's Sound Factory and Chicago's Powerplant or David Mancuso at the Loft on the Deep House Page. That site even features a bootleg stream of Larry Levan playing the closing night of the Paradise Garage.

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Listen to Paris DJs

Listen to Brazilian Rare Grooves

Listen to legendary DJs

Jam & Spoon

This morning legendary Frankfurt DJ Markus Löffel was found dead in his Berlin appartment. Most likely a quite Fassbinderian death, since the official cause of death was given as heart attack, which for most 39 year old hard partiers is mostly a euphemism for the wears and tears of years of, well, hard partying.

Löffel was half of the Trance Duo Jam & Spoon (his last name is the German word for spoon) , who had a Eurodisco hit with "Right in the Night" in '95 and remixed the likes of Moby and the Pet Shop Boys. Jam & Spoon were often accused of selling out the Techno underground, but nobody could accuse him of Markus Löffel treading lightly. The bouncers at King Kamehameha Club sure had their hands full sometimes. Well, no German city knows how to party as hard as Frankfurt (don't let the Berlin weenies tell you otherwise). Markus Löffel was living proof of that - his DJ sets at the Frankfurt airport disco "Dorian Gray" would start around 6AM and Löffel would beat the crowd into a late frenzy.

R.I.P.

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Watch the videos for Jam & Spoon's "Right in the Night" and "Angel" (directed by Frankfurt homeboy now Hollywood director Marcus Nispel) on EuroDanceHits, where you'll find over 1500 video clips of prime Eurodisco exotica.

LSD

Tomorrow LSD's inventor Albert Hoffman celebrates his 100th birthday in Switzerland (he is still alive and well). There will be a 3-day symposium held in the city of Basel. There is also a short film circulating on the net, documenting a controlled LSD experiment conducted by the British army: "With one man climbing up the tree trying to feed the birds, the troop commander gave up, admitting that he could no longer control himself or his men."

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Watch British soldiers tripping

Watch Robbie Williams' new video "Tripping"

Download the strangely homeopathic poster for the LSD symposium in Basel.

Question of the Year

Once a year self-styled head of the Third Culture movement and New York literary agent John Brockman asks his fellow thinkers and clients a question, who publishes their answers every New Year’s Day in his online forum edge.org . Thus Mr. Brockman fulfills the promise that is the basic principle of Third Culture. The sciences are asking mankind’s relevant questions he says, while the humanities busy themselves with ideological skirmishes and semantic hairsplitting. That’s why he called a collection of essays by Third Culture luminaries “The New Humanists”.

Marvin Minsky, John Brockman, Daniel C. Dennett
It is about having last words of course, which have never been as embattled as in the current context of post-ideological debates and de-secularization. That’s why this year’s question ‚What is your dangerous idea’ seemed unusually loaded. Since it’s inception in 1998 the forum had mainly dealt with the basic questions of science culture per se. But maybe that’s why this year the debate has brought out the main concerns of Third Culture more direct than in the years before.

The list of participants is impressive - there are answers by 117 stellar thinkers like Stewart Brand, Richard Dawkins, Daniel C. Dennett, Jared Diamond, Freeman Dyson, Ray Kurzweil, Jaron Lanier, Steven Pinker, Douglas Rushkoff and Craig Venter. And they definitely don't agree. Despite the heated debate – Brockman keeps edge.org away from politics and punditry. “Others can do that better than us”, he says. Edge is thoroughly edited though. “We’re not a chatroom and not some Wikipedia”, Brockman states. There are very clear rules about topics and form. That’s why this year he had to intervene editorially more than usual. “20 people introduced a line by George Bush, that were edited out. But look at the times we’re in and you can understand why.”

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Read the answers to the Question of the Year

Who asks the right questions?
	Humanities
	Politics
	Religion
	Science
Free polls from Pollhost.com

Pride and Prejudice

The year sure started with a stellar highlight of television entertainment. Bill O'Reilly was on Letterman and Letterman sure didn't hide what he thought about his guest.

O'REILLY: No way that a terrorist that blows up women and children is going to be called a freedom fighter on my program. (applause)

LETTERMAN: I'm not smart enough to debate you point to point on this, but I have the feeling that about 60 percent of what you say is crap...

O'Reilly had been on the show before, defending him and his station against Robert Greenwald's documentary 'Outfoxed', but Tuesday it was gloves off.

In the meantime Italy and the US came out with new stamps. New stamps always being a great source of national pride and prejudice the comparison of the respective worldviews and qualities of life needs no further editorializing.

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Watch O'Reilly on Letterman in Realplayer Format,

or the 2 minute highlight in Quicktime courtesy of Crooks and Liars.

Watch O'Reilly on Letterman ranting about "Outfoxed"

Trailer - "Outfoxed"