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I've recently started looking for international podcasts on contemporary music, eager to explore everything from french spectralism of the 19070s, to modernist jazz of the now. Here's a list of my findings so far:

Big Bang + Archipel (archive)
Weekly show of the belgian national broadcasting station RTBF, featuring interviews and concerts of upcoming and prominent artists. "Archipel" is a special segment tied to the belgian music libraries called Mediatheques, and showcases new releases off the beaten track. If you're not inclined to listen to the whole show, at least give Archipel a try. I think it's available as a separate download as well.

Les lundis de la contemporaine (archive)
Open jazz (archive)
Both belonging to France musique, the two-hour long les lundis usually contains a full-length concert and a selection of new releases. Open Jazz is a good allround look at jazz, from modern to progressive.

New Music up Late (archive)
Jazz up Late (archive)
Both available on the australian ABC radio channel, they're international in scope but feature young australian artists every now and then. Jazz up late is one of the few shows that specialize in progressive jazz.

Battiti (archive)
Back to Europe, this time bella Italia. Battiti (RAI) is a mix of everything from black music to japanese noise art. And it works. The programming is smart, intelligent and funny. I love this show. It's also a good complement to the more classical spectrum of the other entries on this list.

Hear and Now
BBC weekly, international in scope as well as young artists from the UK.

Zeit + Ton
This is a good show from Austria, understanding german could be helpful. Unlike the other shows on contemporary music, Zeit + Ton is more likely to feature regular pop artists as well. I find that refreshing. A little bit of Battiti in there.

All shows contain interviews, but there's always the possibility to skip forward. Also, don't forget that most archives are temporary due to copyright issues. So listen sooner rather than later, or the show might already be gone. At least the music listings stay online indefinitely.

internet k-hole provides little explanation for its galleries of random photo streams, but that makes scrolling down the giant pages just more poetic. User Babs really created some nice juxtapositions using (what appears to be) mainly private amateur footage from the 70s and 80s. Holiday snaps, prom nights, exhibitions, cats, porn, street life. Babies getting born, dicks getting sucked, music.

Singer-songwriter Woody Guthrie's new year's resolutions for 1943. "Play and sing good, dance better, help win war - beat fascism". Not much has changed.

Whew, another year gone by. So much stuff has happened. So much! Like, crazy.

Ok, seriously, I've finished writing a play two months back, and am now looking for a way to bring it to the stage. It's called "The Rat king", and it's about a group of temp workers who have to fight a monster in the Vienna sewers. It's supposed to be funny AND political. At least I hope it is. I'm currently working on a sequel, but it's entirely possible it'll turn out to be something completely different. If you're curious about the play, drop me a line at ratking@michaelmaurer.net. I'm looking to translate it as soon as possible.

In the meantime, have a very 80's christmas with BeTaMaXMaS - a giant sampler consisting of Drakkar Noir commercials, fast food ads, Mask episodes and other goodies from a decade of shame/greed/revolution.

Thomas Hoepker: On that day five years ago, sheer horror came to New York, bright and colorful like a Hitchcock movie. And the only cloud in that blue sky was the sinister first smoke signal of a new era.

See The meaning of 9/11's most controversial photo @ Guardian.co.uk, as well as Frank Rich Is Wrong About That 9/11 Photograph @ Slate.com. Every time I look at it, I can't help but think of Le déjeuner sur l'herbe.

Jonathan Jones: Stendhal similarly captures the dissonance of history in his novel The Charterhouse of Parma. A young man volunteers to fight for Napoleon at Waterloo, but instead of a defining moment of courage all he experiences are random, marginal, meaningless accidents on the edges of the great day.

Nice quote I picked up while leafing through Suppressed Transmission 2:

Thus the truest account of reading Shakespeare would be not to write a book with beginning, middle, and end; but to collect notes, without trying to make them consistent.

- Virginia Woolf

Dark Girls, a documentary to be released Fall/Winter 2011, takes a a look at the challenges faced by dark skinned black women in the USA today. A short preview has been posted on Vimeo, featuring interviews and a particularly saddening school test, where a small girl is asked about skin tone and intelligence.

The film is being directed by Bill Duke, the 80s action star of box office hits like Predator and Commando. Apparently he's quite the humanist, doing stuff for the inner city youth and the United Nations. (via Gawker, Black Snob)

If you're tired of the "they're all criminals, lock them away" rhetoric, check out this interview by benuk1234. I don't know who he is, but he managed to find an articulate voice amidst the fires and the looting. Nice piece of citizen journalism right there.

August 6 and 9 marked the 66th anniversary of the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Democracy Now! takes a look at the censored footage by Pulitzer Prize winner George Weller, as well as the government-approved reporting by embedded journalists.

I'll be writing up a summary of articles I've been reading later this week, until then check out this op-ed by the Guardian on the psychology behind the UK riots.

FTA:
Hiller takes up this idea: "Consumer society relies on your ability to participate in it. So what we recognise as a consumer now was born out of shorter hours, higher wages and the availability of credit. If you're dealing with a lot of people who don't have the last two, that contract doesn't work. They seem to be targeting the stores selling goods they would normally consume. So perhaps they're rebelling against the system that denies its bounty to them because they can't afford it."