“The demand for [banned] pop and jazz recordings at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties [in the USSR] was enormous. This led to the birth of a legendary phenomenon — the memorable records ‘on ribs.’ These were actual X-ray plates … rounded at the edges with scissors, with a small hole in the centre and grooves that were barely visible on the surface. Such an extravagant choice of raw material for these ‘flexidiscs’ is easily explained: X-ray plates were the cheapest and most readily available source of necessary plastic. People bought them by the hundreds from hospitals and clinics for kopeks, after which grooves were cut with the help of special machines (made, they say, from old phonographs by skilled conspiratorial hands).”Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (1987)Quoted in a fascinating article about the roentgenizdat or x-ray press, the audio counterpart of Soviet underground literature’s samizdat. Apart from the political context, they’re also strangely beautiful as objects, niet? PS: Check out the article’s comments section, too.
View Separately

“The demand for [banned] pop and jazz recordings at the end of the fifties and beginning of the sixties [in the USSR] was enormous. This led to the birth of a legendary phenomenon — the memorable records ‘on ribs.’

These were actual X-ray plates … rounded at the edges with scissors, with a small hole in the centre and grooves that were barely visible on the surface. Such an extravagant choice of raw material for these ‘flexidiscs’ is easily explained: X-ray plates were the cheapest and most readily available source of necessary plastic. People bought them by the hundreds from hospitals and clinics for kopeks, after which grooves were cut with the help of special machines (made, they say, from old phonographs by skilled conspiratorial hands).”

Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (1987)

Quoted in a fascinating article about the roentgenizdat or x-ray press, the audio counterpart of Soviet underground literature’s samizdat. Apart from the political context, they’re also strangely beautiful as objects, niet?

PS: Check out the article’s comments section, too.

The major concern of Buddhist philosophy is epistemology and “psychology” … and the development of practical systems of meditation toward the end of liberating a few dedicated individuals from psychological hangups and cultural conditionings.

Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion. Wisdom without compassion feels no pain.

The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. They are both contained in the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom, meditation, and morality. Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one’s ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself — over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community of all beings.

This last aspect means, for me, supporting any cultural and economic revolution that moves clearly toward a free, international, classless world. It means using such means as civil disobedience, outspoken criticism, protest.

Gary Snyder: Buddhist Anarchism (essay, 1961)