The Null Device
2000/11/22
Abort, retry, fail: Anti-capitalist billboard improvers attach fatal error dialog boxes to dot-com billboards. (via Salon)
And while we're on web comics, the previous PLIF, if you ("RazorMemory") is quite an insightful one. (This is what happens when you don't look at web comics for a few weeks; you miss some good ones.)
The Pacific Peso (aka the Australian Dollar) has fallen to its lowest point in history, and looks set to fall below US$0.50.
I just got the Cocteau Twins 1982-1990 best-of compilation, Stars and Topsoil, and am listening to it now. It's really good. From the booklet:
It was much better than any rave; I would take a little something and get the bus to the zoo, listening to home-taped compilations of the Cocteau Twins on my walkman. The zoo was much better fun: cheaper to get in, the people were prettier, residents better conversationalists, and there was no dress code. No bouncers either, except kangaroos.
Displaced nostalgia: Speaking of things Mod, here's an essay on the Mod revival of 1979. Yes, there was one (and possibly more) before Damon and Liam and so on decided to resurrect the movement's trappings in the 1990s under the auspices of major-label-backed "indie". (via Pearls)
Yesterday I had occasion to be in PolyEster Books, and picked up a volume titled The Sharper Word: A Mod Anthology. This is a series of essays about the origins, evolution and decline of the original Mod subculture in the early 1960s. I've read most of it, and it has gotten me thinking about the memetics of subcultures, and the principles by which they evolve, recombine and mutate. (Mod is a very good example of memetics at work, having evolved out of a variety of different memes and favourable social conditions, and subsequently mutated into more virulent strains, the most recent of which being 90s britpop; it may also be argued that a lot of component memes of Mod ultimately found their ways into things such as the rave culture (possibly via Northern Soul).) Hmmm; I think there may be a PhD thesis in here somewhere...
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... it's the piped music they've started playing in City Loop stations. There are speakers covering the entire station, which until now have been used exclusively for announcements. Now, perhaps to make the new, privatised train companies look more like a service, they have started playing what can be loosely termed music from these. The music covers the gamut of naff radio fodder from Phil Collins to Celine Dion to indeterminable boyband ballads. Some executive at Bayside Trains probably thinks this creates a pleasant environment.