2001/6/30
A meticulous and illuminating reconstruction of Memento, the retrograde noir thriller. Wow; I do get the feeling I'll have to get the DVD when it comes out.
EvoPsych: Research in the UK has shown that appearance is more important than youth when men evaluate women's attractiveness; namely, that men find attractive older women more subjectively desirable than healthy but otherwise average-looking younger women. Why is this important? Well, for one, it suggests that the human sexual urge is based on aesthetic pleasure rather than reproductive fitness (as evolutionary psychology would hold that an average-looking yet fertile younger woman would be a better reproductive investment than a highly attractive, but less fertile, older woman).
2001/6/29
More doom and gloom: Police in Sweden raided a video store, seizing around 500 illegal DVDs. Not pirated DVDs, mind you; perfectly original DVDs which happened to be Region 1 titles, apparently illegal in Sweden and/or the EU. Such things are all the more reason to write to the ACCC and urge them to rule against the DVD region system; if they don't, these kinds of raids could end up happening in Australia as well. (via Lev)
An American couple who booked a flight online to the picturesque Spanish city of Gerona were surprised when they were thrown out of a bus for attempting to pay in pesetas, and then realised that they had mistakenly booked a flight to the Italian industrial city of Genoa:
On leaving Genoa airport the couple still hadn't noticed their mistake. In fact they remained in blissful ignorance for several hours - even assuming the Italian flags that adorned the local buildings were evidence of a proliferation of ice cream parlours.
Michael Brown and Kate Rogers' mistake was confirmed when they two other tourists -- an English couple -- which country they were in. (via Techdirt)
The next genetically modified animals have been announced: a US company plans to offer allergy-proof cats for people with cat allergies; the cats will be available in 2003, or so it is hoped, and will sell for $1,000. (Wonder if they'll be pre-sterilised to protect Transgenic Pets' intellectual property.) The announcement has been condemned by animal-rights groups opposed to Man tampering with God's handiwork.
Quelle surprise: A US appeals court has overturned the break-up ruling against software monopolist and Bush campaign donor Microsoft. That and the recent commercial death of Linux-on-the-desktop as a viable alternative does make one worry for the future.
Former Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic has been extradited to The Hague, to face trial on charges of crimes against humanity. Milosevic will become the first foreign head of state to be tried by the war crimes tribunal.
(Does the UN still have the death penalty for crimes against humanity, as was handed out to Nazi criminals after the war, or is the current practice locking them up for life, Rudolf Hess-fashion?)
Last night I changed the ring tone on my mobile phone. It now plays a rendition of the organ-grinder's melody from The City of Lost Children (well, as much of it as could fit); I wonder how many people will recognise it...
2001/6/28
As the screws tighten on MP3 and the intellectual-property barons step up attempts to herd consumers into the black iron prison of total access control, Ogg Vorbis has reached version 1.0. Ogg Vorbis is a compressed audio format believed to be superior to MP3 in quality, and taking a firm stand against access control enforcement. Expect the penguinheads to adopt it en masse, Microsoft to studiously ignore it, Fraunhofer to make vague noises about patent violations, and the MPAA to put pressure on manufacturers to not support this renegade format, or even on ISPs to add .ogg files to their auto-delete list or face vague, insubstantial threats of copyright infringement lawsuits. It'll be interesting to see how this pans out: whether Ogg Vorbis will be confined to the penguinhead underground or end up becoming the Next Big Thing.
Security guru Simson Garfinkel reckons that the DMCA and the ban on DVD decryption will inevitably fall and the MPAA will end up losing. I'm not so sure; given how much money there is riding on keeping artificial scarcity and preserving the hegemony of multinational content companies, I suspect that we're merely witnessing the opening salvos of a War On Copying to rival the War On Drugs in ferocity and scope. (Remember all those people who've been predicting the legalisation of marijuana, year after year, for the past three or four decades?)
Amusing quote from NME: "Despite the lingering suspicion that they make music solely for graphic designers, Goldfrapp's art-hop is undeniably enchanting." (Actually, I do know one graphic designer who has the Goldfrapp album.)
If you wonder why this blog has been a bit quiet over the past 24 hours or so, it's because (a) the Windenburg NT machine on my desk at work died two days ago, and I only got it back now, and (b) I had to come in to work early today (before 9am!) and thus didn't do much blogging late in the evening. Normal service should resume soon (or maybe not, given my present workload).
2001/6/27
<RANT>
What is it with indie-pop's fixation on the 1960s?
I recently picked up a free postcard advertising the Poptones record label;
it is green in colour and adorned with various cover art, all of which
has a strong retro motif.
Day-Glo colours and earth tones, swirly psychedelic lettering and
pop-art iconography abound. And then there are the shagadelic fonts used for
the text (ones in which the @ sign in the email address looks out of place)
and the Poptones logo itself, consisting of two swirly things in various shades of green. It's as if the past three decades never happened.
And then there's much of the indie music you hear. In between Damon and Liam acting like extras from Quadrophenia, Belle and Sebastian doing the flower-child thing (compare them, the leading exponents of introspective pop balladry, to countarparts from a decade earlier, such as the Field Mice, or even the Smiths, and you will see what I mean), and all the lounge-pop and Bacharach-hop acts, the whole indie ideosphere seems rather backwards-looking.
It wasn't always like this; during the late '80s/early '90s, things were more innovative. New Order had just combined rock and acid house, and the Madchester baggycore movement was doing something similar; meanwhile, further south, the shoegazer scene was happening. Bands looking for inspiration found it in The Smiths, not retro acts from decades ago.
Of course, then came the juggernaut that was Seattle Grunge, steamrolling everything in its path; faced with the Seattle onslaught, all the other scenes wilted like so many flowers (or alternative web browsers/ independent cafés, if you prefer). Once grunge inevitably degenerated into manufactured pop (i.e., Alanis, the Presidents of the USA), the landscape was blasted and barren, and what followed (such as the britpop movement, which of course was a construct of the music press) had to go back several decades to the Golden Age Of Pop(tm) for inspiration. (The Great Spirit of Perfect Pop, you see, lives somewhere around 1967.) Pretty soon it was just wannabe-Mods and flower children, with a few brave souls venturing into '70s prog-rock.
Me? I'm just holding out for the shoegazer/madchester revival.
</RANT>
In the US, a conservative group is petitioning the Internal Revenue Service to revoke an environmental group's non-profit status. Frontiers of Freedom, based in the CIA company town of Arlington, VA, claim that Rainforest Action Network is ineligible for nonprofit status because their members have been involved in criminal activities, namely anti-globalisation protests. The IRS prohibits groups whose members engage in criminal activity from holding nonprofit status, a rule aimed at activities such as embezzlement. Needless to say, activists of all stripes are alarmed at the prospect of a Bush-administration IRS siding with Frontiers of Freedom.
This may or may not be satire: The Dallas school board plan to purge all school textbooks of Invictus, the poem used by executed bomber Timothy McVeigh as his last words. Meanwhile, textbook companies are already reducing the amounts of potentially controversial long-dead authors used in teaching materials:
Some textbook companies are simply creating entire literature texts around excerpts from the Bible, which has met with the quiet approval of school boards in Texas. In Dr. James opinion this effort "serves as a reasonable extension of President Bush's faith-based initiative. After all, there are no surprises in the Bible, and we are reasonably certain the murderer never read this book."
Ah, of course; McVeigh's twisted ideas were the product of corrupt, syphilitic 18th-century Enlightement philosophers and godless, sensual poets like Walt Whitman. These should all be banned from schools, and replaced with nothing more than the Bible, to make a more just, moral society. After all, there is no bloodthirst or evil in the Bible, is there? (via Lev)
A chilling look at the training of Palestinian suicide bombers, who are taught from very early childhood to seek martyrdom:
In Hamas-run kindergartens, signs on the walls read: "The children of the kindergarten are the shaheeds (holy martyrs) of tomorrow." The classroom signs at Al-Najah University in the West Bank and at Gaza's Islamic University say, "Israel has nuclear bombs, we have human bombs."
They also are promised something more risqué: unlimited sex with 72 virgins in heaven. The Koran, the sacred book of Islam, describes the women as "beautiful like rubies, with complexions like diamonds and pearls." In one of the passages of the Koran, it is said the martyrs and virgins shall "delight themselves, lying on green cushions and beautiful carpets."
"I know my life is poor compared to Europe or America, but I have something awaiting me that makes all my suffering worthwhile," says Bassam Khalifi, 16, a Hamas youth leader in Gaza's Bureij refugee camp. "Most boys can't stop thinking about the virgins."
A Shetland pony on a farm in Cumbria has unexpectedly given birth to a half-horse, half-zebra hybrid. The hybrid foal has some zebra-like stripes; the question remains whether it is a zorse, a zetland or something else altogether.
A cross between a horse and a zebra is rare but by no means unheard of. Colchester Zoo in Essex has had three zeedonks - crosses between a Chapman's Zebra and a black ass - since 1983.
(Today's word of the day is zeedonk. Say it after me....)
A horse has 64 chromosomes; the zebra has 44. The zorse that results from cross breeding will have a number of chromosomes that is somewhere in between.
Doovy! there's now an open source outline font editor for Linux/UNIX. Given that Fontographer has not been in development since 1996, perhaps open-source tools are the way to go. (ta, Toby!)
2001/6/26
A Melbourne "online marketing" company has developed a new advertising technology. Their Admail system is installed on an ISP's mail server attaches ads to users' incoming mail. The advertising is targeted to users' profiles. Not surprisingly, acceptance of this has been somewhat less than unanimous.
Software of the day: Ogle, a DVD player for Linux which apparently does subtitles and menus.
2001/6/25
A consortium consisting of a US property developer, one of the remaining San Francisco new media companies and the makers of the Spice Girls movie are reviving the Ealing Studios brand; the consortium seek to cash in on the trademark, by using it to make "quirky British" films, which probably involves dialect-coached American lead actors and market-tested feel-good formulae, in the finest Hollywood/Working Title tradition.
Strange bedfellows: In one of the more unusual geopolitical love-ins of recent times, the Vatican and several conservative Islamic nations, including Iran, Syria, Libya and Pakistan, have joined forces in opposition to a UN AIDS treaty, because the treaty includes specific measures to help homosexuals, prostitutes and drug users, and thus would "legitimise their status and offend moral standards". Curiously enough, John Howard's Australia hasn't opposed the treaty yet; though we can probably expect them to follow after George W. Bush comes out against it.
2001/6/24
Yesterday I was at Windsor Station, and noticed that the music in the café in the former stationmaster's office sounded rather familiar; the stereo there was playing one of my favourite discs from some years back, Dead Can Dance's Within the Realm of a Dying Sun (the closing strains of Xavier and the opening of Dawn of the Iconoclast). Then my train rolled in, and for a moment I had a vision that it was not the nondescript Hitachi tin can it was, but something from an earlier era; a great steel locomotive, with one baleful burning eye of a headlamp.
I rewatched Dark City today on DVD. The visuals and set designs (dig that groovy art deco!) are quite spectacular in places, though with every viewing it seems less like an internally consistent story and more like a stylistic pastiche, referencing films from Metropolis to The City of Lost Children, as well as the entire film noir genre and much of recent scifi. It's not fatally flawed (one can suspend disbelief), but there are a few things which don't quite hold up under scrutiny (i.e., if the Strangers have a group mind, why doesn't each Stranger immediately know what happens to each other of its kin; also, if they can change reality by mental powers alone, why do they need to physically arrange props for their guinea pigs?). Still, for the visual experience, it's worth seeing (especially on DVD or in the cinema).
(I'm rather fond of boldly visual films, and recently noticed that a lot of my favourite directors come from predominantly visual backgrounds. Jeunet and Caro worked on music videos in the 1980s, as did Alex Proyas (though I wouldn't call him a favourite on the strength of one film, and The Crow didn't really seem that special), and Terry Gilliam was, of course, the Monty Python team's resident animator. By that token, I'm really looking forward to Chris Cunningham's take on Neuromancer.)
Vivendi Universal takes its brand of Pimp-Style Artist Management(SM) online, as its newly-acquired subsidiary MP3.com drops Analog Pussy, one of its most successful acts, and confiscates its CD sales revenue, citing unnamed "suspicious activitles" and refusing to elaborate. The fact that Analog Pussy was (a) successful and (b) already signed to an independent label has suggested to many observers that they were an early victim of a cull of MP3.com artists not useful to Universal's strategic vision.
So what did I do over the past 24 hours, whilst offline? Well, I
- Went to see Down Town Brown at Revolver; the show wasn't quite as spectacular as the one a few weeks ago, but was nonetheless enjoyable.
- found a DVD of Dark City (recently deleted); which I bought mostly for the visuals
- upgraded my Macintosh to MacOS 9.1, and fixed all the stuff I broke doing so.
2001/6/22
The official site on Invader Zim, Jhonen Vasquez' TV animation. And yes, it does look very Vasquez, from the stupid alien invaders to the way the characters are drawn. I hope that SBS or someone pick it up; preferably after I have moved to somewhere where I have control over the TV.
First ExxonMobil got George W. Bush appointed as US President, and now allegations have emerged that they've been complicit in torture in Indonesia; perhaps taking a leaf out of Shell's book on handling recalcitrant natives.
It alleges that Exxon provided the Indonesian military with equipment to dig mass graves, as well as building interrogation and torture centres. Exxon denies all the allegations.
Do Some Good: A group of concerned citizens has launched a Campaign to Ban Minesweeper. The International Campaign to Ban Winmine contends that the popular Windows time-sink is an "offence to mine victims and those who sacrifice themselves, rixking their own life, clearing the lands contaminated by these implements". Their web site has instructions on how to delete this offensive program from your PC; and to satisfy your Minesweeper cravings has a web-based, politically correct variant named Winflower, which involves not treading on flowers.
Speaking of mysterious iconography, a site called Sticker Nation has some rumours about those "THIS IS A HEAVY PRODUCT" stickers that are all over Melbourne. Apparently, (a) the campaign hasn't got anything to do with the Cave Clan, apart from the fact that the Cave Clan borrowed the design as an in-joke; (b) that there is a huge reward for the capture of whoever is behind these stickers because of the damage they have caused, (c) that 35,000 have been put up with 20,000 in stock, and (d) that they have recently been spotted as far afield as Thailand. (Btw, if you like the design, Lev may still have some Heavy Product T-shirts for sale in his shop.)
So this is where that Fish Worship graphic came from; I remember seeing that in the window of a shopfront residence in North Carlton many years ago; in that same ideosphere that's now populated with Obey Giant graphics (only a few years behind the US, too). (via Grouse)
Unusual sock design of the day: Snakes wearing red lipstick.
That's right; snakes with big, pouting red lips. (Well, actually, they could be
eels, but anyway...) Your guess is as good as mine.
(Seen in the Coles Express near Flinders St.)
Digital camera update: I just discovered something interesting about the digital camera I bought. When the Windows image-acquisition software (a TWAIN driver or somesuch) connects to the camera to fetch images, it launches the Windows PPP driver. Clicking on the network icon brings up a status display, which shows a PPP connection to the camera, which looks to Wintendo 98 like a "Windows NT PPP server", whatever that means. Running NETSTAT reveals a connection to port 7 on a device with the IP number 192.106.34.50, which would be the camera.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet managed to get a PPP link going to the camera from Linux; pppd doesn't want to connect, and when I connected to it with minicom (a serial terminal app), it just responds with "OK" to anything I type. The options are (a) there's a magic command which starts a PPP session on the camera's built-in server, or (b) it needs a username/password via PAP or somesuch.
(Once PPP is going, it'd be interesting to portscan the camera; perhaps there's a port which gives a shell on whatever embedded OS the thing runs?)
Update^2: It appears that the camera software adds an entry to Windows Dial-Up Networking for connecting to the camera; this reveals that the camera imitates a modem, waiting for two commands (SV, and then ATDT1234567), upon which it starts a PPP server. Now, the problem is, I so far haven't managed to get pppd under Linux talking with the camera's server at all; it just times out.
2001/6/21
Intriguing rumour of the day: I heard today that underground comic artist/writer Jhonen Vasquez (who created Johnny the Homicidal Maniac) is currently working on an animation project, sponsored by Disney or someone. Sounds interesting, or possibly very odd.
Does foul-mouthed shock rapper Eminem suffer from Tourette's Syndrome?
"I'm a really nice person and my so called attacks of rage are a symptom of so-called Tourette's Syndrome... When I record it suddenly takes over. I want to say 'bird' or 'bee' but suddenly I hear words like 'fuck' or 'shit' or 'I'll strangle your mother' coming out."
The global marketplace: Many of the telemarketing calls made to American consumers are actually made from India, where wages are lower. An entire US telemarketing industry has arisen in India, with workers being meticulously coached in appearing American, given generic middle-American names like "Betty Coulter" and encouraged by their employers to become addicted to Friends and Ally McBeal. (Wonder if the anti-globalisation people will pick up on the last bit as a crime against humanity.)
2001/6/20
According to the Melbourne Times, Starbucks is coming to Melbourne. The aforementioned McDonalds of coffee is planning to open several outlets, initially in the CBD and Lygon St. (Melbourne's Italian café precinct), with an outlet in Brunswick St. planned. Given that the Starbucks modus operandi has been to saturate the market with outlets (sometimes opening several per block) until revenue starts dropping off and rivals go out of business, and thus claim a monopoly on the coffee experience (what is it about these Seattle firms?), that is worrying.
Some academic ratbag types in France have released an open-source DVD player, which apparently does CSS decryption. This is currently legal in France, though with the EU Directive on Copyright, it won't be for long. (via Slashdot)
2001/6/19
Scare meme of the day: A CD-eating fungus has been discovered. So far, this killer fungus, which devours the aluminium in CDs, has only been found in the tropical climate of Belize. Rumours of it having been genetically engineered by the RIAA to force a migration towards secure trusted-client systems such as SDMI have not been confirmed.
I got 111 on the quirkyalone quiz, somewhat higher than Graham's result.
Firstly, I wonder how gender-specific the test is; one thing I've observed is that solitude is seen as more acceptable for men than women, because of some combination of culture/biology/patriarchal oppression/what have you. Therefore I wonder whether there may exist tendencies towards solitude which fall within the average for men but are considered unusual for women. Myself being male, my result may thus be skewed.
Having said that, it wouldn't be skewed by that much. I do like walking alone, tend towards solitary creative activities (music, reading, writing and such in my case) rather than socialising (I never understood nightclubs, for example), and have never fit into scenes, subcultures or cliques. Rather than having circles of friends, I have probability clouds of friends/acquaintances. I'm also rather skeptical about the whole courtship-ritual thing as being optimal for anything other than forming breeding pairs (I have decided that I don't intend to breed in the foreseeable future (I'd be a lousy father, for one), so it's not really a priority for me). I also don't particularly like sharing a house with other people, and would rather not have to smile and act nice to whatever strangers are in my living room through no action of my own. If I want to be amongst people, I'll catch a tram to Brunswick St. or something. I value my solitude (though not at all times, to be sure), and don't appreciate attempts to rid me of it, however well meant.
Of course, there are probably drugs on the market to cure my personality
type and reduce people like me to well-adjusted Shiny Happy People,
able to contentedly vegetate in front of the TV like a normal member
of society, like a pig in a cage on antibiotics; no alarms and no surprises.
</RANT>
Today in the mail I received a few copies of the new FourPlay remix 2CD, DigitalManipulations, which were sent to me because I contributed to it. I've been listening to it a little, and
it's pretty good (this is my opinion of the other contributors, incidentally;
I've heard my own mix so many times I'm a bit sick of it, and also I can find
the faults in it too easily). There are 27 tracks, ranging from electronic
ambience to cut-up, digitally distorted beats to various experimental weirdness,
with contributors including Deep Child, B(if)tek, Black Lung,
Machine Translations and Darrin Verhagen, as well as some you probably
haven't heard of (including myself and Graham, to name two). If you're the
kind of person who buys records from Warp or Mego, you may want to give it
a listen.
2001/6/18
An American commentator on the McVeigh thing believes that both the death penalty (as currently administered in our squeamish, citified age) and imprisonment in America's luxurious prisons are too pleasant to deter criminals and that America should established gulags in Alaska, where murderers, rapists, drug dealers and such could be imprisoned under harsh conditions without parole. Perhaps they should also bring Sheriff Arpaio on board, dress the convicts in pink underwear and set up web cameras?
(As far as the Australian perspective goes, such a system could easily be implemented in the far north of Australia; it could even be combined with the revolutionary Russian drug addiction treatment, with harsh boot camps for junkies being established in the same general vicinity as migrant detention centres. (As for importing the City Without Drugs programme to the United States, that would be easy to do; just add a faith-based element and have someone preach fundamentalist Christianity at the junkies whilst they lie strapped to their beds in withdrawal Hell.)
Nature/nurture: According to a Canadian study that looked at sets of identical twins, some personality traits (such as tendency to read and beliefs on the death penalty) are genetically influenced, whereas other traits (such as beliefs on gender roles and propensities for playing bingo) seem to have no genetic connection.
Today (well, technically, yesterday), I also went to the record collector's fair in Essendon and bought a number of CDs. One of these was a single of the JAMs' It's Grim Up North. Or, rather, was meant to be such; when I put it in my CD player, I realised, to my dismay, that it is actually an old Nine Inch Nails single. (The label copy and printing on the CD all says it's the KLF single.) I'm not pleased.
This is not the Onion: In the homeless shelters of California, the usual drug addicts, schizophrenics and hard-luck cases are being joined by a new class of derelict: former dot-com employees, whose six-figure, stock-optioned lifestyles had been snatched out from under them by the Dot-Com Bust.
"what makes this unusual is that people in the valley have become appendages of their jobs and their workplace. They've worked up to 110 hours per week and slept on the conference room floor," said Ilene Philipson, a clinical psychologist at the Center for Working Families at the University of California at Berkeley. "People have given up all sorts of things to give to their job, and when there's a layoff there's no other support for them."
There's an only-in-Silicon Valley twist to his story: Sacrosante and three other former high-tech workers who met at the shelter are launching a start-up business that will resell wearable mobile computing systems.
Howard, Watters, take note: A group of Russian philanthropists, under the name City Without Drugs, have devised a novel method for curing heroin addiction; rather than opening up injecting rooms for junkies, they have established treatment centres, where users are strapped to beds and beaten to within an inch of their lives.
"Drug addicts are animals who have lost all sense of values. This way, the next time they think about getting a fix they remember the pain of the thrashing rather than the rush of the drugs. It's very effective. You cannot solve this with mild manners - you need tough measures."
After their initial beating, addicts spend their first few weeks handcuffed to a bed, left to face their withdrawal symptoms with nothing stronger than bread and water. Later the inmates are put to work chopping down trees or labouring. Nobody is allowed to leave during the treatment, which lasts a year.
Given that injecting rooms are Out Of The Question, whilst conventional imprisonment doesn't seem to be having an effect, perhaps we can expect to see Howard's drug war council adopting a similar approach sometime soon? (via Lev)
Digicam update: The camera in question appears to be a rebadged Pretec DC-520. Which doesn't seem to have much in the way of technical documentation at all online. VMware isn't of much help, as the Windows software doesn't seem to like its serial implementation (I suspect it does some kind of tricky bit-twiddling rather than using the serial port as a character device). Pfaknok.
I just bought a cheap digital camera (an IXLA DualCam 640). It's pretty small, and whilst it only does 640x480, it can connect to a computer or display images on a composite video display (that's a TV or VCR). In short, it's ideal for keeping in a pocket and using for blogging/capturing miscellaneous visuals.
Now I just need to figure out how to connect it to one of my computers, which will involve one of (a) finding or writing Linux software for interrogating it, (b) managing to get the InstallShield thingy for the Wintendo software supplied with it to work on my VMware setup, or (c) upgrading the Mac I use for music to OS 9.0 and plugging it into its USB card. (Ideally I'd want to use the first option; why load a multi-megabyte all-singing-all-dancing GUI application with pretty icons when you can just use a command-line tool to snarf the images out of the camera?)
2001/6/17
The latest Signum has an article on Placebo. which isn't too bad. I have been listening to Black Market Music a bit, and as far as simple straightforward rock goes, it's not too bad (though the lyrics seem a bit vague in places).
A good explanation of misconceptions about haiku, and specifically, why joke "haiku" are evil and must be destroyed. Join the crusade.
(Though I'm not sure about the author's assertion that "limericks have no proud tradition to debase". Wasn't the limerick form coined by Thomas Aquinas?)
2001/6/16
Last night I went to the Store Room theatre to see the play Pretty Vacant, a triptych from the people at Theatre In Decay (who were behind The New Scum). Part 1 started ominously in an empty space with a couple embracing and abusing each other, surrounded by stacks of pills. It was rather nihilistic and bleak, and perhaps reminiscent of some of the late Sarah Kane's works. Part 2 involved two women dancing around, telling each other to sing out words and shuffling the audience around as they told a story; I thought this part was a bit tedious and hackneyed. Part 3 featured the late painter Frances Bacon, a man eating excrement from a porcelain toilet, a pointless survey and a paranoiac who kept spouting disturbing factoids about nuclear warheads, phone taps and poisons in the water supply. It was, in my opinion, the best part of the play.
2001/6/15
An old yet most interesting interview with Greg Egan, the Australian hard-scifi author.
Music is just as important to me, on a personal level, as literature, but any influence it has on my writing is usually pretty tangential. I did write a story called "Worthless" for In Dreams - a recent anthology on "the culture of the 7-inch single". I'm a big fan of The Smiths, so the first idea that occurred to me when I heard about the anthology was to try to write a kind of SF equivalent of a Smiths song - a story with the same ambivalent attitude to the whole idea of worthlessness, half-embracing it as a positive thing. That was a one-off, though. The only other story where music played a major role was "Beyond the Whistle Test", in which scientists use neural maps to design advertising jingles which you literally can't forget.
I don't want to write motherhood statements - feel-good stories that cave in at the end and do nothing but confirm everything you ever wanted to believe; I've done that in the past, and it's insidious. Stories like that should be burned. If I'm certain of anything, it's that understanding how the real world works - how human brains actually function, how morality and emotions and decisions actually arise - is essential to any kind of ethical stance which will make sense in the long term.
As Paul Davies has said, most Christian theologians have retreated from all the things that their religion supposedly asserts; they take a much more "modern" view than the average believer. But by the time you've "modernised" something like Christianity - starting off with "Genesis was all just poetry" and ending up with "Well, of course there's no such thing as a personal God" - there's not much point pretending that there's anything religious left. You might as well come clean and admit that you're an atheist with certain values, which are historical, cultural, biological, and personal in origin, and have nothing to do with anything called God.
Australia possesses thousands of subcultures, quite apart from any question of ethnicity. One of those subcultures consists of people who consider their nationality a vital part of their self-image; that's their right, but they should stop deluding themselves that everyone else thinks the same way. Nothing's more ridiculous than talking about the "unique Australian character" - unless it's talking about the "mystical qualities of the Australian landscape".
(ta, Peter!)
NME has a track-by-track preview of the long-awaited upcoming New Order album, Get Ready, due on August 27. Interesting; some of the descriptions (the Smashing Pumpkins and Oasis influences, for example) sound a bit off-putting, other parts look potentially interesting (though it's hard to tell).
Florida's illicit prostitution industry has found a way of avoiding undercover police stings: by requiring customers to expose themselves before the "models" do. Police are prohibited from exposing themselves, and the state won't authorise the use of informers. (via Plastic)
Honour the work: Convicted mass murdered and prominent Melbourne High School Old Boy Julian Knight, currently serving a 27-year sentence, is compiling detailed files on prison guards and judges. The files contain names, addresses and the names of family members.
2001/6/14
Representatives of various nations are meeting in The Hague to make legal decisions enforceable across jurisdictions. Under the Hague Convention, as proposed, legal decisions on matters such as patents, copyright, libel and censorship made in any signatory state will be enforceable in all signatories. This delights both censorious regimes eager to silence offshore dissidents and multinational corporations eager to extend their grip on intellectual property, and alarms civil libertarians, consumer organisations and free-software advocates, including Richard Stallman:
If a French court ruling against Nazi statements is enforceable in the US, or in your country, maybe a Chinese court ruling against anti-Chinese-government statements will be enforceable there too. (This might be why China has joined the Hague treaty negotiations.) The Chinese government can easily adapt its censorship law so that the Hague treaty would apply to it; all it has to do is give private individuals (and government agencies) the right to sue dissident publications.
Suppose, for example, that Microsoft would like to be able to impose copyright on languages and network protocols. They could approach a small, poor country and offer to spend $50 million a year there for 20 years, if only that country will pass a law saying that implementing a Microsoft language or protocol constitutes copyright infringement. They can surely find some country which would take the offer. Then if you implement a compatible program, Microsoft could sue you in that country, and win. When the judge rules in their favor and bans distribution of your program, the courts in your country will enforce the judgment on you, obeying the Hague treaty.
Connect 'Em Till They Bleed: A new study shows that unhappy workers are more productive, not being distracted by unprofitable pursuits such as happiness, and/or seeking to lose themselves in diligent work. Perhaps this will spawn a new school of management methodology designed to keep one's employees profitably miserable?
2001/6/13
Yay! Field Mice guitar tabs. And one more here. Not particularly detailed ones, though, and not for every song I'd have liked, but still..
Speaking of the Field Mice, it's a small world; I just found that the only Field Mice website is run by someone at Monash, whom I'm probably two or so degrees of separation from, and quite possibly passed in corridors in years gone by.
A state report clears the police of any wrongdoing during the S11 riots, in which a bunch of reds and ferals got done over, baby-seal style. The report says that individual rogue police may possibly have been culpable of bashing protesters, but conveniently enough, they cannot be identified or punished as they remembered to remove ID badges beforehand. Up here for thinking, mate! Meanwhile, subversive groups such as the Uniting Church and the Media Arts and Entertainment Alliance have reacted with alarm to the report, saying that it is a "blank cheque for police violence".
An interesting interview with Jim Gettys, architect of the X Window System, where he puts paid to the myth of X bloat.
Most of the perception of bloat is caused by how Linux reports memory. An X server maps the display card into its address space, and on current graphics cards this can easily be 8, 16, 32 or even 64 megabytes of address space (for the frame buffer and registers of the display). Naive people look at "ps" or "top" and draw the wrong conclusion.
(via Slashdot)
Chuck Palahniuk has a new book out, Choke; and there's an interesting interview with him here.
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I HATE...
it's the piped music at Museum Melbourne Central station.
The station has an expertly-designed PA system which gives uniform coverage
of all parts of the station, from the escalator leading into it to the
platforms. Unfortunately, some marketing type at the newly-privatised
operators of the station decided to "add value" to the waiting-for-a-train
experience by piping music through this system. The music, in this case, being
past chart hits, adult-contemporary rock ballads and bubblegum R&B.
Supposedly, on average, people like this.
Thanks to you, Mr. Bayside Trains Marketroid, I now have I've Had The Time Of My Life playing in my head, I hate you, Mr. Marketroid.
2001/6/12
A good piece looking at the degeneration of copyright law into a corrupt, undemocratic system for enforcing corporate hegemony.
I just remembered: When I went to the sinny to see The Monkey's Mask, there was an interesting poster in the foyer, advertising the upcoming movie of He Died With A Felafel In His Hand; good to know it has been made. It's by Richard Lowenstein, who also did '80s Michael Hutchence share-house punk classic Dogs In Space, and the poster features a black-haired, suited fellow who looks rather like Nick Cave (who is featured on the soundtrack). Now this is one film I will have to see.
And now, a solution to the global warming problem that even Dubya could love: altering Earth's orbit, so that we can burn all the fossil fuels we desire as we sit in our extra-wide SUVs, with CFC-laden air conditioners going full blast. If NASA pull it off, not burning lots of oil could be considered harmful, putting the Earth at risk of global cooling; wouldn't that just tickle the White House pink? No news on whether the scheme would also stop epidemics of cancer, cholera, AIDS, etc.
Military scientists in Britain have developed a system for tracking stealth aircraft by measuring discrepancies in cellular telephone signals. Though didn't the Chinese develop something very similar some months ago, only using radio/television signals?
Bolshie radical and veteran of numerous protests (including S11) Steve Jolly is running for Mayor of Melbourne. It'd be interesting to see what would happen if he won; would the State Government (keen to preserve its business-as-usual definitely-not-socialist credentials) disband the Melbourne City Council, as happened with the Greater London Council under Loony Left Red Ken in the 80s?
The World Meteorological Organization has removed the name "Israel" from a list of hurricane names, at the insistence of Jewish groups fearful that a destructive Hurricane Israel could have unfortunate political connotations. The name has been replaced with "Ivo", which suggests that Cocteau Twins fans and 4AD anoraks don't have much in the way of political clout. (via Lev)
Doovy! They've ported X11 to the Sega Dreamcast, running on that Linux distribution. May have to see if I can find one of those. And there's also MAME, so you can, umm, play games on your Dreamcast.
2001/6/10
Fair game: Heavily-armed terrorist Keith Henson, who declared war on the Church of Scientology and made for the Canadian border, has been released from jail in Canada, and granted refugee status.
Last night I went to see The Monkey's Mask; it's about a chain-smoking lesbian private investigator who sets out to track down the killer of a young angst-ridden poet and ends up having an affair with her lecturer. Not a bad story (some of the characters seemed vaguely familiar from various places); the cinematography and music (the latter by Single Gun Theory) were excellent; very stylish.
It will probably finish playing this week, so if you want to see it in the cinema, now may be a good time.
2001/6/9
Decrying the corrupting evils of Harry Potter is not just for Christian Fundamentalists anymore: and to whit, a radical-leftist denunciation of Harry Potter, in the finest neo-Marxist style.
And justice for all: Riot cops bash unarmed protestors at S11 and get a state-funded barbecue; a leftist protestor cream-pies the Premier and gets a one-month jail sentence.
Tonight I went to see Down Town Brown at the Evelyn Hotel. If you don't know who Down Town Brown are, think something not unlike a combination of Devo, Kraftwerk and the Doug Anthony Allstars; they wear sci-fi-looking bodysuits, play funky, tongue-in-cheek electro-pop and put on amazing shows.
And tonight was a truly awesome show. It started after midnight, with one of the members of the band getting on stage attired in a lab coat and oversized glasses, playing some chords on a synth and pointing into the crowd, where another member was dancing around in an anime robot costume, complete with spotlights. As everybody watched the robot, the scientist climbed onto the ceiling, and a third member, dressed in an alien mask, danced onto the stage. And that was just the intro; through the rest of the show, they played their brand of electro-funk, danced about, lipsynced movie samples, and indulged in acts of acrobatics, martial arts and bootywhang. And then was the encore, with The Contender coming back on stage bare-chested and wearing a heavy-metal wig and playing guitar solos on a strap-on keyboard in a cover of what I think was an AC/DC song. It was mind-blowing.
Anyway, DTB are playing on the 22nd of June at Revolver. Don't miss it.
2001/6/8
Former standover man and hired killer turned best-selling true-crime author Chopper Read has turned his attention to writing children's books. Chopper's first foray into the genre will be titled Hookey the Cripple, about a bullied young hunchback in 16th-century Italy. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out.
And now, for something completely different: The British Department of Trade and Industry has just released the latest injury statistics. Tea-cozy injuries have gone up by 185%, from 20 last year to 37, and birdbath-related accidents have more than doubled, but placemat injuries have had a modest increase, from 157 to 165, and armchair-related injuries have fallen by more than 2,000. (via Lev)
The US Secret Service has ordered a firm which makes fake money for films to hand over its product for destruction, after some film money blew off the set of the latest Jackie Chan movie and members of the public spent it. By US law, fake banknotes have to be 25% smaller or 50% larger than real ones; however, this is not good enough for today's discerning filmgoers.
2001/6/7
Bizarre spam: I just found in my spam filter an email advertising "horse and dog chiropractic seminars". They're apparently hosted by the author of various animal chiropractic books, with titles like "The Well Adjusted Horse" and "The Well Adjusted Cat". If you ever wanted "to REALLY learn how to adjust animals" (and who hasn't?), and didn't mind giving your money to a spamming scumbag, that'd be the place to go.
The latest profession to feel the impact of freelance consultants is the priesthood. A website named rentapriest.com is offering the services of Catholic priests who have left the church, either to marry or because of other differences over the Vatican's increasingly hard-line doctrines. The priests perform weddings, divorces and absolution, among other services; some of their clients are refused service by the mainstream church because of its doctrines (such as those on divorce), and others simply find the waiting lists too long. Catholic canon law does not provide any means of unordaining an ordained priest; however, the Catholic church does not recognise the renegade priests, or any sacraments performed by them.
Hmmm... apparently Björk's upcoming album was written with Napster in mind; and designed to sound great when downloaded. Never mind that they've all been pulled from Napster, along with pretty much everything else. I've heard snippets on Far And Wide, and it certainly sounds very quiet and minimalistic; though perhaps too much so.
EMI CD download update: Apparently the CD-burning technology EMI intend to use to allow consumers to download tracks does include copy protection, in the form of "a scrambled digital signal that would prevent it being copied" in between tracks. Could this be that holiest of Recording Racket holy grails, a Macrovision for CDs? I'd be skeptical about anything like that working reliably one way or the other.
(It makes me want to buy/burn one of those CDs, just to see whether I can rip it and/or whether it plays on all kinds of CD players. Mind you, to do so I'd probably have to sell my soul and run Windows and all sorts of closed-source corporate spyware.)
2001/6/6
I didn't realise that Guru Adrian was American; I thought it was one of those ABC/JJJ yoof-programming things. (I could have sworn I saw his grinning mug on some ABC yoof publication in the 80s or early 90s; and given the anti-American streak of the trendy-leftie set there at that time, I'd have placed him as the creation of a punk-squatter-turned-graphic-designer in Melbourne or Sydney somewhere, and not from New York...)
In the conservative Canadian province of Alberta, legislators have declared June 18 to be Heterosexual Family Pride Day. Wonder whether they'll be having a Straight Pride parade.
Following the explosive popularity of the Harry Potter books,
publishers HarperCollins have been looking at their own brand of
children's fantasy classics; i.e., C.S. Lewis' Narnia books.
HarperCollins and the Lewis estate have unveiled a plan to publish
all-new Narnia books, written by unnamed
hacks authors for a contemporary audience.
Not surprisingly, the new books will not have the element of Christian
theological allegory that Lewis' books had, as HarperCollins presumably
don't wish to restrict them to the Christian media ghetto, alongside
Left Behind and DC Talk CDs.
There will also be plush toys of the characters, and possibly other tie-ins.
Meanwhile, purists have decried the move as a cynical attempt to cash in.
Recording Racket update: Big Five recording company and former international arms dealers EMI reveal their plans to launch a service allowing users to download and burn CDs. That's right, the unprotected Red Book audio format which will be the death of corporate capitalism. (I very much doubt that they have developed a way of burning copy-protected CDs which cannot be copied bitwise; given that hardware CD players ignore CDR barcode serial numbers, watermarks and all that stuff. Though I wonder whether, in exercising due diligence, they will pollute the sound quality of the burned CDs with some half-baked watermark scheme.)
Or maybe EMI actually Get It, and understand that end-to-end copy protection is not a viable requirement? I don't know about you, but I would pay for music in an unprotected format I can use at my leisure without having to deal with proprietary software that only does things its way. (In fact I did; I bought some MP3s from the 4AD back catalogue last year, before atomicpop.com went broke.)
A few years after privatisation, the Melbourne railway system is going British, with a rather nasty train crash happening near Footscray. Fortunately nobody died; probably because electric trains don't generally burst into flames.
2001/6/5
I've been listening to the Field Mice retrospective a lot recently; it has grown on me. I think I might have a new addition to my list of favourite long-defunct bands, joining the likes of Slowdive and The Paradise Motel.
There's now a web browser for the Commodore 64. And it has a GUI interface and supports HTML 1.0, WML, images and forms. It needs a special Perl-based proxy on a UNIX host, though, as it doesn't actually have a TCP/IP stack built in.
To give their new movies a boost, some marketroid at Sony Pictures made up an imaginary film critic. "David Manning", whose reviews lavished praise on Sony's upcoming films and were quoted in press releases, doesn't actually exist, and never has. Mind you, they probably didn't need to go that far, as there are enough whorish critics willing to laud turkeys in small papers in return for getting the red-carpet treatment.
Metablogging: It emerges that Meg's the same age as me. Odd, that; I also thought she'd be older (28-29 or so was my estimate).
Speaking of Meg, I had an odd thought about her recently. Out of nowhere, I imagined Working Title or someone buying the film rights to her blog, to film it as a London-themed light romantic comedy. And I wondered whether they'd get some American actress to play Meg.
Reports have emerged that the bodies of stillborn babies were secretly exported from parts of the British Commonwealth, including Australia, to the US for use in nuclear radiation testing. The parents, of course, were kept in the dark about their patriotic contribution.
Bleah. Housemates have come home and are watching some Top-40-pop video on TV, loudly. Which means (a) I can't use the kitchen to make myself some chai, as I was planning, unless i want to make smalltalk with whatever superficial person is visiting this time, (b) and even if I do (and I could just be antisocial and don a Walkperson), the living room will be lit up brightly like a Happy Shopping Ground, which does not contribute to enjoyment of a cup of chai, something no amount of Slowdive or Lisa Gerrard on headphones can ameliorate.
Also, normally I would put on a CD to block the noise out, but right now I am working on (mixing) some music in Cubase, and when it stops, I can hear the teeny-pop onslaught.
Which reminds me: I should make some time to go looking for a flat.
2001/6/4
There will be a new Douglas Adams book coming out. No, Adams hasn't taken up L. Ron Hubbard-style posthumous authorship; the book will consist of various unpublished works fished from his Mac, including email essays, as well as the screenplay Adams wrote to the Hitchhiker's Guide of the Galaxy film, and his unfinished novel, The Salmon of Doubt.
(Hopefully the publication of the screenplay may discourage Hollywood from butchering the Hichhiker's Guide movie too much, now that Adams is no longer around to contend with.)
The MAGNATE waits upon the pavement
For his enormous limousine,
And ponders further child-enslavement
And other projects still more mean. -- E. Gorey
To coincide with exploitative scumbags winning the Retail Council of Canada's Retailer of the Year awards last year, anti-sweatshop group Maquila Solidarity Network launched its Sweatshop Retailer of the Year awards, which gives "awards" for both particularly bad behaviour, and, constructively, for steps taken to rectify wrongs. Vote now, and tell your dreadlocked friends! (via Rebecca's Pocket)
The BBC has a piece on Radiohead's new album, Amnesiac. It's an interesting album, though the jury's still out. (Oh, and if you're quick, you may score the limited edition which comes with a hardcover book of cryptic/disquieting/pretentious artwork.)
2001/6/3
The amazing story of childhood prodigy David Hahn, who built a nuclear reactor in his garden shed at age 15.
Of his exposure to radioactivity he says, "I don't believe I took more than five years off my life."
(via Slashdot)
John Alejandro King is apparently a CIA agent, a former well-known disco bass player, and quite possibly a raving nutcase. Anyway, he writes bizarre poetry in his spare time and sells books of it, apparently giving the proceeds to Amnesty International. His site has a wealth of borderline-psychoceramic material, as well as this illuminating piece about other eccentrics in the intelligence community.
I just received a mail from a band's mailing list, which had the following ominous footnote:
Come to the Espy while we've still got an Espy. Even go on the nights when we're not playing. Words going around that the ESPY will be closing its doors for good at the end of July. This will be a sad day for Melbourne. The Continental has closed. We're told the Punters Club might be turned into a Country Road outlet. Melbourne's turning into Sydney. Get out there people. Support live music and live music venues.
The Closure of the Espy one can understand; St Kilda has become thoroughly yuppified, and a grungy rock'n'roll venue (especially one that keeps someone as disreputable as Fred Negro off the dole queues) is as out of place there as it would be in South Yarra at the Trak shopping centre. Apart from wasting perfectly good views of the bay on such downmarket clientele, it probably brings property values down, and we can't have that. On the other hand, I did hear that some locals were about to buy the Espy and keep it running (then again, they may be out to turn it into a more upmarket venue of some sort). In any case, something like the Espy in a prime St Kilda location is an anomaly.
You'd think the Punters would be a bit safer though.
The Nepalese Crown Prince has achieved what the Maoist guerillas have been unable to, and wiped out the Nepalese royal family. Crown Prince Dipendra took a machine gun and gunned down the King and Queen, as well as several of his siblings, after arguing about astrological prohibitions on him marrying and having children. Crown Prince Dipendra is expected to become the next King of Nepal, if he survives the self-inflicted gunshot wounds. Though with the hit in legitimacy the monarchy is likely to take after his assention, I wonder how long it will last.
2001/6/2
There's a review on Slashdot of Neil Gaiman's upcoming book American Gods, which does sound rather Gaimanesque. And whilst we're on Slashdot, their next interview is not with a Linux developer, nor a sci-fi legend, but with visionary philanthropist Alex Chiu. That's right, Alex "Eternal Life Foot Braces" Chiu.
Nkosi Johnson, 12, passed away recently, of AIDS-related complications. Johnson was born HIV-positive and served as a symbol of the AIDS tragedy in Africa, opening many eyes to the scale of the problem. Somehow I get the feeling that Nkosi would rather have been something else than a symbol of the AIDS tragedy; like, perhaps, a fireman or an astronaut...
A detailed piece on Nick Hornby, and particularly his new novel, How To Be Good. (I managed to pick up a copy of said novel today, and look forward to reading it.)
2001/6/1
Luke Haines, the man behind Black Box Recorder and The Auteurs, has called a week-long pop strike. Starting from tomorrow, no pop music (including all modern music) is to be made, listened to or consumed, or so the Lukester says. And to discourage scabs, he and some unnamed comrades will be picketing Radio 1. Haines denies that the strike is a publicity stunt for his new album, which, incidentally, comes out tomorrow.
This afternoon, after Far and Wide finished, I wandered down to Heartland to see if they had any CDs I'd be interested in (I wouldn't mind getting the Robots In Disguise album, except that nobody seems to have heard of it). As I looked through the store, I noticed that the CD they were playing was really good; sort of quiet indie-pop, with plaintive, almost Morrissey-esque vocals and shoegazer reverb. I didn't find anything I had been looking for, but I did leave with a copy of The Field Mice's Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way? retrospective 2CD.
Speaking of that Coldplay song, that reminds me: on a train a few weeks ago, I saw some gentlemen in tracksuits and hair gel singing a version of that, acapella, with finger snapping. Now that's a scary thought: a Boys II Men-style R&B-vocal-harmony cover of Coldplay's Yellow. Who knows; maybe Baz Luhrmann would buy it for his next MTV feature...
I received an email from the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, in response to my letter about DVD region coding, acknowledging the points I mentioned and saying that my comments have been lodged in the ACCC's database. Which means that they may have an impact on the DVD inquiry. If you have a problem with being restricted to the DVD titles Hollywood can be bothered to bring out for Region 4 (or with the extra costs of buying US titles over the Net), it may be a good idea to let them know.
That explains that "head candy" thing in my referer logs. Though how much of a target market could sarky bloggers be anyway?
The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was unprovoked? not true, say the subversive malcontents at disinfo.com.
The Victorian government is talking with private contractors about procuring 160kph trains for high-speed rail links to regional centres. On the surface, this looks like a good thing; though the PTUA (that bunch of ratbags) did warn that high-speed trains could mean the closure of smaller railway stations between urban centres, and ultimately could lead to the degeneration of passenger rail to a US-style commuter rail system, running only at peak hours to shuttle workers between dormitory cities and their workplaces.
Clay Shirky on Microsoft's plans for an iron grip on Internet services. In short, they will be using copyright law to prevent anyone from using their SOAP services without going through them. Scary stuff.