2001/8/31
Neural implants are one small step closer, now that scientists in Germany have figured out how to interface silicon chips with brain cells.
Oh dear... now Aphex Twin is jumping on the all-Welsh-language album bandwagon. And I don't think he's even a Welsh nationalist or anything.
Poking fun at goths may be like hunting dairy cows with a high-powered rifle, but when Pokey the Penguin does it , it's something special.
Still listening to Far and Wide; they just played Ali G interviewing Jarvis Cocker, and then toasting gangsta-style over Pulp's Help The Aged. Side-splittingly funny...
Listening the Far and Wide on 3RRR now; they just played a song from a new/upcoming Trembling Blue Stars album. Not bad; I may have to reassess my view of Bob Wratten's post-Field Mice solo career as mind-numbingly dull. At least it wasn't a weepy guitar-strumming come-back-to-me-I-still-love-you number like most of their first album.
Oh yes, and the Dot Allison song they played sounds interesting... I'll have to track that down; that and a CD copy of that King of Woolworths EP.
Oh, and I didn't get a copy of Björk's Vespertine, which they were giving away, despite having programmed 3RRR's number into the autodialer here.
My aging CD-R writer has started working again, after I power-cycled everything and fiddled with the power cable. It probably was a loose connection or something. I should probably put the computer somewhere where it doesn't get nudged quite so often though.
Werther Syndrome for the online age: In depressed parts of eastern Germany, online Satanic teen suicide pacts are all the rage, with kids staging black masses in cemeteries, decapitating goats and talking each other into offing themselves in chat rooms and with SMS messages:
The Blue Rose group encourages youngsters to talk in Internet chat rooms about the uselessness of their lives, the pointlessness of their existence and the glamour of death. In a region of high unemployment, where many towns have no cinemas or discotheques, the group has hit a deep nerve with disillusioned youth.
(So it's group anti-therapy; reminds me of a spoken-word track Boyd Rice. once did...)
This upsurge in the occult and satanic worship culminated in the region at Whitsun last year when 30,000 youths gathered near Leipzig to hear bands like Wolfsheim and Elegia sing morbid songs of suicide and depression.
Someone recently reached this website from a search engine, searching for "Would you like to be the only living human being left in a world full of robots?why". Odd.
The US Government paid boy band N'Sync US$800,000 to participate in its anti-drug propaganda campaign. Which raises the question: if you can't trust boy bands, who can you trust? (via Unknown News)
2001/8/30
I picked up the new New Order album today; on first listen, it's a lot more guitar-based and rockish than their previous ones. Though it's still too early to say whether I'll listen to it much or whether it'll take a place next to the last few Electronic albums and other things soon abandoned.
It came with a videotape labelled "New Order The Videos", and with no track listing or other information, which I can't look at, not having a working television. (Why can't everyone use DVDs or CD-ROMs of QuickTime files or somesuch?)
Incidentally, I had problems ripping this CD as well (some tracks had errors, and needed to be ripped up to 6 times before succeeding), and it is manufactured by the same pressing plant as the two EMI discs I had problems with. So either:
- the new CD-ROM drive in my PC at work is a bit marginal, and so are discs pressed by Digital Audio Technologies Australia, or:
- AOL Time Warner and EMI are both experimenting with similar CD copy protection methods
An interesting review of the Input 64 CD (that's the disc of Commodore 64 music). It talks about the sociology of 8-bit computer brand affiliation in the 1980s and the musical influences of C64 chip tunes (Hi-NRG and pre-Summer-of-Love dance music).
My CD-R writer appears to be cactus. I put a blank CD in and it just spins, trying to make head or tail of it. Not a good sign. May be time to bite the bullet and get a new one. (And maybe this time it'll be one that can do 80-minute discs and those ickle business-card CDs and such.)
Rock over London, rock on Chicago: I just had a bus ride almost worthy of a Wesley Willis song. For one, the bus arrived 10 minutes late, and was unusually crowded. Then, a block into the ride, the driver turned into the wrong side street, realising his mistake when faced with a ONE WAY sign on the much narrower side street than it should be. He manouvred the bus out of the street, but not without grinding it against a sign. After that, the bus (which was considerably late) kept stopping at pretty much every stop to let people on or off, and finally took another wrong turn, missing the stop I usually get off at by a block.
A video of a kitten being killed and stir-fried has caused outrage on the Internet, with animal-rights nazis PETA threatening to sue the Stile Project, who hosted it, into oblivion. Which is much more of a response than similar videos of humans being killed have received.
Grabowicz said depictions of animal cruelty always draw more criticism than depictions of human cruelty, because, like children, animals are innocent and defenseless. "What's ironic is the further away from humans the animal is, the less sympathy you feel," he said. "But when you get to humans, it drops off again."
The video is believed to have originated in Korea, where cats are considered to be a delicacy.
Speaking of cats, a piece in the Herald-Scum today said that cat ownership in Australia is in steep decline, with responsible Australians switching to the more environmentally-friendly dogs. This will undoubtedly delight the lunatic-fringe greenies who believe that cats are vermin that should be eradicated from the Australian continent.
As for me, if I was to keep anything, it would probably be a cat. And no, I don't vote for One Nation.
Tonight's Babble was quite good; it seems that a number of people were inspired by the rant two weeks ago; one guy did a piece titled "Dick For A Day", inspired by that and the Dorothy Porter poetry reading that week, and another guy (one Puke the Punk Poet) went on stage and ranted about how his girlfriend had fucked him around, this time in relation to some TISM tickets; only he did it in a more entertainingly psychotic style (imagine Spider Jerusalem with long black dreadlocks, and you have some idea of what Puke the Punk Poet is like). And the rest wasn't bad either. (I didn't read anything, as I hadn't written anything in the interim; maybe next week, though.)
2001/8/29
I'd have to agree with Graham's assertion, as conveyed to us by Meg, that Peril Underground Records should be renamed Devil's Arse. For one, it's down a stairway off a grotty alley, and secondly, it's full of 15-year-old Marilyn Manson/NIN/Rammstein fans, trying to look eeeevil in their black T-shirts and corpsepaint covering their acne-scarred skin. (I believe they have an entire wall devoted to Trent Reznor-related products; and they once even had a petition of protest to a newspaper who gave a Marilyn Manson album a bad review.) They used to sell interesting electronic/experimental music, before the goth kiddies invaded and the management decided that catering to their adolescent angst tantrums was more profitable.
Make your own joke: Michael Jackson to open the day's trading at the Nasdaq, the battered high-tech stock exchange.
2001/8/28
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: An interesting and ominous article thoroughly debunking the tired old "information wants to be free" cant still heard from libertarian pirasite types, and showing how the Internet can be controlled, and probably in a much more draconian fashion than most people would want.
even if offshore firms are legal in their home bases, their owners "have to be willing to not come back to the United States." Not only do they risk losing any assets in this country, but U.S. businesses that deal with them will also be at risk. "Any revenue the offshore business sends to them could be subject to attachment," says Ballon.
(And if that fails, there are always cruise missiles. Just tell the press that it was a child pornography site, and not a MP3-sharing hub; only ultra-paranoid black-helicopter nuts will question the official version.)
Gnutella traffic has a distinctive digital "signature." (More technically, the packets of Gnutella data are identified in their headers.) Content companies are also learning how to "tag" digital files. The result, in Ballon's view, is easy to foresee: "At a certain point, the studios and labels and publishers will send over lists of things to block to America Online, and 40 percent of the country's Net users will no longer be able to participate in Gnutella. Do the same thing for EarthLink and MSN, and you're drastically shrinking the pool of available users." Indeed, the governments of China and Saudi Arabia have successfully pursued a similar strategy for political ends.
And if the hardware industry resists making copy-protected devices, says Justin Hughes, an Internet-law specialist at the University of California, Los Angeles, an appeal to Congress may be "just a matter of time." If the Internet proves difficult to control, he says, "you will see legislation mandating that hardware adhere to certain standard rules, just like we insist that cars have certain antipollution methods."
Teeny-goth rebellion figure and ordained Satanic priest Marilyn Manson has comforted the mother of a fan who committed suicide after being persistently bullied at school for dressing like a prat. Hang on, though, isn't having pity for the weak against Satanic doctrines as taught by Anton LaVey, whose church Manson serves in? You'd think he'd be praising the jocks who persecute insecure goth kids unto suicide as agents of natural selection, weeding out the weak and enforcing the Law of the Wolf.
And in today's news, a rant on why meat-eaters are all cretinous barbarians. Discuss.
It's almost Cro-Magnon, but there it is. Beef is still what's for dinner in many philistine homes, homes where Coors Lite is the beverage of choice, where Kools are still smoked and where the television has been on continuously since Gerald Ford was in office.
Why, then, are people still eating meat? First of all there's that Genesis thing--you know, where God gave man dominion over the animals. Many a Republican likes to sling that quote around as sort of a Judeo-Christian carte blanche to destroy every living thing that isn't nailed down.
It's gotta be a self-esteem issue for those of limited reasoning ability. I may be a loser, the carnivore thinks, but at least I'm better than this dead critter I'm eating.(via Plastic)
Researchers in India recently did an experiment: they set up a computer, connected to the Internet, in a window where illiterate street kids could operate it, and watched what happened.
Mr Mitra found that within days the children were able to browse the internet, cut and paste copy, drag and drop items and create folders. One of the things they particularly liked was drawing, discovering how to use the MSpaint programme to create paintings. The children then moved on to downloading games and playing then. They did not stop there. By the second month they had discovered MP3 music files and they were downloading songs.
2001/8/27
A survey has found that listening to rap music on the car stereo is more likely to lead to road rage than any other genre (sounds fair enough, as if you've got Eminem cranked up and some asshole cuts you off you'd feel like bustin' some caps in the punk's ass, already being on that wavelength). Meanwhile, "pop" (which presumably means Top-40 girl/boy bubblegum) was the least likely to lead to road rage, being known for its tranquilising properties. (Which is probably why you only hear Top 40 radio in shops, because anything less mindlessly ebullient wouldn't induce people to be happy consumers quite as effectively.) Mind you, given that the survey was taken by an outfit named the Little Chef restaurant, its scientific validity may be in some doubt.
An artist in the US has built a church for dogs. The chapel features stained-glass windows depicting labradors with haloes, and is intended to be visited by up to 15 dogs at once.
"I was up there today," he said, "and there were 15 dogs. They seemed really happy to be there."
So now Americans can cater to their dog's spiritual needs, but only if they live in Vermont. Maybe the next step would be to have drive-thru dog churches in shopping malls, thus bringing this much-needed facility to a wider audience?
Zero-friction commerce in the global marketplace: In Brazil, packets of flour and sugar often don't have bar codes, but cocaine now does. Police have captured packets of cocaine bearing bar codes from a shanty town near Rio. It is not clear whether the codes serve any practical purpose, or whether they are merely decorative.
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: The Catholic Church has been fighting back against accusations of sexual abuse by priests, and has been fighting with dirty tactics, including countersuing victims or their parents, intimidating witnesses and various high-pressure tactics more suited to tobacco companies.
The most egregious example of the Church's legal aggression involved an Albuquerque, New Mexico, man named Timothy Martinez. In 1991, he and 12 other men sued the Archdiocese of Santa Fe charging that they had been molested as children by convicted pedophile Jason Sigler, who left the priesthood in 1982. Despite the former priest's criminal conviction, Martinez faced a fierce fight. Detectives combed through his past; they tracked down old roommates and girlfriends. Among their questions: Did Martinez ever engage in homosexual acts? Did he like it?
(via Unknown News)
A piece on the crackdown on Tolkienists in Kazakhstan, where the government is waging war against all "bohemian" and "counter-cultural" elements who deviate from accepted behaviours. This includes "alternative" artists, homosexuals and punk rockers, as well as people who dress up as hobbits on the weekend.
"I find city life so crude and gloomy. I want to get away from it and create a different world," one 17-year-old fan said. "When I look at other kids who hang out with nothing to do and no interests in life, I feel sad. Their lives seem so empty."
100,000 lemmings can't be wrong: An article on the alarming phenomenon of pro-anorexia web sites, organised by adolescent girls who cherish the symptoms of their eating disorders and bond together to teach others how to be better anorexics.
"girls strive to hold onto it. It's their identity," says Ellen AstrachanFletcher, director of the eating disorders clinic at the University of Illinois College of Medicine in Chicago. "An alcoholic, once they admit their alcoholism, typically acknowledges this is a bad thing, I need to get into treatment. With anorexia, these girls say look at how much self-control I have, look at how much everybody cares about being thin, look at what I'm accomplishing."
"When I was in my peak anoretic phase, I dropped 60 pounds (27.22 kilograms). In three months! God, I want to be there again ... I want to be empty and clean and free again ... So, thankfully, ana has re-entered my life."
Former child stars have been known to get involved in some rather unsavoury activities: drugs, porn, crime.. now, we can add blogging to this list. (via Graham)
And today, one of the people calling themselves Robert X. Cringely shows you how to roll your own ADSL connection, using nothing more than dry exchange circuits intended for serial terminals or burglar alarms and a bit of good old-fashioned ingenuity: (Note: your mileage may vary outside of the US.)
2001/8/26
Campers in Victoria's Wilson's Promontory (which, I have been told, is very pretty), have been besieged by an onslaught of tent-invading wombats, which claw their way through tents and make off with anything edible. The wombats (which, I have been told, are actually quite dangerous creatures) have been encouraged by dumb tourons patting them as if they were cute fluffy animals. However, what is an annoyance to tourists is a boon for the tent-repair industry...
2001/8/25
Activism in action: A woman named Lara Johnstone is one month into her hunger strike to force George W. Bush to keep his promise to reveal the truth about UFOs. Johnstone asked Bush, during his campaign, whether if he got elected he would release classified documents about UFOs, to which Bush replied "sure I will". Then again, it could be argued that, since Bush wasn't elected (but rather selected by the courts), he is not bound by the promise. In any case, perhaps Ms. Johnstone could team up with the 12 Galaxies Guiltied to a Zegnatronic Rocket Society guy.
2001/8/24
Well, I've now got my MP3 jukebox (or Wintendo NT workstation) back at work, which is a relief. As such, I've been ripping a number of CDs I bought over the past few weeks. The CD-ROM drive now works properly, except that it stops at semi-random times when ripping two particular discs. The curious thing is that both discs are recent EMI releases (Kings of Convenience, Quiet is the New Loud, and Matthew Jay, Draw). Could it be that EMI's Australian operation are experimenting with copy-protected CDs on the sly?
A sign of things to come? Excite@Home monitoring users' traffic, terminating accounts downloading copyrighted materials without warning. Wonder how much this has to do with Excite's half-owner, Optus, being acquired by the discipline-obsessed Singaporean government.
Quelle surprise: A Canadian couple who spontaneously got married in a doughnut shop, getting a friend ordained in the Universal Life Church to officiate and using doughnuts as wedding rings, have found out that they are not legally married. The government of Ontario, it seems, discriminates in favour of organised religions, and as such does not recognise the Universal Life Church (which allows anyone to be ordained over the web) as a legitimate religion, or for that matter doughnut shops as places of worship.
The promotion of virtue and the eradication of vice: The conservative Catholic archbishop of Sydney, George Pell, has proposed a punitive tax on divorcees, taxation benefits for married couples and linking old-age pensions to number of children produced. That will teach those inconsiderate non-breeders. Moderate religious leaders have distanced themselves from Pell's hard line. He may, however, have the Prime Minister's ear (Little Johnny is rather inclined towards legislating morality; witness his purging of moderates from the Drug War Council and his push to outlaw fertility treatment for unmarried women, for example), though whether he could push this through parliament right now is another story.
2001/8/23
The Onion: Family of Five Found Alive in Suburbs:
Upon discovery, the family was rushed back to civilization. Attempts to reassimilate the Holsapples into metropolitan living with a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and dinner at a nice Peruvian restaurant were met with resistance. "When we got to the museum, the family became quite agitated," psychologist Dr. Allan Green said. "Jay kept calling all the modern art 'weird' and Meredith said, 'If we wanted to look at art, we could just go to Deck The Walls at the mall.'"
Upon arriving in Buffalo Grove in 1993, the Holsapples befriended the locals, called "suburbanites," and soon adopted their ways entirely, from the mode of dress to the food they eat. Meredith Holsapple described in great detail the suburban settlements called "sub-divisions" where great emphasis is placed on maintaining lawns, watching televised sports, birthing children, listening to Top 40 music, and collecting stuffed animals.
Seen in the most recent Synaesthesia newsletter:
MIKI SAWAGUCHI Big Boobs CD $40
"Interesting and wildly unpredictable debut from this porn starlet turned chanteuse. Imagine big band, salsa, bossa nova, beach parties, and noise, all in one compelling package. Plus lots of softcore cheesecake in the photo booklet. "
To be honest this is amongst the single worst cds i have ever heard - as wretched as this wide world of music gets. unavoidably awful and a total waste of your money. if it's the pix you want - get the internet.
Well, you've got to admire their honesty...
(And no, I'm probably not going to buy it. I don't currently have the extravagant income to justify buying random bulldada objects, at least not ones costing $40. Though I did buy a CD of Commodore 64 game music last time I was there, mostly for the interestingly historical booklet. (The music itself can probably be found in chiptune format on the Internet, and would probably fit comfortably on a floppy.))
You know that food pyramid thingy, compiled by the US Government, which says that you should eat a lot of red meat, dairy products and grains to stay healthy? Well, it now turns out that it overemphasises products of key agricultural industries, such as dairy and beef. Meanwhile, a version compiled by a Harvard professor, without special interests in mind, deemphasises grains and calcium and lumps red meat with such no-nos as sweets and butter. The US Government putting corporate interests before its citizens' health? Say it's not so! (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Oops!
Zimbabwean freedom fighters seize white-minority-owned farms, and in the
process of doing so, liberate penned-up animals and unleash the foot and mouth virus.
When the famine starts, I wonder whether the government will coerce some
kulaks farmers into confessing on TV to deliberately
sabotaging Zimbabwe's agricultural industry out of colonial spite/on orders
from the Queen.
2001/8/22
Scientists in Japan have developed a musical control device that responds to the shape of the player's mouth:
A pickup on the guitar converts the notes being played into MIDI, the language of electronic music that can define properties of musical notes such as their pitch and duration. Meanwhile, a miniature head-mounted digital camera monitors the shape of your mouth and sends instructions to a synthesiser, which modifies the MIDI properties of the notes. Stretching your mouth wide in a soul-searching grimace produces a gritty, distorted sound, while opening and closing the mouth yields a plaintive wah-wah effect.
Interesting; though if they make one that works on audio rather than MIDI, and controls filters or some sort of resynthesis engine, it may be even better.
Where media becomes culture: An article on the remix as fan-fiction, where fans of artists do their own unauthorised rearrangements of recorded music. There is already one site devoted to remixes of Björk by her fans, something of which the Ickle One is apparently aware and seems to tolerate. And then there's always Closer To Spice and Oops The Real Slim Shady Did It Again...
I'm a fan of the remix as an artistic medium; sometimes after listening to a piece of music, I start rearranging it in my head, coming up with ways to reinterpret it. I once did a drum & bass remix of This Mortal Coil's Another Day; I, of course, never released or uploaded it anywhere (doing so would be a massive copyright violation, as it uses great swathes of audio from the original), though people sometimes tell me I should polish it up and send it to 4AD. Then I did a remix for a Melbourne singer/songwriter who thought it was "too spun out". And then there is my contribution to the FourPlay remix project.
Awesome! dreampop guitar tabs. They have some Slowdive and are working on some Cocteau Twins.
2001/8/21
Your next T-shirt could power your MP3 player: Scientists in Germany have developed synthetic fibres that generate solar electricity. The fibres are machine-washable and could be used to make clothing that generates power for wearable computers, or solar-powered tents for techno-nomads or aid workers, or a wide range of other applications. (via the Viridian list)
You know the dot-com boom is over when even the porn sites are struggling to survive. (via techdirt)
Now here's a historical relic: seen in the booklet of Single Gun Theory's Flow, River of My Soul (1994):
For more information, contact us via the Internet at pete.rivett-carnac@f406.n712.z3.fidonet.org
Do you suppose it still works?
Scare meme of the day: Do video games cause frontal lobe damage, and poor impulse control, in children? Professor Ryuta Kawashima seems to think so, and has experimental results to back that up. What promotes proper frontal lobe development in kids? Reading, writing and arithmetic.
Australian screen hunk Russell Crowe has recently been touring the US with his pub-rawk band; The press, however, seem less than enthralled:
"It's about 98 per cent obsessed women and two per cent insecure husbands and boyfriends," said Chicago fan Tom Storcz.
Perhaps in a few decades he'll be the next Michael Bolton...
A government commission in Jamaica has recommended legalising marijuana. The National Commission for Ganja (now there's a name for a band) has said that the righteous herb's "reputation among the people as a panacea and a spiritually enhancing substance is so strong that it must be regarded as culturally entrenched". Peter Tosh would be proud. However, the ink on the report was still warm when the US embassy issued a stern warning that any moves to legalisation would have grievious consequences for Jamaica, so it's not going to happen (or if it does, the CIA-backed administration that replaces the government will overturn it).
2001/8/20
From the most recent Onion:
NEW YORK-- An English as a Second Language textbook focuses predominantly on food-preparation vocabulary, night-school student Eduardo Reyes reported Monday. "I must admit, I would like to learn how to say more than, 'I have diced the onions,' and, 'Did he want scrambled or over-easy?'" said a disconsolate Reyes, speaking through a translator, following his first lesson. "I had hoped to learn words for the different parts of the body so I can pursue my dream of becoming a doctor. I have instead learned much about the grilling of chickens."
So I come in to work today and my PC is still not back. They said they would replace the motherboard by last Wednesday, but they're still waiting for the incompetents who have the maintenance contract (which they're apparently in breach of) to get around to it; and it just so happens that there are no spare machines. Grr.
(Unless, of course, it has been seized by intellectual-property police, who are now poring over my MP3 cache.)
The street finds its own use for things: While baseball has not attained global popularity, baseball bats have, and are selling well across the globe; mainly because they're good for beating people up with:
Athletic Stores in central Belfast, Northern Ireland, sells 10 to 15 bats a week. "Funnily enough, I don't know of any baseball teams" in the area, said John Miskimmon, a salesman at the store. He guessed that half the bat buyers wouldn't know a home run from a foul ball.
2001/8/19
Emergentiles/Rewardians: Attitudes to work are changing, with young employees now demanding enough slack to have a life outside of work; this includes a rise in part-time work, and more flexibility in working arrangements, not to mention more willingness to change careers. (On one hand, that's good, as it provides more slack to those who value it, but then there are exploitative casual McJobs to worry about.)
This evening I briefly went to a joint birthday party for a number of people, including Mike of Grouse!. All those black trenchcoats and ponytails and sunglasses indoors and black lace and PVC; I probably saw more goths tonight than I did all year before then. (Not necessarily a good thing; as I tend to get a bit paranoid and defensive when surrounded by groups of Spooky People; probably as, not having the clique-hierarchy-politics instinct, I can only be an outsider in their world.)
I was half-thinking of printing up a T-shirt reading "I HATE GOTHS" and wearing that there, but I never got around to it.
Say goodbye to your MP3 collection, kids: The recording industry has patented a means of copy-protecting CDs. This method relies on CD players not using time codes, which CD-ROM drives do use, and encrypts the time codes. A computer can access the audio, only with special software that decrypts the time codes, and only on terms approved by the Recording Racket. Which means no MP3s, no listening to CDs on your Linux box, and no using unofficial CD playing software (there goes freedb.org's air supply). Then again, if CD players don't need the time codes at all, and special software can decrypt them (i.e., access the disc), surely it would be possible to write a program which extracts audio without relying on the time codes in the first place. (Would that be a circumvention device, or any more illegal than video signal stabilisers?)
2001/8/18
A copy of some early Swirl EPs landed mysteriously in my hands of late. Hmmm; their cover of Nick Cave's Ship Song is interesting.
And I won't even mention the Bruce Sterling/A-list thing here, except to say that you'd have to be Bruce Sterling to get away with something so obnoxiously crass and come off smelling like roses. Talk about pulling rank.
The future of online marketing? As banner-ad revenue declines and online marketers search for new ways to irritate their customers into paying attention, an English magazine firm has come across an attention-grabbing new tactic: Emap send email to customers, accusing them of accessing illegal pornography, telling them that details had been passed on to the police, and offering a link they could click to appeal against the charges. The link went to a web site advertising the MaxPower car show, orgainsed by Emap. What next? "I've been screwing your wife. Click here to see my AIDS test results.", perhaps? (via Found)
The rise of the post-straight man, or how gay culture has shaped straight masculinity, and straight men are acting more gay, to move up the social ladder and have more success in business and with women. Probably a good thing, if it breaks down the meathead stereotypes of straight masculinity. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
I just came back from seeing Prop; it was a great show. They played two sets, varying in style from mellow ambience to massive bootywhang funk grooves to Mogwaiesque post-rockish pieces, and ending with a rousing climax. Had the show been somewhere with a dance floor, rather than a mature, sophisticated jazz club with stylish round tables, people would undoubtedly have been getting up en masse to dance.
Anyway, their CD (Small Craft Rough Sea) should be making its way to the shops soon. If you missed them this time, they're coming back to Melbourne later this year, and playing at Revolver.
Stranger than fiction: Norway bestows military honour on penguin. The penguin, named Nils Olav, resides in the Edinburgh Zoo and is the first penguin to hold rank in the Norwegian Army, and now holds the rank of honourable regimental sergeant major. (via Meg)
2001/8/17
Today, I went down to Collectors' Corner and found a copy of Trembling Blue Stars' Her Handwriting (they were a solo project of one of the Field Mice). I found it a bit underwhelming; it's relationship-breakup angst, but done in a relatively ordinary way. Anyway, I've posted a review of it to Records Ad Nauseam. (I also managed to pick up Single Gun Theory's Flow, River of My Soul, which has apparently been deleted for ages.)
Apropos of nothing: the 3RRR Radiothon is on now, so those Melburnians in the audience who listen to said station should think of subscribing and helping to keep them on air.
Never send a desktop OS to do a handheld OS's job: Palm to buy Be, who could have been the next Amiga, had it not been for Microsoft, and Linux, and MacOS X, and everybody else with an OS with actual applications stealing their reason to exist.
I've still got a few BeOS CDs somewhere, including a few Intel ones which are rather picky about graphics cards (in most cases you get slow, minging, 800x600x16 shades of grey) and (needless to say) don't run under VMware, and (I think) a PowerPC one that only runs on really old Power Macs. (I once ran it on a Umax Mac clone I had at Monash, which puts it in historical context.) It had a UNIX shell, and you could compile text-based GNU apps, but because of its revolutionary design, it wasn't anything like any OS in popular use, and hence had only a handful of uninspiring shareware apps. All in all, nice swing, no follow-through.
Now the question is whether Palm will attempt to shoehorn BeOS onto their palmtops; if they do, it could be awkward (witness Microsoft's ill-fated forays into PDAs. OTOH, PalmOS could get rather cramped and unscalable, much like the old MacOS (which it resembles to an extent).
Tonight, I strolled down to the Empress Hotel to see Sydney postrockers Sealifepark, who were in town. They played a great show, tight and full of energy; playing some tracks off their recent album Wildlife Documentary and some older tracks, to rousing applause. Afterwards, cajoled into an encore by the audience, they launched into an energetic performance of what I think was a Clouds cover. At one stage (just before Straight Roads Return, I think), one of them said that they feel almost at home at the Empress as they do at the Hopetoun (one of Sydney's better-known interesting live music venues; incidentally, where I saw Prop, who are playing tomorrow night).
2001/8/16
Scare meme of the day: Experts in Thailand are alarmed at the threat of computers to the nation's youth. Not only do computers cause autism and hyperactivity, or so they believe, but also allergy to sunlight, physical weakness and even dehumanisation, creating a generation of young people who "speak less, order more and their language is filled with symbols". Oh, the humanity! (via Techdirt)
A US company is encouraging celebrities to copyright their DNA, so that they can sue anyone who clones them without permission. Though the question of what happens to the illegal clone is an interesting one.
Nick Hornby on the current Top 10:
The single biggest influence on most of these artists, according to the acknowledgments in their liner notes, is . . . Actually, let's see if you can guess. Who do you think is at least partially responsible for such songs as "Where the Party At," "Bootylicious," "Bad Boy for Life," "American Psycho," "The Girlies," and "Pimp Like Me"? ... Give up? O.K. You may well be surprised to learn that the very first person thanked in the liner notes of the CDs containing these gems is the Almighty Himself. He gets thanked on seven of the ten albums, by sixteen different contributing artists. ... Michelle, of Destiny's Child, is moved to point out to the Creator, "There is no one like you!!," which is, on reflection, one of the tidiest ontological arguments you could wish to hear.
The D12 album "Devils Night" offers no respite, needless to say; listening to the fourth track here -- a "skit" entitled "Bizarre," in which one of the gang members' attempts to seduce a colleague's girlfriend goes awry, because he farts all the way through it -- was, I think, the single most dispiriting moment of my professional life so far this millennium.
Ever since Elvis, it has been pop music's job to challenge the mores of the older generation; our mistake was to imagine ourselves hipper and more tolerant than our parents. The liberal values of those who grew up in the sixties and seventies constitute an Achilles' heel: we're not big on guns, consumerist bragging, or misogyny, and that is the ground on which Eminem and his crew choose to fight. I know when I'm beaten; I can only offer sporting congratulations and a firm handshake.
(via Robot Wisdom)
PC woes: My Wintendo NT box at work, taken away for repairs on Tuesday, is still not back. Now, this PowerBook is a nicer machine all round (except for the lack of a good virtual desktop utility), but it doesn't have my MP3 collection on it. As such, I've had to bring in my pocket MiniDisc player and some discs, most of which I had recorded months earlier at latest. (Right now I'm listening to Piano Magic's Artist's Rifles didn't really feel like listening to The Smiths or Joy Division this early in the afternoon.)
IBM says Linux is set to dominate special effects/animation; the reasoning being that it's more hackable than SGI's Irix, and Hollywood's effects geeks like that. So now we'll have movies which are made on Linux boxes but cannot legally be viewed on them because cracking CSS is a felony.
It was an interesting night at Babble (local spoken-word night) tonight; a few months ago, they had a theme night where people recited pieces on a theme ("The Dance"), and these would later be performed as interpretive dances by some interpretive dancers. So I decided to write a piece, in the oversexed vein of a lot of the poetry read there, titled Together We Dance, and containing the line "to the spiralling heights of the cosmic planes of supreme bootywhang".
So I arrived tonight, and was informed by a woman in gothic fishnets that she was going to be performing an interpretive dance to my piece. Which would involve me reading the piece out afterwards. Uh-oh, I thought, and went downstairs, downing a shot of Chartreuse.
Anyway, the dancer (one Lady Hannah Cadaver) came on, writhing erotically
in a Sandman-style gas mask and cavorting with an ox tongue, to much applause,
and then I went onstage, reading the piece out. (The Chartreuse had, by
then, taken effect, allowing me to not feel like a total wanker reading
said piece out in front of an audience.)
I had persuaded the sound engineer to add a lot of reverb
to the vocal when I gave a hand signal, which I gave just before the words
"supreme bootywhang". Nobody threw anything at me, so all in all, things
went well.
The rest of the night was quite good too; with the possible exception of the guy who went on to do a poem about how his girlfriend fucked up his life and ended up ranting about how Germaine Greer was in league with Hitler and Mao and abusing the audience when he got moved off after exceeding the 3-minute limit. Though, still, that's irritainment.
2001/8/15
Some good news for free speech: a US court has upheld an artist's right to use images of Barbie(tm) dolls, on the grounds of free speech, throwing out a copyright infringement lawsuit by Barbie owner Mattel against artist Tom Forsythe. Forsythe had made a series of photographs titled Food Chain Barbie to criticise the stereotype of women presented by the trademarked pieces of pink plastic.
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation (pt. 2): Australian federal government, Catholic Church gang up to overturn a court decision allowing unmarried women to obtain fertility treatment. The Government's Attorney-General is using an obscure power to allow the Catholic Church to join in a High Court appeal against the law, overriding the court's authority to decide. And if that fails, the government intends to draft legislation to enforce compliance with its view of Christian family values under penalty of law, now don't you worry about that.
Innovatively groovy Sydney band Prop are playing this Friday night at the Bennett's Lane venue. (Despite the venue, they are certainly not a by-the-books jazz band, featuring a marimba, vibraphone, analogue synths and bongos among their instrumentation.) They are launching their new album, Small Craft, Rough Sea, which should be really good.
I just got a message saying that last Friday, ABC Radio National are doing a whole show on the FourPlay remix CD, playing a number of tracks, including my remix. (I'm the "bulhak" listed in the credits of the Voidhand remix.) It'll be on this Friday night at 10pm. (I probably won't be home to catch it, but may hear the repeat next Saturday.)
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: Human rights groups, including Amnesty International have urged the Vatican to apologise for tacitly supporting of castration of choirboys, as recently as 1959. The practice, used to make male singers with childlike range and the vocal power of a man, was officially banned by the Vatican, but believed to have been tacitly encouraged, on the pretext that the boys in question were castrated as the result of an accident (such as falling from a horse or an animal bite). Many poor Italian parents had their sons castrated in this fashion, tempted by the promise of a lucrative musical career. (Incidentally, the issue is mentioned in Jeanette Winterson's novel Art and Lies.)
2001/8/14
Today is a day without music; first of all, my stereo at home is off being repaired (the speakers started cutting out erratically); secondly, when I arrived at work, I found that the PC on my desk, which contained my cache of MP3s, was missing. The technicians had replaced a seemingly dodgy CD-ROM drive yesterday, at my request, only to find that there were deeper problems, and the motherboard was probably cactus. They say I'll have a PC tomorrow.
I am typing this on my PowerBook at work; the one with two tinny notebook speakers (that don't do bass, full stop), no MP3s to speak of and a CD-ROM drive that has devoured one CD so far. At home, my options would probably involve using my Mac as a CD player.
The Seven Habits of Sensitive, Celibate Men. Pretty much the "nice guys finish last/chicks dig jerks" argument, which you've probably seen/heard before.
- Habit One: I'll be her friend first
- Habit Two: I'd better go slow
- Habit Three: Sleeping in the same bed will make us closer
- Habit Four: I don't care, what do you want?
- Habit Five: I'll win her heart with flowers and a poem
- Habit Six: I better apologize
- Habit Seven: Women don't make passes at men who wear glasses
I'd put on a Morrissey album right now, only the computer with my MP3s on it is being repaired... (via Plastic)
2001/8/13
I finally went and saw Moulin Rouge. It was basically a two-hour music video combined with one of those Hollywood-on-the-Gold-Coast ads they show before movies. Firstly, the plot (arguably the least important part of this particular film) was weak and trite (a companion described it as taken from a Pepe Le Pew cartoon), the characters were paper-thin and cliché; there were the usual cartoonishly zany Australian-comedy madcap characters, all of them remaining entirely two-dimensional, and then there was Nicole Kidman bludgeoning the audience about the heads with her charms and the manager of the theatre looking like Big Kev or Con the Fruiterer with a silly mustache. That wasn't the only resemblance to bad Australian TV comedy, though; every time a character said or did something the director meant to be funny, they gurned at the camera to underscore the fact that this was meant to be a humorous moment; it was rather reminiscent of Let The Blood Run Free, or something similarly dodgy. In some of the scenes, I was expecting Yahoo Serious to show his face at any time.
Moulin Rouge is a very superficial film. They built all those elaborate sets, and then wasted them by making every shot a zappy, MTV-style opening shot (wouldn't want to overestimate the audience's attention span, would we?) The film was boldly, nay, defiantly commercial, feeling like a 2-hour advertisement for itself (or, more probably, for the technical skills of the Australian film industry; I suspect its real audience was Hollywood types sizing up places to make the next blockbuster). Needless to say, the treatment of the setting (Montmartre, the bohemian counterculture, and all of the truly interesting aspects thereof) was disappointingly superficial, where it wasn't nonexistent.
Following on the success of Working Title romcom Bridget Jones' Diary, Disney's Miramax unit has bought the rights to Kate Reddy, an investment banker and mother created for a Daily Telegraph column. Can Not So Soft: the movie be that far away?
Only the Japanese could come up with something like this: Boong-Ga Boong-Ga.
Select from 8 characters to spank. When you spank the character that you chose, the cards will be shuffled. After detecting your power with a sensor, a card will come out. It will explain your sexual behaviour.(via NTK)
Equivalence of Perl and Python imminent? Gun nut and Pythonista Eric S. Raymond wants the two projects to merge their bytecode interpreters, possibly bringing in other languages, such as Ruby and Intercal, to combat Microsoft's all-devouring .NET. The advantages could possibly include the ability to use class libraries across languages, and perhaps even a unified Perl/Python/Ruby/Intercal class library, and the ability to compile any of these languages to C from bytecode (something that apparently is doable in Perl). (via NTK)
Seen in a local trashy free paper: Divine Brown, the street prostitute best known for being caught in flagrante delicto with English rom-com actor Hugh Grant, is back on the streets after blowing a huge grant; in this case, the one the publishers paid her for her memoirs. Apparently, the article says, her pimp took every cent of it and disappeared. Don't you just hate it when that happens?
2001/8/12
Everything seems to be happening at once. This evening, the Gods decided to have some fun with various mortals, and arranged for two excellent live bands to launch their CDs at the same time. First up, I went to the Dandelion Wine "Cat" EP launch at the Corner Hotel, seeing the two support acts (an entertaining guitarist/ranter named Nick, formerly of some outfit called Wild Pumpkins At Midnight), and then an excellent band named The Restless. After this, I managed to see the first song-and-a-bit of Dandelion Wine's set, but missed the rest, leaving to go to the Espy to see Swirl. Though what I saw was most impressive; from the music to the lightshow.
(Incidentally, someone at the Corner has good taste in music; between the first two sets, they played most of Slowdive's Souvlaki (the first time I've heard Slowdive played in public in Australia that I can remember), and in the next break, they played The Paradise Motel's Men Who Loved Her and Portishead's Roads, among other tracks.)
The Swirl show was great too, albeit hampered by the poor acoustics of the Espy's main stage and the less-than-ideal PA. It was sort of a launch for their new album, so they played some tracks off that, along with some intense shoegazer pieces off The Last Unicorn, ending with an intensely climactic rendition of Tailor's Eye. The PA problems muffled the sound a bit, taking a toll on their more polished recent tracks (with their sampled backing tracks), but the wall-of-noise pieces coped admirably; in any case, the crowd (some of whom were hardcore Swirl fans, in the habit of following them around Australia) were really getting into it, and picking up the energy. It was a good show.
2001/8/10
AIs taking over: Forget about chess, researchers at IBM have created computer software for trading on the stock market, which has outperformed some of the sharpest human traders in tests. The machines were faster and made fewer errors than the human operators and, by the end of the day, made 7% more money.
A fine line between art and psychoceramics: An artist in the US wants to paint the moon red. James T. Downey, of Columbia, Missouri, wants to get millions of people to shine their laser pointers at the moon, all at the same time. It probably won't have any noticeable effect (the total light reflecting off the Earth would drown it out for one, even if millions of people all hit the same general area on the moon), but the point os probably more to get millions of people to go outside, point their laser pointers to the sky and hopefully not feel like complete idiots.
Australian euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke (he of the Laptop of Death and the floating euthanasia clinic) has come under attack from religious-right group Right To Life for his eminently Darwinian idea of making suicide pills available to angst-ridden teenagers. (The Darwinian implications of allowing depression-prone people to easily kill themselves, though, bear some thinking about; imagine a planet of Shiny Happy People, the descendents of those genetically predisposed towards contented apathy.)
I've been listening to Lush's Ciao! best-of CD a bit lately. Desire Lines has really grown on me; it's a great song, in a slightly ethereal, shoegazey sort of way.
I just came back from the Isosceles Film Night at the Glow Bar; it was quite interesting; this time, the films weren't drowned out by the chattering of trendy idiots, as they were on the first one (when a bunch of tossers with expensive haircuts showed up, not invited by the organisers). They had some interestingly odd films. There was a cheerfully morbid documentary about vampirism in nature, in which surrealist Jean Painleve introduced a live guinea pig to a vampire bat (the guinea pig, twice the size of the bat, just stood there as the bat licked its face and proceeded to suck out its blood); Thanksgiving, a stop-motion animation with a creature made from an uncooked turkey carcass, its body cavity a gaping maw, dragging itself around a house by the drumsticks, and The Fly, a meticulous Hungarian animation from the point of view of a housefly; the sort of thing that seems all the more impressive when you recall that it was done without computers; not to mention a Winsor McCay classic from 1914 and an amusing Tex Avery animation which opened the bracket.
I was also surprised to discover that I went to school with one of the people running the film night; he's now a landscape architect and runs film nights on the side.
2001/8/9
Friday 24 August is National Slacker Day, which is sort of like Phone In Sick Day for non-anarchists. If you're not keen to overthrow corporate-consumer capitalism, but just want a socially sanctioned excuse to vegetate in front of the TV all day, this may be for you.
Drinking water supplies in Melbourne are running short, with rationing due to come into force in weeks. Meanwhile, more than one million litres of water are being poured, each day, into the foundations of that monument to the glorious Kennett régime, the CityLink tollway tunnel in Burnley, to stabilise the ground. Not to worry though, the company is in the early stages of "scoping work" to find more economical sources of water, which it had been asked to do last November.
Some choice answers people probably put down for the "Religion" question on the recent Census:
- JEDI -- favourite of fanboys and Penguinheads. Undoubtedly closely trailed by Star Trek, Babylon 5, Buffy, &c., references from rival fanboy groups.
- COLLINGWOOD or CARLTON. Or, if you're an anglophile, Arsenal or Man U.
- SORRY, REPUBLIC, FREE DMITRY and other statements of political belief were undoubtedly popular.
- And surely some sad person somewhere must have written ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US in the box.
As for me, I just wrote what I did five years earlier: "DISCORDIAN".
This morning on 3RRR, I heard a song by Prop, a band I had the good fortune of seeing in Sydney last year. Prop are a pretty groovy six-piece band, featuring a marimba, a vibraphone, drums, bongos, analogue synths and a bass guitar, and they now apparently have a CD out, titled Small Craft Rough Sea (which doesn't seem to be in the shops yet). Also, they are playing somewhere in Melbourne next weekend. I can vouch that they are well worth seeing.
Speaking of Sydney bands in Melbourne, post-rockers Sealife Park are playing at the Empress next Thursday, and indie-popsters Swirl are playing somewhere this Saturday.
Quelle surprise: A community consortium's bid to take over the Esplanade Hotel, the famously grungy St Kilda band venue, has been rejected, and the hotel's owners are now looking for a commercial buyer. Which probably means it will be cleaned up and renovated into a more upmarket venue (gotta capitalise on those million-dollar views of the bay), where moneyed stockbrokers and football identities can sip their chardonnay in style.
An interesting piece on the state of audio software under MacOS X, and what's being ported. Tellingly, there won't be an OS X Cubase for a while. (Also, interesting to note that MacOS 9.0.4 is supposedly more stable with audio than 9.1.)
2001/8/8
Pfaknok. I just destroyed my copy of Yo La Tengo's And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out. I inserted it into my PowerBook's CD slot, only to find it stuck. Upon pulling it out, it had two deep gouges along the bottom of the disc. It appears that some part of the drive mechanism was closed for some reason, which, of course, you cannot tell as it's a nondescript slot on the front of the machine.
Still, one thing to be thankful for; it could have been worse. For example, it could have been my DVD of the Criterion edition of Brazil or something.
2001/8/6
Playing dress-up in Daddy's opera house, and drinking his liquor, after we'd wrecked his Benz: An incisive piece about the casualties of the dot-com boom, finding time to party outrageously in their gentrified San Francisco playground in between the hardships of having to find jobs paying a mere $40,000 a year, while around them, homeless beggars and crackwhores scramble to subsist.
Homeless woman slobbers yaaaaaaaaaggggggghhhhh, and shakes her head, and slides along the curb. It's extraordinary. We're all standing here in line, knocking at the gates of heaven, while huge numbers of the underclass moan about the block. We're like people at a picnic, ignoring the bees. Seventh St., and up to Market-everywhere around here, beyond the boundaries of the shiny light we exude, you've got the walking dead: hustlers hanging around overlit storefronts, guys weaving with bottles.
"Shit, I got laid off at 85 thousand, and just got a new job for 40."
"Forty?"
"That sucks."
Back in December of 1999, a prominent media critic wrote the following: "In the fifties and sixties, creative types all had a novel they were working on, and in the seventies and eighties, a screenplay. In the e-decade, you've got a business plan."
Oh, the humanity! (via Plastic)
Tekeste Kahsay, an Eritrean man living in Sweden, was diagnosed with a liver disease, and prescribed a drug which saved his liver, but had one unforeseen side-effect: it turned his skin white, except for a dark patch on his face. This hasn't made him popular in Eritrea, as there white skin is considered to be a sign of leprosy.
Cool; someone is compiling a Slowdive tribute CD. Wonder what will end up on it; it could turn out to be interesting and experimental, or it could become a morass of mediocre middle-American alt-rock bands doing emo covers of Just For A Day and Souvlaki. Much like one Joy Division tribute compo I once bought. *cringe*
A fascinating piece on voodoo zombie drugs. Yes, they really do exist, and can really turn you into a zombie (if they don't kill you, that is).
The particularly heinous and voodoo twist delivered by tetradotoxin is that this apparently dead person is fully conscious. It is difficult to imagine being pronounced dead in a room full of grieving relatives and you are without the slightest ability to communicate. This is not to mention the pure terror of being buried alive without the ability to render understandable objection. If the victim survives burial or some other horrible fate, the return to the living occurs within a few hours to a few days.
(via Found)
Yow! There's a new Human League album coming out. And it doesn't even look like they're going for the goth market, like so many former 80s synthpop stars (Marc Almond and Gary Numan come to mind).
A new menace is threatening the impressionable youth of Malaysia; the menace of black metal, heavy-metal music with Satanic subtexts. It is not clear how Malaysian Black Metal differs from the Norwegian variant (presumably it'd be more anti-Islamic than anti-Christian, for one), or whether the menace is so far just headbangers getting down to imported Burzum CDs, but clerics say thay have found evidence of heavy metal fans being involved in Satanic activities. the Malaysian government, meanwhile, is taking firm steps to nip the problem in the bud, including ordering radio stations to play less heavy metal and requiring touring bands to submit videotapes before playing concerts. A committee of government-appointed clerics has called for a total ban on black metal music and associated imagery, and some schools have reportedly began strip-searching students for tattoos linked with the subculture.
How to disappear completely: Fugitive embezzler Christopher Skase is dead; or so his doctor says, anyway. Expect sightings to begin any time now. Though I wonder how this will affect the release of upcoming film Let's Get Skase.
2001/8/4
In Kazakhstan, the police are cracking down hard on decadent, "bohemian" lifestyles that threaten common decency; the offenders have included the usual crowd: alternative artists, gays and lesbians, members of religious sects, and Tolkien reenactors. That's right, people are being tortured for dressing up as hobbits on their weekends. (via Lev)
Tonight I went to the film festival and saw Late Night Shopping, a comedy about a group of twentysomethings in Glasgow who work night-shift McJobs and, in their spare time, hang out in a café watching life go by for want of anything better to do. One of them is a serial pick-up artist who has a rule against sleeping with the same woman more than three times; another hasn't seen his live-in girlfriend (who keeps different hours) for three weeks, and has taken to measuring the soap to determine whether she still lives with him. It was very enjoyable; visually dynamic and full of amusing moments and one-line insights into modern-day life, in a Douglas Coupland-meets-Human Traffic sort of way. If there is any justice, it should get general release, or at least a season in a not-quite-dead-mainstream cinema and a DVD.
2001/8/3
A new feature film will be opening in the US, and the story may sound familiar. The Profit is about a science-fiction writer named L. Conrad Powers who founds a religion, the Church of Scientific Spiritualism. The director, an ex-Scientologist who turned against the church, says that the film is entirely fictional, though some Clams are taking exception. Provocatively, tHe film is opening in the town of Clearwater, Florida, which has a heavy Scientology presence. (via Lev)
Perhaps there is a justice after all: The Armani fashion house has lost a battle for control of armani.com. The domain is held by Canadian graphic designer Anand Mani, who has operated under the name A.R.Mani since 1981. Armani have argued that since their profile is much higher, they should be entitled to the domain, an argument which was, surprisingly, rejected by the WIPO tribunal.
Conspiracy theory of the day: Are Microsoft deliberately leaving open security holes in Windows' TCP/IP stack to spread Windows-based worms and fuel demand for a proprietary replacement to TCP/IP, which will allow all connections to be tracked and identified, stamping out file sharing and also kicking those pesky open-source OSes off the Internet? Robert X. Cringely thinks so. And the scary thing is that the content industry (think AOL Time Warner, Sony, et al.) could get right behind something like this, even going as far as buying laws mandating traceability for network connections. (We can probably expect a surfeit of scare stories about the uncontrollable explosion of terrorism/child pornography in the AOL/Murdoch media and the need for something like this sometime soon.)
Researchers at AT&T have developed a speech synthesizer capable of imitating any voice, from recordings. Currently it requires 40 hours of special recordings; however, refinements in the technology will raise interesting issues, such as who owns the rights to famous voices. When we start hearing famous dead actors selling products on the radio, things may get interesting.
Film Festival: Tonight I went to see a film named 101 Reykjavik; it was from Iceland (naturally), and about a shiftless, socially inept twentysomething slacker in Reykjavik who ends up getting his mother's lesbian lover (played by sultry Spanish actress Victoria Abril, who will be well known to Almodovar fans) pregnant. It was quite an enjoyable film; not quite as arty as Angels of the Universe, but quite amusing, and with some poetic moments and some breathtaking outdoor visuals (as may be expected in an Icelandic film). The dialogue was mostly in Icelandic (with subtitles) though partly in English, as Abril's character (being from Spain) didn't speak Icelandic (and, this film would suggest, many people in Iceland can understand and speak English). The music was by Damon Albarn and one of the former members of the Sugarcubes (that's the Ickle One's old band, of course), and featured some amusingly cheesy electronic takes on the Kinks' Lola.
After this, I saw Bells From The Deep, a Werner Herzog documentary about mysticism and the occult in a remote corner of Russia (near the Mongolian border). It included a lot of outré bits, including elderly people crawling around a sacred tree stump, tales of visions of hidden cathedrals and apparitions, and pilgrims crawling along thin ice to pay tribute to the fabled city of Kitezh, said to be hidden at the bottom of the lake (where the Mongol hordes couldn't sack it, of course), as well as footage of locals lining up to buy "consecrated water", a Jesus-lookalike in elaborately embroidered velvet robes spouting mystical mumbo-jumbo and blessing people, and Mongolian throat singing (including, very possibly, the same sample the KLF used on Chill Out, or maybe not).
2001/8/2
Straight after their triumph in preventing you from plugging your DVD player into your aging TV through your VCR, our friends at Macrovision have created a CD copy protection system that allegedly prevents evil users from illegally ripping the new CD they just bought to evil, unprotected MP3 files. The scheme has been surreptitiously used on a number of unlabelled CDs, but now, a bunch of European hackers have released a workaround, in the form of a low-level Windows driver. Which will probably be illegal under the DMCA in the US, and equivalent legislation in Australia, and due to be enacted in Europe over the next year or so. Though it raises the question: if the "security feature" relies on Windows' handling of "damaged" discs, will it stop Linux software such as cdparanoia?
Melbourne residents take note: If you get a chance to see a band named The Wandering, do so. I saw them last night at Babble, and they were amazing. Guitar/piano/(oboe,flute), very æthereal and moody, and in places somewhat reminiscent of Black Tape For A Blue Girl or something (only without the oh-the-angst-of-it-all lyrics, or any lyrics for that matter).
2001/8/1
US Roundup: And now, the latest news from the World's Leading Nation: Firstly, it comes out that George W. Bush's successful missile defense test was a fake, with the target missile being rigged with a GPS beacon for the "kill vehicle" to lock onto. Now if we could persuade Saddam to make GPS beacons standard equipment, then everything would be fine and dandy, but failing that, the test is a sham. Meanwhile, ancient superstition has triumphed over scientific progress with the House of Representatives voting to ban stem cell research, on Scriptural grounds. And the White House's reproductive health policy, surprisingly enough, will divert funds from those subversive pinko feminists in the family-planning movement towards an abstinence-based strategy, closely tied to evangelical Christian groups.
Details of the new disposable single-use mobile phones, soon to be leaching carcinogens into your groundwater.
A number of well-known actors and comedians are boycotting the Perrier Comedy Awards at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, because the sponsor is linked with genocidal scumbags Nestlé, of third-world baby milk infamy. (I wonder how much pressure will be required before Nestlé clean up their act; they've been killing third-world infants since the early 80s at least, and show no sign of doing anything other than the odd spin/disinformation campaign.)
I just found in my SpamCop holding tray a spam, allegedly from a Miami-based group calling itself the American Coalition for Israel, claiming that the TV news is full of anti-Israeli propaganda (mostly the product of left-wing reporters and self-hating Jews in the media and a "dislike of Judeo-Christian religious values amongst liberal/left journalists", they say), and imploring me to send them $24.95 for a video tape proving why this is so, or to email them if I wish to be removed from their mailing list. I wonder if it's a genuine group of zealots who don't realise that spam pisses more people off than it could possibly convince, or a disinformation campaign from some Palestinian infowar cell, seeking to discredit right-wing pro-Israeli groups?