2002/3/31
Former BeOS filesystem engineers talk about databases as filesystems, and the issues there.
Cultural documents: Summaries of Soviet literary classics, most with impeccable socialist credentials:
The daughter of a Volga fisherman becomes a sniper with a Red partisan detachment. She misses her 41st vicitim (a White officer), then winds up stranded with him on a desert island, where they fall in love. However, the White's essentially selfish, bourgeois nature becomes apparent and she shoots him, fulfilling her mission and her class destiny.
A philistine from the NEP era gets accidentally frozen and is revived fifty years later in 1979. The moderns at first mistake him for an honest worker, but then correctly identify him as a bourgeoisus vulgaris , a blood-sucking insect similar to, but more dangerous than, the bedbug. He is put on display in a cage equipped with special filters to trap all the dirty words. (Klop, 1929)
(via Plep)
2002/3/30
A nifty list of culture-bound syndromes, from exotic ones like Koro and ghost sickness to Western syndromes such as anorexia (both secular and religious). (via bOING bOING)
I went to see Stereolab at the Corner tonight; it was pretty good. First up were local outfit Midstate Orange, another one of Tim from Lacto-Ovo's projects, only with perhaps more of a Mod/power-pop feel. Then Brisbane live dance-groove outfit Full Fathom Five played; they were OK, if a bit on the generic-dance-music side of things. If you're at a club with a head full of E, you may appreciate them more, but they didn't seem particularly inspiring to me. Ninetynine were up next; they had been dealt an unfairly short timeslot (only 30 minutes), but they rocked, playing about 10 songs off (mostly off their last album and new ones), and playing with terrific energy (as always). Unfortunately, there's no news of them playing again for some time.
Then Stereolab came on and played for one and a half hours, including two encores. On stage, they had the usual guitar/bass/drums, various keyboards (I could make out some red Nord keyboards -- perhaps the classic-retro-keys one -- and a Korg modular synth), and a trombone which Laetitia played. They played a lot of songs off Sound-Dust, as well as some older songs, and finished with a long, psychedelic instrumental, all the more enhanced by the coloured fluids projected on the wall behind them.
Graham was also there (in a brand-new Stereolab tour T-shirt, no less) and will undoubtedly post his take on things once he gets back online.
2002/3/29
Occupational hazards: English conceptual artist Tracey Emin (best known for exhibiting soiled bedsheets and the like) recently lost her cat, Docket. Doing what any cat owner would do, she put up posters with a picture of the cat -- only to find them taken down by art collectors who believed them valuable.
For no sooner had the notices gone up, than they were torn down as rumours circulated that they could be worth a fortune. A neighbour in Miss Emin's trendy East London artists' enclave, which also houses Gilbert and George, said: "Apparently people have been quoted £500 a poster."
(via bOING bOING)
2002/3/28
10 INPUT A$ 20 PRINT A$
Distributing the preceding 2-line BASIC program for profit or reputation gain will be a federal felony in the US, punishable by up to five years in prison, if the CBDTPA becomes law, as the program fails to prevent any copyrighted works entered from being illegally copied. Seriously. (ta, Toby)
"Don't confuse fans with pirates." Roger Ebert blasts Universal's copy-protected CDs, comparing them to the failed "DivX" DVD variant.
Financial connections between US Republican Party, Islamic fundamentalist groups. Is it merely a heartwarming example of religious hardliners of two stripes putting their differences aside to wage jihad together against liberalism and secularism (and what is the Reagan/Bush/Bennett Culture War if not a textbook jihad?), or something more sinister?
CodeWeavers, who wrote the CrossOver web browser plug-in for Linux (which allows Windows plug-ins to run under Linux) have now released a system for running MS Office on Linux. Which is technically a fairly impressive feat; equally impressively, all the code has been contributed back to WINE, the LGPLed Windows emulation system for Linux; which means that, after all these years, WINE may be becoming more than a technical curiosity. (It's certainly better than things like Lindows, as (a) it isn't based on a customised, dumbed-down Linux distribution, and (b) the code is going back to the community.) (via Slashdot)
Remember the unofficial Björk remix site, hosting all those fan-made remixes of the Ickle One's songs? Well, apparently now they're in need of a new place to host their site. If you've got a server and/or some bandwidth to spare, and would like the gratitude of countless Björk fans and bedroom remixers, you may want to have a word with them.
Extreme Thrift: A big compedium of tips for saving money. Some of these are sound ecological ideas (such as running "grey water" from showers to the toilet, or composting toilet paper tubes), and others are a bit more out-there (such as going to strangers' funerals for the free food, or serving weak coffee in a dark cup to make it seem stronger). (via Plastic)
2002/3/27
Today's Onion: Hey, Everybody, we'll stop Banker Mudge from tearing down our clubhouse by putting on an avant-garde show:
Who will write this play, you ask? None other than yours truly, Mickey McCune, natch! Aw, don't worry, I've seen lots of these kind of showsÂcabaret, poetry recitals, performance art, you name it. It'll be a cinch! I think I'll call my work Meat Play . It will be the story of the aforementioned fetus, who survives a premature birth and eventually ascends to the throne of an obscure Eastern European kingdom. There will be a waltzing skeleton, a murderous clown, an enormously fat industrialist who sits atop a large glass toilet and defecates money, and a lecherous bishop who covets his own sister but can't act on his impulses because he's buried up to his chest in dirt. Ain't that a peach?
And then there's also "Man Bitten By Radioactive Sloth Does The Lying-Around-All-Day Of 10 Normal Men":
CENTRAL CITYÂLaboratory assistant Brent Barker, bitten by a radioactive sloth last week in a freak lab accident, now possesses the relative loafing powers of 10 men. "Could someone pass me some more crackers?" asked the media-dubbed "Crimson Lump," speaking from his titanium sofa, the only known object that can withstand his superhuman lethargy. "I can't reach them from here." Scientists are likewise baffled at Barker's uncanny ability to remain motionless while watching amounts of television that would kill an ordinary mortal.
Sounds that annoy cats, brought to you by a company that makes (Windows) software for cat-proofing keyboards. Because everybody needs some (sounds, that is).
Disobeying doctor's orders: This evening, I went down to the Empress Hotel to see Baseball (Cameron from Ninetynine's side project) and Seth Rees (the local shoegazing guitar instrumentalist). The show rocked. Baseball were great, playing with an eccentric varietty of instruments (accordion, violin, and a drum that looked like it may have belonged to an old-fashioned toy soldier (only larger, of course), alongside guitar and drum kit). Their songs included a number of quirky minor-key numbers, sounding like something out of a late-night movie on SBS, and the band put a great amount of feeling into them.
Then Seth went up and did a set of processed guitar ambience, halfway through which he called Cameron (who was standing out as usual, in a Pakistani fur hat, pink shirt and gaudy tie) up to play drums. That went down quite well, especially considering that they've never played together.
Btw, Baseball may (or may not) be supporting Vodka Party tomorrow (Wednesday) night at the Czech Club. If they are, they're well worth seeing.
2002/3/26
Europe is about to establish a .eu domain, giving European businesses and organisation a choice other than national domains (such as .uk or .de) and top-level domains (such as .com). Though didn't the .eu domain exist for a while, only without many sites in it for reasons of bureaucratic inertia?
More on Internet access in the Workers' Paradise of Cuba: the Cuban government has just banned the sale of computers to individuals without special authorisation; this is believed to be to control the spread of underground media, and maintain strict control over the flow of information.
Do new US postage stamps (allegedly based on the logo of the Roman Prætorian Guard) signal the rise of fascism in America, or is that a paranoid fantasy fnord? Come to think of it, if those Neighbourhood Watch commercials are real, they sound pretty scary... (via Leviathan)
I picked up Hope Sandoval's album Bavarian Fruit Bread last week, and it has been growing on me. Very lovely stuff, in a very laid-back sort of way.
A piece on the effects of the SSSCA CBDTPA. Nice. Not only will it essentially outlaw open-source software development, but it will surround the USA with a virtual "national firewall", by criminalising the importation of non-compliant software. (And that includes downloading Linux kernel sources from the Free World.) All this in the name of protecting Disney's right to keep harvesting the bucks.
Remember the "model democracy" of Cuba that those nice young people from Resistance told you about outside the Nike store one Friday afternoon, and how much more free and happy Cubans are than the oppressed serfs of McWorld? Well, for one thing, the free, happy Cubans are not allowed access to the Internet, lest they become infected with counterrevolutionary ideas. Internet access exists, but is only available to foreigners and trusted members of the Communist Party hierarchy. Not that that stops determined dissidents, who buy access cards from foreigners and use them surreptitiously, or even use accounts and passwords from resourceful hackers who steal them and sell them at a hefty price. (via Techdirt)
2002/3/25
An article from The Age about Stereolab, who are touring this week.
"We are sometimes asked to re-record French songs in translation, usually for commercial reasons; day-time radio won't play anything foreign. But we really can't see the point. It's ridiculous - most English pop songs don't make much sense anyway.
As of today, I've been on the Internet (after a fashion) for 10 years. 10 years ago, on the 25th of March, 1992, I got my first account on yoyo, a student-run shared UNIX machine at Monash. Back then it was (a) the only game in town (Windows-based PC mail clients and POP accounts didn't exist, and nor did the Web, so everyone thus inclined telnetted to this shared UNIX box and used pine/nn/nethack/whatever), and (b) a DECstation 2100 with 8Mb of RAM (i.e., roughly equivalent to a Sony PlayStation 1 in CPU architecture/performance), and as such (c) slow as hell, especially at peak times. Ten years later, after a succession of accounts on institutional and friends' machines, I arrived here.
Blah. I seem to have caught the flu or something, and I'm feeling like death warmed over; no more blogging (or much else) from me tonight. Hopefully I'll feel well enough to see Stereolab/Ninetynine on Friday though.
James Lileks eviscerates Mike Moore, the multi-millionnaire self-styled anti-corporate class warrior. And this piece makes Moore look like a buffoonish poseur, and not the noble champion of the New Scum he paints himself as. (via Reenhead)
2002/3/24
A rant from the US on why your politics suck if you're a liberal, conservative or libertarian. Now does anybody want to do an Australian version? (Graham?) (via Plastic)
A study in the UK has shown that most people under 25 are more dextrous in their thumbs than their index fingers; an adaptation for pushing buttons on mobile phones, remote controls and GameBoys. (This is not a mutation, as the article calls it, though, unless you ascribe to the Lamarckian model of evolution.)
An interesting page on the history and chemistry of absinthe. Apparently many of the so-called absinthes which are now legally obtainable contain little or no thujone (the active ingredient), and are basically nothing more than extremely expensive alcohol containing green food dye. (via bOING bOING)
The Americas' answer to "THIS IS A HEAVY PRODUCT" seems to be the somewhat more kooky so-called Toynbee Tiles, which assert a nexus between the English historian and Stanley Kubrick, and call for the resurrecting of the dead on Jupiter. (via rotten.com)
A tutorial on how to draw those nifty Aqua-style icons, as seen in MacOS X. It assumes Photoshop, though it shouldn't be too hard to adapt to the GIMP.
2002/3/22
I saw Greg Egan's newie, Schild's Ladder, at Slow Glass Books today; however, so far it's only the $49.95 hardback. I'll probably wait until April when the trade paperback comes out. I did manage to pick up a copy of Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division today, though.
More on semiopathy:
Advertisers seem particularly keen on getting the wrong message across. What proud parent would want to buy Boots' "Extra Thick Baby Wipes" for their little Einstein? And who would stop at the farm near Edinburgh announcing "Burning logs and peat for sale", unless they were really fed up with their car interior? And Janis Cortese was tickled by a spam e-mail promising that she could "attract men with larger breasts". However, she tells us she would generally prefer to attract men who have no discernible breasts of any kind.
Some things I'd like to see on DVD (though probably won't):
- Angels of the Universe
- Dogs In Space
- Heavenly Creatures
- The Cure's Standing on a Beach videos. (Yes, I know of the new video DVD; it doesn't have a few classic early videos though.)
Bend over America, here it comes: SSSCA introduced into US Senate, after being renamed to the "Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act". This exceedingly nasty bill will mandate copy-denial systems in all electronic devices (including your PC), and make it a federal crime to circumvent said systems; or, essentially, herding consumers where they may be more easily harvested by the content corporations, their own rights be damned. Needless to say, this poses a threat to the legality of open-source operating systems and commodity hardware. The House of Representatives hasn't yet introduced a similar bill, though it shouldn't be ruled out. If you're in the US, now is a good time to write to your Senator and tell them why the bill is a very bad idea.
Researchers get one step closer to growing meat in vats; now they have successfully made slices of fish muscle tissue grow in bovine serum (which they plan to replace with a vegan medium). Such a technique could produce much more efficient, and less ecologically expensive, ways of producing meat than by raising and killing animals.
Business models for the new millennium: I just got spam from some idiot announcing triumphantly that they just bought a mailing list, giving them the right to advertise to me, and ending with:
Thank you for your time and hope to see you order many things from us. This is a once a week mailing so you won't forget what we offer because I know that you will really love our things when you see what we have to offer! Also please do not try to hack into our web sites because we can hack back and we will destroy your computer with a super ping, you have been warned!
Needless to say, it's now in the hands of their ISP's abuse department. I believe this could count as a "terrorist threat" as well, something that the authorities don't take kindly to these days.
Sokoban in sed! And it's quite playable too, if you don't depend on advancing to the next level automatically. (via Slashdot)
2002/3/21
Researchers in Japan have developed a new solution for taking care of their growing elderly population: a robot teddy bear which contains health sensors and speech recognition, doubling as a health monitor and social companion:
But the robo-ted can also alert staff if conversation breaks off suddenly, indicating perhaps that its owner has collapsed. Interactions, by voice and touch, are recorded and can be analyzed remotely to detect changes in a resident's behavior.
So if you stop talking to the damned thing, perhaps realising that it's not a very interesting conversationalist, it calls the men in white coats?
A company has developed speech synthesis with user-selectable accents, including an Australian accent and a Scottish brogue. Wonder on which platforms this technology will be available.
So much for objective search results; the Google search engine (you know, the only one that gives you something other than porn sites) now blacklists anti-Scientology websites from search results; Google has programmed its filters to elide all references to sites such as Operation Clambake, which criticise the Church of Scientology and its practices, from search results, presumably for fear of Elron's legal rottweilers. At the moment, only search results for "scientology" are censored; looking for "operation clambake" still takes you to xenu.net.
How to make a bootleg remix; you know, one of those post-ironic collages of two songs; one traditionally cheesy bubblegum and the other ultra-hard-core, and/or one of them being by Missy Elliott. (via Lukelog)
See, the luck I've had could make a good man bad: New research discovers that rejection dramatically reduces one's IQ and reasoning ability, increases aggression. It is speculated that being rejected affects one's faculty of self-control (which is exercised in social situations), which affects problem-solving ability (used in IQ tests) and tendency towards violent, impulsive or self-destructive behaviour. Which probably explains Trent Reznor and the like.
2002/3/20
The Alphabet Synthesis Machine, a Java applet which interactively evolves random alphabets and lets you download a TrueType font when you're finished. They don't look anything like any existing alphabet though. (ta, Ben)
Found art: SpamRadio. Spam turned into music with the help of a speech synthesizer. (Though for some reason it plays at double speed here.) (via bOING bOING)
In a heartwarming example of global cooperation, the United States, whose constitution ties the government's hands in dealing with terrorists, has been outsourcing interrogations to torture-friendly régimes. So far this is only for Al Qaeda terrorist suspects (who, it has been established, are not human beings but vermin, and thus not eligible for human rights), but think of the efficiency savings if this is extended to dealing with drug dealers, computer hackers and domestic terrorists such as anti-oil-drilling activists. (via Plastic)
Putrefaction is the end, of all that nature doth entend: Researchers in Germany claim that face creams and preservatives in food are causing overcrowding in cemeteries, by preventing bodies from decomposing properly.
Read: Ex-WIRED cyberculture digeratus Kevin Kelly on where music will be coming from in the age of unlimited digital copying.
But the moment something becomes free and ubiquitous, its position in the economic equation is suddenly inverted. When nighttime electrical lighting was new, it was the poor who burned common candles. When electricity became easily accessible and practically free, candles at dinner became a sign of luxury
Of course, this Utopian view does not entertain the possibility of a dystopia of totalitarian access control everywhere in the interests of "protecting intellectual property" from becoming something other, and guaranteeing the megacorps' ability to harvest the profits as before; which may well be the most likely outcome.
Here's an idea: BookCrossing; a web site which lets you register books, so you can "abandon" them in public places for others to find. (via Wired News)
US teen slang after the WTC attack. Attractive boys are "firefighter cute", petty concerns are "*sooo* Sept. 10", mean teachers are "terrorists", and weird kids (read: acceptable targets for bullying) are "Taliban". (via Reenhead)
Some authors in the US are complaining about used book sales cutting into their profits. I know... we need tougher copyright laws, severe penalties for redistributing books and universal copy-denial technologies to stem this nefarious tide of what amounts to theft. Umm...
How quickly they change their tune. The Government has confirmed that allegations of pederasty made by Senator Bill Heffernan against Justice Michael Kirby are completely false, and based on fraudulent documents, and called on Heffernan to apologise and resign from being cabinet secretary. This is not long after Howard himself lent credence to the allegations, suggesting that the government have the power to sack judges whose sex lives it didn't approve of (other than the usual puritanism, a breach of separation of powers), and insinuating that there is a connection between homosexuality and paedophilia; undoubtedly hoping to leverage the prejudices of Hanson-voting Middle Australia, so useful for winning the last election, to help purge a cumbersomely progressive judge.
2002/3/19
A thought-provoking rant about the commodification of St. Patrick's Day, and the tendency of everybody from British royals to Hollywood celebrities to ordinary people wanting an excuse to get blotto to assert their newly-contrived Irishness. An Irishness which has been reduced into a "concept", a "feeling", or a sanitised, Disneyfied lifestyle package for mass consumption.
Anyone can become Irish today. You can show our Irishness by going to the right pub, having the right attitude, by ticking a box on a census form - but not by getting drunk, fighting, shouting 'Fuck the Queen', or any of the other activities you might traditionally have associated with being Irish, which are especially frowned upon by fake Irish pubs like O'Neill's (no relation).
Is plastic-shamrock cod-Irishness, as some speculated, the one acceptable way in which white people can claim a funky, rootsy tribal identity; one with enough? (via Plastic)
An etext of The King in Yellow, Robert Chambers' pioneering supernatural-horror collection from 1895. (via the Horn again)
2002/3/18
More on the Greens' strong showing in elections. They've clinched formerly Labor-dominated Yarra Council, and won seats in Apollo Bay (of all places) and in the People's Republic of Moreland. Whether they build up a power base, or whether this is just a transitional stage to Liberals winning newly-gentrified ex-Labor seats, remains to be determined; though their policies look more sane and humane than the others'.
A Florida man has been told that he must get rid of his number plate, which reads "ATHEIST", which is apparently an offensive term around those parts. (via Mitch)
I've just returned from Apollo Bay, after spending about 3 days there at the Music Festival. It was great.
I got there on Friday afternoon, arriving on the coach, and checking into the Apollo Bay Hotel (that's the big flat pub with the sprawling beer garden); I then wandered around the township, which I hadn't seen for something like 10 years. I first came to Apollo Bay when I was 17, and have vivid memories of that summer; the sensation of the vast chasm of time between then and now (a lot changes in 11 years) was quite profound.
(Apollo Bay has changed, but not as much as I feared. It hasn't become the St Kilda by the Otways that some have said; and while there is a prominent tourist industry, it's not all chrome yuppie latté bars and bling-bling, at least not yet. (No, that'd be Lorne.) Apollo Bay is still a small township, with a lack of slickly branded consumer experiences, thank the Gods for that. (How long that will last I don't know; land prices are through the roof and the wealthy are buying up land, undoubtedly to knock down the modest houses and replace them with chrome-and-concrete lifestyle fortresses.) The changes I've noticed are that the old Post Office building is now a fruit shop (I think it was an arts shop in 1992, but I'm not sure), and the Mechanics' Hall is no longer a cinema. (I remember seeing a rather bad horror movie there in 1991.)
Anyway, the bands: the highlights from what I saw would be FourPlay (who rocked; the crowd went wild, even in the unenviable Sunday morning slot), Sarah-Jane Wentzki (who has a great voice, and played some melancholic almost trip-hop compositions on guitar, accompanied by Seth Rees' shoegazing guitarwork), and the all-star jam at the end (led by Melbourne reggae outfit Bomba, who obviously studied Bob Marley in great detail). Other acts I saw included the Mongolian Fishmongers (who weren't as punk as the blurb suggested, being more of a pub-style Celtic/country outfit, and none of them had bizarre hair or piercings), Ember Swift (who was quite good in a folky PC singer-songwriter sort of way) and Skazz (who played a mixture of 1960s-style ska and jazz, and did a good job of it). The opening night performance was quite cool too, with fireworks, fire twirling, and people in costumes, and various music (the second piece, with the flute and massed choir, was quite good).
Other than that, I bimbled around Apollo Bay, took a lot of photos (the ones which weren't obliterated when my camera crashed may be posted here soon), went to a few workshops (the TZU turntablism workshop (which was fun), and a blues guitar workshop (which was somewhat interesting)), and hung around with friends (Peter and the gang, and Seth and friends).
All in all, I had a great time. I'll probably go back next year.
According to a lady in a quoll costume in Apollo Bay last night, the Greens have swept Victoria's council elections. They won 5 of the 9 seats in Yarra Council (inner Melbourne, where I live), which is now likely to have the first Green mayor. Meanwhile, over there, they have won their first seat in the Colac Otway shire council, where the big battle about old-growth logging is taking place. Rock!
French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan to convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God.
Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafés at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.
Somehow I don't think Dubya would be too keen on that though... oh, hang on.
Pentagon sources have recently confirmed rumours that America has already sent in a 200-foot-tall robot Jesus, which roams the Taleban front lines glowing eerily and shooting flames out of its fingers while saying, 'I am the way, the truth and the life, follow me or die.' However, plans to have the giant Christ kick the crap out of a slightly effeminate 80-foot Mohammed in central Kabul were discarded as insensitive to Muslim allies.
(via the Horn)
2002/3/15
I'm typing this in an Internet café in Apollo Bay. The computers are quite ancient, but they're sufficiently unprotected for me to download PuTTY and ssh home.
I spent most of today on a coach travelling down the Great Ocean Road. Not the most luxurious form of travel. If you have to catch a coach, you're well advised to take a source of music and headphones. (The headphones cannot be stressed enough; i.e., not like the dude with the boombox across the aisle who was sharing his taste in nu-metal with the other passengers; granted, he had the volume down, but why bother?)
Discovery of the day: the perfect soundtrack for riding down the Great Ocean Road is Slowdive's Pygmalion; it goes sublimely with the scenery (surf on deserted rocky beaches, roads winding around desolate craggy cliffs, etc.); and seeing the approach to Lorne open up two minutes into Blue Skied An' Clear was just perfect.
Righto, that's enough blogging for now; I'm off. Blogging will probably be sporadic or nonexistent over the next few days.
Scientists in Israel have found a connection between fast music and dangerous driving. As the tempo increases, drivers take more risks and drive like maniacs. (Which confirms my observations, some years ago, on the effects of goa trance whilst driving down the freeway.)
Nifty: A program which locates found haiku in text files. Well, found senryu, to be precise. (It needs Python 2.2, as it uses generators.) (via bOING bOING)
Stop hating us or face the consequences: The editor of US conservative publication National Review wants to nuke Mecca if there are any more terrorist attacks. Ever the humanitarian, he argues that Mecca should be a target because "few people would die and it would send a signal". And probably start a holy war against America by the 99.999% of Muslims who, prior to the attack, had no sympathy for the terrorists. Of course, such retaliation can be averted by threatening to nuke other cities in the Islamic world if there is any outpouring of anti-American sentiment:
"Damascus, Cairo, Algiers, Tripoli, and Riyadh should be put on alert that any signs of support for the attacks in their cities will bring immediate annihilation."
(via bOING bOING)
The Digital Consumer Bill of Rights; which reads curiously like Aleister Crowley:
- Users have the right to "time-shift" content that they have legally acquired.
- Users have the right to "space-shift" content that they have legally acquired.
- Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
- Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
- Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
- Users have the right to
kill those who would thwart these rightsuse technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.
2002/3/14
Boot, face, forever: An insightful Salon article on the push for total copyright control, and how it is incompatible with the Internet as a pluralistic communication medium:
A public service announcement: Please instill in your children conservative valuse of dogmatic religious conviction and intolerant social beliefs... or your child may be one of the one children who join the Taliban. (via the Horn)
(The conservative "Godless liberal pluralism -> joining the Taliban" argument is, of course, absurd; however, one wonders whether or not there may be a weaker memetic effect, in the sense of children with no exposure to religion having reduced immunity to fundamentalist religious memes; I have heard of atheist/humanist parents who deliberately went to church with their children for a year or two to "innoculate" them against getting religion and becoming fundamentalist zealots. Though, of course, one could apply this argument to other virulent belief systems, such as Marxism or Objectivism, for example.)
Strange: 25-year-old burglar from Wisconsin (the state which has produced more serial killers than any other in the US, if I recall correctly) breaks into Chicago Underground storage room, hides huge stash of cyanide, changing the locks afterward. It is not clear what he wanted the cyanide for, or indeed whether he was an admirer of Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein or Marilyn Manson, but he did have a posse of teenage followers who called themselves the "Realm of Chaos". (via rotten.com)
A page of lore from the London Underground. Some of it will be mostly of anorak interest, though parts (such as train drivers' pranks, dead passengers and such) may be more interesting. And I can't help but wonder wonder whether Meg had anything to do with those "nasty habit?" signs. (via plep)
2002/3/13
At a Pentagon press conference Monday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld touted the military's upcoming Gulf War II: The Vengeance as "even better than the original."
Odd musical act of the day: CasioNova. The sounds of seduction as you've never heard them before...
Life imitates search-engine referrals: Britney pelted with buckets of urine. (via rotten.com)
2002/3/12
Scratch an atheist and you'll find a Communist terrorist:
Since the terrorist attacks, discrimination against atheists has increased in the US, with the Godless being shunned, denied jobs and vilified as traitors if they reveal their beliefs. As a result, many have retreated to the closet.
Mark Barnes of San Francisco says that revealing his atheism was as difficult as revealing his homosexuality in his native Oklahoma. Filmmaker John Mendoza, whose 2001 movie "Blasphemy" was shown at the meeting, says his mother, "who prayed on her knees in front of the sacred heart of Jesus every day, felt she had failed me and my older brother told me to stay away from his children." And Mary from Berkeley says, "My parents still think I'm going through a stage. Mom, it's been like, 15 years!"
Wonder if it will get to the stage of atheists pretending to be Christians (or indeed Buddhists or Unitarian Universalists or something), or of witch-hunts for "new Christians" who are just going through the motions and secretly teaching their children Darwinism and secular humanism. The more some things change, the more they stay the same. (via 1.0)
We Hate Starbucks, a resource for protest and miscellaneous subversion against the McDonalds of coffee. Hmmm; when the Brunswick St. store opens, it may call for some, umm, festivities. (via the Horn)
The long now: A paper looking at ways of marking nuclear waste dumps as dangerous in a way that can still be understood in 10,000 years' time, without reliance on common cultural meanings. (And no, it doesn't include establishing apocalyptic death cults around their periphery or spreading legends of evil spirits or anything.)
* Design of the entire site and its subelements should avoid those forms that humans regularly tend to use to represent the "ideal," "perfection," or "aspiration." Aspiring forms are sky-reaching verticals, the obelisk, for example. Ideal and perfect ones are the the perfect forms of symmetrical geometry (spheres, pyramids, hexagons) and of regular crystalline structures or polyhedrons. If such forms are used, we suggest their perfection be undermined through substantial and obviously meant "irregularity," as if its builders knew about the ideal and perfection, but asserted that this place is not about them. More appropriate types of forms to use are amorphic or jagged and horizontal, a deliberate shunning of the values of "perfection" or "aspiration."
(via Plastic)
The killer application for broadband Internet access has been found, and not surprisingly, it has to do with pictures of cats.
The site has become a huge hit with surfers, as visitors log on to check Frank's progress, send him get well cards and e-mail pictures of their own pets.
Political rant of the day:
So the US has reserved the right to launch a nuclear first strike against a
list of "rogue nations" (including China, alongside old favourites like Libya
and Iraq) if they do anything suspicious.
Though now analysts say that a first strike is unlikely, and the most
likely scenario is nuclear retaliation for a terrorist attack.
Oh, that makes it OK then. Some underground cells connected with the
Nefralian dictator (who is most likely a former CIA puppet gone rogue)
kill a few thousand innocent American civilians in a terrorist attack,
and in return the US nukes the capital of Nefralia, killing a few million
men, women and children.
Which is perfectly fair and just, because each one of our lard-assed, SUV-driving, TV-watching, shiny-crap-consuming lives is worth a thousand of theirs.
Besides, they don't like us much over there.
And it's not like they're real people or anything, in the sense of
wearing fashion labels and watching Friends and hanging out in shopping malls
and keeping up on celebrity gossip and doing regular-people things like that.
Heck, most of them probably wouldn't even know who Jennifer Lopez or Tom Cruise
are or anything.
Giving how boring and lame their lives must be, we'd probably be doing them a favour.
</RANT>
Read: The curse of coffee-table cinema, or how thanks to Disney's Miramax unit, much of "art-house" cinema is now formulaic, content-free soft-focus schmaltz designed to flatter viewers' sense of culture in a mindless sort of way.
Miramax has given the world a host of cliches about European culture - naughty French priests, macho Greeks, hoity-toity Englishmen, zany Italians - and has reduced human complexity to a bunch of hopeless stereotypes bursting with sentiment.
(See also: Working Title, Merchant Ivory) (via FmH)
Doctors who allowed severely disabled children to be born are being sued for "wrongful life". (Or should that be "conduct engendering life"?)
There was some interesting music on Local and/or General (the 3RRR local music programme) tonight; they played a track by a Sydney band named Grace Emily, who sounded somewhere between Mogwai and The Paradise Motel, or something thereabouts; brooding, minor-key soundscapes with shoegazing guitar textures and Hammond and such, and no vocals. Apparently they have an EP out, titled Caressing the Page; there's a promising review on this site. Though chaosmusic.com haven't heard of it.
There was also a great (and rather long) minimalist post-rock instrumental from an outfit named North Atlantic, who sounded vaguely like Flying Saucer Attack or Hood or someone from that headspace. It apparently came off a CD titled A Forest of Masts, which was sent in to the station, and about which no information seems to exist.
2002/3/11
Beyond the iPod: it turns out that if you want to shoplift software from in-store demo computers, there are many ways to go about it; from asking a bored, underpaid staffer to demo a CD burner for you to surreptitiously copying it to your digital camera, to simply FTPing it to your home machine. Of course, if you use a platform with widely available free software, there's no need to do this sort of thing. (via Techdirt)
Sows dig jerks, it seems. Scientists in Australia and England have found that female pigs are most aroused by the nastiest boar in the pen, preferring aggressive, noisy, vicious and otherwise boorish male pigs to their more docile counterparts. The scientists have suggested parallels to human nature, where some women appear to be irresistibly drawn to "bad men".
"I suppose it's not that different from what you might see going on between men and woman housed in a hostel at a university. It's the same sort of thing," observed Mr. Thornton, who is from Bristol, England.
Perhaps it's a universal truth that, whatever one's species, those who make pigs of themselves are likely to to have good reasons to get away with it? (Or at least, would have had such reasons in the ancestral environment.)
Currently listening to a borrowed copy of the self-titled album by a US post-rockish band named The For Carnation. They're quite good; a bit like Low meets Piano Magic, or something. I think I'll have to find a copy somewhere.
2002/3/10
What is it about the Evelyn Hotel that attracts wankers with egos the size of a small principality? The Punters never was like this.
Is J.R.R. Tolkien responsible for computer culture, and in particular its' hypermasculine, binary nature? MIT professor Sherry Turkle thinks so. Does she have a point, or is this another version of the postmodernist argument about science being the rape of nature, logic being an oppressive patriarchial cultural construct and the like? (via Plastic)
Recently declassified top-secret files have revealed that renowned Australian microbiologist and Nobel laureate Sir Macfarlane Burnet urged the Australian government to develop biological weapons to depopulate Asia, in case the swarthy nogooders decide to invade us.
The minutes of a meeting at Melbourne's Victoria Barracks in 1948 noted that Sir Macfarlane "was of the opinion that if Australia undertakes work in this field it should be on the tropical offensive side rather than the defensive. There was very little known about biological attack on tropical crops."
2002/3/9
Toy of the day: They Rule, an interactive map of the connections between corporate boards. (via Plastic)
This Just In: The Universe is not turquoise, as previously reported; it is a boring shade of beige. (via Found)
I keep getting search engine referrals from Lycos for various random searches which contain the word "null", regardless of whether or not any of the other words have ever graced these pages. The latest is "fieberhitze vielbeschäftigt null tailrekursionseliminierung legierung", which I presume has something to do with eliminating tail recursion.
Tonight was a good night; I went to Pony, to see a number of bands play. First up was Midstate Orange (a project of Tim from Lacto-Ovo), who were good (perhaps a bit Cure-inspired in places, almost shoegazer in others, and they did one song which was best described as Northern Soul with Casios). Then Lacto-Ovo came on, and did a great set, playing various album and non-album tracks; people started dancing at this stage. Finally, an act named Winterville played; they consisted of 2 guitars, drums and a double bass, featured Michelle formerly of Ninetynine in their lineup, and sounded a bit Dirty Three-inspired.
I met a number of people I knew there; Peter from FourPlay was down from Sydney, and Nick and Naomi from Dandelion Wine also came along. A bit later, I ran into Cameron from Ninetynine, and talked with him a bit. Apparently, Ninetynine have signed a distribution deal with News Corp. "indie" subsidiary Trifekta (though retaining their own copyrights and creative control, so they won't end up being turned into the next George), and at the end of the month depart for some 3 months' touring overseas.
2002/3/8
Two designers in Germany (where else?) have developed a video game which inflicts pain when you lose. Called the PainStation, the game is a two-player tabletop version of the ancient TV game of Pong, only players place their hands on anelectrical plate. An electric shock is delivered to a player when they miss a ball; it can do several sorts of pain, including heat, punches and electric shocks of various duration, and looks likely to be a big hit with the Big Yellow Shorts crowd:
"When you're playing in public against a friend with people cheering you on, it's very hard to throw in the towel without putting up a good fight. I've seen people leave the table with blood on their hands and their skin completely raw because they didn't want to back down in front of an audience."
Surprise, surprise: Connections between filtering software manufactorers and conservative religious groups. In the US, censorware is mandated by law in public schools; and while firms keep their blocked lists a secret and downplay connections to religious groups, it's likely that school students' access to the Net is shaped to conform to religious-Right ideology, with sites about everything from non-traditional religion to sexual orientation being blocked.
The same Fundamentalist-linked firms provide the mandatory censorware required to be supplied with all ISP accounts in Australia, which probably suits Senator Alston just fine.
Happy International Womyns' Day: Voters have narrowly defeated a referendum to tighten Ireland's abortion laws, already some of the most restrictive in the world. The proposal would have closed the loophole allowing women to leave Ireland for an abortion if they're deemed to be at risk of suicide (something which came out of a court case involving a 14-year-old rape victim in 1992). Though the fact that almost half of the voters suppoted such a mean-spirited restriction is somewhat alarming. It seems that the Middle Ages aren't quite over in parts of Ireland.
2002/3/7
Burn down the disco, and hang the blessed DJ: An aging rocker on why dance music is rubbish:
The dance craze is the very antithesis of what punk stood for. Punk was iconoclastic. Its gigs were exuberant and unpredictable. The Pistols and The Clash lifted two fingers at some of the worst aspects of British society, with its class-ridden inequality, nauseating obsession with the Royal Family and penchant for vile-tasting beers. Dance, on the other hand, is contrived and controlled. John Major's government gave it an undeserved outlaw appeal by trying to curb large raves through public order legislation. The little grey man need not have worried his funny-looking head. Dance culture is about as big a threat to the governing classes as Val Doonican or Celine Dion.
A friend of mine, a former punk who claims to appreciate the underlying aesthetics of dance music, explained to me why I am a dance philistine. "It's very simple, Dave. You don't take E." Taking ecstasy "gives you a great buzz", my friend informed me. After popping an E tab once, he stayed up all night reading gardening books, planning his shrubbery in minute detail. Hearing that an ex-punk resorts to rave drugs, to improve his gardening, convinced me that something is seriously wrong with the world.
I must confess that I don't entirely disagree with him; I listen to more music played by live musicians than pre-sequenced electronica (though a bit of the latter), I don't have much time for the sorts of homogeneous, repetitive records that you can only appreciate when on drugs at a club, and on most of the times I saw "live electronica" acts, I found them boring (with the exception of the more theatrical acts like Down Town Brown).
OTOH, I wouldn't write off all electronica in the same vein; some of it (such as Negativland's The Letter U and the Numeral 2, which he rubbishes in the article) has more in common with his beloved punk genre's core ethos than he gives credit.
The punk rebellion started because music in the Seventies had become mind-numbingly bland. As we approach the millennium, the dance music promoted by the style gurus is even more infuriating. Any attempt at a punk rebellion now would probably be ludicrous. Yet we urgently need something with similar vitality and imagination to challenge the mediocrity stifling European club-life.
I think the problem is not that there is no challenging, vital music, but that the industry and market ignore it and select for easy-to-digest blandness instead. (link via 1.0)
The Mouse That Ate The Public Domain, a good summary of the Disney-sponsored copyright extension act, and hopes for overturning it.
Seen in this light, the CTEA cannot survive. Because already existing works cannot be created anew, extension of subsisting copyrights does not "promote progress." Congress is not empowered merely to provide copyright holders with an additional boon - that is not "progress", but corporate welfare.
The linguistic convention by which works "fall" when they enter the public domain is revealing: immanent in the phrase is the notion that a work is debased when no longer copyrighted. Perhaps it is this view that allows statutes that shrink the public domain to gain widespread support.
Cool; Moses Avalon, of "Confessions of a Record Producer" fame, has a web site. This includes a (somewhat outdated) industry newsletter detailing the latest recording racket scams and lawsuits, and the royalty calculator, which shows by how much you're getting screwed if you're an artist signed to a major label. (via bOING bOING)
2002/3/6
Did Christopher Marlowe write Shakespeare's plays, having used the mediocre actor and landowner Shakespeare as a frontman after having faked his murder with the help of his handlers in the Royal Secret Service? A new documentary presents evidence which seems, on the surface, quite compelling.
A BBC announcer may be prosecuted for blasphemous libel after reading out a poem about a centurion's homoerotic lust for Jesus. The author of the poem already was sentenced to nine months with hard labour for blasphemy upon its publication in 1976; the sentence was suspended. Britain's blasphemy laws, which apply only to blasphemy against Christianity, were introduced in the seven teenth century, when ques-tioning the existence of the state religion was akin to treason. They have remained unamended ever since.
A catalogue of "big" landmarks in Australia, or a homage to the Australian tradition of making cyclopean replicas of random objects and putting them in various country towns to attract tourists or the easily amused.
2002/3/5
3RRR just played a glitchy electronic reworking of The Smiths' There Is A Light That Never Goes Out by a German outfit named Schneider TM. Apparently it's from a Rough Trade compilation called Rough Trade Shops: Electronic 01, which consists of 2 CDs of tracks selected by people who worked in Rough Trade record shops. Sounds interesting...
My musical instrument collection grows slightly: I was on Sydney Rd. today, and at one of the pawn shops there, I picked up a Casiotone MT-45 keyboard. (That's the one with the laughably thin imitations of instrument sounds, and the 8 built-in rhythm loops that you may have heard used by everyone from Ninetynine to Sealifepark to Lacto-Ovo.) I'll probably use it for experimenting, and possibly in recording as well; and if I figure out how to get into live performance, it may come in handy (being small, for one).
Oh dear... there are goth furries out there. Wonder if they consider themselves much cooler than the furries who aren't goths. Or indeed if they're into Star Trek slash fiction as well. (via Psychoceramics)
Cos mentioned this outfit a while ago: Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. Basically a guy in San Francisco recording naïve little pop songs on toy keyboards and answering machines; very DIY.
Dead media: In 1986, the British government commissioned a new digital Domesday Book, as a state-of-the-art time capsule of contemporary Britain. 16 years later, no-one can read it. The New Domesday Book, you see, was stored on 12-inch laser discs, accessible by special custom hardware and software based around the BBC Micro (which was sort of the British national computer in those days, and only used in education and official functions; pity, as it was probably the most sophisticated system based around a 6502, but I digress). This is emblematic of how a lot of data in obsolete formats has been lost, because the means to access it no longer exists.
A crisis in digital preservation now afflicts all developed countries. Databases recorded in old computer formats can no longer be accessed on new generation machines, while magnetic storage tapes and discs have physically decayed, ruining precious databases.
I picked up Röyksopp's Melody A.M. today; at first listen, it's pretty good; ambient and soundscapey and a bit moody and atmospheric and groovy in places, though managing to avoid becoming dull or repetitive. (Unlike some superficially gimmicky retro-house acts, of the "here is a track called "Minimoog" that has a MiniMoog in it, and here is an 80s-electro-hip-hop pastiche, and here's some filler, and here we build a track around a sample of African flute; cool, non?" variety.)
I also picked up the most recent Stereolab CD, though the jury's still out on that.
2002/3/4
Be paranoid: Connections between the CIA and the Florida flight school at which the September 11 terrorists studied. And Christian Fundamentalist preacher Jerry Falwell, who blamed gays, feminists and liberals for bringing God's judgment down on the WTC, is also connected to the company. Could it be that, sometimes, God's wrath needs a terrestrial helping hand? (via one.point.zero)
A look at Britain's mobile-phone mugging epidemic, by a 14-year-old girl who has had two phones stolen:
My friends and I are "trendies". We wear American-type skateboarders' clothes: hoodies and baggy trousers. The kids who jack mobile phones we call "rudes" - rude boys. They're working class, mainly black, although not always, and at the moment they wear these funny woolly hats with two bobbles, and big jackets with fur-lined hoods. (Obviously, only a minority of kids who dress like this go jacking phones.)
(So the victims dress in imitation of ghetto gangbangers from America and the perpetrators are actual local gangbangers? The authentic preys on the imitation...)
A few days ago, I dreamt that I saw a new Commodore 64. It was like the old one (well, the white, triangular one, anyway), but for one addition: beneath the joystick ports, there was a USB socket. Apparently there was logic onboard which translated USB mass storage to the Commodore's crippled IEEE-488, allowing the C64 to access ZIP disks and the like as if they were 1541 disks. Then I realised that the USB translator logic would probably be more complex and computationally powerful than the C64 itself.
And, as if by coincidence, NtK tells me that some enthusiastic soul is reviving Zzap!64 Magazine, undoubtedly reliving cherished childhood fantasies. Don't expect to see issue 107 at newsstands anytime soon, though if you have a fast link and a colour printer, you can print out yourself and show it to your trainspotter mates. (It's only 30Mb in PDF format.) And if that's not enough, they have an archive of back-issues, in HTML and scans; this includes a number of features, including Andrew Braybrook's Paradroid diary.
I wasn't a Zzap! reader during the 80s; I preferred Commodore Computing International, which had a bit more in the way of technical details. Now I just read Future Music, which fills a similar niche, though is perhaps a bit less silly. What is it about English tech magazines?
First came archæological and linguistic analyses of the Christian apocrypha and Gospels, and the resulting theories of their authorship, and now a new generation of scholars are turning their attention to analysing the origins of the Koran and the Islamic religion using similar methods. Their research has shown a number of things at odds with the official line (for one, they claim that the Koran was written over several centuries, and probably somewhere with more Jews and Christians than Mecca; and also, the thing about the 72 virgins is apparently an error of translation). However, many of them write under pseudonyms, as their occupation is a dangerous one; some unorthodox scholars have already been attacked or threatened with death by fundamentalist groups. (via Plastic)
2002/3/3
Japanese T-shirt of the day, from the very amusing engrish.com. Wonder if there's any way to get them in Australia. (via bOING bOING)
Social engineering: A sneaky way to find out a friend's secrets with the use of a fake web survey. Though in this case, "secrets" is limited to sexual history and fantasies, so this is probably more of interest to excitable adolescents or fans of teen gross-out comedies. (via bOING bOING)
Shit. It looks like the EU is about to legislate for mandatory DRM technology in all digital devices. Wonder if they follow through when they realise that it is impossible to add copy-denial to an open-source OS, and that mandating DRM technologies will restrict the use of open-source (read: non-Microsoft) operating systems, essentially enforcing an expensive dependency on a foreign software monopoly.
Tonight I went to Pony to see Stuart from Boyracer/555 Recordings' solo act, Steward. He rocked. Most of the set featured backing tracks off a CD, but nonetheless, the live performance was inspiring. He started off by playing these toy drumsticks (you know, the ones with the speaker box on the belt which makes electronic drum sounds when you shake them) over a track, then went on to play guitar over a few others. Towards the middle of the show he went walkabout in the audience with a QuickShot toy four-track tape deck and a microphone, and at the end, he used one of those dashboard toys which makes ray-gun/explosion sounds to get weird sounds out of his guitar. The entire performance was done with an inspiring amount of spirit and energy; it made me want to pick up my guitar and start doing weird things to it.
2002/3/2
Evil things afoot: The Reg reports from the SSSCA hearings. Critics of the draconian proposed law were not invited; nonetheless, an Intel representative had the temerity to question the need for legally mandated copy-denial technology in all hardware, and got blasted for it.
The 'some people' says it all. Most people are criminals, and only a tiny minority are honest and decent, Rosen assumes. This is the also official perspective of Hollywood -- of Eisner, and Valenti, and Hollings. It is a perspective natural to a certain class of person. Consider that we all imagine others to be more or less like ourselves. Decent people expect others to be decent, just like themselves. Criminals expect others to be criminals, just like themselves. When Eisner and Rosen and Valenti and Hollings see a world populated by cheats and frauds and freeloading scum, what does that say about them?
I went to the Empress this evening, to see a number of bands. First up were Tugboat, who were not bad. Then was English indie band Boyracer, or rather Stuart from Boyracer, his wife Jen (?) and someone else filling in on drums. It was an interesting show; Stuart played the guitar like a maniac, gurning and wibbling and jumping about, though it ended up sounding quite good (despite his guitar being a $120 one he picked up on Brunswick St. earlier; he didn't bring his famed Hello Kitty guitar this time). He also joined the Cannanes' lineup when they played afterward, doing various duties, though after breaking a maraca and a glass, he was relegated to playing the triangle. Towards the end he danced about on stage and then decided to help the drummer along, standing in front of him and hitting the drums.
Stuart is also the guy who runs 555 Recordings, formerly of Leeds and now based in the US, and they had a stall, where they sold various CDs for $10. I picked up two things from there: Soft Love: A Tribute to Soft Cell (which is interesting in places, consisting of various weird indie laptop electro-pop and such; New Waver's version of Numbers with the lyrics changed to be about office life is somewhat amusing), and Knowing We Was Right From Da Start, a label retrospective compilation (which I haven't heard all of yet). I also scored the Cannanes' album Communicating At An Unknown Rate.
2002/3/1
Every home should have a ram's head snuff mull on wheels, don't you agree? (via the Horn again)
Speaking of corporations using copyright lawsuits to crush all who defy them, the EFF and a number of US law schools have opened ChillingEffects.org; a site for documenting incidents of legalistic intimidation; everything from Paramount shutting down Star Trek fan sites to the Republicans trying to use trademark law to shut down a critical website named EnronOwnsTheGOP to DMCA-related reverse-engineering lawsuits. Welcome to the Digital Millennium.
Those copyright fascists at Disney are at it again; from McCarthyism to the SSSCA, they've never been far from the repressive authoritarianism du jour. And now, they're buying up the rights to Hong Kong films, editing them (from simple censorship to actively changing the story with dubbing and editing) and completely bastardising the filmmaker's original vision in the process, releasing their edited versions in Western markets, and then suing anybody who deigns to violate Disney's copyrights by making the originals available. Nice; next time Disney's flacks talk about the need for more draconian copyright laws to "protect artists", keep this in mind. (via the Horn)
Now it's autumn; summer is officially over, the days are slowly getting shorter, and the year is getting into full swing. Soon daylight saving time will end and not long after then it will start getting dark at 5pm (something that's hard to imagine in summer; even now it seems unreal).
For some reason, I don't mind winter all that much, though. It getting dark in the afternoon is perhaps a bit irksome, but it's better than sweltering in 40 degree heat; and there's something bracing about the cold, crisp air. Oddly enough, I find the onset of summer to be a bit depressing, in a "bloody hell, there goes another year" kind of way. Which probably comes partly from having a birthday within a week of new year's day.
The latest trend in low-tech music performance: cassette jockeying. Like turntablism only more retro, and without the godlike stature and bootywhang of superstar DJs. Heh; it reminds me of a live act I saw in between acts at the Empress; it was a guy who called himself Son of Icewoman and played hand-spliced tape loops on various old reel-to-reel tape recorders attached to a mixer. Not quite block-rocking beats; more like experimental noise textures.
I wonder whether anyone has tried using the magnetic strips on Metcards or similar cards for recording music; given a sufficiently dismantled tape recorder (or perhaps just a read head wired up to an amplifier), one could swipe the card back and forth, scratching up a loop (or, more probably, a fragment of a loop). (via one.point.zero)