2002/7/1
A set of extra-sarky propaganda posters for the Bush/Ashcroft era.
Cheap Oil Is a RIGHT! Conservation is just Letting the Terrorists Win!
YOU! Stop asking questions!
Perhaps someone should make some for John Howard's Australia. (via bOING bOING)
The latest tidings from the brave new era of neo-Galambosian intellectual-property absolutism: John Cage's music publishers are claiming to own the rights to the concept of silence as music. A British music producer has received a legal nastygram from the publishers over a 60-second silent track on a CD he put together. Cage's publishers are claiming that the track is a derivative work of Cage's 4'33". (via bOING bOING)
2002/6/28
Some good news for a change: the Australian senate has rejected the government's surveillance bill, which would have allowed government agencies to intercept electronic messages (such as email, voice mail and SMS) without a warrant. Don't rejoice too much though, as the government has promised to reintroduce the rejected amendment.
A law drafted in the US will allow recording companies to carry out denial of service attacks against file-sharing services with legal impunity. Another instance of assuming that file-sharing is in itself illegal or criminal.
Boot, human face, forever: Cantabrigian security expert Ross Anderson has a FAQ on Microsoft's Palladium total access control initiative. It looks pretty scary; killing the GPL, neutering Linux and locking down digital music is just the top of a rather sinister iceberg.
Pet Shop Boys Song-by-Song Commentary; a detailed analysis of the Boys' songs, with backstories and other information. In case you ever wondered what exactly West End Girls was about, or how they came up with the cover artwork and titles for various albums. (via Cos)
2002/6/27
More from the Rachel Goswell interview:
RG: Slowdive I look back with pleasure and pain really. The first couple of years was really exciting. And I was a teenager turning into my 20's. I had a lot of experiences I will never forget! Neil and I broke up around the recording of 'Souvlaki' and it was extremely difficult maintaining a working relationship. there was alot of anger and tears. I would say it wasn't really til we started on Mojave that we really broke free of each other completely, personally. Mojave 3 has been alot easier, far more relaxed and by mid twenties you're kind of more sussed about life (though not as much as when you hit 30, lol).
I didn't know that. After this, I'll probably listen to Souvlaki (and, to a lesser extent, Pygmalion) somewhat differently; in particular, just how personal songs like Dagger really are. Though, OTOH, Pygmalion always did have a sense of transcendence-through-abstraction, at least to me.
Rub a Dub Dub with Shrub: Criticism is arising from various corners, including such unpatriotic and seditious elements as farmers and the Labor Party, about the Australian government's unquestioning support for the US, from supporting Uncle George's first-strike policy against designated "terrorist" states to not opposing US agricultural tariffs. Some analysts say this is a regression back to the Vietnam War, and "All the Way with LBJ":
"The present Government has been giving endorsement of US policy in a far more extreme form than the Menzies and Holt governments ever did, and in a situation where there is no evident physical threat to Australia as a nation."
Of course, the "no evident physical threat" situation may not last for long; by being the only nation to unconditionally back US first strikes, Australia may be making itself a more tempting target for terrorists. Of course, the increased threat of terrorism may be a good thing for Howard, as it would allow hard questions to be deflected as "unpatriotic", as in Bush's America, and allowing his nice, shiny deputy's badge to imbue him with reflected charisma. And when US troops enter Baghdad, Havana or The Hague, Australian troops will be right among them, in the first wave.
Meanwhile, Australia will be buying 100 stealth fighters, costing as much as $4bn. Next time you wonder why your taxes are so high while social services are so underfunded, think about that.
(I wonder whether these are the 'stealth' fighters that can be detected by measuring their effects on TV and mobile phone transmissions, using only some receivers and a laptop computer.)
Common sense at last: The US Pledge of Allegiance has been ruled unconstitutional, as it violates the separation between church and state. The offending part is the "under God" added to it during the McCarthy era.
Favourite long-defunct indie bands: It seems to be a bumper time for interviews with ex-Slowdive personnel. recordcamp.com has one with Rachel (now of Mojave 3), where she talks about how she and Neil started jamming in high school, their change of sound, and so on: (via the Avalyn list again)
RG: Pygmalion was released a year after we had recorded it. During that year Neil had moved on musically to doing different things. Had we not been dropped 'Ask Me Tomorrow' would have been the fourth slowdive album. With 'pygmalion' we had experimented with sounds as much as we had wanted to and just wanted to do more 'traditional' tunes and strip everything down.
(I still think that they threw the baby out with the bathwater, but that's just my taste. Maybe one of these days I'll Grow Up, get into Mojave 3, and start frequenting the Country'n'Preston gigs that dot the inner city of Melbourne; or maybe not.)
Anyway, the interview may be found here if the link works; if not, it's also on their main page (a few columns across).
Urk. Something's wrong with my phone line/modem/ISP. The connection keeps dying; it usually lasts somewhere between a few seconds and 10 minutes. Not fun...
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Bootywhang: A piece on the rise of 'alternaporn' sites. These are independently-run online soft- to medium-core porn sites with subcultural themes (raver, goth, geek, punk, and others), 'real' models who often have online journals, and a distinct paucity of the ugly, degrading, exploitative material that your typical spamvertised commercial porn site pushes. And, perhaps surprisingly, many of their subscribers are heterosexual women.
"I want to take the sketchiness and smuttiness out of porn," said Chase Lisbon, 28, who launched Supercult in August 2001. "I don't use words like tits or ass or pussy anywhere on the site." Supercult is a mod-styled website featuring pictures of naked hipsters posing with Lambretta scooters and Star Wars action figures. Chase estimates that 30 percent of the site's paying users are female.
(Well, someone had to put Mod revivalism/retro hipsterism and porn together sometime...)
Anyway, as far as porn has been with us since the Etruscan era, if not cave paintings, and is likely to be with us as long as we have sex and symbols, it's a good thing to know that it's not all misanthropic, envelope-pushing brutality and ugliness ("Teenage sluts get banged hard by farm animals!"), and that perhaps porn can be humanistic and positive. Of course, the religious right don't agree. (via bOING bOING)
2002/6/26
A Reg piece on the Microsoft/Intel/AMD "Palladium" DRM/security system in development, and how it could kill the GPL. Basically, to work with DRM content and the "trusted" hardware, binaries and kernels will need to be certified, which makes the whole idea of open source useless. (You can compile your own, but it won't work, as it won't be certified.)
An article putting forward the case that sweatshops are good for the third world, that the alternatives are much worse, and that anti-sweatshop campaigns, run by well-meaning humanitarians, do more harm than good for the conditions of third world workers.
Nike used to have two contract factories in impoverished Cambodia, among the neediest countries in the world. Then there was an outcry after BBC reported that three girls in one factory were under 15 years old. So Nike fled controversy by ceasing production in Cambodia. The result was that some of the 2,000 Cambodians (90 percent of them young women) who worked in those factories faced layoffs. Some who lost their jobs probably were ensnared in Cambodia's huge sex slave industry -- which leaves many girls dead of AIDS by the end of their teenage years.
I've heard this argument before from "free trade" advocates pointing out how daft the Nu Marxists are. How much truth is there in it?
(Of course, this is separate from the issue of whether there is such a thing as a "free market", or whether what they call "free trade" is not just a way for the US/EU/&c to push smaller economies around.)
An interesting interview with Christian Saville, former guitarist from Slowdive (and, mercifully, not involved in any sort of alt-country/early-70s-AM-radio-easy-listening act), talking about the rise and fall of Slowdive, the crap state of popular music today, those unreleased Slowdive demos floating around, and his new band, Monster Movie (which is probably more interesting than Mojave 3 anyway). (via the Avalyn list)
The funniest thing I saw recently was on Travis' website, the very first screen you see has photos of their Brit Awards on. That sums the "big" UK bands up. It is revolting. The music is way down the list of priorities for these guys. I don't have a problem with bands getting famous, but some of the bands from Britain right now seem content to be as ordinary, unadventurous, and inoffensive as possible. As for the mercury prize, I don't understand it - it seems like its only function is for Record Company execs to try to seem like they are trendy and for irratating bands to mouth off about how innovative they are for bothering to do an album once every 2 or 3 years. Any award that can list previous winners as M People is totally worthless. I don't want to sound like a moaning bastard, there is plenty going on that I really like. The internet is great for hearing bands. I guess the thing is you have to look a little harder for the interesting things than you did perhaps 10 years ago. I really love 'Yo La Tengo', and 'Stereolab' and they are still around.
Yes. Too bad those RIAA fuckers have been determinedly shutting down all possible sources of interesting music on the Internet (from AudioGalaxy to web radio), one by one.
And here is the Twee Kitten blurb on the Monster Movie EP, and one of their album. I can see it in my next order from some independent disc emporium or other.
2002/6/25
The Pentagon is developing a sonic weapon based on one of the most fearsome sounds known to humanity: that of a baby crying. The weapon transmits sound along two ultrasonic signals, so that only the immediate target hears it. Other parts of the military-industrial complex are keen to cash in on the technology as well; already a company plans to use it in soft-drink machines, so that the person in front of the machine can hear the sound of a can opening. Wonder how long until they put this in advertising signs.
Somebody has written a plug-in for the Linux xmms media player to allow it to use Winamp visualisation plugins, using the Wine Windows emulation library. Which is fairly nifty. Now if only someone wrote a Linux library for accessing Windows VST audio processing/synthesis plugins, perhaps in the aRts or LADSPA framework...
Read: Seventy-Two Letters, a great, vaguely steampunkesque short story by Ted Chiang, combining kabbalah, 17th-century naturalism and the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution:
Robert Stratton went on to read nomenclature at Cambridges Trinity College. There he studied kabbalistic texts written centuries before, when nomenclators were still called baalei shem and automata were called golem, texts that laid the foundation for the science of names: the Sefer Yezirah, Eleazar of Worms' Sodei Razayya, Abulafia's Hayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba.
(via bOING bOING)
The Reg dissects Microsoft's DRM "trusted computing" OS plans.
It looks pretty nasty; say goodbye to commodity data formats and protocols, and
hello to signed "trusted clients" and end-to-end content control, all routed through the one degree of separation that is the One Microsoft Way. And you can bet that this stuff won't work with open-source operating systems. But hey, it's For Your Own Good...
Well, after a bit of tweaking, the HTML of this blog has become somewhat less hideous, and as such it renders OK in Konqueror now. (Amazing how much a missing </FONT> tag can stuff things up. And yes, I know I should get rid of all the FONT tags and do everything with stylesheets, and I'll get around to it one of these days.) I haven't tested it in IE yet (not having VMWare set up on my new Debian system yet), though.
Tonight was the last ever Trivia Night at the Empress Hotel (the host is calling it a day to concentrate on his indie-rock career), and the team I was on were crowned the all-time reigning champions.
I'm the dodgy-looking geezer in the glasses, btw.
2002/6/24
An absolutely gorgeous 3D-rendered webcomic speculating on what blogs will be like in the distant future. Though in some ways it has that early-90s cyberculture/teledildonics vibe, back when technology was going to bring the singularity and disembodied virtual sex was supposed to be the new LSD or something. Still, for us in the year 2002, living under the threats of Al-Qaeda dirty bombs, home-grown totalitarianism and war without end, and the prospect of a locked-down, censored, end-to-end rights-managed Internet being more a tool of corporate control than personal liberation, it's a nice bit of utopian retrofuturism, a vision of a future from a different timeline. (via rebecca's pocket)
Now why didn't Gary Glitter think of that? On trial for sex with a minor, 'R&B' producer R Kelly has recorded a song making his case. The song, titled Heaven, I Need A Hug, will be released exclusively to a local radio station. With the salacious backstory and stomach-turning title/lyrics, it looks set to end up on numerous least essential recordings lists and post-ironic novelty mix CDs.
Today I saw a guy named Gary Wiseman (who has interesting CD packaging), the always lovely Jen Turrell, local guitar/double-bass act Sodastream and Amy Linton of the Aislers Set play, in a backyard in inner Melbourne. Which was fun, if a bit chilly at times.
Every band venue should have a Hills hoist in the middle... And every backyard should have a PA setup and a combination mixing console/compost bin.
And that was probably the last time I will see Stewart and Jen (two genuinely lovely people and very talented musicians) for some time, as they leave Australia this week, not to return for some years. The next time will probably require me to visit the US or something like that.
A piece on US synthpop/techno act Fischerspooner, and their eschewal of any pretense of creating the music on stage.
"Once you put that aside and don't worry about these issues of musical integrity -- this illusion that people are manufacturing the music up there, which they're not -- you have all this time and energy and space and freedom to do lots of other things. You could stage a Busby Berkeley musical, because you don't have to worry about playing the guitar."
2002/6/23
Live bands: This evening's live music at the Tote was quite good; first up was Steward (aka Stewart Anderson), doing the very final gig of his recent Australian tours. It was a solo gig, with just a guitar, some crunchy noise pedals and a MiniDisc of drum loops (some of which sounded like an 808 being run through various distortion pedals). He didn't bring any Hello Kitty toys or other similar noisemakers, but rocked out nonetheless. If Stewart plays in your town, either solo or in Boyracer, go and see him and be reminded what rock is.
Next up were Sister Cities, a minimal side project of Architecture in Helsinki. Guitar, clarinet, ba-ba-ba harmony vocals, a toy piano and some very lovely, sweet pop. At one point they did what I think may have been a Bruce Springsteen cover (though not that he'd recognise it). Anyway, they're playing again on the 4th at the Town Hall Hotel.
Then came Origami; a slightly punky two-girl indie-pop band (founded by a former member of a certain casiopunk outfit I keep going on about); mostly jangly indie guitars, with a few surprises (some banshee-like screams, and at one stage an 8-bar funk breakdown). Stewart joined them on drums and played really well (though he didn't think so).
Finally, Sarah Dougher came on and played a set, in a singer-songwriter sort of vein; fellow Oregonian Amy Linton of the Aislers Set joined her on drums.
<TANGENT>
Towards the end of their set, Origami did a short (and rather doovy) guitar/Casio instrumental named Nancy Drew; which got me thinking about the connections between a certain type of indie-pop and retro/childhood references.
Whether it's retro-hipster irony, indiekid neoteny, subversive punk culture-jamming, or some combination of all three.
</TANGENT>
Anyway, it was quite a good night.
2002/6/21
This is pretty cool; the London Bloggers Tube Map, mapping bloggers in London to their nearest Tube stops. (Oddly enough, it looks more complex than the Tube maps I've seen. Either they've carried out a massive Underground expansion programme since the London Underground mousepad I have was printed, or those white lines are some other (non-underground) railway system.)
Anyway, someone should do a Melbourne blogger tram map. Here's a start:
to
grudnuk.com
via Hume Hwy
^
: |(B)| Legend:
| | | | A = The Null Device
| | 112 + | B = Leviathan (on hiatus)
19| 1| /(A) | C = The Monkey Puzzle
| | / |86
| | | +-----+
: ++ : |
-+-+---+--+
-+-+---+
======== YARRA RIVER ======
| |
\-------
\------
+-----------------67
C
Ph3ar my l33t ASCII-art kung fu!
The bizarre world of ZX Spectrum clones, from Russia, Eastern Europe, South America and Asia. Apparently there were dozens of the beasties, some straightforward knockoffs and some (particularly in the USSR) with bizarrely improvised keyboards and some specced up to run MS-DOS and such. (via the Horn)
Yoz Grahame reckons that Perl is the Yiddish of computer languages. Hmmm... (via bOING bOING)
The latest new arrival to This Blogging Lark is mag/tif, the inimitably spunky West Coast zinester, indiegrrl and cultural identity. Welcome aboard, tif.
2002/6/20
A heartwarming example of inter-faith unity: What could bring the Bush administration and members of the so-called Axis of Evil together on the same side? Opposition to rights for gays, women and children and the Godless European secular humanists who back them. (Wonder where Australia's government stands on this; I suspect that if push came to shove, our leaders would line up obediently with Bush.) (via lots of places)
Engineers in Britain have developed a super-miniaturised mobile phone that can be implanted in a tooth. The phone receives digital radio signals and transmits them to the inner ear by bone resonance, in a way that no-one else can hear; it can be implanted during routine dental surgery. No word on whether it contains any sort of microphone or means of sending sound.
(How much do you want to bet that the CIA/MI6/&c. have already had something of this sort for some time?) (via Techdirt)
Lech Walesa, leader of the Polish Solidarność movement which, during the 1980s, started the collapse of Communism in Europe, talks about the role of communications technology against oppression.
2002/6/19
Upon being told that a mandatory cat registration programme was too expensive, a New Zealand councillor has suggested that the council encourage people to eat cats to save the native bird population.
Mike Cotton told the meeting that while living in East Borneo he experienced what they called a "dog day" when locals went round shooting all the strays. "Maybe we could look at a cat day here," he said.
Following EMI's purchase of once-credible postpunk indie Mute, the Big Mean German has stepped into the fray and bought Zomba, the world's largest "independent" record label and premier purveyor of booty music and bubblegum pop.
(It's funny how everybody smaller than the Big 5 was considered technically an "independent" label, regardless of how they operated; as such, this lead to anomalies such as well-known indie-pop artists NSync and Britney Spears dominating the NME "indie" charts. On one extreme you have people who say that EMI is an indie label as they're not part of a zaibatsu, and at the other there are the indiekid snobs who would classify labels such as Matador as not being real indies because they're not run out of a bedroom.)
I just picked up the CD of Mali Music, Damon Albarn's project with musicians from Mali. It's pretty good in places (especially the opening track). For some reason, though, it fails to rip on the PC I tried it on (which plays it fine, but fails to extract data from it). It rips OK on a PowerBook though. The booklet says nothing about any copy-denial technology being used. Has anybody else had any such issues with this disc?
A forensic audio expert believes he can recover the erased 18 1/2 minutes of the Richard Nixon tapes. Using computer analysis of minute fragments of leftover sound, it is believed that any erased audio recording can be reconstructed.
2002/6/18
Just heard a track from the new David Bowie album; it sounds like he's jumping on the glitch/laptop electronica bandwagon. Though it's probably a good change from him trying to sound like Nine Inch Nails or someone, as he did through much of the 1990s. (The whole angstcore thing doesn't really work unless you're a self-loathing teenager from the Bible Belt, and a veteran conceptual-artist type doesn't quite cut it. Though perhaps someone should tell Gary Numan that.)
15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense, which does a good job of shooting down the obfuscations and misquotings of the creationists, not to mention their numerous attempts to dress religious dogma up as science (i.e., the so-called "intelligent design theory"). (via Pagan Prattle)
To all intents and purposes, AudioGalaxy is dead. Despite their filtering of known copyrighted tracks, the RIAA went after them anyway, and they rolled over. The settlement involves them blocking all songs not specifically approved by copyright holders; which means no more obscure, long-out-of-print remixes or records from defunct indie labels. Which is a shame; if it wasn't for AudioGalaxy, there is so much I'd have never discovered (such as most of the Field Mice and Even As We Speak back-catalogues or the DJ Spooky remix of Lush's Undertow).
(Plug: if you haven't done so already, check out The Circle. It's completely decentralised, and so there's no central point to go after.)
As our governments prepare to give government employees extraordinary surveillance powers over communications, with the usual provisos about how this is necessary to keep us and our children safe from terrorism and how the employees in question are bound by strict codes of honour and can be trusted to not abuse their powers, here is a list of top 10 police database abuses; they range from officials using confidential data to influence elections to a crooked cop scouting out "potential girlfriends" in the database, and another suspected of using the database to arrange the murder of his ex-wife. And if the cops can do this sort of thing with their databases, what's to say the tax department, post office, ticket inspectors and other minor functionaries can be totally trusted with your email, phone and web access records? (via rotten.com)
Proof that blogs are no longer the exclusive domain of introspective cat-owners, list-making geeks and right-wing warhawks: women in Iran take to blogging, to talk about social issues that women cannot discuss openly in the conservative Islamic society. (via Reenhead)
A minor bump, always apparently the woman's fault, was usually followed by an informal cash settlement and months of telephone calls and rejected invitations to dinner. When a number of victims complained to police of harassment, the scale of Cabiale's hazardous dating game was quickly exposed. Police searching his flat found 2159 photographs of damaged vehicles and their female owners, all taken by Cabiale immediately following his accidents. An address book was also found, containing hundreds of names and phone numbers, all belonging to women aged between 20 and 40.
In one of Cabiale's cars investigators found a mechanism that temporarily disabled the vehicle's brake lights.
Looks like Saddam Hussein is fair game now; the CIA have apparently been instructed to send in special forces to capture him, or kill him if he puts up a struggle.
(I'm not at all fond of Saddam Hussein; he seems like the typical barbarous alpha-male thug who claws his way to power over the corpses of lesser competitors -- only he had the help of the Reagan administration, who considered him to be "our sonofabitch", and a useful foil to Iran. However, given that there is no evidence connecting Iraq to the WTC bombing, this seems unjustified except as Bush Jr. (speaking of power-drunk alpha-males) settling family scores.
And then there's the nation-building argument; the only two factions who could establish an post-Saddam Iraqi government with a reasonable powerbase are Shiite Islamists and Communists, both of whom are unacceptable to Washington. So whoever replaces Saddam is likely to be a minority warlord, kept in power with the help of School of Americas-trained death squads and US military and economic backing, against the will of most of his subjects. And we've seen how well such regimes turn out.)
Anyway, in ancient times, captured kings were paraded about in cages in the victors' cities. Of course, these days the cages would be Plexiglass, and city squares would be replaced with shopping malls and TV networks. Which inspired me to jot down this short story a while ago.
Feeding my addiction: Reader's Feast are having a sale during which purchases count for double bonus points; as such, I went down this afternoon and spent too much money on books. I picked up a book on computer-based music composition and genres titled How To Get The Sound You Want (which seems OK, and is conveniently Mac/Cubase-centric), The Feng Shui Detective Goes South, which promises to be quite entertaining, the second His Dark Materials book, the graphic novel of From Hell, and the Lonely Planet guide to London. All of which should get me one or two free books when my bonus points come in.
(Isn't it funny how words can be like sweets or cigarettes or sex or anything else that's habit-forming? How there is such a thing as binge reading, and how one can compulsively read. Or, indeed, if there is nothing good to read, how one will sometimes pick up rubbish like the MX street murdoch and read about the latest celebrity plastic surgery or whatever, like a junky looking for a fix?)
A school in Los Angeles is allowing its students to play videogames during PE class. Mind you, the game in question involves dancing and, according to the story, has helped otherwise sedentary students lose weight. (Which, in a place like LA, where there's nowhere to walk beyond your own driveway, is a good thing.)
I remember when I went to school (Melbourne High), they briefly had laser-tag (called "Phasor Strike") as a sports elective. Students would go down to a video arcade down the road from the school and shoot at each other with infrared guns. I say briefly, as it got binned after parents complained.
(I'm not sure whether this was before or after a MHS old boy went postal and massacred some 7 people on Hoddle St.; mind you, I don't believe there was any connection. For one, he didn't go to school at the time, and was more a product of the extraordinarily militaristic culture that existed around the school's cadet corps. (Ah yes; the cadet corps. For some reason, it seemed to bring out the worst in adolescent boys, turning them into psychopaths who wished they could have been in 'Nam "napalming gooks" and such.) Anyway, Phasor Strike got canned, but the cadet corps continued on as before.)
As for me? I took golf as a school sport. It was a decent excuse to have a leisurely stroll, rather than wrestling in mud with 10 other blokes and getting bruised and scraped and rained on or some equally unpleasant way to spend a Wednesday afternoon. Even at the cost of lugging a set of cheap, decrepit-looking golf clubs back and forth on the peak-hour train every week.
2002/6/17
Wow! I just got mail telling me I've won the porn lotto. And I didn't even know there was such a thing as a porn lotto. Those Brazilians are so generous...
2002/6/16
Interesting Times: Boy bands vs. the Chinese Communist Party, or the handsome, well-groomed face of dissent in the 21st century. An interesting look at the state of affairs in China, and the interplay of the two cultures of centralist hegemony (nominally Communist, though dating back to Imperial times in spirit) and an increasingly out-of-control market-oriented media consumerism, and boy-band VCD piracy is the new samizdat. (via bOING bOING)
Angry Robot reviews the new Curve album, which is only available by mail-order from a UK niche retailer. Sounds promising, though I'm not sure if I'll buy it; I've already got 3 Curve albums I don't listen to much and mail order from the UK is expensive. (Besides which, they never got back to me about the remix I sent them.)
Open-source identity and guns-and-Ayn-Rand-libertarian whacko Eric S. Raymond has a righteous rant about Liberals and Conservatives, and why they are inpardonably unappealing. To which, Charlie Stross offers a reasoned response. (Note: link corrected.)
(My beliefs on the last two questions would be fairly similar to Charlie's; I find legislating to control human behaviour based on some theory repugnant (whether it's Christian Fundamentalists, Marxists, copyright absolutists or any other stripe of true believers doing the legislating), but don't like the dog-eat-dog social-darwinism of what passes for "libertarianism" in the US. And I think Ayn Rand is one notch above L. Ron Hubbard in terms of credibility.)
Also on ESR's page, an essay applying the scientific method to why porn is so ugly and unstimulating; keeping in mind that he's a libertarian polyamorist of the Heinlein stripe with a keen interest in all things bootywhangular, you can probably guess that it's not written from a puritanical angle.
The recording industry in the US is crawing attention to another little-publicised form of piracy and theft that's bleeding it dry: used CD sales. Some voices in the industry are now calling on a federally-mandated royalty on used CD sales, to be distributed to the recording industry (i.e., major labels). (via Slashdot)
2002/6/15
Rub-a-Dub-Dub with Shrub:
Australia's Prime Minister comes back from a love-in series of meetings with the US President and Leader of the Free World; during which he almost unconditionally committed Australia to fighting alongside the US, ruled out signing the Kyoto treaty (in the name of loyalty), and dropped the ball on trade issues, which he ostensibly went there to debate. And now, it looks like many elements in the Liberal Party, including the PM, are opposing ratifying the International Criminal Court, lest Kissinger or some future Calley find himself in the dock.
Wonder whether Australia will send troops to help the US invasion of the Hague in the event of US servicemen or leaders being put on trial. I imagine the bill is doing the rounds of the Liberal party room as we speak.
2002/6/14
I just found a pretty doovy online mail-order indie record shop, which is located conveniently in Australia, is fairly cheap (and all prices include postage in Australia) and has a good range of stuff, both local and from various good US/UK indie labels: Traffic Sounds. (Oh yes, they also have MP3 downloads, and they support payment by direct deposit, for people without credit cards.) Just my luck that I found this a day after ordering two discs from Twee Kitten (also good, though located way over in California).
Perhaps having realised that going out of one's way to inconvenience customers is not a good business model, Hollywood may be giving up on Macrovision, the copy-denial mechanism that prevents you from connecting a DVD player to a VCR. Warner Home Video have released the Harry Potter DVD without Macrovision encoding in the UK; this means that you can plug your DVD player into your VCR and pirate it for all your friends untrammeled. Or, if you have an older TV without A/V inputs, you can plug your DVD in through your VCR and watch it, full stop. Mind you, Macrovision costs the studios a few cents per disc, and is fairly easy to bypass with (as yet not illegal) "signal enhancers".
2002/6/13
This just in: An experiment in an IRC 'carder' chat room with a fake IIS web server reveals that IRC credit card hax0rs are clueless.
Within 24 hours approximately 200 cyber warriors had bitten the hook, and not one figured out that they were stuffing around on a Linux box. A quick banner check, or even a quick check with Netcrtaft, was all they'd have needed to see what they were onto. No one tried to own the machine; and a surprising number didn't even bother to go through a proxy.
Researchers in Wales have found that the types of books you read affect your dreams. Adults who read fiction have stranger dreams than those who don't, and are more likely to remember them; meanwhile, fantasy readers have more nightmares and lucid dreams, while those who prefer fantasy novels have more emotionally intense dreams.
In Cuba, where the government aims to control every aspect of the flow of information, one needs special permission to borrow most books from libraries. As such, speakeasy libraries are the latest form of dissent, and seen as the latest threat to socialism:
"I can't just walk into a public library and ask for books on Afro-Cuban religion," said Luis Antonio Bonito Lara, a retired engineer and avid reader. "I can't even ask for copies of Granma from two years ago without special permission. It's enormously frustrating."
(Remember, this is the Another World that the people protesting outside the Nike store will tell you Is Possible.) (via Reenhead)
Plagued by mice, Britain's House of Commons debates getting a parliamentary cat. (via rotten.com)
Looks like there are plans for a Lemony Snicket movie. Paramount's kids' unit Nickelodeon are planning to make one, with Daniel "Lemony Snicket" Handler writing the script. Though the article suggests that the studio suits may force a happy ending onto it (you know, the standard Hollywood character development arc: characters are plunged into dire peril, find inner strength, and ultimately overcome); meanwhile, Handler is already planning merchandising tie-ins like unwinnable board games.
I hope they get Stephin Merritt to do the soundtrack, given how good a job he did with the book-on-tape version. Though they may just do the obvious thing and get Danny Elfman to do one of his spooky-fairytale scores. (via bOING bOING)
Oh yes, I picked up the new Piano Magic album, Writers Without Homes, today. Currently am halfway through it. The packaging is very nice (4AD's house design firm v23 were involved), and so far, the album sounds mellow and understated, with poignant bits of atmosphere, song and spoken-word about lives, stories and such. I think it'll take a few listens to fully get into though.
When I watch old films in which animals appear, I get sad because those animals are certainly dead now. And that certainly prompts my private epitaph and I have to say it out loud "That dog is dead. That cat is dead. That horse is dead..."
Interesting to see that Simon Raymonde, of Cocteau Twins/This Mortal Coil fame, is involved on some of the tracks here. (This sort of cross-pollination, I've noticed, is something characteristic of 4AD acts; what, with This Mortal Coil, and Robin Guthrie producing the first Lush album, and so on...).
2002/6/12
George W. Bush as messiah? Wonder how much of that photo was deliberately engineered to be so. (via Reenhead)
Also from the Onion, this examination of hope and despair: Best Years Of Area Man's Life Apparently Never Going To Happen:
"I guess I always just figured the really good years were right around the corner," Videk said. "What a pantload. I remember in high school, thinking that as soon as I got a car, the best years were really gonna kick in. I'd be able to go anywhere, get girls, maybe get laid, and people would think I was cool. Then, when I finally got a car, it was such a shitheap, I figured that once I got a better car, then everything would be fine. Well, you know what? I've owned 11 cars in my life, and I thought the same exact thing about each one of the fuckers. Not one in the succession of cars I've bought since I was 16 has ever done anything for me but drag my sorry ass to and from work every goddamn day of my life. That's it."
"It's like you're thinking, 'The world's my oyster and anything is possible,'" Videk said. "'As soon as this next immediate obstacle to happiness is cleared, I'll be able to do anything I want.' Then the goals become less and less realistic as you pass 35, and you start to set more modest goals for the best years of your life, like making shift supervisor at the goddamn screen-door factory where you work. Eventually, even these pathetically scaled-down fantasies prove unworkable, since some asshole named Glenn Harrigan has seniority at the plant and obviously isn't going anywhere. Suddenly, you're 51, and at long last, you figure out that whatever it is you're hypothetically still waiting for, it's pretty much irrelevant. Then you go to bed and have to work at the screen-door factory for another nine hours the next day, and that's pretty much that."
An interesting (if perhaps somewhat too sympathetic) look at Goth culture in the US Midwest, where a $273,000 grant was recently awarded to a youth outreach unit to combat study "goth culture" and the leaders preying on our children.
(via Rebecca's Pocket)
As she sits still, her pale back exposed to him like a canvas, he pulls out an X-Acto knife. He leans in and carefully scratches the razor across her back in short strokes. Thin lines of blood appear in an abstract design. Not once does she wince.
Draven says he's a vampire, that he drinks blood, believes in werewolves and smokes weed. "It's a religion," he says, though he can't name any rituals beyond drinking his friends' blood and partying. He says he likes that people seem afraid of him, but he also thinks people should accept him like anyone else. Then he walks off.
(Heh; I've met goths like that...)
(I say too sympathetic, because it completely glosses over what petty-minded, bitchy tossers most goths are; and how, for all the noise they make about being "creative" and "original", they are one of the most uncreative and slavishly derivative youth subcultures around. But I digress.)
2002/6/11
An interesting article looking at the potential of UNIX shell script viruses. Shell scripts run on many architectures, and (along with C compilers) can be used to custom-build exploits and rootkits for the specific platform; while no such virus has been wildly successful yet, the potential is there.
(Of course, there's an easy way to defang many of them: remove the C compiler from your servers/front-line machines, which would make building exploits rather impossible. A malicious script could still download precompiled exploits from a website; though if you run your servers on something weird, it may not be able to find one; if crackers had to precompile exploits, they would probably go mostly after the 95% of machines which run Red Hat Linux on a x86 or something equally common.)
Centrelink, Australia's social security office will start sending SMS messages to clients, reminding them to attend job interviews. Of course, the next logical progression from this (which the Liberal Party should love) would be to integrate this with mobile phone tracking/triangulation, to keep track of dole recipients; much like those bracelets they put on home-detention inmates, only the client pays for the technology. If they leave the 5km radius of their home or registered appointments, or enter an off-limits area during business hours, their benefits get cut off until they wait in queue, grovel and fill in forms. After all, dole recipients are parasites, the philosophy goes, and the experience of receiving welfare should be made as humiliating as possible. And with the government's new telecommunications intereception bill, giving a wide range of government agencies the power to intercept people's communications without a warrant in the name of Fighting Terrorism, this could be possible.
US authorities have arrested an al-Qaeda terrorist, apparently foiling a plan to attack the US with "dirty bombs", raining radioactive death on millions. Abdullah al-Mujahir, also known as José Padilla, was arrested in Chicago in May after arriving on a flight from Pakistan. Er, hang on; José Padilla? Wasn't he the guy who put together those Café Del Mar chill-out CDs? (Maybe that's why he left that project...)
So what did I do this weekend, you ask? Well, today I spent much of the day installing Debian 3.0 on my Linux box. It looks quite doovy (it has a lot of packages), and it's about time I replaced the patched-over RedHat 6.x setup it was.
Yesterday I caught up with Nick and Naomi of Dandelion Wine. They brought a CD of some of their new material; it's sounding very good, in a trancy, somewhat Delerium-esque sort of way. (I'll probably have MP3s to share on Circle once they give me a copy.)
I'm looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. (Note: that was irony.)
2002/6/9
Coming soon to supermarkets across the US: talking margarine tubs, which wiggle and shout "BUTTER!" at passing shoppers. The tubs will contain motion-detecting voice chips. Could genetically-modified self-advertising broccoli be next? (via bOING bOING)
Meeting People Is Easy: The latest fad in mobile-obsessed Britain is M-Parties. Participants register their mobile numbers with an organiser, and get SMS messages with hints as to the location of a secret party, often coming together before the party to work it out. A social killer app for a traditionally reserved society, or just a safe corporate yuppie version of the illegal fly-by-night raves of the Summer of Love?
2002/6/8
Gearlust: I was in Manny's today and had a play around with the Clavia Nord Electro. This is a virtual synth which simulates the sounds of various vintage keyboards (Rhodes/Wurlitzer pianos, clavinets, organs, &c), with various effects, and has some very groovy (and in places quite quirky) sounds. I want one.
Morrissey/Smiths Ringtones, for the status-conscious miserablist who's got everything now. And they're free; just key them into your Nokia from the webpage. (via Lukelog)
Charlie Stross has a modest proposal: swap George W. Bush with Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, for the mutual benefit of Britain and America.
There are some red faces in Beijing, after the most popular newspaper there, the Beijing Evening News, reprinted an article from The Onion, stating that it was true. The article in question had U.S. Congress threatening to relocate to Memphis or Charlotte unless Washington built them a new Capitol with a retractable roof. (via one.point.zero)
2002/6/7
I was in the vicinity of Heartland this afternoon, so I stepped in and picked up the imported DVD single of New Order's Here To Stay. It comes with four clips from the upcoming film 24 Hour Party People; it looks like it's going to be a very interesting film.
Though I wonder whether that's really Bernard Sumner in the Here To Stay video; he looks a bit younger and perhaps thinner.
(My verdict on DVD singles: they're a good medium for videos and such (the resolution is much better than Quicktime on CD-ROM), but they probably won't replace standard CD singles for audio, precisely because of the custom interface. When I put on music, I don't want to have to navigate flashy custom menus to hear it (let alone sit through the mandatory copyright warning message). It is precisely the CD's generic, no-frills interface which gives it an advantage over the DVD as a music medium.)
Research shows that online music fans don't mind paying for music; however, they can't stand locked-down DRM formats.
(And quite rightly, too. If Vivendi Universal or someone was to sell me music I liked from their back-catalogue for, say, US$0.99 per MP3, I'd be cool with that, and would probably end up spending a fair bit of dosh on it. But not if it's in some crippled format which (a) requires me to run their choice of operating system, (b) requires me to use and trust their software (which may show ads/have spyware/do ghod knows what), or otherwise (c) assume that I'm a criminal.)
However, what are the odds that the Recording Racket will get the point, clue in and drop their demands for "end-to-end content security"? We'll probably see Hell freeze over, Microsoft embrace the GPL and Nestlé stop killing third-world babies before that happens.
I had a fairly busy evening tonight (in a good way). Readers of my blog may remember my dilemma from a few days ago. To whit; two shows worth seeing, both unlikely to be repeated, on the same night. Firstly, American indie singer/songwriter Jen Turrell was playing at the Empress, in her last tour of Australia before she and Stewart have to stay in the USA for two years (it's a permanent residency requirement, I believe); secondly, the ever-rocking Ninetynine were set to play at the Tote, in possibly their last gig before their world tour. If I missed them, my next chance to see them would probably be in Reykjavík in November.
And then I realised that (a) Jen was playing a support set, while Ninetynine were headlining, and so if I went to see Jen, and then rushed down to the Tote, I had a good chance of catching them. Which is exactly what I did.
I got to the Empress shortly after 9. Jen was the first act on, and went on stage at 9:30, playing about a dozen short, sweet jangly-pop songs, accompanied by Stewart on bass and their TR-808 on Minidisc. It was a very nice set, with a lot of lovely harmonies and classic chord progressions, and a bit more than a touch of fey sensitivity.
Then I made my way to the Tote. I got there halfway through the second band's set. The band room was quite full, and I recognised a number of the people there (Jesse from Sir, Sarah-Jane from I Want a Hovercraft, a girl who followed Ninetynine all the way from Sweden, and a guy who collects Casio keyboards were some of the people I ran into.)
Anyway, Ninetynine came on, and they rocked hard. They had a lot of kit with them (vibraphone, glockenspiel and three Casios), swapped instruments a lot, played with great energy, doing a lot of new songs and finishing with an intense version of Polar Angle. Their new material is very strong; sophisticated and layered, and yet with a spiky edge and punk energy, and their next album (due in 3 or 4 months) should be something to look forward to.
It was a good night.
2002/6/6
Apparently the message of recent films such as Spider-Man and the latest Star Wars is that celibacy is a heroic virtue, and bootywhang is the root of all evil. Which the author considers surprising, given the traditional belief that Hollywood is a den of hot-tub hedonists whose ultra-permissive liberal ideology infuses everything they touch.
(I'd say that "Hollywood liberalism" is a myth. Hollywood is a set of commercial ventures, far beyond human scale, and dealing in whatever rakes in the most profits; i.e., having a bias towards crowd-pleasing populism, which, by its very nature, sticks to familiar and conservative beliefs and motifs. For every oversexed flower-child auteur, there are dozens of accountants, script doctors, market researchers, lawyers and other components of the studio apparatus to keep them in check, and keep things profitable.)
Loose Talk Is Noose Talk: A look at the NSA's retro-styled information-security posters. Very retro, and not too unlike Soviet Socialist Realism.
Tangent #1: Does anybody remember the old Microsoft Word for Windows installer, from the days when it came on floppies and ran on Windows 3.1? It had the usual set of images shown whilst installing, but to save space, they were all vector images, of neat arrays of documents, office computers and such. It struck me how they looked like the late-capitalist equivalent of Soviet propaganda posters.
Tangent #2: Does anybody know where I could find images of the propaganda posters from Terry Gilliam's Brazil?
Russia's answer to the Cave Clan call themselves Diggers of the Underground Planet, and explore the vast labyrinth of tunnels beneath Moscow, finding everything from secret subway lines and disused facilities of various sorts to Neverwhere-like societies of fringe dwellers and sinister groups of uniformed men doing god only knows what:
According to the Diggers, the underground is also a refuge for former prisoners. It is against the law for ex-convicts to reside in the Russian capital, so those who do move to the city must find inconspicuous lodgings. Some settle in basements with good air-conditioning systems and two or three exits. Sometimes they gather in groups, living by "prison laws."
In a tunnel under the Centrobank building, the Diggers observed uniformed people in masks equipped with powerful halogen lamps. The Diggers were afraid to follow them lest they should come under fire. So far, security services have not taken the Diggers' reports of these sightings seriously.
Under the Skliffasovsky clinic the Diggers encountered people dressed in monk's robes, carrying torches around a strange-looking altar made of stone. They were performing some sort of service and singing. When they saw the Diggers, they hurriedly disappeared.
(via bOING bOING)
2002/6/5
You know that the term "street cred" has lost all meaning when you see articles talking about the Queen's street cred.
The Bush Scandal for Dummies, or a good argument for the case that Bush knew damningly much about the September 11 terrorist attacks in advance and chose to let it happen to rally the country behind him. (via one.point.zero)
Oh yes, and apparently some blokes are kicking a ball around a field somewhere in Korea right now, which is of earth-shaking significance. Or something like that.
I just realised that this Thursday night, Jen Turrell is playing at the Empress (on tour from the US for the last time for a few years, most probably), at the same time that Ninetynine are playing at the Tote. It's things like this that make me wish I could be in two places at once.
2002/6/4
The Mod scene is big in Japan, with many young Japanese donning Union Jack-emblazoned army parkas and tightly tailored suits and cruising around on chromed Lambretta scooters, like extras from Quadrophenia. (via rotten.com)
Hoizumi counts at least three Mod revivals: The Neo-Mod movement inspired by ``Quadrophenia'' (and which eventually led to the Skins); an early 1980s resurgence built around the British group Style Council (the Japanese Mod scene remains a huge milkcow for Paul Weller); and a unique-to-Japan revival in the mid-1990s created by teenage photoceleb Hiromix, whose snapshots of herself and her friends in undies became an international artworld sensation.
But in some ways, whilst the scene is a knockoff of 1960s British youth culture (and also of subsequent "revivals" of Mod)
. Until recently, Japan's Mods have overwhelmingly come from the ranks of hairstylists, overworked, underpaid and image-conscious, who leave the suburbs and countryside with big city dreams of grooming stars and cutting it as ``charisma stylists.'' ... But the stylists have moved on with the Hiromix boom, and the Mods of 2002 are a cadre of college art students, graphic designers and apparel professionals. Many have had their parents buy their first bikes for them, and quite a few own several bikes. They seem more sure of themselves and aren't as interested in making a class statement as an aesthetic one.
Sounds a bit like Melbourne's Mod scene, which is mostly rich private-school kids using their classicist style of youth rebellion to differentiate themselves from the plebeian rabble north of the Yarra. I.e., like the Young Liberals only noisier and more stylish.
2002/6/3
Just played around a little with Google Sets. It's interesting, but not perfect. For example, ("True Faith", "Perfect Day") yields the set of New Order and Lou Reed songs, but ("True Faith", "Perfect Day", "Golden Brown") yields nothing, and certainly not the set of songs about heroin.
As the baby-boomers who grew up in the 1960s struggle to protect their children from awareness of sex, race, violence and other facts of living in a fallen world, they're now putting bowdlerised editions of books in schools; the special editions have anything controversial, from suggestions of nudity, violence or alcohol to discussion of inter-ethnic relations, excised, often with absurd results:
One passage was derived from Frank Conroy's memoir, "Stop-Time." The changes include replacing "hell" with "heck" in one sentence and excising references to sex, religion, nudity and potential violence (in the form of the declared intent of two boys to kill a snake) that are essential to an understanding of the passage.
The ostensible rationale is to eliminate the possibility of offending anybody in any way. The outcome, however, will probably be to create a generation of sheltered psychological infants with weakened intellectual immune systems and severely stunted ethical reasoning skills.
Falco! That venerable British institution, Punch magazine, looks likely to close its doors for the final time. Punch previously closed down in 1992, but was revived by Mohammed Al-Fayed (yes, that one) four years later. After six years of disappointing circulation, Al-Fayed pulled the plug on its life-support system, and it looks like this is the end.
And here is an article by a former writer, charting its decline over the past decades. The article suggests that Punch was a victim of the rise of television and the decline of satirical magazines. Though you'd think that with the rise of web-based humour, a revitalised heir to Punch might be able to carve out a niche for itself.
(I have fond memories of reading Punch in the school library in the late 80s. The publisher's attempt to go for the youth market was evident; they kept profiling people like Stock-Aitken-Waterman, or going on about which club Patsy Kensit or someone was seen at. All this probably led to the formation of magazines such as Oldie, which eschewed all the yoofist stuff and undoubtedly bled Punch's circulation. Though the pre-shut-down Punch did have the classic cartoon caption contest, something the relaunched one sorely lacked.)
Ah yes, the SIRC Guide to Flirting, enumerating the rules of the game in anthropological terms. Useful for Martian scholars of Earth customs, or if you'd like to flirt but the flirting parts of your brain have become rewired for obscure programming languages or train spotting or something like that. Or just read it for the many insights into human psychology that emerge in such a subject:
Research has also shown that men have a tendency to mistake friendly behaviour for sexual flirting. This is not because they are stupid or deluded, but because they tend to see the world in more sexual terms than women. There is also evidence to suggest that women are naturally more socially skilled than men, better at interpreting people's behaviour and responding appropriately. Indeed, scientists have recently claimed that women have a special 'diplomacy gene' which men lack.
The "diplomacy gene" theory makes sense; one thing I've noticed that, in many close couples, a sort of specialisation develops where the woman handles most of the social interaction, even with old friends of her partner. (via one.point.zero)
Could this be the future of commercial popular music? A radio station which plays "the best parts of your favourite songs", to "address the short attention span of today's busy music fan". The Seattle station will play excerpts from 426 songs per hour, which means that on average, each fragment can be no longer than 8 seconds (probably less with ads). Um, this has to be a joke, right? (via Found)
2002/6/2
Let me just state that the Dictionaraoke version of The Smiths' How Soon Is Now? is very, very silly.
You, pipe down, why are you able to
state that I act incorrectly
I am a person and I require affection
The same as all other people do
Tonight I went to Pony to see the electropop show they had. It was pretty doovy. First up, Letraset went on, and played a set of experimental electronics; there wasn't much in the way of vocals as far as I can recall, though Nicole did play trombone alongside the filtered glitches. Then Laura McFarlane (of Ninetynine) played a solo set. She started with a jazzy number on vibraphone, her vocals infused with a smoky sorrow, and then went on to perform various songs (mostly from the Ninetynine back-catalogue and/or their upcoming album) on some Casio keyboards and a guitar. She totally rocked; her vocals alternated between the heartbreakingly fragile and an almost fearsome intensity, and she got surprisingly much dimension and expression from a table of Casiotone keyboards.
Then New Buffalo, aka Sally Russell, came on, with her two analogue keyboards, vintage drum machine and guitar, and performed a pretty nice set. In one of the newer songs she kept changing between 4/4 and 6/8 time, which was pretty nifty. Towards the end, Laura joined her on vibraphone, which worked fairly well.
All in all, it was a good night; though I've never seen Pony as packed as this. Getting around was somewhat of a challenge.
(Btw, apparently New Buffalo are recording in LA soon, paid for with EMI money. I hope that they don't try to make her into the next Danielle Spencer or something, and that her album remains quirky, naïve and left-of-centre, rather than becoming slickly-polished commercial-radio fodder.)
2002/6/1
Dictionaraoke, or pronunciation samples from online dictionaries sing the hits. (via the Horn)
A chap by the name of Banksy is responsible for a lot of subversive and/or pranksterish stencil graffiti around London and various other cities across the world.
He's also behind a recent anti-Jubilee party in London. (In Britain, republicanism has an air of unspeakable subversiveness about it, like revolutionary anarchism; unlike in Australia, where every respectable non-Liberal-voting latté-leftist and progressive business/media identity from the big end of town is a card-carrying republican).