2002/7/31
An article about a new book about Henry Darger, the outsider artist of Vivian Girls fame. His former landlords and present owners of his work don't come across very well in it. (via Robot Wisdom)
Terry Gilliam's Unresolved Projects, part of Dreams: the Terry Gilliam fanzine. It looks like Good Omens is indefinitely on hold. And pity that he's not going to do the Fungus the Bogeyman film, as that would have rocked.
Inter-religious violence over holy sites in Jerusalem is an equal-opportunity game; now Ethiopian and Egyptian monks are brawling over a chair position in a shrine which is shared among six Christian sects. The two sects have been virtually at war for over a century over esteemed positions on the roof of a church.
"They (the Ethiopians) teased him," said Father Afrayim, an Egyptian Coptic monk at the next door Coptic monastery. "They poked him and brought some women who came behind him and pinched him," he said. Each side accuses the other of throwing the first blow in the fist-fight and stone throwing that ensued. Police eventually broke up the brawl but by all accounts many of the protagonists were already wounded.
Perhaps it's something in the water or the air? (via the CoFD)
2002/7/30
A lot of people have linked to this recently (GJW/Jimbob and Jorn are two), but it's somewhat frightening how much of this Onion article from January 2001 has come true.
The scary similarities between Bush's America and Orwell's 1984. From the state of permanent war to the Ministry of Truth Office of Strategic Influence, and more. Perhaps soon they'll introduce a daily Three Minute Hate, with summary dismissal or detention for non-participation?
(via FmH)
Aircraft manufacturer Boeing are working on anti-gravity propulsion technology; they are attempting to solicit the aid of a Russian scientist, Dr. Evgeny Podkletnov, who claims to have developed a device called an "impulse gravity generator". (It is not known whether Podkletnov was involved in the development of Russia's "jumbo cosmosphere" programme.)
But it is also apparent that Podkletnovs work could be engineered into a radical new weapon. The GRASP paper focuses on Podkletnovs claims that his high-power experiments, using a device called an impulse gravity generator, are capable of producing a beam of gravity-like energy that can exert an instantaneous force of 1,000g on any object enough, in principle, to vaporise it, especially if the object is moving at high speed.
The fact that "free energy" is mentioned in the story, however, seems a bit dubious. Though, if this succeeds, it may finally put the USAF on a par with the Nazi flying saucers based inside the hollow earth fnord. (via bOING bOING)
Tonight at the Film Festival, I saw a documentary titled Love and Anarchy: The Wild Wild World of Jamie Leonarder. The subject of the documentary is a rather unusual person, who has lived the life of the outsider in every way. He worked in psychiatric hospitals, started a noise-rock band named The Mu-Mesons, most of whose members suffer from schizophrenia, associated with outsider artists, and more recently, ran a retro/lounge/exotica night named Sounds of Seduction in Sydney, and became a renowned collector and exhibitor of "psychotronic" cinema (i.e., all the indescribably weird stuff from prior decades, from low-budget monster movies to films from Christian groups on the evils of teenage dating to vintage sex-education films). Anyway, the documentary had some interesting thoughts on outsider art, including the assertion that outsider art is more original than art by trained or mentally normal artists (which makes sense).
Doovy-font-of-the-week site Fontomas is back. This time they've got 10 fonts for the taking, for a limited time only.
2002/7/29
Humans were biologically meant to be hugged, it appears. Scientists have discovered that the human skin has a special network of nerves whose sole purpose seems to be to feel pleasurable touches. The C-tactile (CT) nerves are independent from the normal touch receptors and operate at a slower rate; they hook into the unconscious aspect of touch, giving pleasure when stimulated.
"It must be used for unconscious aspects of touch because it is so slow," says Håkan Olausson, who led the study at the Department of Clinical Neurophysiology at Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Sweden. "It seems the CT network conveys emotions, or a sense of self."
Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns into bed: In Melbourne, a group of divorced fathers angry at the state of family law have decided to do the most sensible thing about it: form a paramilitary fascist group, complete with uniforms, balaclavas and a historically ominous name (the Blackshirts), and go around campaigning to "re-establish marriage" by the most direct route: that is, of course, by anonymously harrassing their and each others' ex-wives. Now it turns out that the organiser of this group is a fixture of Melbourne's rock'n'roll scene. He has apparently run a rehearsal studio for over a decade, and users of it are familiar with his numerous psychoceramic beliefs (such as towing Tasmania back to the mainland).
The new United Fruit Company?
After the Peruvian government introduces a bill mandating the use of open-source software in government, the US ambassador warns Peru to kill it or the CIA-installed junta that replaces you will kill it for you.
2002/7/28
These people sell modern PCs retrofitted into old Amiga 1000, Atari 2600 and Nintendo Entertainment System cases. And they come with emulators for the original machines. (Except that the PC's disk drive, of course, won't read Amiga floppies, and I doubt that they've interfaced the cartridge ports on the Atari and NES cases to the emulator software. If they had, it'd be pretty doovy.) (via Slashdot)
Film Festival: This afternoon, I went along to the screening of a collection of animations by the Brothers Quay. The brothers, for those not in the know, are reclusive American-born identical twins based in England, and known for their surreal animations, which are rather inspired by eastern European animators (such as Jan Svankmajer). A lot of their material is done on commission (including music videos and a MTV station ID), but is no less bizarre for that.
The screening had a number of short films, mostly made with models, puppets and such. Two of the animations (starring a stuffed toy rabbit and a vaguely monstrous little-girl mannequin) were videos for His Name Is Alive; they certainly had the 4AD look down pat, looking like the cinematic equivalent of v23's cover artwork. One was set to a piece by Karlheinz Stockhausen (whose atonal music matched the incomprehensibilist aesthetics of the brothers), and was about a woman in a mental hospital writing letters, never delivered, to her husband (or so I discovered at the end). Another was an exploration of anamorphism in painting, and was surprisingly comprehensible.
Which brings me to a point. At the risk of sounding like an uncultured philistine, I must say that I didn't enjoy the animations as much as I was hoping, because I found much of the stories pointless and incomprehensible. (In one, a homunculus is wobbling a ladder inside a vaguely Escheresque wooden structure. It droops, its hands become detached and start zooming the ladder back and forth along the landscape. Not once is the ladder used for anything other than moving around; one gets the feeling that either escape from or exploration of the structure would be futile because everything is ultimately meaningless in the Quays' worlds.) Though, I suppose it's an acquired taste, and connoiseurship makes anything interesting. Perhaps I should have read up on them beforehand.
I also bought a ticket for the Jeunet and Caro shorts coming up later in the festival. They should be good.
Cattle mutilations are up. The US cattle industry is facing a wave of mutilation. Could Al-Qaeda be responsible? (via rotten.com)
2002/7/27
Last night, I went to the Melbourne International Film Festival screening of a rather strange film titled Every Day God Kisses Us On The Mouth. It's from Romania, shot in black and white and rather bleak. It's about a man coming home after many years in prison; then bad things happen, he travels around rootlessly, and ends up killing more people. I get the feeling that, had Nick Cave come from the Balkans, he could well have come up with stories like this.
2002/7/26
A group of overweight New Yorkers are suing fast food chains for making fattening food and not telling the public that it wasn't healthy. Whatever happened to the notion of personal responsibility?
If you break the law, the law will break you: From this week onward, if you live in the UK and burn a CD containing "illicit recordings" -- i.e., anything infringing on copyright, such as a MP3 downloaded from a file-sharing service -- you could be gaoled for 10 years, a more severe sentence than some handed out to murderers, rapists and paedophiles. Uh-oh; better not make that mix CD for the friend I'm going to be visiting in London in that case.
The state of the market: Compensation given to relatives of Afghans killed by US "friendly fire" shows that, in the current market, an Afghan life is worth 1/700 of a Chinese life, 1/10,000 of an Italian life, and 1/30,000 of an American life. (via rotten.com)
Proof that Australia's foreign policy isn't just about sucking up to Uncle George: Australia votes against UN anti-torture protocol, joining an elite club of such esteemed defenders of human rights as China, Cuba, Libya and Nigeria. (The US, incidentally, abstained.) I've no idea why Australia rejected the protocol; perhaps supporting such bleeding-heart initiatives would make Australia look temptingly humane to refugees, undoing all the work of setting up draconian detention camps? Or perhaps because such naïve concerns have no place in the grim, warlike post-9/11 world?
2002/7/25
Alternative points of view: Pro-war activism is not just for hairy-backed bloggers and talk-show callers: pranksters and conceptual artists can do it too.
Partridge calls the protesters "TV babies" who are spoon-fed reactions and for whom war exists only conceptually. "These folks are not thinkers; they are only a crowd that operates with a unit mind," he says.
Partridge says he happens to actually believe war is groovy, but he especially likes to upset people with his revolutionary ideas. Before this protest, Partridge visited a group of hard-core Christians who were condemning the "sinners" downtown. He started handing out pamphlets that said, "Christ is for sissies."
He seems somewhat more lucid than the Ayn Rand zealots who hold pro-Starbucks demonstration to piss off the Nu Marxists; or indeed the My Country Right Or Wrong crowd, for that matter. (via rotten.com)
Site of the day: Theo's wunderbare Welt der Bandfotographie. Band photos like they only made in Europe. Check out the matching jumpsuits and soft-focus photography. Not to mention the very serious-looking costumed metalheads on page 2 and the Santa Clauses with the MIDI keyboard on page 5, and classy names like "Golden Showband". Replete with (what look like) sarky comments in German. (via Reenhead)
From the GYBE website, Faulty Schematics of Ruined Machine. Hmmm.. someone should do a font based on Efrim's handwriting. (via gimbo)
2002/7/24
This is fairly interesting, in a global-economy sort of way: impressions of New York as perceived by data entry workers in Ghana who transcribe fines issued by police in New York. (via bOING bOING)
Astronomers recently discovered a 2km asteroid on collision course with earth, scheduled to hit on February 1, 2019. The space rock, the most threatening object yet detected, was discovered on 5 July. (5 July? Reminds me of the giant face-shaped asteroid that was meant to hit the Earth in July 1998.)
Today I picked up a copy of Belle & Sebastian's The Boy With The Arab Strap, after hearing it in the car when catching a lift back from Saturday's Ninetynine gig. (The advantage of living in North Fitzroy: people you catch lifts with are likely to have good stuff playing in the car.) I'm listening to it now, and it's growing on me. There are some quite catchy understated melodies there; I particularly like Sleep the Clock Around and Ease Your Feet In The Sea.
I didn't get into Belle & Sebastian a few years ago, when all the indiekids were wearing their I-own-Tigermilk badges, because I just didn't get them. I mean, I was into The Smiths, mostly because of Morrissey's sardonic miserablism and Wildean allusions (and probably living a socially isolated existence in Ferntree Gully had something to do with it), but B&S didn't scratch the same itch. Then again, I didn't quite get the concept of (indie-)pop sensibility back then either; it was a bit too subtle for me. As they say, when the student is ready, the teacher appears.
Ever wonder what it feels like to have an epileptic fit? Here is a very vivid description of the experience, and the altered state of consciousness beforehand. (via Lukelog)
The Riceboy Page, a sarcastic look at a peculiar subculture (note: not ethnically-based) obsessed with souping up Japanese compact cars to look fast and "sporty", rebadging them to claim they're some exotic sports model, and often impairing their performance with ridiculous-looking modifications. But hey, if it makes it look fast and impressive, that's all that matters. Which all brings to mind a certain Down Town Brown song about a fast car. (via The Fix)
2002/7/23
Seen in spam filter: a spam with the title "Mortal dance in machine ambulance". It's supposedly for some ambulance-themed porn site run by someone whose first language is not English.
In any case, "mortal dance in machine ambulance" sounds like a great title for an industrial/noise CD (think Coil or someone).
2002/7/22
Yep, here it comes: massive US/UK invasion of Iraq imminent, with Bush telling his troops to get ready, right on cue, and Blair (and Howard undoubtedly) following obediently. Operation Monica by another name, or Gulf War II?
After the 11th of September, the much-scorned, unelected pretender to the throne George W. Bush became one of the most popular presidents in US history. Now, his astronomical popularity rating is taking a battering, in the wake of corporate fraud scandals. Time to invade Iraq or Cuba?
<PARANOIA> (Not that the powers behind the throne stand much chance of being ousted any time soon. With all the creepy Gestapo-like agencies being established to "fight terrorism", and being given sweeping powers exceeding those of Hoover's FBI, any political opponent or opposition movement could be shot down before they became a threat. Chances are, whoever seized power in the US will stay in power for the foreseeable future. Bush, however, could probably be ditched without much loss. They could even have him assassinated by "anarchists" to justify a clampdown on dissident groups, if it proves expedient.) </PARANOIA>
It's funny how, lying in bed and being stared at by a cat, sometimes the cat's eyes look like the eyes in one of those old paintings of Jesus Christ, beholding you with what appears like infinite patience and compassion.
2002/7/21
THIS IS A HEAVY PRODUCT: Some witty Londoner has printed stickers modifying Tube maps, adding imaginary details such as chasms (marked with "Mind the Gap") and alien spaceships to otherwise featureless Tube lines. (via 1.0)
As the hardline government of the United States redoubles its' crusade against the evil of marijuana, medical marijuana users are seeking asylum in Canada. (While some US states have ruled medical marijuana to be legal, the federal government is zealously prosecuting all involved in its provision. And with all those FBI agents assigned to the War On Drugs and son-of-COINTELPRO, makes you wonder who's actually doing something about boring old-fashioned crimes like murder and robbery.)
In live music news, Ninetynine have completed recording, mixing and mastering their new album. It'll be titled The Process and should be out in 3-4 weeks.
(I dragged myself along, doped up on pseudoephedrine, to see them tonight. They put on an intense show; more so than you'd expect from a group of people who had been up for 48 hours putting the finishing touches on an album. And they're playing in about 2 weeks' time at the Rob Roy.)
2002/7/20
Before blogs and the web, the hip young mutants were publishing zines; the late 80s and early 90s were an explosion of zine culture, with the likes of bOING bOING (it wasn't always a blog), Ben Is Dead and Pagan's Head arising out of Generation X slacker/hipster ennui and spreading their memes widely. It was a subculture in which ideas, rather than clothes, social hierarchy or animal magnetism, were the arbiters of cool. Now there's a book on zines, which has articles and interviews with the leading lights of the zine wave. (via bOING bOING (the blog))
A list of 100 albums you should get rid of; not counting obvious easy targets (except perhaps for the one Celine Dion release that somehow ended up there; why anybody with taste would own a Celine Dion CD in the first place is beyond me), but mostly a list of outdated and overrated works, some undoubtedly overlapping with glossy magazines' "most essential CDs" lists. Oddly enough, I've only got two or three of the titles here.
(For some reason, Mozilla doesn't show the entire lists, mistaking parts for HTML comments. If the list looks somewhat incomplete, try viewing the source.)
2002/7/19
True Porn Clerk Stories; a study in polymorphous perversity from a woman who works in a video library with a porn section.
I don't think he was as angry at the notion that he might have to clean up his own mess so much as he was furious that he'd been caught making it. Sometimes new customers don't see the security cameras right away, and they sure as hell don't expect the Voice of God mike. When you're scrutinizing the charming cover art of White Trash Whore the last thing you want is to be chastized by a booming voice from above.
The challenge of creating really good shuffle is endlessly entertaining, and appreciated by all clerks, no matter what our musical tastes. For a while Casey and I were really into Bollywood soundtracks, and, really, anything that would make the customers look up at the speakers in an attempt to figure out what the hell we were playing. Casey eventually got his hands on some Mongolian throat-singing, which was a delight. Roy Orbison, the Trainspotting soundtrack, Soul Couging, and any good New Wave collection used to be a favorite blend of mine, though Casey came up with the most elegantly simple mix: Belle & Sebastian and GWAR.
(via Found)
2002/7/18
Blah. I seem to have come down with a bug of some sort; I spent much of the day lying in bed feeling like death warmed over. Not at all fun.
Anyway, seeing how I wasn't going anywhere, I dragged myself down to the local video library and rented Enigma. Not a bad film; it seemed rather faithful to the Bletchley Park story, and didn't butcher or simplify things for the sake of mass-market appeal; and the settings and incidental music were quite apt too.
(aside: Isn't there now a cryptographic museum at Bletchley Park? And how does one get there from London?)
The DVD came with a bunch of interviews and the like, which were the usual fare; interesting to note how many times Saffron Burrows (who was a committed Marxist) uses the word "class" in hers.
(Tangent: is it officially Sir Mick Jagger or Sir Michael Jagger? And I wonder who will be first to get a knighthood in a few decades' time: Damon Albarn or Liam or Noel Gallagher.)
2002/7/17
Not only is it the future of journalism, but blogging is good for you. It has been found that keeping a blog wards of Alzheimer's disease, by virtue of exercising parts of the brain.
Site to watch: libertus.net; keeping an eye on freedom of expression and censorship in Howard's Australia. (via Graham)
Selected graffiti found in the gents' toilets, Town Hall Hotel:
LIVING IN A NATION WHERE
THOUGHT IS CONTRABAND
MY ILLNESS IS MY TREATMENT
Q: What is E.T. short for?
A: He's just got really small legs.
2002/7/16
Geeky distraction of the day: A big list of Commodore emulator-related file formats. Interesting that they've now got digitised C64 tapes, consisting of the data as the C64 would see it; essential for that authentic watching-the-flashing-border-until-it-loads experience that ordinary emulator formats don't give you. Not to mention raw GCR disk images, for those who missed hacking the 1541 and inventing better ways of writing bit patterns to a 5 1/4-inch floppy. That's what plentiful RAM, disk space and CPU cycles give you, I suppose. I wonder how long until someone writes an 8-bit computer emulator which works on the logic-gate level, or renders the actual electrons in the machine?
I'm listening to Seascapes of the Interior's demo CD, and it's brilliant. Very atmospheric and soundscapey, with piano, fiddle, effected guitar, analogue synths and more. Can't wait to hear what their album's going to sound like.
2002/7/15
Here come Ashcroft's Stasi. The Bush Administration is planning to recruit 1 in 24 Americans as informants, to watch their neighbours and report "suspicious activity". The Citizen Corps, as it's called, will include a greater proportion of the population than East Germany's notoriously comprehensive informant network ever did.
Historically, informant systems have been the tools of non-democratic states. According to a 1992 report by Harvard University's Project on Justice, the accuracy of informant reports is problematic, with some informants having embellished the truth, and others suspected of having fabricated their reports.
Present Justice Department procedures mean that informant reports will enter databases for future reference and/or action. The information will then be broadly available within the department, related agencies and local police forces. The targeted individual will remain unaware of the existence of the report and of its contents.
There goes that unpopular notion of the "consent of the governed".
Aren't you glad you live in a country so concerned about your safety? Because if you aren't and say so, your unpatriotic sentiments will end up in the mother of all Oracle databases, to be used against you at some future time.
2002/7/14
It's official: according the the UN, American nationals cannot, by definition, be war criminals, and crimes against humanity can only be committed by non-US nationals. At least for the next 12 months, renewable annually. And so, justice comes from the barrel of the biggest gun.
(What happens when China comes into its own as a world superpower, and demands that Chinese nationals be exempted from prosecution, threatening to sabotage the UN process if it's unfairly denied this privilege that the US has (as would be the rational thing for China to do faced with such a snub); or when Israel pushes for exemption for its operations in the Palestinian territories, with US backing? Or when Indonesia (the world's third most populous nation, and a potential economic and military powerhouse) starts doing so, and pushing its weight around? Or when a dozen other countries do the same? The criterion for exemption from prosecution doesn't seem to be anything other than "might makes right" (unless you believe in the doctrine of America's God-given Manifest Destiny or some other system of teleological mumbo-jumbo, of course). So we'll end up with a club of powerful nations who are above the law, and a puppet kangaroo court existing solely to try their defeated enemies and keep the small fry from rising above their station in world affairs.)
2002/7/13
This is bizarre: Apparently, Yahoo's free webmail services silently change your words around when you send mail from them, in an arbitrary way. "mocha" becomes "espresso", for example, and "expression" becomes "statement". Though as it hyphenates "javascript" and bowdlerises some HTML tag names, the most likely hypothesis is that it's a hamfisted way to defang tags in outgoing HTML email. (via NtK)
I hadn't been going out much, or blogging much for that matter, lately due to work having been rather insane. However, I have been listening to CDs, so here's a list of what I've been listening to lately:
- Hope Sandoval and the Warm Inventions, Bavarian Fruit Bread. The more I listen to this disc, the more it grows on me. The quiet vocals floating sleepily over the subtly muffled guitars, with barely audible brush percussion and the odd xylophone. Very, very lovely.
- Parsley Sound, Platonic Rate; understated, with subtle distorted beats, analogue synths, vintage keyboards and floating, reverbed vocals; rather dreamlike and atmospheric, with perhaps somewhat of a 1960s psychedelia influence in places.
- Malory, Outerbeats. Best known as "that German outfit that tries to be Slowdive", this album goes beyond their influences somewhat. Granted, the Slowdive-circa-Just-For-A-Day influence is obvious (you can pick out specific songs and rhythms there), though they add synth textures and crunchy beats. And it works. Some of the tracks almost edge into Gus Gus territory.
- Which probably prompted me to dig out my copy of the Icelandic chillout outfit's This Is Normal album and give it a spin or two. It's still as good as it was back in 1999 when I picked it up.
- Victor Lancaster, Mr. Mention. Yes, the plastic bucket drummer who plays on the streets of Melbourne; and better than you'd expect it to be. Some of the remixes are particularly impressive.
- The Love Letter Band, Even The Pretty Girls Take Medicine. One of the raft of 555/Red Square indiepop releases I walked away with during one of Stewart and Jen's popfests, and quite a nice one, in a somewhat fey electro-pop vein.
I was looking at a railway map of Europe recently, and, following the lines, I had a flashback to this old Commodore 64 game. A rather cheesy platform game with vaguely Spectrumish graphics, but somehow it had stuck in my mind all this time, or at least the association between the themed screens and various European locales (from a 1980s English holidaymaker's point of view, by the look of it).
Tonight, I finally got out again to the Empress, getting a much needed dose of live music and Guinness. Seascapes of the Interior were brilliant, playing three 10-15-minute atmospheric pieces, with guitars, violin, piano, analogue synth and plenty of effects; a bit like Mogwai in some ways, only not. And Heligoland were quite lovely too, and very atmospheric. Makes me wish I had a turntable, so I could buy the 7" single they were launching.
2002/7/11
Spam subject line of the day: "BE A MAGNET THAT ONLY ATTRACTS WOMEN"
I'm still waiting for some spammer to better that with "BE A MAGNET THAT ATTRACTS BOTH WOMEN AND MONEY" or something. And then maybe a third one topping that with "ATTRACT WOMEN, MONEY AND LUXURY HOLIDAYS WHILST REPELLING TAX INSPECTORS AND DEBT COLLECTORS" or something.
These people say that it's Blog Meetup Day in 7 days, and have a database of cities and venues. Mind you, the fact that two of the three Melbourne venues available for voting are a Starbucks and a food court doesn't inspire much confidence. (via The Fix)
2002/7/10
Read: Singer-songwriter Janis Ian has a very lucid article on why the recording industry's standard practices are orders of magnitude more damaging to artists than file sharing.
Everybody's getting CDs out these days; even the guy who plays drums on plastic buckets in the Melbourne CBD. Known to friends as Victor Lancaster, the high-precision bucket man now has a CD, titled Mr. Mention, of him playing buckets on the streets and in venues. It's not bad either; it has a number of remixes or tracks built up over his beats, ranging from hip-hop instrumentals to experimental glitch electronica to funky grooves using elements such as car horns and meowing cats in creative ways. It's available now from Victor himself, whom you'll find on the streets of Melbourne, and he only has a few left so you'd better hurry.
2002/7/9
The Narcolombians aren't the only ones at the cutting edge of infotech: Hell's Angels in Canada are also relying on information technology and high-tech intelligence gathering to wage gang wars. (via bOING bOING)
Denial's not just a river in Egypt A morbid new trend sweeping the USA: parents commissioning digitally retouched images of stillborn babies to make them look alive, or indeed sufficiently ungruesome to show off:
Her work is grueling -- she spends two to four hours on each picture -- but she has yet to turn down a photograph, no matter how grisly. Some of the photographs she gets are of 20-week fetuses with transparent skin. Others are of babies that have been dead in the womb for so long that their facial features have dissolved, requiring her to redraw them.
The next logical step would be to use photograph-aging software to interpolate the photographs into the life that never existed; advanced software would use the original photograph, as well as those of parents and siblings, to generate "photographs" of the phantom child at various ages, "growing up" in realtime in a frame on the mantlepiece. I can see a sci-fi/gothic-horror short story in this...
A survey at Japan's Nihon University has revealed that video games decrease brain activity in the brain regions for emotion and creativity. Activity does not recover, and heavy video game users were found to have trouble concentrating, managing anger and associating with friends. (Mind you, this is from the Mainichi, which appears to be a somewhat sensationalist tabloid.)
FALCO! British film production outfit FilmFour is being shut down. Having been responsible for films such as Trainspotting and My Beautiful Laundrette, FilmFour was the premier maker of edgy, intelligent British films. Now the British film industry looks likely to be mostly Working Title/Miramax feel-good pap, insipidly bourgeois Merchant/Ivory costume dramas and formulaic Hollywood blockbusters.
2002/7/8
And while we're on the subject of the lovely people in the entertainment industry, media/sewage conglomerate Vivendi Universal is looking rather fucked these days. And Universal Music head thug and former CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. is probably kicking himself for letting it happen. Of course, given Bronfman's record as one of the most rabid hardliners in the War On Fair Use, I can't say I feel sorry for him.
(Though even if his corporate career is washed up, he could always take up songwriting again. It worked for another hard-nosed businessman.)
Oh, and you can find more schadenfreude here.
An article looking at why the recording industry hates web radio, and wants to wipe it out with prohibitive royalty rates. It comes down to the classic 'turd-in-a-can' business model: it's cheaper to manufacture Britneys and Limp Bizkits ("blockbuster artists" as they're known) than to provide quality and variety; if there's a varied music ecology, consumers expect to find music to cater to their varying tastes, and the recording racket can't sell everyone the same homogeneous rubbish. So, it makes perfect business sense to do their best to kill off the ecology, close off alternative channels and ensure that consumers are a captive audience conditioned to accept that there's no alternative to what Clear Channel is playing.
The smoking gun comes from testimony of an RIAA-backed economist who told the government fee panel that a dramatic shakeout in Webcasting is "inevitable and desirable because it will bring about market consolidation."
Once they cut off the alternatives, the consumer will have no choice but to buy the turd in the can and tell himself that that's what he wanted. Or so the theory goes; of course, people could just stop buying records altogether, even when their Microsoft Trusted PCs don't allow them to listen to anything they haven't paid for, resulting in the recording racket collapsing, dying in the scorched wasteland it has created. (via Techdirt)
It's a bizarre and perhaps frightening world we live in in which outspoken black nationalist militant Louis Farrakhan is a voice of moderation in international affairs.
Why are many men avoiding marriage these days? Because it's a mug's game. (via one.point.zero)
Could the Dutch experiment with liberalism be over? After winning power and ending the long reign of the left, the new Christian-right government of the Netherlands has outlined its conservative social agenda, which includes recriminalising marijuana, shutting down drug cafés, and laws against same-sex marriage and prostitution. Mind you, I wonder how much of the "failure of liberalism" spin of the article is due to it being from a paper in Singapore, a city-state that is the epitome of the philosophy of benign authoritarianism. (via rotten.com)
2002/7/7
Could this be the best 404 ever?
Welcome to Zork. This version created 11-MAR-91 (PHP mod 25-OCT-2001) There are 4 users playing Zork. You are in an open field west of a big white house with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here. >
(via Peter, who really should update his blog more often)
TouchGraph Google Browser shows Google results in a graph. (Java required; it seems to work with Mozilla on Linux.)
Did the British tourist who was abducted with his girlfriend in the Northern Territory last year, and who is believed to have been murdered, fake his death?
2002/7/5
The Fourth of July has passed, and the feared terrorist blitz has not occurred; no Al Qaeda dirty bombs Chernobylising entire cities, no massive truck bombs levelling US bases, no Iraqi PlayStation-powered anthrax-spreading cruise missiles raining from the skies over the Midwest. However, an Egyptian limousine driver did shoot up an El Al counter in Los Angeles, before being shot by the ever-vigilant El Al security personnel. Which suggests one of three possibilities:
- Al Qaeda are scraping the bottom of the barrel as far as terroristic talent goes
- Al Qaeda want us to think they're running out of competent terrorists, to lull us into a false sense of security
- We are seeing the first of a wave of Al Qaeda-inspired spontaneous mass shootings; the post-9/11 equivalent of postal worker/high-school goth rampages.
Here (scroll down) are some technical details on how Microsoft/Intel/AMD's total access control system, Palladium, will work. It's quite ingenious, though still seems like something too draconian. With any luck it'll flop, people will avoid restricted content, and even Microsoft, the RIAA and the MPAA won't be able to get people to pay for software or content which breaks if their system changes. (via bOING bOING)
This is interesting: According to Angry Robot, New York-based French-chick-fronted-pop act Ivy are covering The Go-Betweens' Streets of Your Town. I'll be interested to hear it.
2002/7/4
I got a phone call today from the landlord's representatives, telling me to get rid of my cat. It seems that neighbours have complained about it meowing during the day, obliging the landlord to act. Pity, I was getting used to having the little rascal around.
(A word of advice: if you want to keep a surreptitious cat in a flat, make sure it's not a Burmese kitten; they're a rather boisterous breed, and don't like being left alone all day.)
Anyway, it looks like I'll have to stash him at someone else's place, at least for the time being.
Fed up with waiting for JK Rowling to finish the much delayed next Harry Potter book, some anonymous party in China has decided to take matters into their own hand, by publishing an alternative fifth Harry Potter book. Written in Chinese and translating as Harry Potter and Leopard Walk Up To Dragon, the book uses existing Harry Potter characters, though diverges wildly from Rowling's works, going in a somewhat more Tolkienesque direction; in it, the young wizard is transformed into a fat, hairy dwarf and stripped of his powers by a mysterious rain, and goes off to battle evil in the shape of a dragon.
The book begins with the lines: "Harry doesn't know how long it will take to wash the sticky cream cake off his face. For a civilised young man it is disgusting to have dirt on any part of his body. He lies in the high-quality china bathtub, keeps wiping his face, and thinks about Dali's face, which is as fat as the bottom of Aunt Penny."
I wonder whether this will show up in English. Maybe I should start checking certain bookshops for it...
Whenever talk of fighting bullying at schools comes up, the religious right and their ilk get up to vigorously oppose it, as it would protect leftists, homosexuals, freaks, nerds, hippies, atheists, questioners and other undesirables from being set right by the crew-cut defenders of our values. Bullies, their argument suggests, are the unsung guardians of moral probity, the kids who draw the line and make sure everybody else toes it, without whom the values that make Our Great Nation great would be lost, and who grow into staunch patriots, the backbone of society. Well, perhaps this is the sort of righteously patriotic act they have in mind. (via one.point.zero)
When injustice becomes law... As the US Government's webcasting royalty rates force small hobbyist-run streaming music stations offline, a new generation of peer-to-peer streaming tools are taking lessons from both Napster and Radio Caroline, and threatening a new age of underground pirate radio, challenging the Clear Channel homogeneity of big, trustworthy, RIAA-approved corporate webcasters. Meanwhile, the RIAA are planning to target individual MP3 swappers. And the MPAA's pet congressman is preparing a bill to give the copyright cartels letters of marque, or permission to attack file-sharing computers with legal impunity.
When a boy in rural Pakistan was seen walking with a girl of a higher social status, violating age-old conventions, the tribal council decided to punish him and his family by ordering the gang-rape of his sister.
This is the sort of thing that argues that, not only is the belief in the superiority of Western liberal-humanist values consistent with progressive thought (rather than the shameful manifestation of racism that many naïve ivory-tower leftists would say it is), it is perhaps an essential part of it. Human progress won't come from respecting barbaric ideas of "family honour" as equally valid, in the name of diversity and cultural relativism. (via Reenhead)
A former employee of late lamented MP3-sharing application AudioGalaxy spills the beans on how it worked, and the lengths they went to to prevent copyright infringement (despite the RIAA's disingenuous protestations that they didn't try). (via Found)
This humble blog now has a (somewhat rudimentary) RSS feed. Let me know if it works/doesn't work for you.
Chinese-based spiritual movement/terrorist group (depending on whom you believe) Falun Gong have reportedly hacked one of China's main TV satellites, broadcasting a pro-Falun Gong banner on TV channels. (Mind you, this news comes from The Australian, a publication of News Corp., whose executives have outspokenly condemned Falun Gong and defended the Chinese government's hard line against the group. Make of that what you will.)
2002/7/3
Business at the Speed of Thought: A look at the amazingly sophisticated high-tech infrastructure used by those exponents of zero-friction transnational capitalism in its purest form, the Colombian cocaine cartels:
the cartel had assembled a database that contained both the office and residential telephone numbers of U.S. diplomats and agents based in Colombia, along with the entire call log for the phone company in Cali, which was leaked by employees of the utility. The mainframe was loaded with custom-written data-mining software. It cross-referenced the Cali phone exchange's traffic with the phone numbers of American personnel and Colombian intelligence and law enforcement officials. The computer was essentially conducting a perpetual internal mole-hunt of the cartel's organizational chart. "They could correlate phone numbers, personalities, locations -- any way you want to cut it," says the former director of a law enforcement agency. "Santacruz could see if any of his lieutenants were spilling the beans."
They even use a fleet of submarines, mini-subs, and semisubmersibles to ferry drugs -- sometimes, ingeniously, to larger ships hauling cargoes of hazardous waste, in which the insulated bales of cocaine are stashed. "Those ships never get a close inspection, no matter what country you're in," says John Hensley, former head of enforcement for the U.S. Customs Service.
When the Colombian government launched the unit that Velásquez would later head, it established a toll-free tip line for information about Cali Cartel leaders. The traffickers tapped the line, with deadly consequences. "All of these anonymous callers were immediately identified, and they were killed," a former high-ranking DEA official says.
There are three ways the US could attempt to combat this: (a) by bombing Colombia into a parking lot (which is about as much as would be required to eliminate the cartels), (b) by banning the export of sophisticated communications technology (yeah, like that would work), or (c) by legalising cocaine, immediately cutting off the cartels' revenue and leaving them with a multi-billion-dollar technology bill they have no hope of paying off.
The unthinkable has happened: Graham has ditched his hand-maintained blog system in favour of Movable Type, and now has permalinks. Welcome to the modern world, Graham.
Spam watch: Someone calling themselves Roxie Leeks just sent me mail trying to sell me some sort of dental-care programme. I ask you: would you trust your teeth to someone named "Roxie Leeks"?
(It's a bit like those offers of financial services from people with names like porn stars. Very reassuring, that...)
2002/7/2
Our illustrious leaders: The Workplace Relations Minister, Tony Abbott, who is spearheading plans to criminalise unauthorised strike action and otherwise restrict trade unionism, said today that a bad boss is better than no boss; he went on to elaborate that bad bosses are like bad husbands or bad fathers, and on the whole did more good than harm. He backpedalled somewhat, after outrage from unions, feminists and others who, for some reason, found his remarks offensive.
3RRR just played a rather odd cover of New Order's Subculture; it's glitchy buzzing electronic sounds and a sparse electric piano, with a woman with a thick German accent singing/reciting the lyrics. It's by an act named Ming, and apparently from a compilation named Further Electronic vol. 1.
They're reopening Melbourne Central now, after giving it the all-clear. Given that there were no personnel in moon suits around, it's probably a good sign that the "suspicious object" probably wasn't one of them Al-Qaeda dirty bombs or deadly poison nerve gas or anything. (If it were Al-Qaeda, I'd probably blame Johnny "W.'s cabana boy" Howard for getting us into this mess in the first place.) There also didn't seem to be any TV news crews around, which is rather odd for an emergency of possibly terroristic nature they shut the entire city loop down for. (Unless the government can now get instant D-notices on events as they happen or something.)
Cat and Girl are back; and this week's one is quite good, dissecting indiekid/emo/hipster fashion/symbolism.
I just walked past Museum Melbourne Central station, and found
that it was closed. The down escalators had been sealed off, and two police
and some station staff were guarding the entrance. The staff wouldn't answer
questions as to why it was being evacuated, except to say that the city loop
had been shut down, and passengers needed to go to Flinders St.
Which is rather unusual, and perhaps somewhat worrying. (Could it be
a terrorist gas attack or something?)
Apple buys Emagic, axing the Windows version of Logic, and effectively handing over the Windows sequencer market to Cubase. It'll be interesting to see whether Apple's Logic works better with OS X, whether Apple will still support VST plug-ins or tries to enforce its own plug-in format, whether they'll integrate Logic more with stuff like Final Cut Pro, and so on.
Then again, apparently they bought the two leading image-compositing software firms recently too. Wonder if this means that they'll be killing their Irix and Linux product lines to force everyone onto MacOS X. (Which is technically a pretty nice system, though is quite a bit more expensive than cheap Linux boxes. Which probably suits Apple just fine.)
When two professors were murdered recently at Dartmouth University, the police followed a number of leads whilst looking for the killer. One of the leads was a disgruntled former dishwasher named Ludwig Poehlmann, better known as Archimedes Plutonium, author of numerous Usenet rants about his revolutionary religioscientific theories.
''It was (Hanover Police Chief Nick) Giaccone's impression that Plutonium, although a very odd individual, was not associated with the murders ... and that no further investigation was required into Plutonium,'' a police report states.
Sounds a bit Lynchian, wouldn't you say?
A study at Imperial College, London has found that eccentrics become more extreme with age. The researchers speculate that this is due to the human nervous system becoming less plastic, and less capable of covering up eccentricities to better fit in. Though Eliot from whom I got the link suggests it may be due to people becoming less concerned about others' opinions as they grow old. Though I wonder whether, given that thought and consciousness are physical processes, one is not a physical side-effect of the other.
Re: the 1'00" thing. Apparently it's not as absurd as it has been made out to be. Mike Batt, the composer in question is not being sued for putting a track of silence on his CD, but rather, he is being billed for royalties because he credited it to John Cage. And then, when billed for writing royalties, he claimed that the silence credited to Cage was his own, and not Cage's. Which is still absurd, but not the neo-Galambosian outrage it was reported to be.
Batt had used Cage's name for "obvious reasons," Caprioglio said to evoke Cage's provocative 1952 composition. "If Mr. Batt wants to produce a minute of silence under his own name," he conceded, "we would obviously have no right to the royalties."
So in a sense, Batt's defence comes down to "I credited John Cage as a joke, but shouldn't be expected to pay real royalties, because 4'33" is not a real composition"; which sounds a bit too much like the "modern art is rubbish" argument. (via the Horn)
Healing the rift between Church and State: A Slate article on how America, a nation founded by secularistic Freemasons during the Enlightenment, became One Nation Under God, with monotheism of a particularly Protestantoid stripe its official core value. (Well, either that or fast-food franchises.) Not surprisingly, it had a lot to do with the McCarthy Era, and the fight against Godless Communism. (Even now, atheism is seen as un-American, and surveys show that many if not most Americans wouldn't trust an atheist with public office. What would Jefferson have said?)
I wonder what effects a War Without End against bomb-wielding religious fanatics would have. Perhaps the only good to come of it will be that people will come out of it not trusting those religion-spouting sonsofbitches. (via Reenhead)
Alternative/underground music review webzine Pitchfork Media has an article on file-sharing after AudioGalaxy. All the clients there (other than the one using the dead inefficient Gnutella system) are proprietary Windows-only clients, and, as they point out, not unlikely to contain spyware and other such nasties. (That's the consequence of file-sharing being driven underground; to use it, one has to truck with people of flexible ethics; much like the case with drugs.) Though they don't mention any open-source systems, such as the Circle. (via Jimbob)
2002/7/1
Which character from The King in Yellow are you? It says I'm Prince Thale. I've got a copy of it sitting around; one day I'll have to actually get around to reading it. (via Lukelog)
You can't keep a good nutter down, it seems. Former BBC snooker presenter David Icke, these days best known for his beliefs that the world is run by a sinister cabal of shape-shifting lizards, is making his TV comeback. Icke, who also claims to be the "Son of God", will be presenting a show named 'Headf**k' on the Sci-Fi cable/satellite channel (presumably in the US), and will put forward his bizarre ideas to a broader audience.