2002/9/30
The New McCarthyism: In the U.S., members of antiwar/environmentalist/progressive activist groups are being placed on the no-fly list, and being detained should they try to board an aircraft; just in case the Godless comsymps decide to help out their buddy Osama.
(It says a lot about the worldview of Bush-era America that left-wing progressives are lumped in the same category as Islamic Fundamentalist militants.)
A German study claims that blond-haired people will die out in 200 years. Blond hair is caused by a recessive gene, and is thus genetically disadvantaged. This was compensated for by blond people being widely seen as more attractive (*ahem*), but modern artificial blond colourings exploit this bias much more effectively than natural blond hair.
Or will blondes die out? Professor Jonathan Rees (who previously proved that redheads are sexier) claims that the blonde gene will become less common but never completely disappear, as it does not carry any disadvantage. (Except in jokes, that is.) (via FmH)
2002/9/29
The Fitzroy-themed Between the Spires art exhibition, formerly at the Found Project Space (which has since been evicted to make place for a trendy clothing shop or yuppie lifestyle apartments) is now taking place at Dante's Upstairs Gallery, in Gertrude St. (It's above a café named Dante's).
Why am I telling you this, dear reader? Because among the works in this exhibition are two of my photographs of the last day at the Punters Club. (Albeit not in their original 640x480 cheap-digital-camera glory; they have since been autotraced and processed into something a bit more interesting-looking, or at least a bit more amenable to being printed on large pieces of paper.)
Anyway, the exhibition opening is this Tuesday the 1st of October, at 6:30pm, at Dante's Upstairs Gallery, 156 Gertrude St., Fitzroy.
This evening I crossed the Yarra and went to Revolver to see
Kevin Blechdom and supports; meeting up with
Cos there.
First up was the obligatory DJ (given that it's in Prahran, I believe there
are council zoning requirements mandating DJs in all venues there),
playing various electro, including some new Death In Vegas, some
Takako Minekawa, a Kraftwerk remix and such.
Next up, local Dadaistic hip-hop collective Curse ov Dialect went up, attired in various costumes (as in robes, face paint and a jester hat; no gangsta bling-bling here), running around the stage, rapping and talking over prerecorded beats, in between running into the audience and grabbing glasses off tables. They were quite good; conceptually more original and innovative than most Australian hip-hop (which tends to consist of knockoffs of Afro-American urban culture, down to the beats and samples, with the token Australian accent and slang terms thrown in).
Next up were The Sailors, who appear to be three post-ironic inner-city hipsters doing Detroit-style rock (with a bit of Beastie Boys thrown in for good measure); either that or one of those New-Saviours-of-Rock bands whose names all start with The. Stylistically not in the same bag as Kevin Blechdom, but similarly fond of innuendo (only of a more homoerotic nature, cf. their Stooges-style opus "Y.C.M.A.", which has nothing to do with the Village People). Perhaps one could classify them as an indie-rock Down Town Brown.
Finally, Kevin Blechdom came on. (For those who aren't aware of this, she is female, and Kevin is not her real name.) She started off by playing banjo, solo or over loops from a Macintosh laptop behind her.
Later she picked up a home-computer MIDI keyboard (adapted into stage gear by the clever expedient of gluing a strap onto it) and started playing that, triggering some Casio-like buzzy warbles whilst singing. She finished with her exquisitely bootywhangular chair-dance to her electropop cover of Tina Turner's Private Dancer, at one stage falling off the chair but soldiering on. Alas, my digital camera ran out of batteries at the time; had it not, I'd have a video file to show for it.
I'm not sure what to make of Kevin Blechdom. On one hand, some of her lyrics are a bit daft (some choice examples: "use your heart as a telephone, and you'll never ever be alone, you see, you'll be with me", "I don't think you understand, bad music is grand -- like a piano!", and a song about breasts exploding in flames which had a schoolyardish puerility about it), and she overacts more than a little, giving the impression of watching an enthusiastic amateur in a talent show. Though judging by her content, I suspect that that may be a deliberate aesthetic choice. OTOH, she's more entertaining than watching some bloke making burbling noises with a PowerBook, or the sort of dull, pretentious twaddle that makes up a lot of "experimental electronica".
2002/9/28
Let's hear it for the Telstra marketing people. Every so often, my mobile phone bill comes with a booklet titled "conversations" (note the stylishly lower-case title), containing announcements of new services, SMS competitions and other attempts to get the consumer to work up a higher phone bill. To keep up the façade that the booklet is a fun free magazine, and not, in fact, an attempt to sell you something, the "news" and advertising are interspersed with a small amount of copywritten, non-promotional "fun" material, such as some highly dubious "conversation starters":
- Conversation Starter #2: Is a zebra white with black stripes or black with white stripes?
- Conversation Starter #3: Did you know our nose and ears never stop growing?
- Conversation Starter #6: Why is it called an eggplant? It's not an egg or a plant.
I can totally see these being used as an icebreaker at parties. Or indeed to approach attractive strangers in a bar.
YOU: "Did you know that pearls melt in vinegar?"
ATTRACTIVE STRANGER: "Wow! I never knew that..."
YOU: "It's true. And the Grand Canyon could hold about 900 trillion footballs... (nervous giggle) That's a *lot* of footballs!"
ATTRACTIVE STRANGER: (wide-eyed) "Reeally?"
Try it!
2002/9/27
First there was spyware, and now there's diversionware; hidden add-ons to free Windows utilities/toys, which intercept the user's web requests to shopping web sites and substitute in the software maker's affiliate ID, even if someone else's ID was used. And this is completely legal, because users agree to it in the click-through licence agreements.
I suppose that's a key cultural distinction between UNIX and Windows. In the UNIX world, "free software" implies Richard Stallman's ideology. In the Windows world, "free software" implies layers of parasitic spyware and diversionware working behind the user's back. (via Techdirt)
The Observer's Lynn Barber talks to Morrissey about his self-imposed exile in Los Angeles, his (lack of) place in the current music industry and the acrimony between him and former bandmates:
Los Angeles suits him, he says, because 'it's a particularly sexless city. Everybody's bodies are so sanitised, so caked in every conceivable exfoliation, cologne and mousse, they have no trace of any kind of sexuality, nothing real and earthy. So I blend in very well!'
And here's a review of a recent Morrissey show, which certainly sounds promising. (via Luke)
2002/9/26
Who will be our son of a bitch leader of the burgeoning new democracy we establish in Baghdad when we get Saddam?
The Sunday Herald
profiles the leading candidates. Each is a nasty piece of work, ranging from sadistic mass murderers to amoral crooks. But at least they'll guarantee that the oil keeps flowing. God Bless America!
(via Charlie's Diary)
Want to do your bit for the moral defense of capitalism? Why not buy a copy of the Libertarian Girls calendar; each month has a different latter-day Dagny Taggart in a patriotic pose (and showing lots of flesh too). And proceeds go towards the Libertarian Party's campaigns, so rich people can smoke dope without government interference. (via die puny humans)
2002/9/25
Read: The Childhood Origins of Terrorism, an essay which suggests that Islamic Fundamentalist extremism and terrorism are products of abusive child-rearing practices found in parts of the Middle East, and the resultant culture of self-loathing and violent absolutism, and draws comparisons between the psychologies of terrorists and serial killers. Which sort of makes sense, though sounds suspiciously Freudian in places. (via FmH)
The Smaller Picture, an exercise in evolving a bitmap font one pixel at a time, using input from the public. (via bOING bOING)
2002/9/24
Soup, Cos' new community blog storytelling project, has an entry on overpasses as community noticeboards; i.e., the tendency for people to write birthday wishes, declarations of love, &c., on bridges and overpasses.
Many years ago, there was a graffito over Burwood Highway (I think it was on one of the Alamein line railway bridges), reading "I'LL ALWAYS MISS YOU EILEEN &heart; SD". I saw it many times when being driven to school, and imagined a tearful SD writing that before jumping to his death below. It occurred to me later that the bridge was nowhere near high enough to reliably commit suicide from, by when my mental image of SD was revised to lying with a broken leg in the middle of Burwood Highway at 3am, a bucket of paint spilled beside him, the pain distracting him from his broken heart, and the alcohol taking some of the edge off the pain.
One day I saw a piece in a community paper (I think it was out Ferntree Gully way), by a journalist who tracked down the real SD, who wrote his famous message one drunken night after Eileen left him, a decade or so earlier. Since then he had married another girl, bought a house in Boronia or Upwey or some place, and become a father. Every day he would commute to work down Burwood Highway and see his younger self's testament of undying love; sometimes, he said, he wanted to climb the bridge and paint over the silly thing once and for all.
Porn spammers are taking to online dating web sites to prey on the unloved and gullible; it now seems that 3% of online personals are spam, crafted to collect email addresses and hopefully sucker the respondent into subscribing to a porn site.
While the ads are tricky to spot, it's not impossible. They tend to be women in their 20s who have very general information listed in their personal essays, and often leave many personal details fields blank. And of course, an immediate request for a private e-mail address should be suspicious.
The UK government is escalating the War On Copying: in a heartwarming display of public-private partnership for the common good, the government and recording industry are co-funding a new post at the Department of Culture, Media and Sport. The post will be held by a former executive of V2, BMG and Warner Music, and its purpose will be to stamp out the scourge of file-sharing and help ease in mandatory copy-denial technologies.
"Legitimate means of distributing music are under threat "
(via Charlie's Diary)
2002/9/23
Shopkeepers in Russia have discovered an innovative advertising medium: the sides of stray dogs. They lure the dogs with meat, paint their shop's logo (as well as those of any brands they stock) on their sides and release them; the hapless, half-starved animals then wander around like walking billboards, until they're caught and repainted by a rival shop.
Well, at least it must be less obnoxious than those big black trucks with huge-arse billboards, usually advertising some lifestyle product for unsubtle gimboids, driving around in fleets of three and spewing diesel fumes into the air, as some sort of cocky, defiant fuck-you to all the oxygen-breathing bystanders ("hey, try ignoring this, motherfuckers!"). Are there really large demographic groups who choose to consume a certain brand because the manufacturer cares enough to pay someone to spew carbon monoxide into their air?
2002/9/20
Is anybody else having trouble getting through to GJW's blog? the-fix.org now seems to resolve to some corporate portal with "free credit repair" and "private investigators" and other things with a clammy, spamlike feeling about them.
And while we're on the subject of bootywhang, here's a comprehensive Venn diagram of sexual fetishes, from the commonplace to the bizarre. (via Charlie's Diary)
Greenpeace have released a guide to environmentally safe sex, for highly principled people, with advice such as "if you like to use produce to get the blood boiling, make sure it is GE-free", and making sure that paddles are made from sustainably-harvested timber; not to mention suggestions for role-playing S&M games such as "George Bush and Corporate America at the Earth Summit":
6. Have you got something more than a good time up your sleeve. Could it be polyvinyl chloride? Ditch the PVC and vinyl accessories for your playtime. The production of PVC creates and releases one of the most toxic chemicals - dioxin. You also don't want to be sucking on that stuff. The use of PVC in young children's toys has already been banned in many countries. Instead, opt for accessories made from natural substances like rubber or leather.
Not sure what animal-liberation groups will think of Greenpeace telling people to use leather instead of PVC. How about sex toys made from hemp and recycled tyres?
An Israeli hacker has written a program for extracting audio from scans of vinyl records. The sound quality isn't brilliant, though the original material is identifiable. Many suspected it was a hoax; though the author has now released source code. I wonder whether high-fidelity audio extraction could be achieved with commodity image scanners and audio-enhancement software.
Some good news: of the 2,400 nuclear warheads that were in the Ukraine, over 90% have been accounted for. That's a load off everybody's mind.
A short (30 second) video fragment I took at last night's Ninetynine performance. The bad camerawork is mine. (5.5Mb; AVI format, with somewhat dodgy sound).
For some reason, the How indie are you? test thinks that I am a scenester. (via Reenhead)
You are so indie it hurts. You hang out with the coolest people in your city. It doesn't even bother you that none of them know your name. You know lots of bands personally, you know a couple of guys from We Hate The Mainstream Records, and you blag your way into getting almost everything for free. That fanzine you write gives you extra kudos. You probably don't even care that non-scenesters think you're a pretentious fuck.
Which is rather amusing, if totally, er, mostly incorrect. (Shut up, Graham.)
Anyway, writing a blog is apparently nowhere near as cool or indie as writing a photocopied zine, because blogs don't have the cachet of the scarcity/obscurity factor. (cf: mp3.com sites vs. 7" split singles. Any suburban bogan can put something on the web, but only the hippest of hipsters actually have stylishly crappy-looking bits of photocopied paper with twee-looking drawings on the front in all the right shops.)
2002/9/19
The latest fad among young Japanese is having sekusutomo -- literally "sex friends", or groups of friends one has casual sex with, on a rotating basis. (via rotten.com)
2002/9/18
Yes! Morrissey is playing a solo show at the Forum on October the 15th. The show will apparently feature songs from both his solo career and the Smiths back-catalogue.
Could this be the most twee Flash game ever? A kid of indeterminate sex flying a kite from a bicycle, over a vaguely pastoral backdrop, while a plucked acoustic guitar loop plays. How much do you want to bet the programmer was listening to a lot of Belle & Sebastian at the time?
As far as the question of giving ratings to records goes, IndiePages has an interesting alternative to the rating out of 5; they call it the Mix Tape Quotient.
So, here's the deal: every record is rated on its Mix Tape Quotient, or MTQ. This is the number of songs worthy of repeated listenings on that album. For example, a great 3-song 7" would get 3/3 or a hit-and-miss 12-song cd would get 7/12.
An interesting approach, though I'm not sure of how useful it is; some discs worth it for just a handful of brilliant tracks. (One example I could think of could be Slowdive's Pygmalion; as a totality it works splendidly, though there are only 3 or 4 at most tracks I'd choose on their own from it*). And one brilliant track could beat 7 passably good tracks.
And there's the question of what threshold you set for something being on a mix tape; does it have to really stand out, or just be good? Is it bad form to put more than N tracks by one artist on a mix tape (or CD)? (A number of years ago, I was in the habit of putting way too much Paradise Motel on my mix tapes; one or two I made contained about half of Some Deaths Take Forever, interleaved with other stuff. I try to avoid this sort of thing these days, though the last one I made did have several Field Mice-related tracks on it.)
* in case you're wondering, Rutti, Crazy For You, Blue Skied An' Clear and possibly J's Heaven; though the others do a good job of filling out the whole.
Tonight I went to the cinema to see Insomnia. It was quite good; perhaps not as innovative as Memento, but still quite interesting. Robin Williams, in his calm, cheerful demeanour, makes a chillingly plausible psychopath, and the script kept things uncertain until the end. And the cinematography and scenery was beautiful; lots of blues, greens and greys, sweeping landscapes and water/frost effects. It reminded me perhaps a little of early X Files episodes, perhaps because it was also filmed in British Columbia.
2002/9/17
Nothing shows patriotism like having a photomosaic of Shrub made of Jesus images in your house, right next to the gun rack. Yeee-ha!
Now someone should make one of John Howard, Our Christian Prime Minister. (via bOING bOING, The Fix)
Life imitates A Clockwork Orange? A Victorian company wants to sell alcoholic milk. Named Moo Joose, the knifey moloko will have a 5.3% alcohol content, higher than that of most beer; if they get permission to sell it, that is.
Heard on 3RRR this morning: Morrissey is rumoured to do a solo show in Melbourne, in addition to his Livid appearance. I hope so; I might not need to buy that pair of big yellow shorts in that case.
First he stole American childrens' Christmas PlayStations, and now that Saddam Hussein rotter has pissed off the US again: by unconditionally agreeing to arms inspections, robbing Bush and Blair of the pretext for an invasion. The US representative doesn't seem at all happy with this, and still hopes to have a jolly good war soon.
Bartlett called the Iraqi offer a tactic aimed at giving "false hope to the international community that he (Saddam) means business this time".
If the US wanted to resolve the issue through negotiation, it would at least adopt the polite fiction that Iraq is an honorable participant in diplomacy, in the hope that Iraq behaves like one and progress can be made. Though the US seems to be spoiling for a fight, at any excuse.
Meanwhile, in the land of commercial radio, the latest entry to the top-40 charts is a pop group named after a confectionery brand. The fictitious band named Starburst, whose actual performers' identities are concealed, was manufactured by a marketing firm commissioned by confectionery maker Mars. Their song, "Get Your Juices Going", whose lyrics are built around the flavours of Mars's Starburst sweets, was released by Zomba Records (who also released Britney Spears' branded hit "Taste The Victory", free with bottles of Pepsi not that long ago), and is on heavy rotation on "hip", "alternative" new commercial radio station Nova. Is it just a 4-minute ad jingle, or the future of branded pop culture? And what would Naomi Klein say?
(Also, haven't extended versions of ad jingles been released on records before? Was that "It's The Real Thing" Coca-Cola jingle that those DJs sampled recently released to the public; or the German commercial jazz on Popshopping? And I vaguely remember some commercial-techno Coca-Cola jingle being in the suburban Sanity singles racks in the mid-90s.)
For decades, the recording industry has been a rigged game, with recording companies systematically exploiting if not defrauding artists; now, a growing artists' rights movement, counting among its number many artists (as well as perennial troublemakers like Steve Albini), is standing up to the recording racket, and has its sites set on reforming the system, from giving artists their copyrights and doing away with draconian recording contracts to reforming the arcane and obfuscatory accounting practices that allow companies to fleece artists. Naturally, the RIAA are putting on their best mask of wounded innocence.
As for label fears of financial ruin, Henley fires back, "When the record companies make $5 for every $1 the artist makes, I don't see where they get off making those remarks. It's another spin tactic."
Now that the recording industry is suffering a slump, the artists' rights movement has a chance. Hopefully it will succeed, and the industry will become more like the publishing industry and less like organised crime.
2002/9/16
Caveat lector: The ever-lucid Charlie Stross deconstructs alleged Al-Qaeda spokesman Suleiman Abu Ghaith's ghastly tirade, in which he claims the right to kill 4 million Americans. It appears the Middle East Media Research Institute, which found and translated the piece, is run by people connected with Israeli intelligence, and thus may not be as impartial and nonpartisan as it purports to be; and there's the suggestion that this Abu Ghaith chap may be just some random lunatic chosen for his scariness.
(Imagine a mirror-image Arab news organisation combing the US local newspapers for editorials demanding that we kill them all or forcibly convert them to Christianity. They wouldn't have to look far with the likes of Anne Coulter about, would they?)
Being a professional heartless bastard can take its toll. The daughter of immigration minister Philip Ruddock, of detention camp infamy, has left Australia to work in a developing country. Kirsty Ruddock gave distress with her father's policies and politics as one of her reasons for leaving.
She says she has asked her father not to wear his Amnesty International badge when discussing immigration matters as the organisation opposed his policies.
What does one have to do to be kicked out of Amnesty International these days?
Figures released in parliament have revealed that Australia's rate of phone tapping is 20 times that of the US. Last year, more than 2,150 phone tap warrants were issued in Australia, compared to 1490 in the US. The Australian figures exclude ASIO, who stand to gain sweeping surveillance powers in new "anti-terrorism" legislation being considered. Despite this, Australian authorities have had fewer arrests than their US counterparts. Is Australia a world-leading panopticon state, or home to more high-tech criminals? Or do Australians rely on telecommunications more than Americans do for some cultural or geographical reason?
For the style-conscious indiekid: Cat and Girl, one of the better web comics, now have some rather twee-looking button badges. Wearing suggestion: on fur-lined parka with black-frame emo glasses, to flaunt your subcultural awareness.
A recently uncovered secret document from the Project for the New American Century hass revealed that Bush and senior figures from his cabinet planned to invade Iraq and seize control of the Middle East even before the 2000 election. The blueprint for US world domination, drawn up for Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other Bush cabinet members, refers to the Middle East as the "new American frontier" and calls for, among other things, a permanent US presence in the area, using US allies such as the UK as instruments of US control, the development of biological weapons, the creation of "US Space Forces" to dominate space and "regime change" in China. It also shows concern that Europe could rival the USA and says that the US must 'discourage advanced industrial nations from challenging our leadership or even aspiring to a larger regional or global role'. (via rotten.com)
2002/9/15
I went to the Empress tonight, to see a few bands. I only saw The Steinbecks' last two or so songs, but they seemed quite good, in a Sarah Records-esque jangle-pop sort of way. Lacto-Ovo played mostly new material, and sounded rather early-80s (as they do); in one of their songs, the guitar was somewhat reminiscent of The Cure circa A Forest. With any luck they'll have a new EP out sometime soon.
Psyco, a just-in-time compiler for Python. Unlike most JIT compilers, it's a specializing compiler, meaning that it makes several versions of each function, optimised for different data sets. The author claims it can accelerate Python algorithmic code to C-like levels of speed, obviating the need to write C modules. (via NtK)
A look at Burma's burgeoning rock scene, where bands with metal-sounding names like Iron Cross and Emperor perform Beatles covers and country & western numbers. Isolated totalitarian states sure are weird places.
2002/9/14
Web Designer Builds Home out of Flash; hits the nail right on the head.
Conventional home builders aren't concerned just yet that they will become obsolete. "I see a fundamental usability issue with Flash homes," relates Greg Watson of J & G Builders. "For example, from home to home there will be design differences. In one house if you turn the door knob it'll open the door, but in another the house might start dancing."
(via Gimbo)
This afternoon, I found a copy of you-know-what in PolyEster. On first listen, it's every bit as good as I hoped it would be, and captures their sound and vitality remarkably well. The packaging is also quite classy. I'll probably write up a full review for RAN soon.
I'll shut up about them now, before this turns into some kind of indie britneyblog.
I just downloaded the Python/Linux client for SoulSeek. It's pretty doovy, and quite a decent replacement for AudioGalaxy. One nice thing about it is how many specialist genre fan communities there are on it; rather than just the usual Limp Bizkit/Britney Spears crud that clogs up MP3 sharing networks, you can find all sorts of indie, IDM, post-rock, electronica and so on. (A search for "Takako Minekawa" returned a lot of hits, and even something obscure like "Fog and Ocean" returned a few.)
One annoyance is that the interface depends on the wxgtk UI libraries, which are hardly part of every Python system. But the code looks modular enough, and hopefully someone will make a command-line-mode plug-in or interfaces for other OSes. (MacOS X Cocoa would be nice.)
2002/9/13
Hmm... Ninetynine's The Process comes out on Monday, and chaosmusic.com already have a page for it. The track listing looks very promising (and the excerpts I've heard on 3RRR do too). The artwork doesn't seem to have the same indie-geeky quality of previous albums (they've ditched the graph paper, I see, along with the numerical album title thing), but it's probably appropriate, as their sound has become more fluid and organic and, dare I say, more mature.
Right now, I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of this disc.
Forbidden thoughts on 9/11, ranging from political thoughtcrime and hate-mongering to just people getting in touch with their inner sociopath.
"I used to think all firemen were hot. I now think they are slimy. At least four times last October I was in a bar where a fireman was so forward and sleazy, saying things like 'It's been so hard. You can't believe it' while pawing me. I'm sure his buddy who died running into a building on fire would feel vindicated by this slimeball getting laid, but I'm not going to participate." -- Anne, 31, an advertising sales manager in New York
I read [the New York Times'] 'Portraits of Grief'... as object lessons in why one should never aspire to be a model employee.
"The day of 9/11, [my friend and I] spoke frequently, as we always did, being that we were inseparably close. The next day she called and said that she was walking in her neighborhood and some 'Indians wearing saris' were walking down the street and she spit on them -- it was her patriotic duty."
And then there's the response of British artist Damian Hirst, best known for chainsawing cows in half, who acclaimed the terrorist attacks as a work of art; echoing what Laurie Anderson said (many years ago), that terrorists are the last true performance artists. (Wonder what will happen when Hirst next sets foot in New York; I imagine quite a few people would see it as their patriotic duty to grab a Louisville Slugger and form a welcoming committee for him.)
I went to see Season tonight at the Empress; they were pretty good, in a cinematic, soundscapey sort of way. The processed guitar/bass alternated between indie post-rock, shoegazer and even went metal for a few bars. They brought in a cellist (a woman named Kaz) towards the end for their song Russia, which added a lot to it; it ended up somewhere in the vicinity of New Order meets Black Tape For A Blue Girl; not a bad thing at all.
Anyway, they won't be doing any gigs for a while, but hopefully will have another CD out by the end of the year.
2002/9/12
Says God, a more intelligent retort to all those "God says" billboards in the US:
If I wanted you to have seven kids, I would have given you a bigger planet. --God
I never said, "Thou shalt not think." --God
You'd better have stopped fighting by the time I get back, or you're all grounded. --God
Here's a clue--if they say they're doing it in my name, they're lying. --God
(via bOING bOING)
Those comsymps at the Grauniad are having a minute's silence for September 11 victims -- September 11, 1973, when the CIA-backed Pinochet regime overthrew Allende in Chile. Mind you, the estimated 30,000 men, women and children who were killed were all Communists, who would have enslaved Chile under a hellish Stalinist dictatorship had the CIA not intervened in the name of defending freedom worldwide.
(Wasn't it Kissinger or someone who articulated the difference between "totalitarianism", which is uniformly evil (and ideologically "left-wing"), and "authoritarianism", which can be benign, a strong state concerned about defending cherished values and such?)
On a similar tangent, I once heard that one of the reason for the West's toleration of the Indonesian invasion of East Timor was that Fretilin had troublingly leftist leanings; an independent East Timor would have been a probable Soviet client state, and Australia could have had its own Cuban Missile Crisis. And what better experts on Communist eradication in the asia-pacific region than Suharto's New Order?
A brief roundup of news items this God Bless America Day: Salman Rushdie commenting on how Bush's selective "anti-terrorist" campaign may end up achieving what Osama bin Laden sought to do, i.e., radicalising large sections of the Islamic world. Meanwhile, a US journalist comments on the blind spot of the US newsmedia:
In Washington, the media function like a palace court press. In the name of political neutrality, the definition of quotable sources is limited to the narrow spectrum from Republican to Democrat. If a given point of view - say, that missile defence is a dangerous fantasy - is not articulated by leading lawmakers, it is ignored. Instead of substance, journalists focus on palace intrigues: what is the White House proposing today, how will Congress react, who will win the fight? Rarely does the coverage stand back from insider debates, or offer alternative analysis. Thus our media fail to act as the check and balance our nation's founders envisioned.
And then there's the Stepford Citizen Syndrome, or the 10 official "truths" of the War On Terrorism (ranging from Bush's moral virtue and wise leadership to the immediate threat of Saddam Hussein, to the integrity of America's famed constitutional checks and balances), each debunked:
Overlooking our thrice-arrested president's blatant disregard for civil rights, human rights and the environment, they continue to downplay scandals and downgrade their role as protectors of the public trust. But with oft-repeated quips like, "lucky me, I hit the trifecta" and "if this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier," G.W. offers a glimpse at his indecent inner frat boy. Especially revealing was a Talk Magazine interview, in which he mimicked death row inmate Karla Faye Tucker. "Please," Bush whimpered, mocking Tucker's plea for clemency, "don't kill me." Gallows humor is only funny when those telling jokes don't have the power to save people from the gallows.
Europeans don't agree with us because we're wrong. They understand the geopolitical motivations behind this war, as their press isn't as censored. In America, however, stories about Enron's involvement in the proposed oil and gas pipeline though Afghanistan were squashed, and if you wanted to know about the Taliban's trip to Texas, you had to learn about it in the National Enquirer rather than on Meet the Press.
Stability in Afghanistan is but a myth, warlords carry out atrocities without intervention, and the State Department is forced to guard President Karzai. Meanwhile, many warn that Bush's plans for Iraq could lead to Armageddon. Yet "Bush is doing an excellent job in the war on terror?" How?
In other words, where are we going, and why are we in this handbasket?
2002/9/11
Yakuza gangs in Japan have figured out a way of monetising sex crime; and have started operating rape safaris for paying customers, presumably the sick bastards whose tastes have become too rarefied for hentai anime and vending-machine schoolgirl panties.
"If a member tells his club the type of women he'd like to rape, the club will arrange it for him. Market rates are about 100,000 yen a rape. If the member designates a specific individual, the fee can go over 1 million yen in some cases. Designating an individual usually involves putting the guy together with somebody who knows him, making it more likely they can be reported to the cops, so the greater cost arises from the greater risk factor," the source tells Asahi Geino.
(via die puny humans)
Shortly after the CIA has failed to find any link between Iraq and terrorist groups, the UN's chief weapons inspector, Hans Blix, has said that there is no evidence of Iraq having or trying to build weapons of mass destruction. Nonetheless, Bush, Blair and Howard are still going on about how there must be terrorist links, and how with international help, Iraq could easily make a nuclear bomb to give to Al-Qaeda. Call it faith-based geopolitics.
Evidence or no evidence, there will almost certainly be an invasion of Iraq. Bush will not be robbed of his statesmanly stature and turned into just another bumbling idiot politician again, and nothing short of Saddam Hussein giving himself up to U.S. authorities (and not those UN/EU pinkos either) will suffice to stop the machinery now in motion. And as soon as Saddam is safely in his supermax cell in Colorado and the insurrections across the Middle East have been put down, they can go after Castro or Gaddafi; the possibilities are endless.
The World's Oldest Multinational Corporation: Looks like the Vatican is still unclear on the concept of free speech and the open debate of issues, fiercely condemning a film about abuse in convents. Perhaps they should bring back the Index and summarily excommunicate anyone who partakes of forbidden media. Incidentally, I wonder how it will fare against Australia's film censorship regime.
2002/9/10
Some conceptual artist types have set up a web server programmed to crush itself. The machine is inside an industrial crusher controlled by itself, and is programmed to crush itself on Thursday. Jim, from whom I got the link, suggests that perhaps there should be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Computers to prevent such atrocities.
Power Goth Girls, a somewhat amusing combination of the two memes, with actual animations. Unfortunately, most of the animations are in Windows Media format.
I know; let's go goth clubbing! (via the English Manager)
Another thing to see if I visit the US: the Edward Gorey museum, in what was his home in Cape Cod. He was quite a character, it would seem. (note: link requires registration, but not a working email address.) (via bOING bOING)
I finally went to see Ghost World. I enjoyed it; it's a good film about outsiderhood and alienation in the (post)modern world. The main character, Enid, is sort of the anti-Amélie; an over-intellectual, sarcastic (almost to the point of misanthropy) 18-year-old girl, who has just graduated from high school, and hides her existential insecurity beneath an armour of defensive irony and sarcasm. Like Audrey Tautou's character, she is also a misfit, an outsider, not belonging with the people around her; though she's not particularly nice. The film had a subtly cartoonish air about it, populated with caricatures; the main characters, however, are quite realistic and complex; the portrayal of Enid, for example, balances irony and sincerity quite well.
(Oh yes, and they have the addition of Seymour the record collector, who wasn't in the graphic novel (or at least didn't have a name); fortunately, his interaction with Enid isn't the usual cloying romantic-comedy fare about kindred spirits finding each other and love conquering all and all that Working Title/Miramax schmaltz. They didn't make a High Fidelity out of it, thankfully.)
I usually only go to see films with other people; though this time I'm glad I saw Ghost World alone; this is the sort of film whose effect would be spoiled by seeing it in a group as part of a social activity.
I'll probably get this on DVD when it comes out.
2002/9/9
Hmmm... The Designers Republic, the graphic design outfit who made all those Warp and PWEI album covers and spawned legions of dodgy imitators, are coming to Melbourne; they're appearing at something called the Design Forum, on the 16th of October (i.e., one day before the Mogwai show).
Last night as I was about to put my mobile phone into its charger, I suddenly noticed that I don't have a mobile phone. Calling it revealed that it wasn't in my flat. It seems to have disappeared somewhere between Ascot Vale and North Fitzroy, possibly on a train. I called the train companies, but to no avail (another Nokia 3210 turned up in Greensborough, but it wasn't mine).)
So today I went to the Telstra shop to look at new units. Basically, it appears, between the time I got my last one and now, they stopped making them free in the plans, and now one has to buy the unit separately. Not wishing to spend the $300-$1500 a passably decent new mobile phone costs (depending on features; the Nokia 7650 looked temptingly doovy, though there are more important things I could spend that money on), I went down to Northcote and found a Nokia 3310 (one model up from my 3210, and obsolete enough to be cheap) for $130.
The 3310 is basically like the 3210, only with a few other features (such as more slots for ringtones); a good inexpensive model. I looked at the ones with infrared, but they either lacked custom ringtones or cost more than I was prepared to pay for the convenience of beaming contacts from my Visor. The only annoyance (other than having to rekey my City of Lost Children organ grinder's theme ringtone) is that the 3310 doesn't have the 3210's dictionary-based text entry system (which I had gotten used to using in SMS messages).
This looks (and sounds) pretty nifty: Virtual Guitarist, a VST plugin which plays rhythm guitar in various styles, getting chord information from MIDI input. It appears to be an intelligent sample player/chord engine and a big bank of guitar note/part fragments.
Via The Fix, a big list of links to MP3s of tracks played on the John Peel show, from artists including Mogwai, Hefner, Set Fire To Flames, Trembling Blue Stars, Solex, King of Woolworths, Kid 606, Low, The Aislers Set and more. They're not MP3s of the actual Peel sessions, but of original recordings, as released by the artists or their labels.
And some more MP3 links: Mogwai live, Radiohead live. (via someone calling himself Das Katerer.)
2002/9/8
Tonight I went up to Good Morning Captain to see Qua, a local electropop act. It turned out that Qua is one guy with an iBook and that he was doing more of a DJ set sort of thing, playing and mixing tracks from his album and unreleased works. Nonetheless, it was quite good; in places like some of the German/Austrian laptop music you find at Synæsthesia, though not as sterile as some. He played a new track of his, which featured acoustic guitars and a vocal from Jason Sweeney (of Other People's Children, Simpático et al.), which sounded like the laptop equivalent of Northern Picture Library or something. (Given Sweeney's Bobby Wrattenesque delivery and Field Mice fandom, that's hardly surprising.)
There were a number of people from the local indie electro-pop scene; I ran into Cailan from PBXO, and ended up talking with him about the cultural significance of Slowdive. And thus I found out that Other People's Children may be releasing their own Slowdive cover (I think they're doing Catch The Breeze or somesuch.
Anyway, Qua is playing on Thursday at the Rob Roy, I believe. If I'm not dead tired, I may well rock up.
2002/9/7
Tonight I caught part of the Chapter Music show at the Rob Roy. This was sort of the last hurrah of Chapter; the founder, Guy Blackman (who also plays bass in Minimum Chips, and cohosted Untune The Sky on 3RRR) leaves for Japan on Monday, and is winding the label down, at least for the time being.
Jeremy Dower did a set of his combination
of experimental glitch electronica and Casiotone boudoir jazz (be very afraid!); much of his set seemed to be prerecorded on a MiniDisc or somesuch (in time-honoured indie/electropop fashion), though over that he played synths, tweaked knobs and at one stage got out a saxophone and played that. Towards the end, he played what sounded like a Casio-driven twee-electro version of Wham's Last Christmas, with jazzy improvisations; which was amusing, in a silly sort of way.
After him, Minimum Chips came on and played a set of their groovy, krautrock-meets-lounge-pop brand of music. (If you haven't seen Minimum Chips, imagine what Stereolab would be like if they came from Fortitude Valley, had played at the Punters Club for years and had an aversion to going inside a studio and recording, and you might have some idea of what they're like.)
Which was good, as they played a number of the songs they haven't gotten around to recording.
(Aside: I always find that Minimum Chips are the sort of band who sound better on recordings than live. Perhaps this is because they're such perfectionists in the studio that recordings come out highly polished and impeccable; one of the reasons why they don't have much released output.
They're sort of like the opposite of Ninetynine (who sound better live than on recordings) in this way.)
I left shortly after Minimum Chips finished (the Wagons, the next act, are a bit too country'n'Preston for my liking), but I went away with the Chapter retrospective compilation Double Figures, as well as the recent Chapter rerelease of Essendon Airport's Sonic Investigations of the Trivial.
2002/9/6
Delegates to the recent Earth Summit, held to discuss solutions to environmental problems and poverty and ways to weasel out of actually doing anything about them have produced produced 290,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide by flying to the summit, using electricity and driving around.
A voluntary fund was set up to offset this damage, but so far, only 1/7 of this has been paid for.
(via die puny humans)
To commemorate the September 11 attacks and impress the might of America on all those who may seek to challenge it, a US radio talk show host has proposed moving the Prime Meridian to New York, and redrawing maps and calendars.
"I recommend that the Prime Meridian be moved to New York. Let's put it right down the middle of Ground Zero so all our enemies will know where our time begins. Instead of a polite English voice announcing the hour, we will use voices of the survivors of the terrorist attack. And every year, on the precise anniversary of the attack, we will stop time for a few minutes to honor the dead and force the whole world to mourn with us, whether they like it or not.
Which reads rather like Jonathan Swift combined with Ed Anger. (via bOING bOING)
ArsTechnica has a long and very detailed review of MacOS 10.2, aka Jaguar; looking at performance improvements, new features, internals, and various random bits of skulduggery. Nonetheless, it looks quite doovy.
OK, enough doom and gloom for now. Turkmenistan's massively eccentric leader, President-for-life Saparmurat Niyazov (best known for renaming the months and legislating the Ages of Man), has punished a local TV station for being too boring. The head of the state-run TV station, most of whose coverage was of Niyazov's speeches or smiling children singing songs of praise to him, was docked one (appropriately renamed) month's pay over the "low quality" of programming.
Nelson Mandela is not someone who is deterred easily. He phoned US president Bush. Bush didn't respond or return his calls, having no time for him. So Mandela called his father, asking him to have a word with his son about hastily invading Iraq.
Read: Christopher Hitchens on Islamic fundamentalism, the marginalisation of moderates and humanists, and why the Saudis and their ilk are not our allies.
And he's right; moderate humanism isn't very popular in Washington either. Not long before 11 September, the Bush administration was advocating "faith-based government" and praising the Taleban as allies in the war on drugs. Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Association of Women of Afghanistan are still persona non grata with Washington, who preferred to back the warlords and rapists from the Northern Alliance. The conflict is not so much framed as "humanism vs. zealotry" as "our god vs. your god"; the God-given manifest destiny of America vs. the will of Allah. Which sounds like nothing so much as a debate between paranoid schizophrenics. Only the schizophrenics have armies and nuclear missiles and zealots willing to kill and die on their word.
The real conflict would be between enlightened, tolerant liberal (I'd say libertarian, if the word hadn't been taken over by the Ayn Rand cult and like-minded zealots) humanism (i.e., the values we should export to all who seek them) and the belligerent, atavistic ignorance of every thug, tyrant and dictator. Though our leaders have sided with the thugs too often.
Or, to quote an entirely different holy book, "Death to all fanatics!"
As Bush and his toadies (Blair and Howard, to name two) push for war in Iraq, foreign ministers from the Arab League warn that it would severely destabilise the region; one likely outcome is the collapse of the pro-Western monarchy in Saudi Arabia. Mind you, former Blair cabinet member Mo Mowlam reckons that that may be the intention. Over and above putting Saddam in the supermax cell waiting for him since Bush Sr.'s days and getting a warm, fuzzy feeling, the plan may be precisely to give the tottering Saudi monarchy a push, justifying an invasion and a more secure pro-Western regime, based on direct control of Saudi oil assets with no uppity sheikhs spending your oil money on anti-US jihads.
Mind you, an invasion of Iraq could set off anti-Western hatred like we've never seen, at least not since the Crusades. And I doubt that even Ashcroft's ideal high-tech police state could protect America from the wave of terrorism that would arise then. (The Israelis have enough trouble doing that, and they have small borders and a highly militarised population.)
In short, we could soon be looking at World War 3 proper, in which there is no such thing as a noncombatant, and everybody is fair game; a war of spectacular genocide on a global scale.
2002/9/5
A business model for the post-dot-com age: online begging, where people set up web sites with sob stories about dodgy spouses or crippling credit-card bills and wait for soft-hearted suckers to PayPal them money. The difference between a pockmarked junky begging on the street for heroin money and a woman in Brooklyn asking for money to pay off her Prada bills comes down to presentation; well, that and the social acceptability of the addiction.
After a long, debilitating illness, Napster is finally dead; as opposed to having the "virtually dead" state it was in for the past year or two. It's still something to look back on fondly when we're languishing in the Black Iron Prison of mandatory total digital rights management.
2002/9/4
Apparently Mattel's Harry Potter tie-in Nimbus 2000 broomstick, which vibrates when you ride it, is popular with kids of all ages.
When my 12 year old daughter asked for this for her birthday, I kind of wondered if she was too old for it, but she seems to LOVE it. Her friends love it too! They play for hours in her bedroom with this great toy. They really seem to like the special effects it offers (the sound effects and vibrating). My oldest daughter (17) really likes it too! I reccomend this for all children.
Via a lot of places. I wonder whether it's really as risqué as the comments make it out to be.
A Salon article looking into the bizarre parallel universe of Christian apocalypse movies, with B-list actors and plots lifted from Hollywood blockbusters, only infused with an odd mix of fundamentalist separatism, end-times paranoia and smug digs at liberals, atheists, evolutionists, new-agers and others.
it's set in a deserted observatory (erroneously referred to in the movie as a "space station") where everyone's worst sin emerges. Then a weary-looking Judd Nelson realizes what's going on: SETI@Home, the distributed-computing project for analyzing signals from space, is functioning as no less than Satan's own peer-to-peer AudioGalaxy network.
When a signal arrives with a suspicious duration of 6.66 seconds, the usual archetypal characters from rapture movies have their own plans for it. Louis Gossett Jr., as a power-mad general, wants to control it. A crackpot New Age radio host -- the kind of comic-relief character only found in Christian entertainment -- begins raving about how the signal will "evolve" humans to a "higher consciousness" (evolution frequently appears in these movies in conjunction with madness.) The eyebrow-cocking "dot-com billionaire" wants to sell it, exclaiming: "It'll be the biggest webcast in history!" And the lusty TV reporter, naturally, wants to corrupt Judd.
Sounds like it could make for quality bulldada. (via Plastic)
The Greek government just passed a law banning all electronic games, with heavy fines and prison sentences for possession of the forbidden devices. This law applies to everything from mobile phones with integrated games to DVDs with promotional game components, not to mention standard Windows installations, online chess games and so on; its purpose is to protect the virtuous Greek citizenry from the corrupting influence of online gambling, which the government has admitted to being unable to separate from other forms of games. (via Found)
Today's sonic atrocity from the Melbourne Central station PA system: Charles & Eddie, Would I Lie To You. Urgh, Blue-Eyed Soul; sort of like boy-band R&B for old fogies.
2002/9/3
A while ago, the Found Project Space gallery in Brunswick St. (which had previously hosted things like Cameron Potts' photography exhibition) announced that they were hosting an exhibit/competition for art representing the changing face of Fitzroy. Shortly afterward, the gallery was evicted from the space it was occupying (a former warehouse behind an Internet laundry) by rising rents and avaricious landlords eager to sell the space to a DJ bar or yuppie lifestyle apartments or something.
Meanwhile, across the road, the teen-oriented pizza bar that will be taking over the shell of the Punters Club has announced its own competition for a promotional photograph; the new face of Fitzrovian creativity (much like Sam Newman's Pamela Anderson mural was the new face of St Kilda quirkiness). And then there's the cancellation of the Fringe parade, and the continuous closure of shops that don't sell expensive designer fashion items.
I think what Brunswick Street really needs now is a Starbucks or three, and I mean that seriously. That would finally put the last nail in the coffin of the
obsolete notion of the area being a hotbed of creativity, or indeed having any sort of authentic culture, or being about anything other than artifice and consumerism.
And I think the location of PolyEster Books (or Records) would make a good Starbucks location, don't you?
</RANT>
Did Osama bin Laden kill Princess Diana? Is there any nefarious deed in the past decade he wasn't behind? (via New World Disorder)
Here it comes: product placement in rap lyrics, with rap record labels and luxury product companies doing deals for mentions in lyrics, and rappers hawking their own lines of luxury products. Hands up who didn't see this coming from a long way off, with the conspicuous brand consumption obsession that is central to commercial hip-hop. (via Reenhead)
Australian Competition and Consumer Commission calls for criminal sanctions against corporate cartels; big business calls for the ACCC's powers to be curtailed. Now Professor Alan Fels, the head of the ACCC and scourge of corporate monopolists, has announced that he will step down in 2004. How much do you want to bet that his Liberal-appointed replacement will be firmly in the pocket of Big Business, and that we will see a new laissez-faire, pro-corporate ACCC which is about as much of a watchdog as George W. Bush's pro-oil Environment Protection Agency?
2002/9/2
3RRR just played the title track from (a sampler of) the upcoming Ninetynine album, The Process. Hmmm... on first impression, it sounds impressive. It has a lot more energy and punch than most of their earlier recorded material (which tended towards the meandering in places, at least in my perception). Of course, the songs sound different in a studio recording than in a live show; it doesn't have quite that reverberating adrenaline rush of seeing them live, but I could hear a finer, more layered quality to it. If the title cut is representative of the album, it's set to be impressive indeed.
2002/9/1
A good Pitchfork article on Joy Division, looking into their origins, the recording of their various releases, and the inner conflict of Ian Curtis. Worth a read. (via The Fix)
Want to inject some spice into your life? You could always join the Australian Association of Timetable Collectors. I hear their social functions are quite something.