2002/10/31
Seen on a flyer picked up from a record shop in Islington:
Bowlie Nite
1st Thursday of every month at Lounge Bar
DJ's
The Hatster
Kid Sinead and Friends
With regular guests including:
Billy Reeves (BBC London Live)
Playing Bowlie favourites such as: Free Design, Mamas & Papas, Beach Boys, Young Marble Giants, Stereolab, Belle & Sebastian, Black Box Recorder, Broadcast and a Bowlie shaking selection of 60s/French Pop, Northern Soul, 50's Jives and varied records of sweet and melodic sounds, old, new & rare!
The obverse of the flyer has a drawing from an old children's book of a little boy and girl running along a street, with a Belle & Sebastian lyric printed over it.
Does anyone know what the word "Bowlie" means in this context? I get the feeling it's a (new?) name for a twee-pop subculture, but why Bowlie?
I spent most of today wandering around Tate Modern. It's pretty doovy, and should be on the itinerary of any London visitor interested in 20th-century art. Some of the things which made the biggest impression were the Jan Svankmajer animation (that's the one about three varieties of dialogue), the Sarah Lucas room (which contained a number of objects as social commentary, including a garden gnome covered in cigarettes and pages of a tabloid newspaper, presented verbatim as comment on the prurient interests it is aimed at), Thomas Struth's photographs of buildings and cityscapes, Cindy Sherman's Bus Riders (a series of photographs of the artist disguised as various bus passengers), the Soviet propaganda posters, and the mail-art room (which, alas, was towards the end of my visit, and I didn't have the time to do it justice).
As promised, here are a few photos from the Ninetynine gig at the Metro Club, a black-painted, mirror-lined cavern beneath Soho:
The first support band, The Projects:
A few photos of The Lollies (whose album, incidentally, rocks):
And a few of Ninetynine:
2002/10/30
I went along to the Ninetynine gig in Soho this afternoon, partly to see them and partly for the supports (it's always interesting to see what supports a band has in a different city).
The first band was meant to be a C86-ish outfit named Kicker; but they pulled out, and so were replaced by a band called The Projects. They were fairly typical indie-pop; guitars, keyboards (a Casio and, adding that particularly English touch, a Novation analogue synth), and punchy short songs with indie-pop sensibility. They were OK; pleasant enough, though they didn't stand out much.
Next up was a punky outfit named The Lollies. Comprised of two Canadians and an American who met up whilst in London, the band consisted of a punk rocker girl with pigtails, fishnets and a Powerpuff Girls T-shirt playing guitar (with lots of jagged chords), another girl in a white singlet playing bass (quite nimbly and melodically), and a guy with sideburns and black-framed glasses behind the drums. They were sort of power-pop, alternating between punk numbers and wry pop ballads (such as Office Romance); think something not far from Bidston Moss, perhaps. Anyway, I ended up shelling out the ten quid and getting their CD.
Then Ninetynine came on. They played with a 3-member lineup, without Iain (that's the anarchist hipster guitarist). They had a few technical glitches early on, and the PA/mixing was a bit muddy in places, but they rocked and the audience picked up on that, applauding wildly after each song. (Mind you, Laura said at the end of the show that about half the audience were from Melbourne.)
I did manage to get some photos (my camera sort of works), but this laptop's rather slow at editing them and it'd take me all night to get some thumbnails ready, and I'm too tired. Maybe later.
2002/10/29
Whether the London Underground is the greatest public transport system in the world is debatable, but it certainly seems to be one of the most branded. The range of Tube-brand merchandise you can buy is astounding; it ranges from T-shirts and fridge magnets to saucy underwear and tea. The only thing that seems to be missing is Tube toothpaste.
Also, the mythology of the Underground extends beyond its history and famous ghost stations; in the London Transport Museum shop, there were not only books on the history of the Underground (quite a few of those, going all the way up to expensive coffee-table books), and books on the history of each line thereof, but books on the history of the famous Tube map, and of the typefaces used for signage. Not to mention a boxed PC/Mac version of the Tube font itself (Johnston Underground, from US type foundry P22), which appears in the new title graphic of this page).
A few photos from Portobello Market last Saturday:
This chap's name appears to be Mafa Mianmaud Bamba, and he is a localised celebrity of some sort, at least for his mad hairdo. He was standing near a wall, with a rack of postcards of himself which he was giving away for free, and smiling at people. A number of people posed for photos with him. I don't know whether he has any other claim to fame other than his hair.
A woman with an antique barrel organ and a pram full of small dogs in hand-knitted woollen cardigans. She would turn the handle and the dogs would yap. Almost like something out of the English equivalent of a Jeunet & Caro movie or something.
Marxist chic appears to be big in the yoof-oriented parts of London, with Soviet-flag T-shirts and numerous items of Che merchandise all over market stalls. In fact, not far from where this picture was taken, someone was selling Che handbags. This particular variant of the icon appears on the railway bridge across Portobello Rd.
(I also saw some Giant stickers nearby; though, so far, I haven't seen one THIS IS A HEAVY PRODUCT sticker anywhere in London.)
2002/10/28
The good news is: I've managed to get the laptop I'm using to read my CompactFlash cards. (For some reason, only the second PCMCIA slot works.)
The bad news is: my camera appears to be broken. I.e., the mode switch (the one that goes between camera, off and playback modes) seems to be stuck permanently in camera mode; rotating it has no effect. Anyone know of a good, quick and reasonably priced camera repair place in London?
Well, I went to that "indie showcase" thing last night, and it was pants. I arrived after 10pm, finding a somewhat dingy pub. In the middle of the floor (the pub had no actual stage, you see), a group of musicians were playing a Dire Straits cover. It didn't get any better; the band, it seemed, was an ordinary covers band. The patrons didn't seem to be paying much attention, being pretty much regulars who apparently didn't come here for the music. I left shortly after the start of the third song ("Still Got The Blues For You"), immediately after draining my pint of Guinness, and caught a chain of buses back.
(Btw, English pub Guinness tastes rather like the Australian stuff, or perhaps more like the stuff you get in cans in Australia. Don't know yet what the Irish Guinness tastes like.)
2002/10/27
Computer scientists at MIT prove that Tetris is NP-hard; i.e., optimally stacking blocks is in the same class of problems as things like the Travelling Salesman problem, meaning that there is no known way to solve them efficiently. Maybe this means that we'll soon see Tetris-based cryptographic algorithms?
I picked up the recent Time Out (sort of like the London Beat/InPress, only in magazine format, not free and a bit more upmarket), and apparently there's an indie-band open-stage night tonight at some place called the George and Dragon, in West Acton. Which could be something good, or it could be third-rate post-Oasis brit-rock bands or something. I might go to check it out anyway.
Also, the supports for next Tuesday's Ninetynine gig at the Metro Club sound good; one of them is said to be C86 inspired, which to a Field Mice fan like myself sounds rather promising.
In other words, I went to the Portobello Market today and scored a pair of Doc Martens for £35 (which comes out as A$98 or so with the peso's current exchange rate). Not bad, given that they cost close to twice that much back home. Ben Sherman shirts don't seem to be much cheaper here, though.
2002/10/25
So here I am in London, home of the brash outrageous and free. I'm now typing this on a borrowed laptop in Ealing (a perfectly pleasant and very leafy sort of place). After hopping on a plane and spending some 20 hours onboard, mostly watching the animated map on the screen in front of me, I spent much of the day wandering around Notting Hill and Soho, and managed to visit a few of the local record shops. I only picked up 4 CDs, though (a promo copy of Primal Scream's Autobahn 66, Neil Finn's cover of There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (only £1, and so far sounds quite decent, if not particularly different from the original), Röyksopp's nicely electroclashy Remind Me single, and the Pop Romantique compilation with Air and Ivy and such, all at Music & Video Exchange).
A few observations while I still remember:
- The new Flaming Lips album (heard on the plane over here) is good. I'll probably have to pick it up.
- Sunsets from 30,000 feet don't look anywhere near as interesting as you'd think they would.
- There's a shop in Carnaby St. called Casio @ Carnaby, whose name sounds like an indie-pop compilation album concept.
- No matter how many CDs you burn to take with you, there'll be something you want to listen to which you left at home.
Anyway, I'm about to fall over, so it's goodbye from me for now. More to come later, including possibly photos if I sort out some technical problems.
Btw, does anyone know a good way of getting Windows 95 to talk to USB Mass Storage devices (i.e., CompactFlash readers), or IDE storage devices? Is it doable?
2002/10/23
Another reason to invade Iraq? A distributed denial-of-service attack disabled 9 of the 13 root servers running the Internet domain name system. (The article, cluelessly enough, refers to them as "Web servers".) Fortunately, the attack lasted only an hour and didn't cause major disruption.
A BBC article on the much-hyped New Saviours of Rock; i.e., the Strokes/White Stripes/Vines (oh, and the Datsuns too, Jen).
Form your own "new rock" band You will need:
- To be thin
- To be male
- To be white
- To have dark hair
- To have a band name starting with "The..."
- To wear tight T-shirts or leather jackets
- To know a maximum of three guitar chords
2002/10/21
Much has been written about the epidemic of obesity in the US: now it turns out that obesity may be America's secret weapon against terrorism, by making it harder for terrorists to blend in.
"The average American today is between fifty and seventy pounds overweight," said Dr. Charles Reardon, author of the study. "That means that a terrorist who hopes to fit in here would have to eat like a pig to do so."
I'm not sure whether this will work against terrorism though; the words "Semtex fatsuit" come to mind. (via Richard)
10 shot, 2 dead at Monash University; in the History department on the 6th floor of the Menzies building, to be precise. wtf?
Live recordings of Morrissey's new songs, in MP3 format; enough to tide us over until the new album comes out. (via MeFi)
Another review of last week's Mogwai gig. That quiet flute bit certainly did lull one into a false sense of security.
An article about synaesthesia, and in particular, the tendency to associate colours with letters. The article gives a table of letters and their colours; are they more or less universal, or specific to one particular case?
I suspect that synaesthesia isn't all that exotic, and most people experience mild forms of it. I for one remember associating letters with colours when I was younger, though the colours were different (A,E and M were red, B was green, C and G were orange-yellow, and H was either red or blue). Some years later, I developed the theory that the mapping came from a set of alphabet blocks I played with when I was an infant.
Surely enough, the Greens take Cunningham, their first lower-house seat, and set their sights on the balance of power in Victoria (which they could well get, with the two major parties being what they are right now). This was a kick in the gut to Labor (the first opposition party to lose a byelection in half a century), not to mention to the Democrats (who tried, and failed, to win lower-house seats on many occasions).
2002/10/20
Surprise, surprise: after September 11, a number of Hollywood films which had been made were shelved as unpatriotic. These films included those which projected negative images of the US military.
And then there were not one but two Che Guevara biopics planned, one starring Antonio Banderas. On September 10, 2001, with Communism having all but collapsed as a threat, it was safe to pander to baby-boomers' '60s radical nostalgia by rehabilitating one of the (now safely commodified) icons of their wild youth. Then the planes hit, and the projects got scrapped to make room for Jerry Bruckheimer patriotic thrillers and safely escapist fantasy flicks.
(The identity of heroes/villains in films can be telling; for example, there's Four Feathers, which glorifies the British Empire (which can be seen as a rather prestigious model to proponents of a a global American empire) and its doings in the Middle East, only a few years after pre-9/11 film The Patriot painted the British as the original Nazis (somewhat slanderously, apparently). I wonder whether we'll see any metaphorical films about straight-dealing, heroic apple-pie Romans (played by Ben Affleck or Brendan Fraser) doing battle with treacherous, Taliban-like Visigoths.)
It looks like the Bali bombing and the (anecdotal) rush back to the safe apron strings of conservatism hasn't tanked the Greens; the party is tipped to have won the seat of Cunningham in a byelection, giving them their first lower-house seat in federal parliament. That's what, one more than the Democrats ever had, no?
Anyway, good stuff. If the Greens can climb their way up to having serious political influence, then maybe Australia won't turn into the redneck state of South-East Asia.
(One of the Greens' policies is hardline opposition to invading Iraq, and an almost seditious disdain for Australia's current "I'm-with-Stupid" foreign policy. Maybe Graham was right and the Australian public is too smart to fall for the "Bali was bombed, therefore we must invade Iraq" bait-and-switch. Which would suggest that Australians are less gullible than the Poms. Discuss.)
2002/10/19
2002/10/18
Some sensible news from the fashion front: conspicuous consumption is out, and thrift is in. Spending less is now not so much a sign of shameful poverty or low social status as one of defiance against the corporate branded lifestyle.
The word 'luxury' has become so overused it has become completely meaningless. For the intelligent consumer it simply means overpriced and overhyped. The new trend towards thrifty shopping is as much about being ahead of the curve as it is about saving money. The cheaper holiday destination might be the one the rest of the planet hasn't quite discovered yet; that old 70s leather handbag you spotted at Oxfam might be the one that a researcher for a big fashion house might snap up if you don't.
Of course, then the brands will start making tatty-looking thrift-chic items, objects fresh from the Indonesian sweatshop that look like they've been pre-worn since the 1970s, and selling them for obscene prices, and the cycle will repeat itself.
An anti-milk campaign outside a Scottish school by lunatic-fringe animal-rights group PETA (they're the mob who want to ban the domestication of animals, full-stop) turned sour when the two PETA protestors, one in a cow suit, were attacked by 100 schoolchildren. Carrying banners reading "milk for the masses", the children surrounded the two PETA activists and drenched them in milk before police could intervene. Could People for Eating Tasty Animals be involved?
Research in neuroscience suggests that conscious free will may be an illusion, with decisions being made in the brain before they reach the conscious mind.
What Libet did was to measure electrical changes in people's brains as they flicked their wrists. And what he found was that a subject's ''readiness potential'' - the brain signal that precedes voluntary actions - showed up about one-third of a second before the subject felt the conscious urge to act. The result was so surprising that it still had the power to elicit an exclamation point from him in a 1999 paper: ''The initiation of the freely voluntary act appears to begin in the brain unconsciously, well before the person consciously knows he wants to act!''
Then the experimenters would use magnetic stimulation in certain parts of the brain just at the moment when the subject was prompted to make the choice. They found that the magnets, which influence electrical activity in the brain, had an enormous effect: On average, subjects whose brains were stimulated on their right-hand side started choosing their left hands 80 percent of the time. And, in the spookiest aspect of the experiment, the subjects still felt as if they were choosing freely.
Which makes sense; if cognition is a physical process, then so would be decision-making. And it could be that the conscious mind is a very small part of the processes of the brain.
I've suspected for a while that our conscious minds don't so much do the thinking as weave together a coherent internal narrative from the myriad of subconscious processes in our heads, providing a serial stream of consciousness essential to having the sense of self and the ability to introspection. So it could be that we don't consciously make any decisions, only rationalise what the physical processes in our brains do.
Today's video clip is a special treat: 30 seconds from the Morrissey gig on Tuesday. (AVI MJPEG file, 4Mb.) The sound is awful (due to lack of level control in my camera), but you can sort of make out that he's singing Everyday Is Like Sunday. This clip may not stay around for very long though.
An American tourist's account of North Korea, that bizarre bastion of fetishistic neo-Stalinism and insular paranoia.
The spectacle was something I'll never forget, though perhaps not for the reasons Mr. Huk and his countrymen intended. The show was so precise as to be robotic. No one outside the group, everyone buried within it. All done with a flair and focus that was chilling to behold. The model of mass unity that was being held up as proof of greatness and independence smacked of mindlessness. Of course everyone in the performance was human, with their own hopes, dreams and desires. This though was something to be eliminated, not tolerated or encouraged. These were things that still had to be rooted out in an effort to build the utopian, Juche-centered society. The zeal in Mr. Huk's voice spoke not of a country, but of a cult.
(via Reenhead)
Neurologists have discovered the cause of teen angst. Like many psychological phenomena, adolescent awkwardness and the resulting anxiety comes from physical changes in the brain; in particular, the parts of the brain that deal with emotions and social situations are diminished between the ages of 11 and 18, and the desire to listen to deliberately bad music probably comes from that.
Now perhaps someone will invent a pill for counteracting teen angst, and thus send Hot Topic and Interscope Records into bankruptcy.
I just came back from seeing Mogwai, and my ears are still ringing.
They played at the Prince of Wales in St Kilda; the last time I set foot at this venue was to see FourPlay, and back then the PA was appalling. Though this time, the problem had apparently been fixed; either that, or with all the amps Mogwai had on stage, the Prince's PA was irrelevant. Either could equally be the case.
First up were a Sydney band named Decoder Ring. Somewhat Tortoise-ish, or perhaps like Prop with guitars instead of chromatic percussion. They were OK; quite agreeable in places, though they didn't excite me all that much.
Then Mogwai came on, picked up their instruments and made a lot of noise. Two basses, 3 guitars, a Rhodes piano, a flute, a sampler, a Titanium PowerBook and a lot of amplifiers, pedals and miscellaneous kit. They started with You Don't Know Jesus, then went into Mogwai Fear Satan, with the quiet flute bit suddenly going into a tidal wave of distorted guitar. They also played Helicon 1, making some quite lovely shoegazer textures, and then went into 2 Rights Make 1 Wrong, with vocoded vocals and a processed drum loop of some sort (though no banjo).
For the encore they did Secret Pint (which I thought was one of the less interesting parts of Rock Action, though they fleshed it out a bit with the Rhodes), and then into an intense, headbanging version of the Jewish hymn My Father My King, rocking for a good 10-20 minutes and culminating with the bald guy tearing most of the strings out of his guitar, and leaving it to feedback, turning his attention to cranking all the amps up to 11 and doing things with pedals, treating the audience to several minutes of fucked-up noise.
It goes without saying that they totally rocked.
2002/10/17
The Onion draws another spot-on sketch of human despair: Goodwill Toy Section Most Depressing Thing Ever. (I think "Goodwill" is the US equivalent of the Salvation Army Family Stores or something like that.)
"The toy area has its own distinct odor: sort of a musty, mildewy, plastic, sour-milk, baby-vomit, metallic, rotting-cloth smell," Robichaud said. "It isn't quite the smell of evil--just despair."
Some topical fiction for our times: The Moscow Times has a suitably nihilistic cyberpunkesque dispatch from US-occupied Iraq, circa 2004. And a Santa Claus techno-thriller for the Bush era.
Then he's over the wall and yelling and charging straight at the machine guns and somehow the bullets aren't hitting him. Gone is the Santa of old: fat, jovial, and bearded. Now he's clean-shaven, square-jawed, buff and barrel-chested in his signature red and white uniform, and the colors blaze amongst the desert browns and greys. And his bag, painted bright blue with little white stars to show his national pride, is slung over his shoulder. He's like a beacon, a big banner that says shoot me, I'm American.
(via bOING bOING)
While ~40% of Britons want to invade Iraq, another poll shows that 40% of Americans want to annex Canada. Though the article stresses this isn't a manifestation of belief in America's God-given manifest destiny or desire to dominate the continent, but a gesture of friendship and good will to their friends up north. (Hmmm.. could it be something like "let's liberate our Northern brothers from the shackles of state-funded medicine and gun control and give them citizenship in a real country"?) Meanwhile, just under 20% of Canadians favour Canada joining the United States. (via rotten.com)
(Does anyone recall the proposals floating around during the dot-com boom for northern California, Oregon and Washington state to unite with British Columbia, all parties cutting loose Washington DC, the Bible Belt, Quebec and other such liabilities and making a new manifest destiny out of dot-com stock options?)
2002/10/16
Polls taken in Britain after the Bali bombing have shown that support for invading Iraq has skyrocketed, and that the public has a poor grasp of cause and effect. Or at least, if we go in there and kick Saddam's ass, it feels like we're doing something. We can't catch Osama bin Laden, so let's string Saddam up in his place. And won't our dead compatriots be vindicated by ExxonMobil's new Iraqi operations and the shiny new McDonalds in Baghdad?
I wonder how army recruiting offices are doing; have they had to hire additional staff to cope with the rush of people wanting to sign up to go and kick some towelhead ass?
(If you want to see the future of Western society post-9/11, go rent Starship Troopers.)
Prominent transhumanist, conspiratologist and compiler of High Weirdness by E-Mail Mitchell Porter has a theory on the September 11 terrorist attacks and Bush's war campaign. He rules out conspiracy theories about it being a way to enrich oil companies with control over Middle Eastern oil, seeing no evidence for that (and besides, it'd be too much of a risk). However, his theory holds that it's likely that Saddam Hussein was behind both terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center, as well as the mailing of anthrax around the US. And there's not a thing Bush (who comes out looking somewhat implausibly noble of intentions) can do about it, because Iraq has him over a barrel. Which is why the real evidence against Iraq is suppressed by our leaders, who instead construct deliberately weak arguments about "preemptive strikes", as some sort of psychological game. Or something like that.
It sounds implausible, but is it implausible enough to be true?
People with red hair may be provably sexier, but that comes at the price of being more sensitive to pain.
I just came back from the Morrissey show, and it rocked.
First up were the support band, for whom I didn't care much. Pretty much back-to-basics '70s rock, with a few glam elements. I think they were called The Anyones or something.
Then Morrissey came on. A recording poem (by John Betjeman, I believe) was played, then Moz came on, launching into I Want The One I Can't Have, to riotous applause. He went on stage wearing a simple black shirt, and his trademark short back and sides; a middle-aged man, somewhat paunchy, but unmistakably Morrissey. The crowd (many of whom undoubtedly grew up listening to The Smiths) loved him. He sang a number of old songs (Suedehead, Hairdresser On Fire (with the words changed subtly), a heartfelt rendition of Meat is Murder, Everyday is Like Sunday (with a banjo)), November Spawned A Monster (with some funk guitar, and a clarinet) and some new numbers (more on those later).
Anyway, Morrissey put on a great show; singing with gusto and passion, his voice as clear, emotive and vulnerable as ever, and dancing around the stage, with the sorts of stylised gestures of awkwardness and ungainliness that were so Morrissey. In between sets, he engaged the audience with banter (at one stage announcing that he had nothing with the company named Morrissey which sold see-through underwear, and getting stuck into the media and the meat industry); his speaking voice is a lot deeper than his singing voice.
And Morrissey's new songs are quite good; The First Of The Gang To Die is a classic Morrissey ballad crooned over guitar rock, written in Morrissey's new Los Angeles home. The World Is Full Of Crushing Bores was the sort of thing you could expect from Morrissey; disdain for the vulgar world we live in, with a touch of that famous smothering self-pity.
Irish Blood, English Heart is a meditation on England past and present ("I'm dreaming of a time when the English are sick to death of Labour and the Tories...").
It's clear that, as a songwriter, Morrissey is in fine form.
I for one will probably buy his next album on the day it comes out.
The show ended with Morrissey removing his shirt and throwing it into the audience, where it was undoubtedly torn to tiny pieces, each of which will be cherished by whoever got it, and leaving the stage, telling us that God, Oscar Wilde and someone else whose name escapes me were with us. Shortly later he came back on, in a plain white shirt, and performed There Is A Light That Never Goes Out, to riotous applause; people were singing along with it in the audience. He thanked the audience and left the stage, leaving the band to finish the song.
(Security was notionally tight, with bags being half-heartedly checked for cameras and recording devices. However, I managed to sneak a camera and a minidisc recorder in in my pockets. I got some photos, but as far as recording goes only succeeded in finding out what an effective low-pass filter a coat pocket makes, and why one should always monitor with headphones when recording a gig. I doubt much could be salvaged of the recording. Time to invest in a good-quality lapel mike for next time, I think; either that or not take photos and record at the same time.)
Update: Photographs of this gig now reside in this gallery.
2002/10/15
Santiago Sierra is an artist who specialises in winding up the art world and using the medium of "art" to criticise the world we live in. As previous works, he has hired labourers to masturbate or to blockade galleries, recorded street riots in Argentina and distributed CDs to gallery patrons with instructions to play them out loud, and most recently, invited patrons to a gallery opening where the gallery was blocked off:
Last month, a steady stream of them turned up to the opening of the £500,000 extension to the Lisson Gallery in London, expecting canapes and cocktails. Imagine their frustration at being confronted by a sheet of corrugated iron across the entrance. "It was as though they were saying: 'Just get me inside and give me a drink. That's what I've come for.'" So the invitees weren't so much frustrated at being deprived of an aesthetic experience, but angry because they couldn't get inside for champagne and nibbles? "Obviously," says Sierra. "I mean, there were 10 other openings in town that night. And the aesthetic experience was right in front of them. The corrugated sheet was beautifully made. They just weren't ready to look at it."
Now that's what art is about, I think; more so than pretty landscapes, portraits of sportsmen and prime ministers and safe, bourgeois decorative objects. More in the realm of conceptual terrorism.
This coming Sunday has been declared a day of mourning for the Bali victims. At least they're keeping this secular around here; none of this "national day of prayer" mumbo-jumbo, and no snide implications that secularism is a moral deficiency and atheists are borderline sociopaths who do not belong in society.
Aardman Animations have created 10 new Wallace & Gromit shorts, titled Cracking Contraptions. As you can imagine, expect zany inventions and general garden-shed/teacozy Englishness all round. And the first one, Soccamatic can be downloaded from the BBC. (It's Quicktime, and not some poxy DRM format either.)
A former spy claims that Anthony Burgess' most famous novel, A Clockwork Orange was inspired by his work with the CIA; the "Ludovico technique", and the use of images to trigger emotional responses for Skinnerian conditioning, was based on top-secret trials of a mind-control technique, and the Russian-based slang used by Alex and his droogs comes from Burgess' dealing with secret agents. Apparently the location of Fort Bliss, a US military base used in mind-control research, is encoded fnord in writing on Alex's bedroom wall. (via Unknown News)
2002/10/14
In the wake of the bombing in Bali, the words Al-Qaeda seem to be on everybody's lips. Whereas, in fact, this could be the product of entirely local issues, unrelated to the Middle Eastern situation.
'Several mass graves with more than 5,000 bodies have been discovered. ExxonMobil paid the military to provide security for its operations, and reports allege that the company provided equipment to dig the mass graves and allowed its facilities for torture and other activities.'
Not to belittle the bombing; it was, of course, an unpardonable outrage, and not any form of legitimate political discourse. The backpackers and holidaymakers there didn't volunteer to be sacrificial lambs in someone's game any more than the working stiffs in the World Trade Center did. But the word terrorism could be just as easily applied to ExxonMobil-backed torture and murder in the region.
Terrorism begins at home. If we (as nations) want peace, we should make sure that we're not complicit in acts of terrorism.
Mind you, it's rather unlikely that we'll see ExxonMobil outlawed and its assets frozen under anti-terrorism laws any time soon. But maybe if more people stood up against such things being done in their name (and if you're American or Western, these things are done to an extent in your name), our governments would be more careful about whom they whore themselves to, and ordinary people would cop rather less bad karma for it.
(Philosophical question: how many Acehnese or Afghani lives is one Australian or American life worth? Show reasoning.) (via Luke/Graham)
Daily gig listings for the UK. Hmmm; Ladytron and Fischerspooner are playing in November, though I don't think I'd bother seeing them unless they come down to Melbourne and play Revolver or something. Unfortunately, nothing about Spearmint, and Trembling Blue Stars are touring the US.
Entrepreneurial Communism, or Nu Marxism as a consumer fetish object, with some authentically ugly-looking (though non-sweatshop-made) merchandise for the urban revolutionary. (via Cat and Girl)
Luke just came back from the Morrissey gig, and it sounds like it was a good gig, at least judging by the old songs he played (including There Is A Light That Never Goes Out). And the fact that Luke left the show feeling down suggests that Morrissey has still got it.
As for me, I'm rather looking forward to this Tuesday's show. (Hmmm.. must make space on camera CF card...)
Local community radio station 3RRR has rejected a sponsorship/advertising deal from the DJ bar opening where the Punters Club used to be, on the grounds that the name "Bimbo Deluxe" is offensive. The owners deny any offense intended, claiming that it is named after an Italian café. Are 3RRR being PC nazis? Or would opening a bar named Bimbo Deluxe feed the rise of a Chapel St.-style "show-us-ya-tits" hoon culture in the formerly countercultural, bohemian Brunswick St?
(I wonder how long 3RRR will stick around there; for one, the culture of the area is now a lot more Nova FM than 3RRR, and secondly, the yuppie apartments being built in the former Universal Theatre next door to the station could put a damper on rooftop live-to-air events. It wouldn't surprise me if, within the decade, they relocate to Northcote/Thornbury or some place.)
Anyway, I'm sure Bimbo Deluxe will find that Nova FM/Fox/MMM will be more than happy to take their money and run promotional campaigns for them. And their clientele probably don't listen to weird community stations like 3RRR anyway.
October 18 is Media Democracy Day, a day of awareness of and protest against homogeneisation and corporate control of the media, and the media's undermining of democracy by shaping the public awareness. Sounds like a worthy cause; whether it'll achieve anything is another matter.
Is former US president and recent Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter a war criminal? Apparently his administration signed off on the massacre of pro-democracy protesters in South Korea, then a fiercely anti-communist military dictatorship. Of course, Henry Kissinger is also a Nobel laureate. (via rotten.com)
Massive car bomb blast destroys Bali nightclub, killing at least 187 westerners, including at least 8 Australians. Islamic separatists are believed to be to blame; given that Bali is mostly visited by Australians, it could have been an attack on Australia.
(Expect the Hun to highlight the human tragedy of the footballers who died there, and hammer the point home that this is a vindication of the Bush/Howard Doctrine and another reason why we must take down Saddam.)
2002/10/13
An article on why mandatory digital restrictions management would be a very bad thing. To wit: (a) to be effective, DRM systems would have to be pervasive, controlling all devices that are connected, and (b) making licensing enforcement a priority is incompatible with making systems mission-critical or fault-tolerant. As you can imagine, all sorts of havoc would ensue if Hollywood and the RIAA succeeded in making DRM a legally-mandated requirement:
The DRMP system is based on the premise that unlicensed use of software or data should make computers stop working. You could also argue that bridges should be designed to fall down if someone is detected crossing without paying the toll.
(via bOING bOING)
Vile Chomsky-like pro-Saddam hot-tubber Robert Fisk on all the things we must forget before we invade liberate Iraq.
(via a lot of places)
And here's Abraham Lincoln thoroughly discredited, all through the wonder of pure logic, rigorous fact-checking and the power of the moral high ground.
(via Graham)
2002/10/12
This evening I went to Good Morning Captain to see some bands; first up was a woman named Dimitra, who picked an electric guitar (and later electronic keyboard) and sang. She sounded uncannily like Merida Sussex, both in her voice and languid, breathy mode of delivery, and should be an artist to keep an eye on. Next up was Simpático, aka Jason Sweeney's vocal/guitar project. He played all new songs (well, newer than The Difference Between Alone And Lonely, anyway), strumming a guitar and singing in a half-falsetto. The Field Mice/C86 influence was quite noticeable.
2002/10/11
Surprise, surprise: the Liberal Government's successor to Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Allan Fels is tipped to be a big business man, with a history of representing the big end of town. We probably shouldn't expect anti-corporate decisions from the new ACCC, which could well be faced with issues such as mandatory digital rights management laws, copyright expansion and technological monopoly-enforcement legislation.
An interesting article about psychological operations in recent conflicts and military engagements:
A T-shirt used in Cambodia to try to deter kids from entering certain unsafe zones featured a boy squatting over a mine that he was poking with a stick. The silk-screened shirt was yanked from production, according to one account, when angered villagers kept asking why American personnel were distributing images of kids defecating over land mines. The squatting boy was eventually redrawn.
Alexander the Great ordered his metalworkers to craft giant helmets to fit men the size of 20-foot monsters. His soldiers would then leave the helmets strewn about in conquered villages, hoping to inflame the wildest imaginations of enemy armies passing through the area. Folklore has it that along the same lines, though pitching at a slightly lower angle, American psy-op specialists in Vietnam left foot-long condoms along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, presumably to preoccupy the enemy soldiers with hiding their wives and daughters.
(via MeFi)
And a big hello to all my readers in the international indie-pop underground; in particular, to the Japanese indie kids coming here via this bulletin board. I don't know Japanese, but it appears to be some sort of indie-pop-related web BBS, with a rather twee colour scheme, some very kawaii-looking cat cartoons and some intriguing fragments of English text
The show starts at 8 p.m. MINISKIRT will play roughly 12 songs including their classics "Blue Contact Lenses" and "No Jesus No Coffee No Coffee No Jesus" and some new songs which they never played live before.
(I'm wondering whether "win a sheep free" is the name of a band, and if so, what they sound like).
The Babelfish translation sheds slightly more light on it, not to mention a few particularly doovy turns of phrase, such as "super luxurious gorgeousness".
Btw, if you came here looking for the photos from last weekend's Ninetynine CD launch, they're here.
2002/10/10
How to be bitter and broke by 30: a musician's guide;
7. Embrace the hype 1 Do every single bit of media that you can. You need to be everywhere. Then people will buy your record. How about some car ads? They're good. Go on Burke's Backyard. Burke is sex. Real life example: Motorace
8. Rush back into the studio to record your second album Sure, you're tired from all that touring, media and all those video shoots. Yeah, you're only human and you need a break. And you haven't had a chance to write any new songs. But you've got to strike while the iron is hot - get back into the studio and deliver that follow-up album pronto. You can always write in the studio - that's a great idea. And if there are any problems we'll just get Tom Lord-Alge to mix it. Or maybe the Neptunes could produce the single? Real life example: Frente again
An article looking at the social impact of mobile phones. From workers being "on call" 24 hours a day, and the increased vagueness of distracted conversations, to users tuning out their environment and sharing their private conversations with strangers, to the phones' double-edged effect on social connection and isolation, an interesting study in unintended consequences: (via Techdirt)
The portable phones, depending on their usage, can by turns be a shield against loneliness or create isolation. At one end of a restaurant, a patron dining alone places his or her order, then dials a friend - alone but not alone. At the other end of the restaurant, a cell phone conversation interrupts a face-to-face dinner conversation - leaving one party dining alone.
I wonder what effect PXE phones with built-in digital cameras capable of taking and sending instant photographs will be; the immediate will be teenagers zapping pictures of themselves and friends gurning bozotically to their friends and the like, but chances are that a synergistic combination of two features, and the human tendency towards all sorts of social interactions, will go in directions nobody has anticipated. As Gibson said, the street finds its own uses for things.
A few local news items: a new study claims that public transport use will only decline in Melbourne; the government's plans to double public transport use won't happen without massive intervention in the form of massive upgrades and restrictions/charges on automobile use; in other words, not at all, as the marginal seats which decide elections are in the Los Angelised outer suburbs where public transport is nonexistent and not missed. (Hey, maybe we can import some of those American golf carts for teenagers.)
In good news, however, something will soon be done about the public liability insurance crisis, which has crippled things from street parties to children's pony rides. (All the more reason to stay in your nice, safe sports-utility vehicle, insulated from the dangerous world outside.)
And finally, the government is set to ban the eating of dogs and cats, after a lost puppy was rescued from a man who intended to eat it. (I'll leave the moral difference between a dog or cat and a pig or chicken as an exercise to the reader.
Computer-generated warblogging; just enter the name of a liberal figure, hit the button and watch it go and tear them to shreds with machine-like thoroughness, exposing their vile, Chomsky-like treachery, dishonesty and pathological detachment from reality and using lots of lofty words in the process. God Bless America!
"Maybe we could compare this to another war besides World War II for a change," says that most pro-Saddam of the multiculturalists, Albert Gore, jr. This is why I could no longer write for Z Magazine, not with a clear conscience. The hot-tubbers of the contemptuously political Left are not capable of rational thought. So they accuse tough people like Condie Rice of whatever pops into their heads. There you have it: the ad-hominem irrelevance, the hollow self-immolation of the anti-war Left. Amiri Baraka's appeasement was appeasing. It was dishonest. It was child-molesting. But I understate. "This whole thing is bullshit," said Al Gore in an interview with Connie Chung, refusing to disclose his own position, which is shockingly Chomsky-like and anti-movement.
(via Charlie's Diary)
2002/10/9
Eternally zealous in the moral defence of capitalism, the Ayn Rand Institute denounce opponents of copyright extension as "Marxists". (Note in particular the prohibition against redistributing the article to media at the bottom of the page.) It's not hard to see how Randism ties in with intellectual-property absolutism, and how short a leap it really is from Ayn Rand to absurdities like Galambosianism. (via Reenhead)
British scientists have developed a camera which can see through things. The camera picks up extremely high-frequency "terahertz waves" emitted by all objects. The project cost £400,000, but the developers believe the costs can be brought down drastically:
"If it were mass-produced, there is no reason why it could not be available for a cost similar to that of a digital camera."
So, thanks to the wonder of modern technology, those "X-ray specs" you may have seen advertised in old comic books may soon be a reality. (via one.point.zero)
An interesting Age article on Icelandic music, talking about Björk, Múm, Thule Records and a number of up-and-coming bands (including Cold, Trabant and The Funerals, who are country and not black metal), and speculating on why Iceland's so cool (apparently it's either the landscapes or the small and isolated nature that makes it one big friendly scene).
(The seems quite clueful; they don't lump that Sony rap-metal band in here either, for one.)
2002/10/8
Escher's Belvedere in Lego(tm); that's the one with the monks on the infinitely ascending/descending staircase (and yes, it is physically impossible; still, it didn't stop these people from doing it). (ta, Peter!)
One theory suggests that artists and criminals have a lot in common psychologically, such as a disdain for the rules of normalcy and often a primal rage, one which is expressed with creation in one case and violence in the other. (via FmH)
This is classic: serial masturbator arrested at Sleater-Kinney show. Make your own joke about wankers at indie-rock shows here:
So not only is this guy Seattle's premiere alleged indie-rock show masturbator, he's a snobby indie-rock show masturbator who will only choke his chicken to certain bands! Classic! (In a completely disgusting sort of way, of course.)
(via Reenhead)
Bias in the Blogosphere, an analysis of the blogging phenomenon using the Chomskyite propaganda model, and concluding that blogging is a reactionary, right-wing propaganda machine by its very structure. Makes some good points (about linkwhoring, the threat of being Dooced or mailbombed serving to shut down dissenters, and dependence on official resources for facts), but it appears to fall into the "blogging was born on 9/11" fallacy, the stereotype of equating blogging as a whole with the right-wing, jingoistic talkback-radio excesses of the "warbloggers". (via Graham)
It may well be that the majority of bloggers are wealthy white males, Libertarians turned born-again Rush Limbaugh clones when the planes hit the WTC, but that just reinforces Sturgeon's law; specifically, that when people have the means of expressing themselves, the vast majority will use it to download porn, put up photos of their cats, discuss the last episode of Friends, or loudly expound their allegiance to their favourite thought-saving orthodoxy, and only a small proportion of content will be actually interesting. (Well, that and the primal instinct to form packs and do battle against rival packs.) So it's not unexpected that big chunks of the blogosphere look like a conservative, vaguely xenophobic suburbia; well, that and the LiveJournal britneyblogs, and the technofetishistic E/N sites run by misogynistic virgins, and so on. Just that warblogging is the currently fashionable flavour of blogging for pinks.
It looks like the second Sir album hasn't vanished into the black hole of heartaches, heartbreaks and inter-city relocations; according to their US label, its title is Only Lonely and it's slated for January 2003; and they have two MP3s from it, including one which fans will recognise from gigs. I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this one... (thanks to Jarrod for the heads-up)
The World's Greatest Democracy: According to this article, the company which makes all the voting machines used in US elections is owned by Republican-affiliated companies. The software in the machines is, thanks to hard lobbying, proprietary and thus not open to external scrutiny. Which is not to say that the machines are designed to rig elections; just that things look somewhat fishy, and if the manufacturers decided to give the voters a hand in making their choice, they'd have an easier time of it. (via Stumblings)
Canada's outgoing Prime Minister wants to decriminalise marijuana. Not because he's a pothead or anything (he's not), but for more practical reasons. The US is unhappy with this, and has made threatening noises about trade restrictions and more. Perhaps if it happens, we'll see Whitlam-style "regime change" in Canada?
Don't like surveillance cameras? A concerned New Yorker has discovered that you can temporarily blind them with a cheap laser pointer. Coupled with a telescopic sight, cameras can be jammed from well out of range. The implications are far-reaching; other than putting laser pointers onto the wallet chains of homeboy trainslashers, and adding them to the already extensive Al Qaeda doomsday arsenal, it looks like they could join aluminium-lined headgear as must-have accessories for the modern paranoid
(Though I'd be surprised if spy agencies, terrorists, professional burglars, &c, hadn't known about this for years.)
Our obesogenic society: In parts of the US, walking is something that's not done outside of the home. If you're an adult, you drive. If you're a school student, you drive a golf cart to school. How long until there is a whole line of electric carts in "extreme teen" styles/colours, sold at Wal-Marts across the US and aimed at the commuting needs of suburban kids?
Frequently Asked Questions about Calendars, which has a lot of information about how the Christian, Hebrew, Islamic, French Revolutionary, Mayan and Chinese calendars work. (via gimbo)
This week's Cat and Girl is a particularly good one. As they say: it's funny because it's true.
Bubblegum pop producer Pete Waterman (of Stock-Aitken- fame) has revealed that he lifted the structures of many of his songs from classical compositions. Kylie Minogue's I Should Be So Lucky is apparently based on Pachelbel's Canon in D, and Dead Or Alive's You Spin Me Round (Like A Record) borrows from Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, one of about 20 times Waterman has copied from Wagner. (I presume he refers to chord progressions and harmonies.) Waterman also has the extraordinary temerity to compare himself to The Beatles and Burt Bacharach.
And while we've brought up Kylie Minogue, the ubiquitous pop star has recently described herself as a drag queen caught in a woman's body. Funny; I once said almost the same thing about her.
Via Graham and others, a very lucid critique of what's wrong with libertarianism. Or in particular, the market-fundamentalist, Ayn Rand-quoting, gun-toting, all-taxes-are-evil strain that's popular in the US. The argument there is pretty much the same one that shoots down Communism.
By the way, Russia is the answer to those testosterone-poisoned folks who think that guns will prevent oppression. The mafia will always outgun you.
2002/10/7
As promised, the video clip from the Love of Diagrams set at the Ninetynine CD launch on Saturday is online (6.5Mb AVI format; 30 seconds). It'll stay up for at least a week. (I can only keep 1 video clip up at a time in my Alphalink account, so the Ninetynine clip I put up earlier is gone.)
Hmmm.. perhaps it's time to expand this into a proper live-gig-video-of-the-week page?
The Mollys, the awards given each year to the worst in Australian music by a cadre of urban hipster street-press types, are in. Withering invective ahoy!
According to this ABC News piece, a family of Iraqi refugees detained in Papua New Guinea have named their newborn baby Philip Ruddock, after the immigration minister, undoubtedly condemning their son to a lifetime of playground beatings and ceaseless mockery. The story goes on to say that the family, who are still in detation, wrote a letter to Ruddock expressing their gratitude, and talks about the successful refugee policy; which all sounds like a propagandistic press release. I gather that Senator Alston's political purge of the ABC has been thoroughly successful then.
When the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra sent out a promotional CD recently, they were horrified to discover the song titles replaced by pornographic descriptions of sex acts. It appears that this occurred when some helpful volunteer uploaded their version of the track listing to commercial CD database cddb.com. Yes, the same cddb.com which took a free, volunteer-collected database, fenced it off and locked out free clients, and which relies on unpaid submissions from users to build up its proprietary database. As they say, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.
Apparently the New Zealand police are looking into it, and various parties are crying "hacking" and looking for someone to prosecute. Is it a crime to volunteer incorrect data to cddb.com?
2002/10/6
Also via Metafilter, a list of the Top 40 conservative pop songs, arguing that rock'n'roll isn't entirely a Communist plot to corrupt our youth. The list includes the obvious sorts of songs with religious, patriotic and "pro-life" themes, as well as songs scorning leftists, feminists, pacifists, activists and other troublemakers and reestablishing the Natural Order Of How Things Should Be, Goddamnit (James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World" has pride of place at number 4), as well as songs about the evils of taxation.
The Oldie is a British satirical magazine formed in the wake of Punch going all trendy and yoof-oriented. As you can imagine, it went for exactly the opposite approach. Marketing itself at the old-at-heart, it's cantankerous, self-consciously old-fashioned and scornful of youth culture and superficiality. You can imagine Morrissey reading The Oldie. And it has outlived Punch -- twice, at that. and now it's on the web. And here is what it has to say about the Hello Kitty phenomenon.
The sickly sweet shockwaves of kawaii are being felt everywhere. When Panasonic were launching a new state-of-the-art portable e-mail device with built-in camera, they thought that the most important design consideration would be how many pixels the screen could display. They were wrong. After consulting their focus groups, it turned out that what they should be concentrating their efforts on was making it a cute colour, with a keyboard that did not chip girls fingernails.
(via Metafilter)
Tonight I went to the Corner Hotel to the Ninetynine album launch. First up was Max, a local singer/songwriter/accordionist whom some describe as "Björk meets Tom Waits. I got in as she was playing her soprano-klezmer number; she did a few more songs after that, mostly with her Little Ensemble.
Next up were another local band, Love of Diagrams. This outfit have been around for maybe a year or so; they played with Ninetynine and Sir at the Punters Club on Valentine's Day, and have played around town a few times since then. Anyway, they're a band worth keeping an eye on; guitar, bass, drums, and they can certainly fill a space with sound and get the crowd moving. I'll probably put the video I got of them online in the next few days.
Finally, Ninetynine came on, and put on a terrific show, even by their standards. They played for about an hour, doing pretty much all the songs from The Process, and a few older ones too. Cameron was in particularly high spirits, playing like a demoniac, interacting with the crowd and throwing himself into the show. (At one point he announced that Synthetic was about the Pepsi commercial in which Michael Jackson's hair caught fire and the experiments that continued from that; though that doesn't sound much less plausible than the official line about it being about the Assyrian empire.) Towards the end of the set, a guest (Hi Ben!) joined them, adding some extra guitar riffs to The Specialist (their Northern Soul number). The set ended with The Process; the audience went wild calling for an encore, and the band obliged, coming back on stage and launching into Polar Angle, playing until Cameron collapsed. Now that's showmanship.
(I also liked their new merchandise; in particular, the fluffy llama logo adorning it looks quite doovy.)
(Update: photo links now go to images from the photo gallery page for this gig, which also has other images.)
2002/10/5
And here are the Ig Nobel prize winners for 2002. Though given that the belly-button lint study was by pop-science pundit Karl Kruszelnicki, chances are it was intentionally flippant. Come to think of it, there probably are occasions when calculating the surface area of an elephant is a useful exercise...
Blogging, it has been claimed, was born on September 11, 2001, in a burst of grief and resolute patriotism. Now blogs have gone to war. The US Army unit responsible for the America's Army game has now launched an actual real-life warblog. Not one of those chickenhawk letters-column warblogs, but one written by "Scorpion", a pseudonymous US soldier based in 'stan, describing military life there. As you might expect from a recruitment tool, it's heavily vetted, and has a somewhat Spielbergesque sentimentality about it.
2002/10/4
Word up, y'all! In an attempt to grab the lucrative black-identified-white-kids demographic, CNN plan to start using hip-hop phrases in headlines.
"In an effort to be sure we are as cutting-edge as possible with our on-screen persona, please refer to this slang dictionary when looking for just the right phrase," reads an internal Headline News memo obtained by the Daily News. "Please use this guide to help all you homeys and honeys add a new flava to your tickers and dekos."
Hmmm... middle-aged white people spouting hip-hop lingo on air; should make for some amusing sample material if nothing else. (via Plastic)
Just heard this on Far And Wide: Neil Halstead is coming to Melbourne, and playing a gig at the Evelyn in early December. I'll probably go to see that, even though it's infinitesimally unlikely to go into the sort of luscious, immersive wall of noise that was Slowdive, instead staying firmly in AM-radio easy-listening territory.
Who says childhood dreams never come true? A Belgian man is about to marry his former primary school teacher, on whom he had a crush on when he was six -- 36 years ago. (via New World Disorder)
Conspiracy theory of the day: is the Bush administration drawing up plans to
put Prozac in the water supply to head off the mass protests that are inevitable when Bush steals wins his second term and continues screwing things up?
(via New World Disorder)
They noted that since the election of George Bush, the use of Prozac has increased by 30% and it was the opinion of this board of Department of Defense psychologists that if Bush has another term in office, it could lead to mass depression in the United States, wherein suicide and homicide rates could continue to rise.
There is also a memorandum from the FBI, expressing concerns about this -- that if Bush is allowed a second term in office, there could be not only an economic depression but also a mass psychological depression in the United States.
And then there's the connection between financial statistics and violent crime:
There's another reason why the Department of Defense wants to put Prozac in the water supply. The Department of Justice has begun to notice a very disquieting correlation - a rapid and tremendous increase in violent crime over the last six months. These include murders, kidnapping, rapes, and assaults, and this has occurred in correspondence with the time when people get their IRA and 4o1(K) statements.
Of course, they could just legalise marijuana and encourage everybody to toke up. It's remarkably useful for making people passive and docile, increasing snack food consumption (thus patriotically boosting the profits of companies like RJ Reynolds and Mars) -- and it has that countercultural cachet of rebellion and underground culture which will make some of those most prone to oppose The Man self-medicate into compliance. (The Netherlands, where cannabis is all but legal, has had surprisingly nonviolent international football matches, some believe due to the effects of all the hooligans taking advantage of the local ganja bars and getting mellow.)
Though, of course, it won't happen; the War On Drugs fundamentalists in the Republican party (and US government as a whole) are too committed to their ideology. Though it could be achieved surreptitiously; for example preventing the police from arresting cannabis growers, or even having the CIA start funneling high-grade skunk to the suburbs (as they allegedly did with crack cocaine in the inner cities). That would have the advantage of not risking diluting marijuana's underground cachet.
At the same time, synthetic cannabinol-based medications without the fundie-scaring image of Marihuana ("The weed with roots in Hell!"), and a milder buzz, could be developed and put on the market, all profits going to Republican-donating drug/food companies. Perhaps a genetically-engineered THC-bearing tobacco strain could be developed to get around the ban, ending up in "extreme cigz" for pierced, wallet-chained mooks.
2002/10/3
The Skeptic's Dictionary, an encyclopædia of fringe beliefs, bizarre ideas and logical fallacies (and a few sensible ideas too). If you were wondering about therapeutic trepanation, the Hollow Earth theory, or identifying vinyl records by sight or that hundredth-monkey phenomenon the true believer in your life keeps citing to show how pitifully limited science is, and thus justify (Creationism/urine therapy/their telepathic poodle's past-life experiences), it's all here, along with the skinny on what's really going on.
And more on the recording industry's systematic defrauding of artists, with Moses "Confessions of a Record Producer" Avalon's reports from recording industry hearings in the US: (via bOING bOING)
1) By contract, artists are prohibited from showing royalty statements to third parties. Normally this would not include their managers, lawyers, consultants, or others who could aid them in getting paid, but apparently this is not necessarily the case. Senator Kevin Murray, leading the initiative for artists' rights, claimed the that Cary Sherman, Chief Counsel for the RIAA himself, said to him in an interview, that RIAA members (the major labels) would sue any artist that broke ranks and shared information with the Committee. This claim was rejected by Sherman but supported by others in the room. Don Henley, among them, outwardly dared his record company to sue him for bringing royalty statements to the hearing. He presented his most recent royalty statement for "Hell Freezes Over," which showed the panel that even though his contract called for a no more than a 10% "reserve" on sales of records shipped, Universal Music had held back more than that for eleven pay periods (roughly under three years) and that, even though his contract calls for no free goods in Europe, they had deducted $87,000 in free goods charges to Europe.
And these mafiosi are the highly moral figures who want to put anti-copying chips in our computers and MP3 players?
An article giving details of how recording companies systematically defraud artists. (via rocknerd.org)
Imagine you're an Australian artist. You signed a contract more than 20 years ago when you were under age. You were getting a royalty rate for singles of 5%... but it was only calculated on 8% of what you actually sold because we're talking singles here. Forget about the fact that your music has been used on countless compilations, licensed by your 'parent' record label. Forget about the fact that you have asked for years about the status of your royalties and the executives at the label have constantly rebuffed you.
Imagine that one of the top executives at the label, when confronted with the inequities of this situation and knowing you are owed money, not only refused to deal with you but told staff to ignore you and like other artists seeking royalties, you'd go away. They always do.
Here's another artist. They are owed about $20,000 from their hits in 1968. 34 years ago. The record company knows it. They haven't informed the artist. They know where the artist lives. The attitude of the man in control of this is why tell them if they don't know and if they want to sue us, fine, let them. But they can't sue us if they don't know. And if we don't tell them, how will they know?
Looks like NaNoWriMo is rolling around again in just under a month. (And no, I won't be participating; given that I'll spend part of November being rained on in Britain, for one.)
I was thinking that there should be something for less ambitious writers; call it PicoWriMo, if you will. The rules are: every day for a month you write a word and at the end you have a free-verse poem or a (very) short story.
On, and another thing: my cat turned 1 today. Happy birthday, Fantod.
The International Criminal Court is strangled at birth; the EU's member states will exempt Americans from war crimes prosecution. (Note that this doesn't apply to US lackeys, so British and Australian troops fighting Bush's wars can still be tried. Which is more incentive for Australia to sign a bilateral mutual-exemption treaty with the US.) I wonder how much this has to do with veterans of Central American interventions rising to power in the US.
But German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer said the EU compromise was signficant. ``The Milosevices and Pinochets of tomorrow will be brought to justice,'' he told reporters.
Though the future Kissingers and Calleys can breathe easily, knowing that their God-given liberty is not under threat. It seems that American citizenship is the salient criterion there.
US vows to block weapons inspections in Iraq unless the UN passes a resolution authorising an invasion of Iraq.
Meanwhile Bush, who has apparently been studying the writings of Hassan al-Sabbah, has stated that the cost of one bullet in the back of the right head would be much cheaper than a war. Truly, a most exemplary show of grandmotherly kindness.
2002/10/2
ziboy.com, a photographic blog from Beijing, showing (often technically excellent and sometimes dramatic) snapshots of contemporary life in the Chinese capital, from red flags to mobile phone ads, smiling couples to mass trials to rock concerts, uniformed police to leather-clad mohician punks. (via Robot Wisdom)
This week's street press has some interesting articles; InPress has interviews with members of Saint Etienne (who say their new album Finisterre is a concept album about London, and that they have a set of short films that goes with it), Mogwai (who once printed T-shirts reading "BLUR ARE SHITE", and then found out that Japanese and US fans tend to be people who are into all British indie/alternative music as a genre), and Ninetynine, talking about the odd varieties of bands they've been booked to play with on their various tours (i.e., in Europe they have played with hardcore/metal bands a lot, not because they're metal as fuck but because of the pop bands all being signed to labels and them being independent). And there's another Ninetynine interview in Beat as well, which makes a Krautrock comparison; hmmm...
(I've noticed the Mogwai thing, about non-British UK-indie fans clustering into "Anglophile" subcultures, as well. Take for example Steve Wide's show on 3RRR, which plays everything from Oasis/Radiohead-wannabe bands to pill-popping dance grooves to French/Icelandic bands liked by UK-pop fans; or a UK-indie list I lurked on once which was mostly wannabe-Mods exchanging trainspotter-like lists of classic swingin'-60s movies and talking about their scooters. Or cliques of US-based "Anglophile" kids exchanging in-jokes on band-related mailing lists.)
The Between The Spires art opening went quite well.
There were some 63 works by 37 artists, presented in a large and quite
pleasant gallery.
Most of the works were pictures (photographs, prints, paintings, etchings, Photoshop work, &c), though there were a few mixed-media sculptures (notably Bruce McLaverty's glasses full of drugs, cigarette butts, silk ties and Italian banknotes), and one neon sign reading "HISTORICALLY INSIGNIFICANT LOCATION" (or something to that effect); nobody submitted any video installations or iMacs running Flash animations or anything like that. Though one work did include a tower of matches, which was demolished by an enthusiastic toddler an hour into the exhibition.
The works were all Fitzroy-related, though the connection was somewhat tenuous
in some cases; though there were quite a few photographs, streetscapes and renderings of landmarks, not to mention one embroidered street map, and a piece titled "www.urbanjoke,cheese grater,young st.", which seemed to be about a controversial luxury apartment building plan opposed by residents.
My two pieces (which were the only ones of the Punters Club in the entire show)
were on the wall in the corner; they attracted some attention, and a few
compliments (some even from people I didn't know personally).
(I didn't win any of the prizes, in case you're wondering.)
Incidentally, when asked if I wanted to sell them, I put them up for $50 each.
Whether anybody actually decides to part with $50 for one of them is an entirely
different question.
All in all, it was a good event; I'm now even more tempted to print out more of my digital images and have an exhibition somewhere; probably late this year or early next.
It seems that local web-order CD supermarket chaosmusic.com are selling a number of worthy titles, including New Order's Power, Corruption and Lies, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures, and pretty much all of the Smiths back-catalogue (except for some of the numerous best-of compilations), for $10 each. If you're lacking any of these, this could be a good chance to fill in the gaps.
2002/10/1
A rather amusing Grauniad piece on life in the countryside; mostly from a British point of view, though a lot of these things (such as the ones about villages being predominantly populated by commuters) are probably universal. (via gimbo)
Here's another scam career opportunity for you, Lev:
Unaccredited doctors are filling in the gaps left by a shortage of properly trained and certified doctors.
The Turkey City Lexicon, a catalogue of conditions afflicting science-fiction (and other genre) stories:
- "Call a Rabbit a Smeerp"
A cheap technique for false exoticism, in which common elements of the real world are re-named for a fantastic milieu without any real alteration in their basic nature or behavior. "Smeerps" are especially common in fantasy worlds, where people often ride exotic steeds that look and act just like horses. (Attributed to James Blish.)
- The Motherhood Statement
SF story which posits some profoundly unsettling threat to the human condition, explores the implications briefly, then hastily retreats to affirm the conventional social and humanistic pieties, ie apple pie and motherhood. Greg Egan once stated that the secret of truly effective SF was to deliberately "burn the motherhood statement." (Attr. Greg Egan)
- The "Poor Me" Story
Autobiographical piece in which the male viewpoint character complains that he is ugly and can't get laid. (Attr. Kate Wilhelm)
- Used Furniture
Use of a background out of Central Casting. Rather than invent a background and have to explain it, or risk re-inventing the wheel, let's just steal one. We'll set it in the Star Trek Universe, only we'll call it the Empire instead of the Federation.
(via bOING bOING)