2004/6/30
Tony Blair to distance himself from Bush ... if that's alright with you, Mr. President. Blair has also described the Abu Ghraib abuses as "revolting", only a week after voting to extend the US's immunity from war crimes prosecution. Someone in the Whitehouse must have given him permission to dissent and play the Good Cop a bit more.
(I'm not quite so sure that being seen as a PNAC asset was as damaging for Blair as some say it is; after all, the alternative is the Tories, who are the Bad Cop to Blair's Good Cop. Oh, and there are the Lib Dems, who are like the worst of both worlds; too small to get elected, and too big to not be in the pockets of corporate lobbyists, at least if Greg Palast is to be believed. Btw, are the UK Greens running for anything other than the European Parliament yet?)
At least Bush still has 100% support from his loyal deputy in Canberra; unlike that hypocritical weasel Blair, Howard is a true believer; for one, he didn't sign the Kyoto treaty, and has recently reaffirmed Australia's opposition to renewable energy. He can probably look forward to a nice "consultant" position with ExxonMobil or Halliburton when he retires.
The Tokyo area of Akihabara started out as a mecca of electronics shops (think something like Tottenham Court Road, only bigger); gradually, as a subculture of otaku evolved around the area, its focus has mutated from being just about electronics and computers to anime costume shops and venues catering for the bizarre, quasi-sexual fetishes of the truly hardcore:
Psychologists say these "otaku" or geeks are regressive, have poor social ability, and have never fully matured as adults. "Therefore, they are not good at communicating with others, cannot date real human beings, and instead adore an imaginary character," said one.
Self-confessed "super otaku" Tetsuto Fujiyama says, "There are five different kinds of geeks in Akihabara. The oldest denizens are the electric appliance geeks, who come to purchase electronic parts and other equipment. Next are the PC geeks, who like to build their own original computers that run as fast as possible. Third are TV animation geeks whose brains can't distinguish between reality and the animation. The fourth group are the magazine geeks who have made original animation fantasy stories influenced from TV and game animation and publish them in small magazines circulated among themselves. The last group are those geeks who love to play video games in which erotic animation is used."
"They are not ImeCla girls (Image Clubs in which you can act out your fantasy in a situational setting as nurse-patient, teacher-student, commuters in packed train and so on). Nor is it a a 'no-pan' cafe (where mini-skirted waitresses with no panties serve customers). These shops at Akihabara are not in the sex business because for geeks, fantasizing is much more important than actually doing anything with girls."
(via bOING bOING)
A tribute to Slowdive, from a Spanish (?) MP3 label. Confusingly enough, it's called "Blue skyed and clear", which is very close to the Morr Music glitchtronica Slowdive tribute. This one's mostly in a shoegazer vein, though, with bits of glitchy post-shoegaze electronica here and there amidst the processed guitar textures, and some of the tracks are quite good. Pity about the 128kbps MP3s.
As a social networking system, LiveJournal is rather doovy; it's got more of a point to it than Friendster and such, and goes some way towards restoring some approximation of the private register. However, as a source of psychoceramic material, it is somewhat lacking, lagging well behind systems such as USENET and the odd self-contained website.
I took a look at LJDrama, an anonymous blog collecting incidents of "drama" from LJ and similar sites. Basically, if someone blows their stack and goes off the deep end, their antics may well end up there. The thing is, most of this is teenagers with brightly-dyed hair and low self-esteem throwing hissy fits about who said what to whom and so on. The issues at hand all seem trivial and interchangeable; their exact details are seldom interesting or unique. To one brought up on a diet of kooks, crackpots and original thinkers, all this makes for rather bland fare. As far as genuine cranks go, LiveJournal has yet to produce an Archimedes Plutonium, an Alexander Abian, a Doctress Neutopia, or even a John "DrGodFuck" Grubor; the closest it gets to the lofty strata of psychoceramicity is a few kinky Furries and slash-fiction writers, and the odd joke community.
I wonder why this is so. Could it be that the social nature of LiveJournal selects against the original cranks and, instead, encourages crankdom to take annoying, lowest-common-denominator forms? Perhaps those who can be bothered setting up and maintaining a LiveJournal account are, by definition, too socially well adjusted to be truly eccentric or "out there" (and no, having lots of body piercings and being into kinky sex isn't "out there"). Perhaps true outsiderhood requires a degree of hermitlike isolation from others' opinions to truly allow one's mental reality to drift away from any sort of consensus.
2004/6/28
I've just had a chance to listen to the album by Relaxed Muscle, Jarvis, er, Darren Spooner's new project. It's the musical equivalent of a drag king show, with Darren playing a number of macho-man archetypes: the street brawler, the working-class battler, and fictional American adventure-story character Billy Jack; the only thing he doesn't do is rap about being a ghetto thug, but there are enough white guys doing that sort of thing with less of a sense of irony), and giving us tracks like "Rod of Iron", "Sexualized" and "Beastmaster". The music itself is a pastiche of manly man music (dirty blues-rock, working-class meat'n'potatoes rock, and a smattering of industrial-type electronics) mostly programmed on synths and drum machines (with a guitar or two in there from time to time), and no more than three chords in any track; all rather danceable and somewhat silly. It's not, as the UK Sun says, "goth", unless you could the first track sounding like they've borrowed some kit from Trent Reznor. It wouldn't surprise me if, with its dance-friendly sound and piss-take of masculinity, Relaxed Muscle was a big hit in some gay venues.
The next trend in graffiti, after aerosol art, stencil art and pasted-on designs, involves selectively cleaning grimy walls. It's much like stencil art, only rather than applying aerosol paint, the artist uses solvent and scrubs a shaped area of the wall clean, creating a distinct image. And, led by the apparent legality of cleaning public surfaces, guerilla advertisers are getting onboard; some chap in Leeds named "Moose" has been commissioned by Diageo to advertise Smirnoff vodka in this fashion. The Leeds City Council, however, doesn't quite see it that way.
You may have noticed a while ago that book review entries, which don't quite look like blog entries, have started appearing interspersed between blog items. These come from the reading section of this site, and are made possible by the aggregator/feed design of the new blog engine that went in a few months ago. Anyway, as of today, book reviews now have their own comment threads attached. It's not yet perfect; these don't yet appear in the "most recent comments" page, the comments pages don't show an excerpt of the review, and the reading page is still generated by old and ugly code, and so doesn't show the comment links. All this will change, gradually, as various old and ugly mechanisms are replaced by newer and more elegant ones.
2004/6/27
The Age speaks with Stuart Murdoch:
It was a fragile beast with mixed abilities; there were tensions between Murdoch and the other writers in the group. There was also a relationship between him and cellist/vocalist Isobel Campbell, which ended acrimoniously three years ago.
I didn't know that; though it explains things. I think Belle & Sebastian probably came out with the better end of the deal; Isobel Campbell's first post-Gentle Waves album seemed quite forgettable.
As bizarre as it seems when hip-hop rules the charts, manufactured pop rules the TV and angry white boys rule the radio, you can be fey, melodic and practically demanding to be beaten up by sexually repressed bullies and still exist. Such a revelation might be worth a celebratory drink. But not for Murdoch. "I like a Scotch whiskey but I'm allergic to alcohol, would you believe, which is a tragedy in itself," Murdoch says.
2004/6/26
I finally got around to going to see that climate-change disaster-porn film that various US "liberals" were acclaiming as a progressive Passion of the Christ. It was much as I expected it to be.
In short, the visuals were spectacular (about half a dozen SFX firms were credited), with magnificent sets and computer graphics sequences. The characterisation and plot was pure Hollywood formula, with a very linear plot and characters having only the simplest of motivations, and, half the time, thinking in schmaltzy Hallmark-card truisms. Mind you, it being from Roland Emmerich (and the sub-Spielbergian sequence from Independence Day of the towheaded little boy and his dog watching Will Smith take off to battle the aliens still sticks in my mind), I wasn't expecting anything above the lowest common denominator in this respect, so I wasn't disappointed. (Some day, I'd like to see a visually spectacular film whose characters are more than focus-grouped, computer-plotted cardboard cutouts, but I digress.) The science, of course, was exaggerated by orders of magnitude to make it more spectacular (running afoul of the laws of physics in places, such as the instant temperature drop), and some of the details were a bit geographically ignorant (such as the scene with the whisky in the Scottish research station; someone there either assumed that Scotland was part of England or that most Americans wouldn't know otherwise; I wonder how well this film will do in, say, Glasgow or somewhere). Then again, none of that was a huge surprise; as I said, it's special-effects porn, and porn films of any variety aren't known for their plotting or characterisation.
2004/6/25
Yahoo Instant Messenger have changed their protocol yet again, locking out third-party clients. Cerulean Studios, makers of Windows multi-protocol client Trillian, crack the new protocol within 24 hours; shortly later, Gaim announce a new version, with a number of fixes, including the Yahoo fix. Which will probably filter through to the Debian package system sometime within the next 2 to 4 weeks
(Hmm; do I wait for the Debian package, or download and compile my own Gaim, taking charge of that package? I'll wait. A funny thing happens when a vendor shows the will to lock people out (as Yahoo have done before); people stop relying on them and move to other systems. At the moment, I don't expect Yahoo IM to work and generally don't bother with it. Though some of the other features, like MSN file transfers and user-icon dragging, look good.)
Speaking of MSN, it's reassuring that Microsoft haven't made good on the vague noises they made some time ago about locking unapproved clients out of their network. Perhaps they've realised that that would encourage people to move to other systems (read: AIM/ICQ); or perhaps they just haven't gotten around to it.
According to findings in last month's issue of Psychological Science, happy people tend to be nasty. The happier your mood is, researchers claim, the more likely you are to make bigoted judgments, like deciding that someone is guilty of a crime simply because they're a member of a minority:
One interesting hypothesis, though, is that happy people have an ''everything is fine'' attitude that reduces the motivation for analytical thought. So they fall back on stereotypes -- including malicious ones.
Elsewhere, there are other arguments against the idea of happiness as an absolute good:
There is one bit of the world that happy people do see in an irrationally rosy light: themselves. As the British psychologist Richard P. Bentall has observed, ''There is consistent evidence that happy people overestimate their control over environmental events (often to the point of perceiving completely random events as subject to their will), give unrealistically positive evaluations of their own achievements, believe that others share their unrealistic opinions about themselves and show a general lack of evenhandedness when comparing themselves to others.'' Indeed, Bentall has proposed that happiness be classified as a psychiatric disorder.
Over the last few decades, it is precisely the groups that have made the most social progress in the United States -- women and educated African-Americans -- that have reported declines in their level of happiness. On reflection, this is not surprising. As education and freedom increase, desires -- and unmet desires -- inevitably multiply; our well-feeling may decrease, even as life becomes fuller and more meaningful. In Eastern nations like China, where happiness as a goal is less highly rated, people report lower levels of life satisfaction, but they also have lower suicide rates.
(via FmH)
Among the names attached to recent offers of black-market anatomical/financial services: Houston Spangler (from Germany, no less), Felix Crockett, Queen L. Butcher and Mallory Justice.
Among recent news stories: intelligence "chatter" suggests impending al-Qaeda terrorist attack, possibly timed to coincide with the US elections (could this be the much-speculated-about October Surprise?). Meanwhile, in Israel, a group of soldiers are being investigated over an art exhibition detailing the brutalisation of Palestinians; it seems (from the report) to be more a case of them acting as whistle-blowers than Lynndie England Mk. 2. In the United Nations, the US has given up on renewing its immunity from war crimes prosecution, after realising that they weren't going to get it; however, in Iraq, they are pushing for immunity from prosecution under Iraqi law, with, of course, the full agreement of the Iraqi people. And in England and Wales, authorities are re-examining more than 100 murders which they suspect of being "honour killings"; there appears to be a sophisticated infrastructure for such killings, with "bounty hunters" making a business out of tracking down victims.
UbuWeb, archive of writings and MP3s by cultural figures from John Oswald to Robin Rimbaud (a.k.a. Scanner), and from Guy Debord to Francis E. Dec, have now given a home to the 365 Days outsider MP3 archive.
2004/6/24
More details have emerged about the recent coronation of Sun Myung Moon in the US Senate. It appears that the politicians involved were duped into taking part, believing the bizarre ritual to be a banquet where Moon would give out awards to people from their constituencies, without any mention of him being crowned as the King of Peace with the posthumous blessings of numerous US Presidents, not to mention the reformed spirits of Marx, Lenin, Hitler and Stalin.
An interview with the designer of the world's biggest truck; larger than a family home and capable of transporting 400 tonnes of whatever it is you want to transport at 60km/hour:
The first time I was in it at a mine, the driver started to drive away and actually ran into the back of a service truck. It seems we mashed it down to the ground. I saw someone yelling, but we didn't feel a thing.
A blow-out can damage vehicles close-by because the tyre is holding so much air and just the force of that... Drivers have actually been killed by tyre explosions, but not on our trucks, thank goodness.
I wonder how long until the technology makes it to the domestic market. Already, in the US, there is a trend towards SUVs one can use the word "palatial" to describe: womb-like cocoons with all the comforts of home for people who spend an increasingly large part of their lives in their cars (partly due to ever-lengthening commutes due to more cars on the road). Surely the ultimate extension would be to make the family home into a super-SUV.
2004/6/23
Every year, thousands of Britons come to Melbourne for one purpose: because some TV soap was filmed here.
Liverpudlian backpacker Chris, 23, and her travelling companions are star-struck after a close encounter with the actors. "It's stupid 'cause in Liverpool, you meet the Brookside (UK soap) actors and loads of footballers and you're not arsed at all. Give them a wave and head back to the bar. "But here, it's like, f---ing hell, it's Karl Kennedy, let's give him a kiss wicked."
Countless tour buses (both the official one and clandestine ones organised by pretty much every backpacker hostel in Melbourne) make their way to the sprawl of Vermont South, laden mostly with young Britons keen on seeing Pin Oak Court, better known to them as Ramsay St. Which probably pisses off the actual non-soap-character people who live in those famous suburban houses:
In recent years, minor intrusions like doorknocking fans looking for Harold Bishop, have given way to drive-by hoons and light-fingered memento hunters. Since the early 1990s, a Grundy-employed security guard has been on nightly duty, blocking unauthorised access to the street from 8pm to 7am. But this did not deter one amorous young couple found intertwined in a rather intimate position on Harold Bishop's front lawn one night about five years ago.
In two years on the job, Forster, 33, has witnessed some bizarre sights, such as the Newcastle (UK) rugby players who posed for photographs outside the Scullys' house with their daks down. "Another fella posed for a photo where he appeared to be urinating in the Kennedy's letterbox," he says.
Meanwhile, fellow Brit backpacker, Ole, 21, who arrived in a friend's car, is about to depart with some old roof tiles he found stacked next to a wheelie bin. "I'm in desperate need of money so I'm going to try and sell them to fans on eBay," he says.
(Somebody should probably tell Lonely Planet about this; the Melbourne section of their book on Australia doesn't even mention Vermont South, instead pointing out sights like the Old Melbourne Gaol, the Botanic Gardens, Puffing Billy and cosmopolitan inner-city areas which aren't home to popular TV soaps.)
2004/6/22
Some (potentially) good news on the software-patent front; after the forces of darkness pushed a draconian software patent proposal through the European Parliament, the Dutch government appears to be listening to the mass geek protests against this, and is considering ordering its minister to withdraw his vote, something that has never happened before in EU history. If this does go through, it would force the EU Parliament to reconsider the software patent directive (which was basically rushed through with intensive lobbying by software corporations). Chances are those same lobbyists will have their daggers out for it, so it remains to be seen who prevails.
(There doesn't seem to be any such luck in Australia; the Dems have signed on for the US-Australian FTA (which, among other things, brings in the same software-patent regime that has worked so well in the US), and Labor seem to be running scared from being considered too "anti-American" to win the Silent Majority Of Suburban Battlers' vote (the Bush administration's insinuation that any Australia too hung up on its sovereignty may end up being thrown to the al-Qaeda wolves probably didn't help in this respect) that they'll be treading very carefully over anything that could be considered anti-American, and raising a stink about some obscure copyright issues that Norm and Sheryl of Nunawading couldn't give a toss about is probably too much risk for too little reward.)
The Graun has published an extract of Germaine Greer's latest polemic, "Whitefella Jump Up". In it (originally published as a Quarterly Essay, and now reprinted by another publisher), she argues that to achieve nationhood, Australia should declare itself an Aboriginal Republic, replacing the head of state with "the Aboriginal people", and allowing anybody in Australia to call themselves "Aboriginal":
The second step in the journey is a second statement to the self in the mirror. "I was born in an Aboriginal country, therefore I must be considered Aboriginal." This is a tougher proposition, as long as Aboriginality is thought of as racial, but if we think of Aboriginality as a nationality, it suddenly becomes easier. It would not involve the assumption of a phoney ethnicity or the appropriation of the history of any particular Aboriginal people. The owners of specific dreamings would continue to be so still, and would continue to pass them on according to their law as it applies to those concerned.
Greer then goes on to argue that the Australian national character owes more to Aboriginal traditions than to the British character; that Australia's British settlers and their descendents gradually "went native" without realising it, adopting everything from the broad, nasal Australian accent to the egalitarian tradition, from backpacking and "feral" dance parties (which came from "going walkabout" and corroborees) to the tradition of telling exaggerated yarns, from the continent's first inhabitants; meanwhile, the gulf between Australia and Britain is vast:
Observers of white Australian life are struck by the degree of segregation between the sexes, which cannot be explained by the prevailing mores of the countries they came from. Aboriginal society, too, is deeply segregated; men and women are used to spending long periods in the company of their own sex. The more important the occasion and the larger the gathering, the more likely it is that women will gather in one area and men in another, just as white Australian men gather round the beer keg, leaving the women to talk among themselves. One explanation of the Australian mania for sport of all kinds is that sport is the only remaining area of human activity that is still rigorously segregated.
Funny that she mentions this, because none other than Jeremy Paxman pointed out (in his book The English: A Portrait of a People) the great degree of segregation between the sexes in English society (as compared to other European societies and/or America, undoubtedly). This has probably changed somewhat over the past few decades, though to say that Australian blokes' tendencies to watch the footy with a tinny of VB in hand while the sheilas talk in the kitchen about their kids/the last episode of Neighbors comes from Aboriginal customs of "secret (wo)men's business" seems more far-fetched than attributing it to how English society was in decades or centuries past.
2004/6/21
London-based indiepop band Spearmint are offering a new downloadable single. The mail says it's an MP3 (and not some kind of DRM-crippled Windows Media file or what have you), and will set you back one quid, including artwork. (That includes VAT, which presumably they'll deduct if you're not in the EU.) Or, for £2.50, you can get it and singles by two other bands on the hitBACK label (The Free French and Host).
2004/6/18
A lot of stuff is being outsourced to India these days; call centre work, programming jobs, Catholic prayers...
What sort of person do the Tories appoint to run a student newspaper they've gotten control of? Well, here's a mirror of her LiveJournal; and here's her user info. She reads almost like a stereotype.
You'd think the tories would have had the sense to play the all-lefties-are-joyless-puritans card by having some kind of fun-lovingly politically-incorrect Sam Newman clone edit Farrago or something, but apparently they didn't. Though it is slightly reassuring to see that Liberal Club-run student newspapers still have eye-bleedingly awful graphic design; some things apparently never change. (via Ben Butler)
Scientists find monogamy gene in voles, successfully making a promiscuous variety of the rodents monogamous by changing one gene (commonly found in a different, more monogamous, variety). The article suggests that the research could have implications for humans with autism or Asperger's Syndrome, which impair social bonding. Though, putting this assertion together with the commonly cited piece of folklore about autism being a concentrated form of a condition which, in its weaker form, is common among "geek" subcultures, is intriguing. For one, it suggests a genetic basis for the prevalence of polyamory among "geek" subcultures. Though perhaps that's stretching things a bit too far. (via MeFi)
The Raven's Spiral Guide to Music Theory is, if you'll excuse the daftly new-agey name, pretty comprehensive, going from the usual basics ("this is a scale") to the details (different chord types with descriptions, strategies for chord progressions and melodies, and a treatise on microstructure and macrostructure), illustrated with examples from everything from classical to techno, and throwing out the occasional idea (such as combining counterpoint with the Amen break).
Anyway, the author (someone calling himself "Kurrel the Raven", not to be confused with another electronica artist named Raven) also got some musical fragments, of which he posts one a day. Some of them are quite good, in a shoegazer/krautrock/electronica vein.
Oh yes, and he's one of those furries. Still, he'd hardly be the first talented musician to be somewhat weird. I suppose with goth being mainstream these days and the Church of the SubGenius having more or less petered out, the eccentric people who, 5 years ago, would have been wearing black or praising "Bob", now gravitate to newer weirdo/fringe subcultures.
The latest troublemaker of the London art world is some calling himself AK47, who claims to be an international "arto-political movement" named "Art Kaida".
He also claimed that AK47 was a rapidly growing international "arto-political movement", but was vague about the membership, saying only that it had "a lot", and adding: "It's not about members, it's about believing. Believe, and you're in.
(Which, to me, translates as either "it's just one bloke", or "it's just one bloke and a bunch of variously deranged hangers-on".)
Anyway, AK47 recently took responsibility for stealing a pink neon sign called Just Love Me, by celebrated angstmonger Tracey Emin, from outside the Hackney Empire theatre, sometime after filching a sculpture by yesterday's aesthetic terrorist bad-boy Banksy. (Does this mean that Banksy is now safe and accepted and conventional?)
Asked to explain his motives further, he said it was "an act of terrorism" and he was posing the question, "What is terrorism?"
("Ooo! Look at me, I'm a *TERRORIST*!" Wanker, more like it. For one, that sort of posturing, stealing a Tracey Emin neon sign and calling it terrorism, cheapens the whole idea of terrorism as art. What would Andre Breton, who said that the archetypal Surrealist act would consist of "going into the street, revolver in hand, and shooting at random into the crowd", say about Mr. AK47's oh-so-scary "terrorist" outrages?)
Now if Mr. AK47 wants to be really hardcore, he should come to Melbourne and steal one of Chopper Read's paintings.
2004/6/17
Someone has put up an online petition to get Talkshow Boy as a support for the upcoming Belle & Sebastian show. Hmmm... it'd be a tad more interesting than one of the more obvious candidates, like, say, the Lucksmiths or Architecture In Helsinki. Whether the organisers would take notice, of course, is another matter (after all, just a year or so ago, the organisers of the Interpol gig chose to fly some band over from Perth rather than give the support slot to Love Of Diagrams; tour organisers work in mysterious ways).
2004/6/16
Formulaic music isn't just for the teeny-boppers and pissed-off teenagers. Computer scientist and songwriter Loren Jan Wilson develops a system to analyse Pitchfork music reviews, finding which words have the most positive connotations, and then using that to write two songs, scientifically designed to appeal to the coolsies who write for Pitchfork.
There are positive values for "rough" and "primitive," and negative values for the words "shiny" and "polished." This points towards a preference for lo-fi recordings, which are usually associated with lower-budget independent music. This falls in line with the Pitchfork reviewers' dislike of capitalism, which I talk about a bit in the other interesting results section below.
The "sadness" group is by far the highest-scoring mood, beating the next mood ("dark") by over 1100 points. As a response to that, I've tried to make these songs as sad as possible.
The songs, Kissing God and I'm Already Dead are provided with MP3 form, along with detailed descriptions of how the analysis guided his creative decisions. The songs, as you'd expect, combine gloomy lyrics, lo-fi guitars, choppy beats and layers of effects.
It'd be interesting if he had gotten Pitchfork to review these songs before revealing their origin, if only to see whether he'd have been critically lauded as the next Radiohead or whatever.
Scientists have finally monetised the formerly un-monetisable, the benefits of a happy sexual relationship. According to a paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a healthy sex life is worth A$71,500 a year; or at least that's how much happier couples who have sex at least four times a month are than than those poor unfortunates who only get to do so once a month. Meanwhile, if you're a man, the more educated and intelligent you are, the less sex you have.
A list of things announced by journalists to be "the new rock'n'roll". Given that most of these are fairly staid things (suburbia, chicken-keeping, normality, cooking), I get the feeling that a lot of aging journalists with mid-life crises have been attempting to hand-wave their conservative, settled-down lifestyles into extensions of their long-gone youthful iconoclasm. Which, I suppose it is, though it's like saying that middle age is the new youth. (via Rocknerd)
And here's a Google search for "is the new rock'n'roll"; knitting, gambling, e-commerce, architecture and collective weblogging all come up.
The Straight Dope answers the essential questions of our time, such as how long would the electricity stay on after the zombies take over:
Now, let's address a scenario where the zombification process is gradual. If the operators and utilities had sufficient advance warning they could take measures to keep the power going for a while. The first thing would be to isolate key portions of the grid, reducing the interties and connections, and then cease power delivery altogether to areas of highest zombie density. After all, it's not like the zombies need light to read or electricity to play Everquest. Whole blocks and zones would be purposely cut off to reduce the potential drains (and to cope with downed lines from zombies climbing poles or driving trucks into transformers). Operators would work to create islands of power plants wherever possible, so if a plant were overrun by zombies and went down it wouldn't drag others down with it. In cooperation with regional reliability coordinators, the plant operators would improve plant reliability by disabling or eliminating non-critical alarm systems that might otherwise shut down a power plant, and ignoring many safety and emissions issues.
A Norwegian black metal musician is reportedly dismayed after discovering that there is a Bollywood romance with his stagename. Magnus Torbjornsen, who plays bass in Oslo band Immortal Mutilation, says he came up with the name Kraath five years ago in school, because it sounded "evil". Kraath the film, released a month ago, is the story of two Bombay taxi drivers in love with the same woman, told with lavish song-and-dance numbers. Torbjornsen is reportedly considering changing his name to Kharaoth.
Spiky-haired dude with a bozotic name goes on some reality TV show or other and stages a sit-in protest with a sign reading 'FREE TA REFUGEES'. People look away anxiously, as if he had started masturbating in public or ranting excitedly about giant lizards or something, or else raise an uproar about this humorless right-on radical-leftist tosser violating their right to feeling good about being apathetic. Nobody likes a smartarse, you know. Meanwhile, the paper of the elitist inner-city latte-socialist chattering classes decry this as a shameful indictment on Australia, tripping over Godwin's Law in the process:
Rod Cameron, chief executive of the Australian polling organisation ANOP, was quoted recently saying, "Those who think about issues, read the newspapers, discuss events, make up only about 10 per cent of voters." If you are reading this opinion page of a broadsheet metropolitan newspaper, relax. You may count yourself as one of that 10 per cent. But sadly, you are vastly, horrifyingly outnumbered. So was Merlin.
Isn't that the case everywhere? I'd be surprised, for example, if half as many Americans paid attention to the Abu Ghraib scandal as the last episode of Friends.
Discussing the plight of the Jews at tea parties in Nazi Germany would no doubt have produced reactions similar to those we saw on Sunday night; jeers, taunts and entreaties to stop all the depressing talk. "Please, mein herr, sit down. Have some more tea and cake."
The chattering classes on mono.net, however, say that that Merlin chap is a "fucking coolsie chat", i.e. a wanker, mostly because of his hair and wardrobe. Meanwhile, you can make your own Merlin sign here, by editing the URL (if you don't know how to do that, then y0re not l33t enough, beeyatch). (via Alex)
Instructions on turning an iPod and a radio transmitter into a pirate radio station. Not quite a latter-day Radio Caroline, but enough to pull various pranks, such as jamming obnoxious motorists' boom cars (hang on, don't most of those bring their own music; after all, if it's about showing what a mackdaddy you are, you want the beats you blast from your ride to be the absolute illest, and not necessarily what FOX-FM is currently playing) and transmitting bogus news reports over CNN at your local gym. It doesn't mention that, in this climate, doing any of those things could probably get you charged with terrorism, or at least ten kinds of crap pounded out of you by the gorilla whose boom box has suddenly started playing birdsong or Icelandic glitch-pop or the Village People or whatever. Not to mention that, in some jurisdictions (such as the UK, where an undeclared war between spectrum cops and yardie garage radio stations has been raging for years), unlicensed FM transmitters are actually illegal to obtain, regardless of their power. (via bOING bOING)
Tony Abbott's bold campaign of restoring 1950s-style paternal authority to Australian society through legislation has suffered a setback with the withdrawal of a bill giving parents access to their teenaged childrens' medical records, overriding doctor-patient confidentiality. The bill suffered a blow after a Tory backbencher, a former doctor, threatened to cross the floor over it. Dr. Mal Washer asserts that the bill would cause vulnerable teenagers in troubled domestic situations to avoid medical help and thus falling through the cracks, and recounted an incident of a teenaged girl who committed suicide because help was not available.
The values of the Howard government embody an authoritarian, paternalistic strain of Australianness, much like those embodied by numerous outback patriarchs in films from The Cars That Ate Paris to Welcome To Woop Woop. Ostensibly laid back, relaxed and comfortable, and if you're in the majority, you'll have it easy. However, if you don't fit in with the Herald-Sun-reading majority, you'll find things getting difficult for you. The sooner you get the message and learn to conform, the easier you'll make it on yourself. But it's for your own good; after all, father knows best, and a country, like a family, is best ruled with a firm hand. Or, as the convict saying goes, cop it sweet.
2004/6/15
A three-part account of a visit to North Korea by an Italian pizza chef taken there to make pizza for Kim Jong Il. North Korea sounds like a bizarre place.
Neural imaging technologies have shown that feelings of love lead to a suppression of activity in the areas of the brain controlling critical thought; in other words, love is blind. Or perhaps it just makes you stupid.
2004/6/13
The Guardian's Zoe Williams talks to Robert Smith of The Cure:
Smith says he hates cynicism, and its sidecar of irony. A lot of artists say that; normally, they mean "I hate it when critics are mean about me, what do they know?" Smith doesn't mean that. Which isn't to say that he has no critical faculty. He'll be plenty critical about his contemporaries - he still has space in his heart to say that Duran Duran epitomised everything he hated about the 1980s (although he's fine about Simon Le Bon . . . "I wouldn't say we were friends. But he's all right. I can chat to him"). And he has a frankly cock and bull theory about the Smiths, and how their influence on the era is overplayed because there's a media conspiracy, full of media people who liked them much more than anyone else did (mind, I would say that: I'm in the media, and I really like the Smiths).
Smith's disdain for The Smiths aside, The Cure seem to have followed Morrissey onto the mook-producer bandwagon; their next album (titled simply The Cure) is being produced by US nu-metal producer Ross Robinson (of Slipknot fame), who is apparently getting them to talk about their feelings about the songs more and so on.
(The fact that it's a self-titled album and there's a commercial-alternative producer on the project doesn't bode too well for it in my opinion; it sounds a bit too much like The Cure are trying too hard to be The Cure, and/or to make a record that moves as many units as possible. I wonder whether they chose Robinson for non-commercial reasons, or whether they had him pushed onto them by their label; I suspect the latter. Mind you, in my opinion, The Cure haven't recorded a memorable album since Disintegration in 1989; Bloodflowers, in particular, was deadly dull, comprised of overly long, tedious stadium-rock dirges. It seems to me that Smith has exhausted the narrow form in which he has specialised, to the point where anything else he does sounds tired and stale. Perhaps if he did what he did before The Cure became, well, The Cure, and set out to write songs with themes other than the usual Cureish mood swings (Killing An Arab and Boys Don't Cry come to mind, as do various stream-of-consciousness exercises like The Walk, written before Smith started weighing his lyrics down with his trademark angst/euphoria), they'd find a new wind.)
So what will the culture-warriors in Canberra do to follow up their anti-gay marriage bill? How about withdrawing the morning-after birth-control pill from prescription-free sale. All in the name of protecting young girls from the dangers of sex, of course. Presumably the need to get parental consent for a prescription will scare a lot of teenagers into abstinence, or so the theory goes. (Do the Silent Majority Of Suburban Battlers really vote for such reactionary gestures?)
Anyone want to start a book on when the Howard government's US-style abstinence-only sex education push will be unveiled?
2004/6/12
I went to the Four Tet/Manitoba show at the Corner tonight. I arrived as Qua was playing; his stuff struck me as being much as it has always been: technically polished and layered, and yet melodically almost completely random; i.e., I'd be hard-pressed to tell the difference between most Qua tracks.
Four Tet was interesting. One guy with a laptop and a box of knobs of some sort (either an analogue mixer or a MIDI controller), rocking back and forth to the music as he controls the laptop. Not really much in the way of theatre, though after a while one got used to mentally coordinating his actions with the changes in the music. Anyway, his music tended towards chopped-up granular loops and glitches; not quite as hardcore as Kid 606 or someone. At the start of one piece, it sounded rather like Neu! or Faust or someone.
(Live laptop acts like Four Tet raise an interesting question: what is it exactly that we're watching? We're not watching him compose the music; it's pre-composed. We're not watching hin play it either; the computer is doing that, and he is controlling it. Chances are, as he put it together, he did so in Cubase or Logic or somesuch, assembling something that, when activated, would produce a sample-perfect copy of the recording, with no interaction required. Only that's not much fun to watch, so he'd have had to have dismantled that and put it into a performance system (like, say, Ableton Live), giving him the ability to control the playing mechanism in real time. So, in one sense, the performance is the ritual of producing an imperfect approximation of something more deterministically constructed. Strange, no?)
Then Manitoba came on. They were three guys in animal masks (though, thankfully, not full-body fur suits), and had two drum kits, guitars, some keyboards and a glockenspiel. They completely rocked out; drumming frenziedly, moving around the stage with guitars or playing keyboards. (Nobody was playing a laptop or anything quite as un-rock as that.) Mind you, a lot of the sound obviously came from a tape (the vocals, for one; nobody had a microphone), but the fact that the musicians were playing part of it and doing so well made the show. They played predominantly tracks off Up In Flames, though did an encore of sorts with a sampled rap vocal.
2004/6/11
Today in Alternate History, a blog giving, each day, the events that happened in several parallel universes:
in 1976, hot off the success of American Graffiti, director George Lucas begins work on a science fiction film that he has written himself, based on old film serials. Unfortunately for him, and everyone involved, the picture runs horribly over-budget and the studio barely advertises it at all. The name Star Wars becomes synonymous with movie failure from that point on.
in 1902, the Vidalia Eddie is introduced. The Vidalia has a small movie screen on it that allows the user to see the output of the Vidalia prior to printing it. This innovation rocks the world and spells the end of Edison's French competitors, who cannot match this technological advance.
in 1953, Elizabeth Windsor, daughter of exiled King George VI, was crowned Elizabeth II after her father's passing. The ceremony, held at the British Government-In-Exile's compound in Washington, D.C. was brief and untelevised. Elizabeth herself lived a reclusive life and would die without returning to England, which remained under Nazi control until her son's return in 1982.
One of the batch of Gmail invites that has recently flooded the streets has ended up in my hands, and hence I've been able to have a look at it.
- Gmail user names must have at least 6 characters, so über-l33t names like, say, "acb" are out. One fewer reason to angst about all the good names having been snapped up by early adopters, big spenders and well-connected digerati.
- If your desired ID is unavailable, it gives you a number of options; i.e.,
- john.smith
- smith
- jsmith
- smithster
- Gmail sends mail in plain text, and not HTML as some broken services (*cough*Hotmail*cough*) do. This is good.
- Annoyingly enough, the links on the Gmail page aren't actual links, but appear to be normal HTML text with JavaScript actions attached. Which means that there is no way to open messages, compose mail, and so on in a new window or tab, but instead can only look at one thing at a time. This is annoying to compulsive multitaskers such as myself.
- Gmail still doesn't seem to have POP or IMAP, either incoming or outgoing. Which is going to make downloading one's mail tricky.
Aside: This site has some concerns about Gmail's privacy implications. Granted, the somewhat eccentric graphics on the site give off a paranoid-crackpot vibe; however, some of the issues raised are concerning:
If Google builds a database of keywords associated with email addresses, the potential for abuse is staggering. Google could grow a database that spits out the email addresses of those who used those keywords. How about words such as "box cutters" in the same email as "airline schedules"? Can you think of anyone who might be interested in obtaining a list of email addresses for that particular combination? Or how about "mp3" with "download"? Since the RIAA has sent subpoenas to Internet service providers and universities in an effort to identify copyright abusers, why should we expect Gmail to be off-limits?
Does anybody know whether the RIAA or an equivalent agency would have an easier time ordering Google to hand over a list of all people with the words "mp3" and "download" in their mail than they would of ordering an ordinary ISP to give them access to customers' mail spools? (Mind you, the latter happened in Australia; ARIA did get access to student mail at various universities.)
Apple's iTunes has been offering "celebrity playlists", of celebrities favourite songs (well, those licensed for DRM-encumbered iTunes sale, anyway). Not surprisingly, many of them are naff:
The liner notes to wild-eyed rawker Andrew W.K.'s playlist sport a delightful exclamation-point-to-sentence ratio of 1.27-to-1. And I can't think of a better summation of Avril Lavigne than her exegesis of Alanis Morissette's "Ironic": "I love how this song was written with all the different examples Alanis uses of things being ironic."
No surprises either that the hip-hop blingerati's playlists are shamelessly commercial:
Missy Elliott, on the other hand, reveals little. Her liner notes, like her playlist itself, are pure hippity-hop boilerplate: "From ol' skool to new skool, these are some of the hottest songs on the sickest beats ever. Holla!!!" For the most part, iTunes celebrity playlists are unlikely to make anyone holla back. The worst of the bunch are those celebrity playlists padded with the celebrity's own songs, epitomized by the queen of the craven playlist, Beyonce Knowles. Eight of the 14 songs on Beyonce's playlist are performed by her thin-voiced sister, Solange, by her former bandmates in Destiny's Child, or by Beyonce herself.
(Pity that Apple don't publish summaries of the playlists in HTML; I wouldn't mind seeing the Sleater-Kinney and Thievery Corporation playlists mentioned in the piece.)
Mac lust knows no bounds. Now those who can't afford actual Macs can do their Windows XP PCs to look like Macs, with a set of 10 cosmetic programs, from a menu bar for the top of the screen (I wonder whether it strips the menu bars off application windows, or whether it just takes up extra space) and a dock to Aqua-style window frames and icons, giving you something that looks just like a Mac, only with the usual Windows viruses, worms and spyware. Or perhaps that looks just Maclike enough to remind you of what you're missing out on. (via bOING bOING)
2004/6/10
The Graun's Jonathan Freedland's broadside against the mythologisation of the 1960s, a decade much of whose alleged uniqueness and revolutionary character says more about the self-absorption and historical ignorance of those who grew up during it than about any genuine transformation of the world:
Note how everything they did was a first, a "revolution". Most have quoted Philip Larkin so often - "sexual intercourse began in 1963" - they've come to believe it, imagining their bedhopping was a genuine innovation. They seem unaware of the hedonistic 1920s, the naughty 1890s, the bawdy 18th century, to say nothing of the Roman and Greek empires. No, in their eyes, promiscuity was unheard of till they invented it.
They were "the first teenagers" too, as if before 1960 children mysteriously skipped from age 12 to 20 overnight. I know, I know - they're referring to the youth rebellion that gave the 60s its fire. Except that wasn't new either. In 1911, 30 kids walked out of Bigyn school in Llanelli, to protest over the caning of one of their peers, sparking a pupils' strike across Britain. Young people were at the forefront of the conscientious objection movement in the first world war a few years later. Whenever there has been a call for change, youth has usually been its voice.
(Though wasn't the whole deal about "the first teenagers" being that they were the first generation in which a large proportion of the adolescent population had the disposable income to create demand for cultural goods marketed specifically at them, hence the rise of rock'n'roll and youth culture and all that it spawned, eventually giving rise to MTV and PlayStations and, arguably, the bulk of the mobile phone industry and such?)
The Age reports that Australians wishing to marry Britons will soon need permission from the British Home Office; this is as a measure applying to all non-EU citizens to prevent sham marriages for purposes of immigration. Though most of the time when Britons marry Australians, isn't it for a new life somewhere sunny resembling Summer Bay/Sylvania Waters/Ramsay Street?
2004/6/9
Ted Jesus Christ GOD is a man with a plan to protect America from terrorism. This he intends to accomplish by building sealed underground cities for the worthy to move to. The cities would be deep underground (deep enough to guard against burrowing nukes sent by America's evil enemies), with huge lift shafts, sealed ecosystems, and farms growing natural ("Creator-original") food. Only the most virtuous and genetically pure 37,000 Americans would be allowed to live in the cities; Satanists, Pagans, atheists and "DarkSide people" (I guess they're the ones with the black clothes and facial piercings or something) would be ostracised to up top, where they'd be easy pickings for the forces of evil. Also, alcohol, drugs and pharmaceuticals would be banned, as for thousands of years people survived well enough without them. Oh, and the the X Files are real, only "X" stands for Christ, and they're a secret FBI/CIA programme to isolate demonic DNA and hunt down and destroy Satan. We know this is true because he has angels with IQs of 10,000 telling him it is.
What happens when a Something Awful goon gets sent to several mental institutions? He writes an article about it, describing the unique sorts of characters most normal people rarely get the chance to observe and interact with to this extent, the camaraderie that forms in that environment, and why it's a bad idea to date chicks you meet in mental hospitals: (via MeFi)
The worst person on the ward though was a small little guy named Rafael. Rafael demanded to be called Obie, and would randomly scream out things like "I did not take her panties off!" Rafael also had the bad habit of hiding in the women's shower room, trying to catch a peek at various butter-troll patients.
The story of Ricky and Lisa started well before I arrived in Summit. Lisa was a 22 year old married mother of two, in the ward for yet another suicide attempt. Ricky was your typical fat, greasy fucked up looking mama's boy: 40, living at home, no job, no chance in life. He was discharged 3 days before I was brought in. He apparently fell in love with Lisa. I'm guessing she was the first girl who ever was nice to him, because once he was discharged, he spent literally ALL DAY calling the payphones asking for her. From the time the phones were turned on after breakfast to the time they were turned off for lights out, like clockwork almost every call would be Ricky asking for Lisa.
Ross was easily the worst roommate I ever had. He was loud, hyper and just downright annoying as hell. He decided that I would be his new best friend, even though it was painfully clear I couldn't stand him. Everywhere I went on the wing, Ross would follow me. If I got up and moved, Ross would be about 3 steps behind me. He was like a bloodhound, no matter where I was, he'd find me. Soon my hatred for Ross knew no bounds. Ross was also the biggest wigger I've ever seen in my life. Think of that piece of shit movie Malibu's Most Wanted. He was that guy. He also had the rather unfortunate habit of calling everyone "nigga". The staff, patients, even the servers upstairs in the dining hall. Since many of the staff was black, this was not taken kindly.
Someone calling themself octobersurprise.net is running this poll:
Currently "Osama bin Laden captured" is the clear leader, with more than twice the votes of the second-most-popular option, "spectacular terrorist attack on US soil". (via jwz)
2004/6/8
Once again, Apple come up with a piece of industrial design that makes one think "now that's nifty": this time, it's AirPort Express, a wireless base station, USB print server and analogue/optical audio output (for streaming iTunes audio from your Mac to your stereo/speakers), all in the form factor of one of those doovy white international power adaptors that come with PowerBooks and iPods. And it's only US$39 (which should come out at about A$70 or so). (via bOING bOING)
The next casualty in the list of disappearing ad-free surfaces: potato crisps. (via bOING bOING)
A look at the stigma attached to women keeping cats. After all, everybody knows that people who keep cats are emotional basketcases; normal, healthy people either keep dogs (a proper, well-adjusted person's pet) or fish (which are more of a hobby than a pet) or don't need the emotional crutch of keeping animals:
Supposedly, to look into the female singleton's trolley is to gaze upon human despair in its purest form. The meals-for-one, the glossy magazines shrieking their self-help messages so loudly people three aisles away can hear, those furtive bars of high-quality chocolate brought as a substitute for the low-quality sex they were having before they decided enough was enough. All these items could be exhibited as evidence in the socio-emotional kangaroo courts that even today persist in judging the solitary female as worthless and hopeless simply because she is mate-less. However, the real clincher is the six-pack of top-of-the-range cat food. A kilo of heroin couldn't be more socially incriminating.
Militantly anti-cat Melanie Reid wrote recently; "Feminism has been blamed for many things but there is no doubt that it is also partly responsible for the rise of the cat."
It's very easy to deal with boyfriends who complain you treat your cat better than you do them. Just say: "Once you've produced evidence that an ancient civilisation worshipped you, then perhaps we'll talk." It could even be argued that some men end up being very poor cat substitutes. ("I just couldn't meet the right cat so I decided to have a relationship instead.")
The article also has a list of famous cat-haters, including William Shakespeare and King Louis XIV. They left John Ashcroft off the list.
Btw, what about men who keep/prefer cats; are we they also considered to be psychological liabilities, or perhaps cat-fanciers are Not Real Men (see also: vegetarians, Belle & Sebastian fans, non-followers of sports teams)?
Public Enemy's Chuck D and Hank Shocklee on how copyright law changed hip-hop; or the impact that the increasingly greedy demands of owners of samples had on the evolution of hip-hop:
The first thing that was starting to happen by the late 1980s was that the people were doing buyouts. You could have a buyout--meaning you could purchase the rights to sample a sound--for around $1,500. Then it started creeping up to $3,000, $3,500, $5,000, $7,500. Then they threw in this thing called rollover rates. If your rollover rate is every 100,000 units, then for every 100,000 units you sell, you have to pay an additional $7,500. A record that sells two million copies would kick that cost up twenty times. Now you're looking at one song costing you more than half of what you would make on your album.
We were forced to start using different organic instruments, but you can't really get the right kind of compression that way. A guitar sampled off a record is going to hit differently than a guitar sampled in the studio. The guitar that's sampled off a record is going to have all the compression that they put on the recording, the equalization. It's going to hit the tape harder. It's going to slap at you. Something that's organic is almost going to have a powder effect. It hits more like a pillow than a piece of wood. So those things change your mood, the feeling you can get off of a record. If you notice that by the early 1990s, the sound has gotten a lot softer.
Stay Free!: So is that one reason why a lot of popular hip-hop songs today just use one hook, one primary sample, instead of a collage of different sounds?
Chuck D: Exactly. There's only one person to answer to. Dr. Dre changed things when he did The Chronic and took something like Leon Haywood's "I Want'a Do Something Freaky to You" and revamped it in his own way but basically kept the rhythm and instrumental hook intact. It's easier to sample a groove than it is to create a whole new collage. That entire collage element is out the window.
2004/6/7
Rock musician questioned for possible terrorist involvement after texting a Clash lyric to the wrong person. Mike Devine, from the Clash cover band London Calling, intended to send lyrics from Tommy Gun to the singer, though sent them to a wrong number, and someone uninitiated with the punk rock band's canon found on their phone a message reading "How about this for Tommy Gun? OK - so let's agree about the price and make it one jet airliner for 10 prisoners.", became alarmed and called the police.
Meanwhile, Stereolab have been dumped by the Warner Music Group, who release their records outside of Britain (where their own indie label, Duophonic, do so). The Warner imprint the groop were signed to, Elektra, has been abolished, and nearly half of all Warner artists are expected to be axed. Those staying on, meanwhile, will have to do with smaller budgets, in what could be new boss Edgar Bronfman Jr.'s initiative to turn Warner into a back-catalogue holding company.
I have it on good authority that Belle & Sebastian are coming to Australia, playing on 24 July at the Palais. I wonder who the supports will be; the obvious choice would be Architecture In Helsinki, though Tugboat were angling for this when it last came up. The Tranquilizers could also work. And I'll nominate Talkshow Boy as an outsider candidate.
Another use of technology to make democracy more of a reality (as opposed to just voting for who'll take orders from the people that matter for the next 3 to 4 years): TheyWorkForYou.com, from the team that created FaxYourMP.com, takes the text of Hansard, the transcript of debates in Britain's House of Commons, and converts it into a threaded, linkable discussion form, not unlike, say, LiveJournal or something. Not only that, but it keeps tabs on MPs, including biographies, lists of their interests (shares, board memberships and such, as well as details of overseas trips and gifts received), how often they speak, performance in replying to faxes, and how often they rebel against their own party line. Here's Tony Blair, for example, and the ultra-groovy member for West Bromwich East.
This sort of system promises to reinvigorate democracy and hold politicians to be more accountable to their constituents. (Do you know what your MP has been doing?) I hope that the TheyWorkForYou team plan on releasing the code, because this sort of thing should be exported to other parliamentary democracies. I'd like to see one in Canberra, keeping tabs on Federal Parliament, for one, and ones for state Parliaments; not to mention US Congress, the EU Parliament, and so on. (via bOING bOING)
Not all that long after voting to adopt software patents, the EU are moving to legally require currency detection code in all image-processing software. This looks likely to either (a) be utterly ineffective, or (b) be mostly ineffective whilst effectively outlawing open-source graphics software. The precedent it sets is not a good one either; how long until paracopyright enforcement is mandated to be built into anything processing audio or video data, or indeed any copyrightable data?
Meanwhile, British Telecom have taken steps to block access to child pornography websites. A laudable sentiment, though one worries that the site-by-site censorship infrastructure required to implement this could easily be extended to blocking other things (overseas news sites publishing things violating the Official Secrets Act, for example, or MP3 download sites that piss off the local recording industry). One brave step towards the Singaporisation of the internet.
Meanwhile, the RIAA's latest campaign to defend the foundations of capitalism from the enemy within will involve putting fingerprint readers into music players to ensure that nobody who didn't pay for music gets to listen to it. Welcome to the Digital Millennium; make sure you've paid your way.
2004/6/6
What do you do when your town council rezones the block next to your muffler shop, damaging your business? Weld armour-plate onto a bulldozer and go on a rampage, flattening buildings including the town hall and homes and businesses owned by the councillors responsible for your setback. Police watched helplessly as their bullets bounced off the armour. Could this be an argument for giving police and/or concerned citizens rocket-propelled grenades?
2004/6/5
This evening, I caught a train to North Coburg, getting off at Batman station (yes, to the Americans in the audience, we do name our railway stations after superheroes here, because we Australians are weird), and walking through darkened streets, with the occasional desultory-looking art-decoish bungalow that has seen much better days, looking for an art gallery located at 8 Lyon St. After considerable walking through this wasteland, I started wondering "what sort of art gallery would set up here?". Eventually, I found it, in a former factory/mechanic's shop/similar, across the road from the only other sign of life in the neighbourhood, a bikie clubhouse (the Foolish Few Motorcycle Club, I believe), some of whose members mingled with the hip young artists and miscellaneous troublemakers.
The art varied; it was mostly "underground" art of various sorts (think "ooh, am I OFFENDING your BOURGEOIS SENSIBILITIES? Good. *Fuck* *you*, SUBURBAN YUPPIE PIG!"). A lot of stencil art (some very intricate), done on old car doors, some of that homie graf/stencil/sticker hybrid stuff that's going up all over the city (there was one piece by "Monkey" and someone else, depicting a fantastic world, with their tags all over everything; got to love the hip-hop culture's tendency towards self-mythologisation), underground comics from members of Silent Army, someone's set of nude drawings of female artists (done as a set of postcards, yours for $10), and underworld hitman-turned-artistic cause celebre Chopper Read's own paintings, showing crude figures of big-breasted women with Ned Kelly helmets (alas, I'm not sufficiently well-versed in contemporary art to tell whether Chopper's art is a work of postmodern genre-crossing genius, a curiosity of "outsider art" notable more for who made it than its own virtues, or a publicity stunt). Chopper didn't seem to be there, though there were quite a few bikies with short-cropped hair, tattoos, big bushy beards and, in one case, Nazi patches. Which, I suppose, made the whole thing a lot more edgy and hardcore and "keeping it real". Oh, and Cameron Potts was there, in his "Osama Bin Laden World Hero" T-shirt. Meanwhile, a band (consisting of members of Jihad Against America and/or The Eggs, I'm told) made noises with distorted guitars and a theremin.
Many of the artworks had prices that wouldn't leave much change from a grand. I wonder whether many well-heeled collectors will trek out in their BMWs to the industrial wasteland to pick up a stencilled car door for their open-plan loft in St Kilda or wherever.
2004/6/4
The Bilderberg group, either an informal social gathering for the world's movers and shakers or a shadowy Illuminati-like cabal, possibly comprised of shape-shifting reptilian aliens, that controls the world (depending on whom you ask), are now meeting, somewhere in northern Italy.
(I don't think that the existence of meetings of high-ranking politicians and business tycoons is a worry in itself; these sorts of things are going to happen, informally, in any system. Even communist states like the USSR and China did business with the ultra-wealthy where it suited them. Democracy and, more importantly, transparency exist to keep such things in check. (On any large scale, centralised democracy serves mainly to make elite influence over power less efficient and keep it in check, rather than any more idealistic purpose; on a large enough scale, public opinion approximates a low-pass filter on the opinions of the Rupert Murdochs of this world.) What's more worrying is the concentration of corporate control over news media and the inherent constraints on democratic discourse when mainstream media buries uncomfortable stories or issues.)
North Korea bans mobile phones, shortly after encouraging the few foreign business travellers in Pyongyang to use the devices. Meanwhile, South Korea's phone carriers merely configured their phones to destroy uploaded MP3 files after 72 hours, in an effort to placate the recording industry. It failed, and the pigopolists are suing the phone carrier anyway. (via Techdirt)
LJDrama.org hax0red, by someone who left a message written in a mixture of h4x0r-d00d-l33t5p33k and hip-hop-thugese.
SHOUTOUTS: The #insub CReW, POUND EL, all my HOMIEZ in the CLINK, the SFIMC K1DZ, yourmom, ...
"all my HOMIEZ in the CLINK"? Word, you must be a bad-ass gangbanger, dog.
YOU HAVE B33N SK00L3D. THE INT0RW3B IS NOT UR PLAYGR0UND
Looks like ljdrama.org picked on the wrong angstpuppies for once or something.
An article from Helen Irving, associate professor of law at the University of Sydney, on why Australia's tradition is secular, not Christian, and all the Bushite culture-war bullshit coming out of the Liberal Party about Australia's religious foundations (including the "National Day of Thanksgiving" that has just been declared) and Australian law being based on the Ten Commandments) is just that. (via bizza)
2004/6/3
The Bush Game is a very well done propaganda piece for the John Kerry campaign in the form of a fashionably pixelated Flash game, referencing 1980s kid culture that's the height of ironic retro hipness with the Generation X/Y crowd. It's a politically-incorrect arcade beat-em-up game, in which hip retro characters such as Mr. T, Hulk Hogan, and He-Man, along with the likes of Mike Moore, Jessica Lynch, and, of course, Democratic Party heroes like John Kerry and Howard Dean, battle evil hordes of porcine crony-capitalists and end-of-level bosses (the entire Bush Cabinet, as well as the likes of Paris Hilton and Janet Jackson's robo-breast). Along the way it shows presentations about Bush's depredations of social security funds, redistribution of wealth to the ultra-rich, and collusion with the likes of Enron, in a fairly easy-to-grasp way -- and then claims that the Democrats will fix everything if they get elected. (via everyone, it seems)
Groups from as far away as America are offering to help reunite a refugee with a cat that kept him company. Aladdin Sisalem's only companion during his 10-month stay at the Australian-run detention centre on Manus Island was a stray cat he named Honey. Then Sisalem's protection visa was granted and he was shipped to Australia, though the cat remained behind. Offers of financial assistance to fly the cat to Australia have since poured into the office of the Australian Democrats (remember them? Perhaps this is just what they need for a cat-led recovery.)
(There is an Age article there, but they've now instituted one of those annoying registration systems, and I can't be arsed doing it, so I'll just link to Beth's blog. Who do they think they are; the New York Times or someone?)
Little by little, classic Australian indie/art-house films are making their way onto the DVD format. The most recent example is The Cars That Ate Paris, Peter Weir's 1974 rural gothic exploration of Australian car culture and country-town conservatism. This film has now come out as a double feature with another Weir film, The Plumber, which is supposedly a psychological horror story or somesuch, though I haven't seen it yet.
And another eagerly anticipated title is slated for release on DVD later this year: Dogs In Space, Richard Lowenstein's semi-fictional look at the Melbourne post-punk "little band" scene in the late 1970s, which will come with more than an hour of extra features. (There was apparently a DVD of it in the UK and/or US a while ago, though the quality was reportedly very poor, as if it had been transferred from VHS tape.)
2004/6/2
What does a radical Muslim lesbian look like? Probably something like Irshad Manji, the Canadian-based author of The Trouble with Islam, a manifesto for a new Islamic reformation, for which she has received very specific death threats:
The core concept in Manji's thought -- and that of all progressive Muslims -- is "itjihad". It's a simple idea, and devastatingly powerful. Itjihad is the application of reason and reinterpretation to the message of the Koran. It allows every Muslim to reconsider the message of the Koran for the changed circumstances of the 21st century.
"For example, the next time you hear an Islamo-fetishist, an imam of the ninth-century school, wax eloquent that Muslim societies today have their own forms of democracy thank you very much, we don't need to take any lessons, right there, ask him a few questions. What rights do women and religious minorities actually exercise in these democracies? Not in theory, but in actuality. Don't tell me what the Koran says, because the Koran, like every other holy book, is all over the map, OK. No, tell me what is happening on the ground." She continues, her voice hard and rhythmic, "Tell me when your people vote in free elections. Tell me how many free, uncensored newspapers there are in your 'democracy'. There is, I believe, such a thing as the soft racism of low expectations. And I believe that there is more virtue in expecting Muslims like anybody else, to rise above low expectations, because you know what? We're capable of it."
Manji offers a specific solution for undermining Islamic fundamentalism and ushering in a reformation; her plan involves diverting a large chunk of the West's foreign aid and national security budgets to small business loans to Muslim women, which would have the effect of empowering women in Islamic societies, and undermining the culture that created al-Qaeda.
This feminism shouldn't be alien to good Muslims, she adds. "Muhammad's beloved first wife Khadija was a self-made merchant for whom the Prophet worked for many years. I sometimes point out to Muslim men that if they are serious about emulating the Prophet, then they should go work for their wives."
2004/6/1
In the race to sell reprocessed Congolese coltan to teenagers who already have some, mobile phone manufacturers are grappling for new, fun and fashionable must-have features to put in the latest models. The latest innovation from Nokia is "airtexting". Phones with this feature are equipped with a row of LEDs down one side and an accelerometer; when waved back and forth, the LEDs spell out text in the air, which is claimed to be ideal for picking up in nightclubs and/or heckling speakers/performers without shlepping around a huge LED display. (via bOING bOING)