2004/12/31
From the pages of the most recent VICE Magazine: a hand-made "PowerBook", made of a grey garbage bag, some issues of the Village Voice, and a hand-painted Apple logo in White-Out; apparently fashioned by a crackhead with a PowerBook box and shrinkwrapping machine, and sold to an unsuspecting student for US$200. Perhaps junkies read Something Awful as well...
Recordings of 2004
- Morrissey, You Are The Quarry. Moz is back, and in fine form. His youthful alienation is turning into the crankiness of a lonely old man, but he still can write a good song (and give a good show).
- Pipas, Bitterclub. A new EP from this London electropop duo; A classy mixture of indiepop vocals, glitchy beats and guitars.
- The Radio Dept., Lesser Matters. Well-crafted indiepop with guitars, synths, Casio drum loops, good chord progressions and songwriting and just the right amount of Kevin Shields influence.
- Talkshow Boy, Watch As I Perform My Own Tracheotomy. Apparently not out yet, though I got an advance copy, and it's a cracker of an album. It's 20 tracks along the same lines as the Ice Police single; glitchy yet catchy electropop with razor-sharp stream-of-consciousness lyrics and titles like Ruff Lovin' In A Tuff Neighbourhood, Go Hard Or Go Home (I Wanna Tweak Yr Moog) and OMG I <3 Livejournal (And My Livejournal <3's Me).
And a few other mentions, honourable and otherwise. The new Stereolab album, Margerine Eclipse was good, though no track leapt out at me in quite the way that various tracks from previous releases have done. The long-awaited New Buffalo album was, to be honest, a bit disappointing; in building her home studio, Sally seems to have mislaid her analogue drum machine, and gone away from the layered glitchiness which made About Last Night (and early live versions of many of the songs) such a delight. Meanwhile, Björk's Medulla didn't grab me; making tracks entirely out of voice samples is an interesting experiment, though the result I'm not sure about. And then there were all the calculatedly commercial post-Interpol/Franz Ferdinand bands like The Killers.
There are a few recordings released in 2004 which I didn't get to check out properly before the end of the year, such as Minimum Chips' Sound Asleep, the Arcade Fire's Funeral and the new Styrofoam. Or, indeed, the new Interpol album. My excuse is that a lot of the money which would have gone on CDs was instead squandered on food and rent in one of the world's most expensive cities; I'll probably catch up on them in the first half of 2005.
Some other bands I discovered this year: GirlsAreShort (a Canadian electropop act), Remington Super 60/Nice System (a Norwegian lounge-pop/bossa-pop outfit), a wealth of British indie from the late 1980s and 1990s, including parts of the Sarah Records back-catalogue I hadn't heard (of) before (key bands being The Wake, The Bodines, and various bands from the Sound of Leamington Spa compilation series) and Azure Ray (an all-female indie duo from Nebraska). Not to mention an appreciation of Electric Six's, Fire (they're like the Scissor Sisters with balls or something; tacky but fun).
Top gigs of 2004 (in alphabetical order):
- BAM BAM in a backyard in Fitzroy in April. I was blown away by their energy and musicianship. They rock hard and look sharp, and if anyone deserves to make it big, it's them. And it looks like things are happening for them.
- Belle & Sebastian at the Palais in St Kilda. Easily the gig of the year. They tore the roof off the place. People were dancing in the aisles and all. The band bantered with the audience, did an AC/DC cover, and at one stage, a girl from the audience got up on stage, sang the vocals from Lazy Line Painter Jane with them and did a perfect job of it.
- Le Tigre at the Islington Academy (in London, natch). Half of it was prerecorded (though they did play guitars/keyboards and sing), though the visuals and stage performance were good to behold.
- The Chickfactor Mon Gala Papillons night in Shepherd's Bush (also in London). Stevie Jackson from Belle & Sebastian did a few quite nice songs, and Pipas took their act to the stage.
- The Radio Dept., at Barfly, Camden. They're as good live as on record.
- Radiohead at the Rod Laver Arena (back in Melbourne again). Gigs at arenas usually suck, because of the binoculars factor, but Radiohead put on a good show, despite Thom's voice faltering somewhat. Their use of the video screens was quite creative too.
- Schmoof, at the Water Rats in London. Slick if slightly silly tongue-in-cheek electropop with rock theatrics worthy of Spinal Tap and visuals handcoded in BASIC on a ZX Spectrum.
Not to mention multiple gigs by various excellent Melbourne bands, including The Rumours, Season and City City City, not to mention the aforementioned BAM BAM and Talkshow Boy.
Britain's railways are now carrying more people than at any time since 1959 (i.e., before the Beeching closures winnowed the railway network down), with more than 1 billion rail journeys made in 2004. Which is surprising, given that a train journey in Britain costs more than the equivalent journey by air where available (largely thanks to jet fuel and airline tickets being tax-free), not to mention trains being frequently late and having a reputation for breaking down. Though perhaps with all those commuters and travellers using the trains, there'll be more money for making the system more reliable.
Patent of the day: Automatic Detection of Pornographic Images:
If the pixel color is determined to be "skin" 46, the image is sent to a first shape detection process indicated for example as "face detection" of block 48 wherein steps similar to blocks 26 and 28 of FIG. 1 are performed. If the image is detected as a "face" 50, the image is classified as "portrait" and a manual check/inspection is done only infrequently (block 52). If the image is not a "face" 54, the image is analyzed to determine if it is a body part (block 56) i.e., other than a face. If it is not a body part (58), the image is classified as a "landscape", and this type is only inspected occasionally (block 60) i.e. only a small percentage of these images are inspected manually. If the image is a body part (62), a pose detection is done to determine if there is an erotic position (block 64). If it is determined that the pose is not erotic (66), this image is classified as a "swim suit picture" and the result of the detection may be a "parental guidance" notice attached (block 68).
(via bOING bOING)
Tulip BV, the Dutch company which owned the Commodore brand and slapped it on dodgy DVD+Rs and VIC-20-brand MP3 players, has sold the brand to a company based in Beverly Hills, the cringeworthily-named Yeahronimo Media Ventures, who currently are in the business of hawking ringtones or somesuch. Apparently their business model involves cracking down on "copyright infringement" of the Commodore name (whatever that means), and or replacing their own less than ideal name with Commodore.
2004/12/30
Thanks to the technological miracle of Microsoft DRM, Windows Media files can contain adware, viruses and spyware, and it appears that an anti-P2P company named Overpeer have been launching such trojan WMAs into the KaZaA network. More details here:
But since the license dialog box acts just like an Internet Explorer window, it can display whatever is on the page it points to--whether a legitimate call for license information or a series of pop-up ads.
Not only did we get bombarded with unwanted ads, but one of the ad windows in a video file tried to install adware onto our test PC surreptitiously, while another added items to our browser's Favorites list and attempted to change our home page. And a window from the original music file asked to download a file called lyrics.zip, which contained the installer for 180search Assistant, commonly categorized as an adware program.
And if the asphead agencies can do it, so can the Bulgarian Mafia and their ilk. Expect to see spam-zombie-trojan-infected WMAs appearing on a file-sharing network near you. The moral of this story, kids, is use MP3 don't pirate music.
(via bOING bOING)
Heard in a Momus audioblog entry:
There is, apparently, a Japanese town named Aberdeen. This town originally had a different name, but was renamed to Aberdeen so that the local whisky distillery could put "Made in Aberdeen" on their bottles, with "Japan" in smaller print below.
2004/12/29
The Indian Ocean earthquake may not only have killed a lot of people and wiped out entire towns, it may have also permanently taken a fraction of a second off each day, by accelerating the Earth's rotation.
Meanwhile, some experts say it's only a matter of time before a landslide in the Canary Islands causes a mega-tsunami in the Atlantic, with unimaginably devastating effects; places like Ireland and south-west England will get off lightly, with only waves similar to those that battered Sri Lanka and Thailand; meanwhile, the east coast of the US will be wiped out with 20-50-metre waves obliterating cities including New York and Washington DC, and the Caribbean and northeastern Brazil would suffer similar devastation. And since it would be impossible to evacuate the entire eastern seaboard in a few hours and impractical to do so preventively for an indefinite period, nobody wants to hear about an early-warning system:
No national leader wants to evacuate the entire coast for an indefinite period of time, causing an economic and refugee crisis on the scale of a world war, for what might be a false alarm. But nobody wants to ignore a warning, and perhaps be responsible for tens of millions of deaths. From a political standpoint, it's better not to have the warning at all.
Mind you, that's only one opinion; some dude on Slashdot said that the depth profile of the Atlantic would cause such tsunamis to dissipate more rapidly, so perhaps things will turn out OK.
Anyway, back to the spin-acceleration thing; this means that there'll be, theoretically, even less time in a day to do things. I, for one, wouldn't mind if someone devised a way of slowing Earth's rotation down, giving its inhabitants a 25- or 26-hour period to go about their day in; those of us with longer-than-24-hour biological clocks, who otherwise tend to retire and rise later each day, would be grateful.
It looks like, after years of positioning themselves as the BMW of the computer world, Apple are about to release a cheap, bare-bones Mac. The new Mac, codenamed Q88, will come with no monitor, a CDRW/DVD-ROM drive and 40 to 80Gb of disk space, and will come in a flat enclosure that can be either vertical or horizontal. Which suggests that it'll look like a shiny white PlayStation 2 and/or an oversized screenless iPod.
The reason for Apple's change of heart is said to be the success of the iPod; the new Mac, which will eschew Apple's focus on performance, and be aimed at Windows users who liked the iPod and would buy a Mac if they were cheaper.
And The Reg speculates that Apple could position these units as home-entertainment PCs.
French underground artist Invader, who's responsible for putting up those space-invader tiles in cities around the world (there's one in Covent Garden in London, and I believe I saw some in Melbourne as well), has now released an exclusive line of sneakers. €103 gets you a pair which leave a footprint with a space-invader graphic. The sneakers are a limited edition of 1,500 pairs. No word on whether or not they are made by children in sweatshops.
Maybe next we'll see Heavy Product Blundstone boots with a motif of a man struggling with a bucket on the sole.
The recent cataclysm in the Indian Ocean hasn't escaped my attention; when capricious Nature kills at least 60,000 people in countries thousands of kilometres apart within a few hours, it's hard not to be awed. Mind you, that figure could double if epidemics of disease spread in the affected areas.
Anyway, Wikipedia has a good page on the disaster as information comes in; BBC News has a special page as well, and bOING bOING links to first-person accounts by bloggers. And if you want to help, you can do so by donating to UNICEF or Oxfam (Australia, UK, USA).
2004/12/28
China Miéville has written a story (for the Socialist Review, of all places), envisioning a privatised, trademarked Xmas:
Don't get me wrong. I haven't got shares in YuleCo, and I can't afford a one-day end-user licence, so I couldn't have a legal party. I'd briefly considered buying from one of the budget competitors like XmasTym, or a spinoff from a non-specialist like Coca-Crissmas, but the idea of doing it on the cheap was just depressing. I wouldn't have been able to use much of the traditional stuff, and if you can't have all of it, why have any? (XmasTym had the rights to Egg Nog. But Egg Nog's disgusting.) Those other firms keep trying to create their own alternatives to proprietary classics like reindeer and snowmen, but they never take off. I'll never forget Annie's underwhelmed response to the JingleMas Holiday Gecko.
No, like most people, I was going to have a little MidWinter Event, just Annie and me. So long as I was careful to steer clear of licenced products we'd be fine.
Ivy decorations you can still get away with; holly's a no-no but I'd hoarded a load of cherry tomatoes, which I was planning to perch on cactuses. I wouldn't risk tinsel but had a couple of brightly-coloured belts I was going to drape over my aspidistra. You know the sort of thing. The inspectors aren't too bad: they'll sometimes turn a blind eye to a bauble or two (which is just as well, because the fines for unlicensed Christmas celebrations are astronomical).
(via bOING bOING)
Expatriate citizen-of-the-world Momus returns to Britain -- and hates it; on returning, he finds squalor, shabbiness, crass consumerism and an edge of latent aggression.
The marketing is slick and constant, nothing works, and it's twice the price it would be back home. And there's some sort of druggy, boozy menace hanging over the streets at night. Blame the binge drinking sprees! Have a happy smashed British Christmas!
We stop at a filling station on the Shoreditch High Street to buy some food. A homeless man is sitting at the entrance. 'Spare some change, please? Spare some change?' A black man gets out of a BMW and comes over to reform him. 'Look at yourself, mate, you've got to stop using the stuff. Go to a gym, man, do a workout, get out of this state you're in, it's a fucking shame on you, man!' He's a winner, the junkie's a loser. Go to a gym, start a business, buy a BMW, join the winners. It's dog eat dog.
The next morning the taps in the bathroom don't seem to work, and neither does the flush in the toilet. Fuck! At least I'm able to shower. I don't think I could bear to be dirty in London. It already feels like a gigantic toilet. Crossed with an advertising agency. An advertising toilet? Why not? Clever marketing idea! Out on the street, I see a bus with an advert on the side that says 'More Glitz! The Brent Cross Centre, feed your addiction'. Feed your addiction? Fuck, you mean become like that junky we saw last night at the filling station? Have drugs and celebrity become metaphors for everything in Britain? Are they marketing heroin yet? Welcome! Fuck!
The atmosphere didn't feel benign at all, nothing like soft, safe neon nights in Tokyo. `it felt brutal. Minicab sharks, cars pulling up behind pedestrians. You're in there, protected, and I'm out here, not. I'm just going to have to hope you have a good heart. People in hip hop hooded tops looking hard in kebab shops. It all feels like one of those Streets videos where a bunch of tanked-up British guys end up with blood streaming down their faces. 'Mate, mate, I don't want any trouble, mate.'
The kids in the next seat just said 'Bling bling!' The phrase is everywhere in Britain, an R&B-rap-pop fashion as widely adopted as the flash white sportsgear people wear on British streets, minus all the gold, silver and diamonds that stars like J-Lo and Britney accessorize it with. I open the Virgin Trains magazine. (Wow, marketing! Trains never used to have in flight consumer magazines! Then again, they once had basic services like running water and hot food.) There's an article about shopping in Birmingham. It begins 'Diamonds, platinum and all things bling lie ten minutes from the city centre in Birmingham's jewellery quarter...' Later in the journey, bored, I open the new tabloid Times and there it is in the financial section. 'Bling bling: fashion designer John Zhao shows off his crystal encrusted iPod'. Britain speaks fluent bling bling. Britain, from top to bottom, embraces the showy materialism. the 'I won, you lost' mindset of hip hop and R&B videos. Bling bling, I win!
I've noticed some of these things since coming here; the ubiquity of branding, often taking priority over other things (for example, anything to do with live music here has the Carling brand (which is a rather generic lager) slapped on it, and band venues have advertising billboards on the walls), the "ATM attendants" stationed beside every cash machine, trying to guilt the relatively well-off user out of one of their tenners, the chav kids looking hard and dead-eyedly cynical in their hip-hop thugwear (Burberry baseball caps worn under hooded tops, to hide faces from the ubiquitous CCTV cameras, seem to be a big part of youth fashion here), drunk arguments in the streets, with couples screaming "FUCK OFF, YOU FUCKING WANKER!" at each other, the dozens of different posters on every form of public transport, from buses to long-distance trains, warning passengers not to assault staff.
2004/12/26
Could this be the worst album ever recorded? A Star Wars Christmas album from 1980, forever debunking any claims that the Star Wars franchise once had a pre-Jar-Jar Golden Age. This album has everything; C3PO and R2D2 singing duets, lots of jingling sleigh-bells and sugary strings interspersed with Star Wars sound effects, corny comedy routines from "droids" and wookies, inane dialogue, the obligatory extra-large helpings of schmaltz, and if that wasn't enough, a young Jon Bon Jovi leading a high-school choir. (via bOING bOING)
I'm listening to The Wake's Harmony and Singles (the LTM repackaging of the stuff they recorded for Factory/Factory Benelux in the early 1980s). They sound very much like New Order circa Movement, down to the drumming sounding identical in places, with similar digital reverb, the same keyboard sound, and angsty, ambiguous lyrics delivered with Caesar's Bernard-Sumner-imitating-Ian-Curtis-esque vocals. It's much in the way that early In The Nursery sounds like Joy Division, only more so.
It's funny to think that they're the same band who released Tidal Wave of Hype, an album of Blueboy/Field Mice-style jangle-pop with baggy and indie-dance influences and songs about provincial discos, obnoxious people, masturbation and John Major, on Sarah Records. Though, come to think about it, probably not much odder than New Order having done a football anthem and a Balearic acid album.
Anyway, if you're ever disappointed that New Order didn't record enough albums in the early 1980s, this CD is for you.
(Come to think of it, one could do a compilation of "songs/albums/artists that sound like New Order but aren't". I'll volunteer this CD, The Bodines' Heard It All and The Field Mice's Missing The Moon.)
2004/12/25
A handful of "liberals" in America have been claiming since November that the Presidential election was stolen. Now, the big news is that Presidential candidate John Kerry may be among them; Kerry is allegedly planning to retract his concession and launch a legal challenge against the election results on the ground that the election was fraudulent. As opposed to the Democrats having lost for having run the most inoffensively uncharismatic candidate, and/or because 51% of Americans really believe in their heart of hearts that gays have it too easy.
For all I know, this could be wishful thinking. Then again, if it does happen, I wonder how far it'll get, especially given that most of the Democrat-voters seem to have acknowledged that Bush won it fair and square. Perhaps we'll see a replay of the recent events in the Ukraine, with liberals, secularists, progressives, gays, lesbians, atheists, humanists, polyamorous pagans, Burning Man attendees and the kinds of Americans who own passports and read books other than the Bible and Ann Coulter camping out in the streets of Washington DC under blue banners, soon to be joined by red-banner-waving counter-demonstrations of Pentecostals, ultra-patriots and Nascar fans.
Then again, it may not get to that; given the state of free speech in the Bush Era, the blue rally are likely to be herded into "free-speech zones" miles away from anywhere, ignored by CNN/FoxNews and their efforts unknown to anybody but a handful of liberal bloggers, with those who resist facing the full brunt of "Miami-model" anti-protest ultraviolence.
The Independent has a piece about the cost of Christmas:
£20m: Amount made by Mark Tilden, British robot expert who invented Robosapien, this year's hit toy
£20m: Amount nations of sub-Saharan Africa are paying in debt to developed world every 16 hours
30,525: Number of miles your Christmas dinner will have travelled to reach your table - vegetables alone are likely to have come 15,800 miles
4.2%: Rise in murder rate over Christmas
(via 1.0)
The bizarre story, with album covers and low-bitrate MP3s, of Yu-Mex, one of the most unlikely musical genres in the history of thrift-shop records. Yu-Mex is what happened when Tito's Yugoslavia broke off relations with the USSR, turned against Russian culture and looked for other ideologically-sound exotic influences, finding them, of all places, in Mexico. And so, sombrero-clad, mustachioed hombres from Slovenia to Serbia put out record after record on the state-run record label Jugoton, with songs with titles like "I Am A True Mexican". (via bOING bOING)
2004/12/24
Living in London and not having a landline, I've been using Skype to call people in Australia; recently, I have found its reliability to be somewhat variable. Sometimes when I call a mobile phone number, I get a recorded announcement saying that the phone in question is not connected; at other times, I get a nameless voice-mail message, which may or may not belong to the person I wanted to call.
Furthering the annoyance, Skype's charging mechanism is a bit unreliable, and sometimes it goes from Ringing to Call In Progress when the phone is still ringing; there goes another 16.5 Euro Cents.
Some H.P. Lovecraft aficionados are making a silent film of The Call of Cthulhu, executed in authentic 1920s/30s silent movie fashion. There's a trailer online, which looks promising.
This afternoon, Your Humble Narrator caught a bus down Charing Cross Road and made it down to Santa's Ghetto a subversive/punk/coolsie art gallery in the guise of a temporary gift shop/graffiti-covered squat.
Santa's Ghetto is a shopfront, covered with graffiti and filled with stolen, tag-covered street furniture and confrontational poster/stencil art. Perpetual public face of the cool set in London, Banksy, was a mainstay of this exhibition, with prints of his stencils on sale (for around £165 or so; my credit card didn't stretch quite that far), as well as T-shirts reading "SUICIDE BOMBERS JUST NEED A HUG", £10 notes bearing Princess Diana's image (for £10.99), and copies of his new book, "Cut It Out". Also, £5 will get you a roll of adhesive tape printed with "POLITE LINE / DO NOT GET CROSS". Other exhibitors included Jamie "Tank Girl/Gorillaz" Hewlett, who had his cartoonish prints of butt-kicking soldier girls and all-American zombie armies, Jamie Reid (who did the Sex Pistols' cover artwork in the 1970s, and seems to be doing much the same sort of thing; I suppose catering to nostalgic middle-agers is where the money is), and D Face (who does those graffiti-character stickers, which look not unlike the ones plastered all over empty shop windows in Melbourne). And there was a picture of two snowmen humping signed, apparently, by Raymond Briggs (of Fungus the Bogeyman fame), though his name wasn't on the flyer. Apparently Chris Cunningham and 3D (of Massive Attack) had works there too, though I didn't see them.
Santa's Ghetto was, in some ways, similar to the Outlandish Exhibition that I saw in Melbourne some six months ago. Except that it wasn't quite as confrontational and wasn't held in an industrial wasteland; it was more a public face of "subversive" art just around the corner from Oxford Street, London's main fairy-light-festooned and perpetually crowded permanent sale and/or Düreresque vision of Hell. There were also no bikies and no Chopper Read artworks, and rather than a punk/noise band, an iPod was playing some funky grooves, of the sort you could expect to hear in a fashion shop or trendy bar, from behind the counter. The business of Santa's Ghetto was not so much to shock and offend the bourgeoisie as to part them from their money (it even takes credit cards) whilst giving them a sense of being subversive and transgressive and underground. (In case you're wondering, I bought a copy of the new Banksy book.)
There are photos here. The exhibition/sale closes on the 24th (that's today), so if you want some Polite Line tape for wrapping your gifts, you'd better hurry.
2004/12/23
Antanas Mockus, the Colombian academic who became mayor of the lawless city of Bogotá, has used his post to stage a city-wide social experiment in changing the mindset and behaviour of Bogotá's inhabitants. Mockus' policies, referencing Douglass North's theory of formal and informal rules and postmodernist Jürgen Habermas, have included voluntary women-only nights in the streets, giving people thumbs-up and thumbs-down cards to comment on others' behaviour, and employing over 400 municipal mimes to mock those flouting traffic rules, as well as other inspired policies.
Another Mockus inspiration was to ask people to call his office if they found a kind and honest taxi driver; 150 people called and the mayor organized a meeting with all those good taxi drivers, who advised him about how to improve the behavior of mean taxi drivers. The good taxi drivers were named "Knights of the Zebra," a club supported by the mayor's office.
(via bOING bOING)
Via bOING bOING, gorgeous photos of American industrial landscapes; freight trains wending their way through vast, lonely landscapes and sunrises through the plumes of smoke over steel mills and such. The Appalachian Railroad ones are probably my favourites, though some of the steel mill ones are also lovely (not a word one typically associates with steel mills).
The hottest children's toy this Crassmas is the Youniverse ATM Machine, a piggy bank/toy cash machine.
Tweens and beyond can insert the supplied ATM card into the silver machine, punch in their PIN, be greeted by name on the electronic display, peer into the pretend security camera and wait for that seminal capitalistic moment -- when crisp bills miraculously appear, ripe for the plucking.
The marketers have a term for it: KGOY -- "Kids growing older younger." The ATM is a real KGOY toy, says Juliet B. Schor, a Boston University professor who wrote "Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture."
The ATM, marked for ages 8 and up, "is symbolically significant and highly valued -- the money machine! It must have a very strong aspirational pull. Using an ATM is one of the things that grown-ups do in full view of kids that the kids have very little access to," says Schor. "It's one part of consuming that kids aren't in on. They are full-fledged consumers, buying clothing, picking groceries, selecting toys. They go to the spa and get their nails done. But they don't have entry into the real ATM."
Well, it's probably less harmful than selling them candy cigarettes. Other than that, opinion seems divided on whether it indoctrinates kids into becoming materialistic consumer zombies or teaches sensible money management habits.
You may want to say thank you to Poland for pioneering the GameBoy orchestra scuttling the European software patent directive.
2004/12/22
This Christmas Day, Britain's Channel 4 is continuing its annual tradition of courting controversy by broadcasting a documentary questioning the authorship of the Bible and suggesting a link between Christian theology and the troubles in the Middle East.
He declares the New Testament a 'masterwork of spin written by people who were nowhere near the events they describe, all gathered by powerful editors who kept out ideas they did not like'.
One of the most revealing moments comes when Beckford visits the US state of Georgia to talk to President Bush's spiritual adviser, baptist minister Richard Land. Land dismisses as 'rubbish' suggestions that the Bible is inaccurate and cannot be the basis for political decisions. 'When you stand in judgment of scripture, that is a theology of death,' says Land, who has called for Iraq to be 'flooded' with US troops.
Again, it's probably nothing most educated people in the secular world haven't heard of; nonetheless, evangelical groups are up in arms about the timing.
2004/12/21
Several German cities have a phone-based bicycle rental service, in which electronically-locked bicycles are left in the street and may be ridden for 6 Euro cents a minute. This was not good enough for some h4x0r d00dz, so they opened one up and changed the firmware, giving them free rides. (via Slashdot)
Meanwhile, apparently there are secret cheat codes for Coca-Cola vending machines; pressing a certain sequence of buttons puts the machine into a debug menu. From there, one can apparently do fascinating things like, um, seeing how much money the machine has taken and how many cans it has sold. (via bOING bOING)
2004/12/20
The authors of 1980s-vintage Merovingian-bloodline conspiracy-theory-of-history classic Holy Blood, Holy Grail are suing Dan Brown for plagiarism, claiming that he plagiarised their "research" into the Priory of Sion, the Knights Templar and the suppressed bloodline of Jesus Christ, in his best-selling novel The Da Vinci Code. Though, by doing so, aren't they effectively acknowledging that their research is a work of fiction? After all, one can't claim ownership of actual historical facts, can one?
A big page of Ninetynine lyrics, transcribed with varying accuracy, for those having trouble figuring out what Laura's singing. As far as figuring out what the words mean, however, you're on your own.
The Commodore 64 music software industry is alive and well; at least as much so as the GameBoy and Nintendo Famicom music software industries, anyway. Some intrepid hackers have created new music software for the Commodore 64; Prophet 64 is available in 3 flavours: standard, TB (which behaves like a Roland TB-303, or as much as one as the SID chip will do), and TR (which behaves like a TR-909, only with Rob Hubbard-style drum samples, as heard in much video-game music). Prophet 64 is free software, and will run happily on a 64 emulator, though with a real 64 it can be controlled with game paddles and synced to MIDI devices (with a simple add-on interface). To facilitate getting it onto a 64, it's available as a disk image, or as a WAV file to record to cassette for loading. (via MusicThing)
2004/12/18
The first people convicted under Victoria's religious vilification laws were two evangelical Christian pastors, one of them an unsuccessful Senate candidate from the Family First political party (you know, the ones all the majors did deals with to keep those dangerous radical Greens out of the Senate), convicted for a 2002 seminar in which they told their congregation that Muslims were training to take over Australia and encouraged domestic violence, and that Islam was an inherently violent religion. The two pastors, from evangelical group Catch the Fire Ministries, claimed that they were merely trying to "increase understanding of Muslim culture".
On one hand, it seems fair enough; the two defendants were obviously fundamentalist bozos. On the other hand, it makes one wonder against whom else the laws could be used. If, for example, Canadian Muslim reformist Irshad Manji did a bookshop tour of Australia to discuss her thesis that mainstream Islam has problematic veins of intolerance and absolutism, could she be prosecuted? Could she be prosecuted for claiming that the Koran was written as a pragmatic political tool for governing the Arab Empire, and not a divine revelation? (Also, if she did the same in Britain after the Blair government's Religious Vilification Bill, which allegedly prohibits saying mean things about the Koran, were passed, what would happen?) Could we end up with a situation where following certain lines of inquiry could lead to criminal prosecution and, instead, baroque lines of circumlocution must be devised to avoid the elephant in the middle of the room?
Quoted from Graham's blog, whose comments appear to be broken:
Bizarro sex ed animations, produced by the BBC. Theres one for the girls and one for the lads. Not Safe For Work. Also notice the difference in the title banners. And could you imagine the response from Murdochs hounds if the ABC even broached anything like this? More evidence that weve fallen behind the mother country in the prudity stakes. (Edit: or ahead, depending on your point of view.)
Actually, I don't think it's a matter of Australia having fallen behind the UK, so much as "respectable" Australian social morés always having been more conservative and less permissive than in the old country. It was like that in the 1950s, when Melbourne and Sydney were (on the surface) much more buttoned-down and less accepting of any deviancy than London; and in the early 1960s, when a British model British fashion model Jean Shrimpton went to the Melbourne Cup wearing a miniskirt (which was the done thing in London), it caused public outrage and indignation.
Part of this would probably come from the frontier/outpost mentality ingrained into the Australian psyche. Australia is a new country, half a world away from civilisation, and thus needs more discipline to hold the line against barbarism. It is, the reasoning can be extrapolated as, not yet mature enough to be trusted with as much leeway as they have in London or Los Angeles. The fact that it was originally a penal colony, ruled with an iron fist by colonial governors, could have something to do with the political culture as well. The convicts are gone, but the paternalistic streak remains in Australia; from John Howard and his idol Robert Menzies to fictitious civic patriarchs in films like The Cars That Ate Paris and Welcome To Woop Woop, Australia has traditionally been a country of stern father figures laying down rules they expect to be heeded. Australia has also been a traditionally censorious society; other than high-profile cases like Baise-Moi and Nine Songs, many mainstream films have scenes cut or shortened prior to being allowed to be shown in Australia; meanwhile, a number of books, including, allegedly, 18th-century erotic novel Fanny Hill, are banned in Australia. And given how popular Howard's retro-styled leadership is (after all, one can only give so much credit to Rupert Murdoch's news-management for the last election), one can conclude that much of Australia finds this sort of governance reassuring.
Of course, that is only one side of the story. The streak of paternalistic conservatism in "respectable" bourgeois Australian society is counterbalanced by another phenomenon: the larrikin tradition. This tradition, of borderline contempt for authority and propriety, has been in Australia since the days of convict settlements and corrupt, arbitrary government, and is just as firmly ingrained, underneath the surface of society, as conservatism. The larrikin element can be argued to have informed everything from Australian contemporary art from the Angry Penguins onwards to youth counterculture (from bodgies to ferals), from contemporary scofflaws (it's no accident that Melbourne is home to the Cave Clan, dozens of zines and one of the world's most active stencil graffiti scenes) to the fine Australian tradition of political pranks.
And so we get the dynamic between wowserism (the bourgeois paternalist conservatism) and larrikinism, with both sides of the equation reinforcing each other. The larrikin vein beneath the surface of Australian culture is proof that Australia isn't ready for the sorts of license they have elsewhere in the world, and needs a firm hand to guide it. Meanwhile, the conservative, conformistic streak in respectable Australian society fuels the undercurrent of resistance. It is a balance, and a positive feedback loop, between order and chaos, just as that described by Discordianism.
It appears to me that the prominent larrikin-wowser dynamic, and its various consequences, is the main difference between the Australian and British cultures. Britain is less conservative or censorious as a whole (in fact, some have called this Britain's "repressive tolerance"), but doesn't have the larrikin tradition (not that it's a terribly orderly place, just that its disorder seems to be confined to drunken neds punching each other up outside pubs at 11pm, and has no deeper cultural manifestation).
A British designer has created a coffee mug with a shelf for storing biscuits. The Dunk Mug, sensibly enough, comes in left- and right-handed variants. (via bOING bOING)
Rod Liddle in last week's Sunday Times on Britain's upcoming religious vilification laws:
Heres a short Christmas quiz. Let me rephrase that. Its a short Winterval quiz. I would not wish to frighten or alienate any Sunday Times readers by waving Jesus Christ in their faces.
Anyway, the first question is this. One of the two statements below may soon be illegal; the other will still be within the law. You have to decide which is which and explain, with the aid of a diagram, the logic behind the new provision. a) Stoning women to death for adultery is barbaric. b) People who believe it is right to stone women to death for adultery are barbaric.
Other people, including comedian Rowan Atkinson, have pointed out that the religious vilification laws could have profoundly chilling effects on debate, which the Home Office strenuously denies. The bill, as drafted, apparently criminalises treating religious texts, such as the Bible or Koran, "in an abusive or insulting way", thus sounding dangerously like the all-faiths blasphemy bill David Blunkett went out of his way to say it wasn't. It does, however, specifically exempt comedians.
(I'll bet that the Church of Scientology's lawyers are rubbing their hands with glee at the shiny new blunt instrument for use against critics they are about to be handed. I wonder whether they'll get to use Britain's national firewall to block access to critical sites.) (via FmH)
For each US$100 donated to the EFF, Public Knowledge or IPac, copyright-reform advocacy group Downhill Battle will send one lump of coal to the RIAA and MPAA.
Brazil now leads the world in revolving apartment technology, with the first-ever such building, Suite Vollard, giving each of its 11 residents their choice of 360-degree views at the touch of a button. (via bOING bOING)
2004/12/17
Tonight, Your Humble Narrator went back to the Water Rats, to see three bands.
First up was Lifestyle. Basically electropop, with some live synths, live bass (played by a hipster in a rather flash hat), and vocals by a chap in a long pinstripe jacket. The elements were promising, though the singer's vocal style didn't seem to suit the music; at times he sounded reminiscent of Jimmy Barnes as he strained and belted out the notes.
The second band, Schmoof, were awesome. An electropop duo with great stage presence; the guy (dressed all in white, and looking just a bit Eurovision) started off playing two synths, while the girl sang and danced around; then they strapped on two SH-101s and moved and played. They were a little like a more pop Mink Engine. They did songs about the Northern Line, choosing between chocolate and boyfriends, and backseat drivers, and an electropop cover of Guns'n'Roses' Sweet Child O'Mine, which absolutely rocked. Oh, and did I mention that projected on the rear of the stage were visuals generated by a Sinclair Spectrum? I.e., the guy in white had spent ages writing BASIC programs to do blocky animations in time to the music. Which all was cooler than cool.
Finally up came Freezepop, a US synthpop act. They sounded somewhere between Ladytron and Barcelona. One of their number moved around the stage playing a Yamaha QY-70 (that's a handheld synth/sequencer). They had somewhat of a hard act to follow with Schmoof, IMHO, though they were fun, especially their last song (with its synthesised/sampled rock/metal riffs and posturing to match).
Between sets, the DJ played tracks like The Postal Service and The Flaming Lips (a Japanese version of Yoshimi). Then, between the next two sets, the "DJ" turned out to be a preprepared mix CD.
At the beginning of the night, there seemed to be a lot of goths about; almost half the room seemed to be of that persuasion. Perhaps they misread the flyer as "Futurepop"? They either filtered out or were diluted by new arrivals by the end of the night.
Anyway, there are photos here.
It looks like Minimum Chips have a new EP out. (It may have come out as early as September, or may be coming out tomorrow; not being in Melbourne makes it hard to notice these things.) Anyway, it has 7 tracks, and is as close to an album as the Chips get.
(Hint to friends in Australia: it'd make an excellent birthday present. That or the Dogs In Space DVD that should be out soon.)
And by the way, they seem to have MP3s of some sort of their entire back-catalogue on their web site. The site hosting them seems to be down, though, so I've no idea whether they're complete tracks or excerpts, or at what bitrate.
2004/12/16
Britain's Home Office, still reeling from the Blunkett scandal, has been dealt a fresh blow when the Law Lords ruled that indefinite detention without trial of terrorist suspects is unlawful, by an 8-to-1 majority. The government is to review its options.
I wonder whether they thought of taking a leaf out of the US's book and moving the detainees outside of Britain proper. The few remaining fragments of the British Empire could lend themselves to small-scale, high-security penal colonies, sufficiently inaccessible to add to their security. Possible locations for a British Guantanamo could include:
- Diego Garcia; an island in the Indian Ocean, forcibly depopulated in the 1960s and now leased to the US as a military base. An agreement could possibly be reached with the US to establish a high-security prison facility there. In fact, the US is rumoured to already have such facilities there.
- Saint Helena, for the historical resonance.
- Pitcairn Island; it could do with publicity for something other than sexual abuse.
Of course, Britain doesn't have as free a hand with extraterritorial penal facilities as the US does, because of that meddlesome European Convention on Human Rights (which, a court has found, even applies to British troops in Iraq), which could complicate these options. Though if, as claimed, the detainees are foreign nationals with no right to residency in Britain, they could possibly be handed off to a compliant foreign government to look after. The US would be a good choice (they have the facilities, after all), though other members of the Coalition of Willing could be looked at. Australia, for example, could repurpose some of its extraterritorial refugee holding centres.
TinyP2P, a (not particularly scalable) peer-to-peer file-sharing application in 15 lines of Python. Expected to be printed on T-shirts by cypherpunk dissident types when such programs become illegal, while the rest of the world shrugs, says "those geeks are weird" and gets back to their Trusted Computing pay-per-play Windows Media singles.
Macular degeneration is an incurable disorder of the eye, affecting mainly elderly people and causing partial blindness. The curious thing about it is that, in some cases, sufferers see vivid hallucinations. (via MindHacks)
When Don was visiting the graveyard where his wife is buried, he sat for a while on a bench. He suddenly saw one end of the church on the far side of the cemetery become illuminated. Then there appeared great crowds of figures of both sexes and in all manner of dresses moving in a stately way towards the church this time they were not advancing towards him. They entered the large area of illumination and vanished.
A further visual effect which Don considered to be rather spectacular was the disappearance of people in front of him, especially presenters on stage in lecture situations. First the persons head would vanish and then the torso, yet Don would be able to see the background behind where the now invisible figure was standing with perfect, uninterrupted clarity.
It is speculated that the hallucinations, which are known as Charles Bonnet Syndrome, are caused by the brain attempting to fill the gaps in its input, interpolating the noise coming from malfunctioning eyes with past experience. Which, of course, happens all the time, except in normal circumstances, the input is more or less trustworthy. It is also believed that many more people suffer from the condition than would admit to it, lest others consider them to be going insane.
If such a condition is possible, it raises the question of how much of our everyday experience do we really get from our senses, and how much do our brains infer. I've seen the claim that the human eye's output is far too poor to give the vivid images we perceive, and much of our perception is the result of post-processing in the brain. Could the bulk of our perceived reality be hallucination, which, in normal conditions, happens to work usefully?
I went along to Dorkbot tonight, which was fun.
It started off with Mike Harrison's demonstration of "The Dreaded Destruct-O-Tron"; basically, a box with a huge capacitor that can be connected to various things, including an induction coil, and, when discharged, does evil things to anything metallic in close proximity to it. Harrison demonstrated it crushing soft-drink cans, launching hard disk platters at 300MPH, and, to popular applause, destroying a few copies of the recent Band Aid single. He also had a DVD of footage taken with a high-speed camera (at thousands of frames per second) of what happens to the hapless objects in question.
The "Exploring the Libido with an Analogue Computer" segment was a bit of comedy, somewhere between Benny Hill and Look Around You, in which a balding scientist type used an electromechanical computing device (an arrangement of motors and gears from a 1960s-vintage flight simulator) as a model of his sex drive, and afterwards, proceeded to demonstrate a spark generator connected to a 1980s portable computer programmed to detect raspberry-like noises, as a uniquely British answer to high-tech Japanese toilets. And yes, it's every bit as puerile as it sounds.
Possibly the most interesting part of the evening was Aymeric Mansoux's demonstration of his experiments with Pd; he basically had videos of Pd patches which gathered data (such as traceroutes to hosts or web server loads) and converted them into pretty good Autechre-esque music, along with visuals which wouldn't look amiss on a Warp DVD. Amusingly enough, the traceroute to www.microsoft.com looked and sounded rather dark and ominous.
The "Dorkestra", which consisted of people making noises was a bit hit-and-miss, being much like the What Is Music? festival in Melbourne. One guy was doing "optical analogue synthesis" with cooling fans and LEDs, which sounds impressive, except that the only sounds he seemed to make sounded somewhere between air-raid sirens and circular saws. Had he been able to play a tune, I would have been impressed.
There was also a raffle with free entry, largely to get rid of two BBC Micros. I didn't win either of them; I'm undecided as to whether that's a good or bad thing.
2004/12/15
A 21-year-old Perth man is lucky to be alive after a home-made motorised beer bong, with a pump powered by an electric drill, blasted a shot of beer down his throat, rupturing his stomach and forcing beer into his abdomen. (via bOING bOING)
"No one else had any problems and I didn't think it would be any different to other things like funnels that people use," he said. "But I knew something wasn't right soon after I drank from it. I started spewing up red stuff and was in a lot of pain."
Surgeon David Cooke said the split in the wall of the man's stomach had pushed food and beer into his abdominal cavity, making him septic. His insides had to be "washed out" twice and he was put on heavy-duty antibiotics.
The shoegazer movement may have died out in the mid-1990s in most places, but in London, it's alive and well every month at Club AC30. Your Humble Narrator went along to this month's one.
Club AC30 is held at a pub named The Water Rats (presumably after the Australian police soap; I heard that the Poms love Australian TV, but didn't think they'd take it quite this far), not far from King's Cross, and features bands and a DJ.
First up was a Clairecords shoegazer outfit named Air Formation; they took to the stage and proceeded to make a wall of noise not unlike My Bloody Valentine or someone. The sound in the venue, or possibly the mixing, wasn't the best, though, so at times it was hard to tell whether, in fact, the keyboard (a Yamaha CS-1X) was plugged in. Anyway, they were quite good, though I'm not sure if I'll get their CD.
Next up was a Swedish band named Douglas Heart (not to be confused with Douglas Hart, formerly of the Jesus and Mary Chain). They were basically minor-key pop with some shoegazing elements; two guitarists, a bass player, a drummer, a Roland D-50 keyboard (wasn't that the one all the gothic-rock bands used in the 1980s or something?), and a female vocalist, who also played melodica and trumpet. Except that the microphones didn't seem to work very well, and half of the time the audience couldn't hear her. Anyway, they sounded a bit like the Cranes or the Sundays or someone; most of their set didn't grab me, but the last song (a stomping number with a great big fuzzy monster bass line) changed my mind.
The third act was Rachel Goswell, someone who gets invited to these things largely on the strength of what she was doing 10 years ago. Her act these days is basically acoustic-guitar folk, much of the sort you could find at any acoustic open-mike night in Fitzroy. For some of the songs of this gig, she had a band with guitar and bass, though her set still contained no shoegazing action whatsoever. She does, though, have a lovely voice. The audience hushed respectfully as she came on (shushing those still talking amongst them), applauded after each song, and called for an encore, which she obliged them with.
Between sets, Ulrich Schnauss DJed, playing a lot of ambient tracks, ranging from shoegazer to electronica; there were some really nice tracks in the mix he played.
2004/12/14
The British government is being asked to close down entire markets if anyone there is found selling copyright-violating DVDs. Looks like they'll have to rip up the Holloway Road footpaths then.
YMCK are a Japanese pop group who make all their music (other than the vocals, of course) with a Nintendo Famicom. And the MP3s they have online sound pretty good. Unfortunately, their label's web site doesn't have ordering information in English. (via bOING bOING)
2004/12/13
I just watched the season 3 finale of Spooks. Quite tense and topical, and once again showing that no character's too important to be killed off (literally, metaphorically, or by having their head deep-fried, as the case may be). It tied into the whole idea of the terrorist as auteur, though I won't say any more about it for the benefit of those not in the UK.
It wasn't a cliffhanger, though. I wonder if this means that there won't be another season.
Update: One of the BBC digital channels just aired a making-of documentary on season 3; for the most part, it was an excuse to recut highlights from the past season with Franz Ferdinand and the Scissor Sisters in the background, interspersed with interviews with cast members talking about how they see their characters and actual former MI5 agents (including David Shayler) talking about how inaccurate the depiction of their former occupations is. According to it, season 4 is being filmed now.
The New York Times Magazine has an alphabetical list of the key ideas of 2004. They make for interesting reading, with items like Genetic Family Values, Wal-Mart Sovereignty, Democratic Providentialism, The Acceptable Knock-off, Kill Midlevel Terrorists, Feral Cities and Psychopathic CEOs, and more. (via worldchanging)
Site of the day: miniorgan.com, an online museum of toy electronic musical instruments from the 1970s and 1980s, including Stylophones, toy organs from Yamaha, Realistic and Casio (and one "Cesio"), and oddities like the Mattel Bee Gees Rhythm Machine. Some of the devices are said to sound brilliant (the Mego Muson, after which the glitch label was undoubtedly named, is described as "kind of a Roland TB-303 but much cooler & cheaper"); alas, there aren't any sound samples provided. (via MusicThing)
2004/12/12
Controversy has erupted after a Christian school in North Carolina introduced into its classes a booklet defending slavery in the South. The booklet, titled Southern Slavery, As It Was, attempts to provide a Biblical justification for the institution of slavery, asserting that the Confederate South was the last true Christian civilisation, and claims that the life of slaves was one of plenty and simple pleasures, with nearly every slave enjoying a higher standard of living than the poor whites:
"Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, it was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence." (page 24)
"There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world." (page 24)
The school insists that the booklet merely provides a balanced view of the institution of slavery; critics argue that it goes beyond that, and provides a theological justification for the neo-Confederate movement. (via bOING bOING)
Under a new deal between Disney Corp. and China's Communist Youth League, millions of Chinese children will now be indoctrinated into the teachings of Mickey Mouse. Or, more precisely, will learn Disney stories instead of Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.
Excerpts from a recent spam:
From: "Protection against human viruses"
Subject: Antidote found in Crocodiles
We have an Alternative to DRUGS & ANTIBIOTICS. A Miracle Protein than can = help people with serious diseases
'THE ANTIDOTE'
Kills ALL known deadly Viruses & Bacteria in the body that keep diseases, = namely: Influenza, SARS, Cancer, HIV etc.
A disease must be made DORMANT to stop infection.
'The ANTIDOTE' is the answer.
WE ARE THE ONLY COMPANY IN THE WORLD WHO HAVE DEVELOPED AND ENHANCED THIS = PRODUCT FOR SALE.
Crocodiles, eh? I wonder whether the spam script has a list of several possible sources, and randomly chooses one for each copy. ("Antidote found in Anteaters"?)
The sad thing is, even if one person in a million is gullible (or merely desperate) enough to buy it, the spammers will have profited.
2004/12/11
This evening, Your Humble Narrator went to the first night of Mon Gala Papillons, a two-day indie-pop festival organised by Chickfactor, at a rather plush music hall in Shepherd's Bush named, appropriately enough, Bush Hall.
First up was Amy Linton, of Aislers Set fame; she strummed an electric guitar and played/sang a few songs, and was quite good. Seeing her brought back some memories; the last time I saw her play was in a backyard in Clifton Hill, when Stewart and Jen were honeymooning/holidaying/touring in Australia.
Next up were a female duo from New York named Mascott. Their set started with one of them (Margaret) on stage, playing violin, as the other played a grand piano (located in front of the stage) and sang. The first song was lovely; it reminded me a bit of another New York resident, Greta Gertler. Afterward, the pianist took the stage and picked up a guitar. Some of the other songs were quite nice, though I thought that the first one stood above them all.
Third on was a solo set from Stevie Jackson, of Belle & Sebastian. He went up on stage, smartly dressed in a suit and tie, and started off playing Ode To Joy on the harmonica, before launching into his own numbers. He didn't play any Belle & Sebastian songs that I recognised; mostly his own songs, and mostly ones about girls (because, as he explained, he likes girls). The songs included "Portland, Oregon", "Phone In My Head" (which was particularly nice), and "Lonely Pop Star", as well as a Belle & Sebastian-style rendition of Frosty the Snowman (which someone requested), and a song he said he learned from Alex Chilton toward the end.
Then on came electro-pop duo Pipas, a girl with shortish brown hair in a stripy top and a guy with a bowlie haircut and glasses in a chequered shirt. They had a PowerBook on stage, which they mostly used to play backing tracks (and a bit of keyboards), over which they played guitar and bass and sang, performing songs off their recent EP and past albums. They were a little shambolic, but generally pretty good.
Finally, the Television Personalities came on. I was expecting them to be like XTC or Wire or The Fall or someone, but they were more Mod-revivalist, right down to the bassist having a Royal Air Force roundel and Vespa logo on his bass.
(Apologies for the crappy photos; I left my PowerShot G2 at home, and had only my futurephone to take photos with. I really need to get a decent camera that fits comfortably in a pocket and gives me no excuse to not take it to gigs.)
2004/12/10
A computer in New Zealand exploded in flames whilst downloading music. Rumours of it having been a test of a new active copyright-enforcement technology have not been confirmed or denied.
2004/12/8
Mind Hacks, the new O'Reilly book of cool tricks and experiments in applied neurology, is out now; the O'Reilly page includes some sample chapters in PDF format. If that's not enough, there is a Mind Hacks blog, constantly publishing new material on similar topics.
Surprise of the day: Hollywood's adaptation of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials books will do away with the atheist subtext, making the evil Church into a secular authoritarian organisation of some sort instead.
Medical specialists from Britain, the US and France claim that Ukrainian opposition leader Viktor Yuschenko was poisoned in the run-up to the country's (now invalidated) presidential election. Who ordered the poisoning (believed to have been done with a rare poison) is unknown, though it could go all the way to Moscow (which stands to lose influence if the pro-Western Yuschenko comes to power).
This is very cool; detailed drawings of the skeletal systems of various cartoon characters, including Charlie Brown, Hello Kitty, various Warner Bros. and Hanna-Barbera characters and the Powerpuff Girls, done in 19th-century anatomy textbook fashion, showing the freakishly distorted physiognomies of the characters in question. These are currently being exhibited in an art gallery in Portland, Oregon. Anyway, judging by these drawings, without their cartoonish skin, a lot of these characters would fit in well in glass cases in some Victorian eccentric's wünderkammer. (via bOING bOING/Toby)
2004/12/7
The BBC speaks to some self-styled "goth" kids in Norfolk; complete with photos. (via caycos)
Josh, also known as Shadow Mercy, Jessica, who calls herself Misery Whispers and Anton who is known as Lord Mercy, are all Goths and 12-years-old.
I listen to Marilyn Manson, Slipknot, Green Day, Good Charlotte and other sorts of punk metal or gothic rock. I like to do magic spells and to look at runes books. ... My advice to people who want to become a Goth is don't be too cocky.
("Don't be too cocky"? What's the bloody point of it then?)
Meanwhile, the comments section at the bottom yields a bounteous harvest of pure comedy gold.
In parts of California, cities are reserving parking spaces for SUVs, and ticketing drivers of un-American small cars who attempt to use these spaces. Mind you, anybody who so obviously disdains large cars, that unifying sacrament of contemporary America, is probably a French sympathiser or something, and thus to be regarded with suspicion.
Jeremy Deller, one of the masterminds behind Acid Brass, has won the Turner Prize, with a video exploring Crawford, Texas and the Branch Davidian siege in nearby Waco. Deller is also known for staging a re-enactment of a battle of the 1984 miner's strike (using former miners to play riot police), placing ads containing Smiths lyrics in the Guardian's Valentines pages, installing a mirrorball in the "vilest alley in Liverpool", and various objects to commemorate ordinary lives and deaths; he is now planning a nationwide exhibition of spray-painted cars, gurning competitions, crop circles and other folk art.
Meanwhile, Momus weighs in, comparing Deller's socially-aware art with the terminally conservative and staid nature of rock, in particular, the rigidly formulaic variety that graces the pages of NME:
UK rock and pop awards in 2004 showed pop music, and specifically rock, to be in a terminally mannerist and museumlike place; dead, irrelevant, tongue-in-cheek, out of touch with contemporary events, as conservative and hung up on the past as opera or classical music at their most decadent, smug, pastichey and tribute-ridden. Awards like the Brits and the NME Carling this year went to sadly Spinal Tappish bands like The Darkness, The Libertines and Kings of Leon, whose moronic-ironic pomo neo-primal rockism seemed to narrow the world down to retro-reverence and in-joke tribute-nudges to rock's heyday, the 1970s (did I mention that satanist-turned-celebrity dad Ozzy Osbourne won the NME's 'Godlike genius award'?).
It seems that everything from cheese to pornography, from technology to obesity to all-terain vehicles, is "the new heroin" these days.
Ultra-groovy MP3 record label Comfort Stand, who brought us the Two Zombies Later lounge/exotica compilation and the Ghouls With Attitude vintage monster/spooky/horror-themed music compilation, are back with a new compilation, titled Wakka Chikka Wakka Chikka. Subtitled "Porn Music For The Masses Volume 1", it's inspired by porno soundtrack music, and features sleazy lounge grooves, wah-wah guitar, bootywhangular guitar/sax/Moog solos and the odd dose of sexed-up 90s dance music, industriogothic cyber-metal, alpine oom-pah-pah and obscene MacInTalk dialogue. (via bOING bOING)
2004/12/6
Lycos has scrapped a screensaver which launched denial-of-service attacks against spammers, after apparently rendering some spam-advertised sites unreachable. I'm in two minds about this: on one hand, as spammers have no respect for propriety, one could argue it's a case of live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword. On the other hand, vigilante action can turn into mob rule, with unpopularity standing in for guilt. What's to stop, for example, a right-wing warblog distributing a screensaver that does a DDOS on the Guardian Online, thousands of PCs in the Red States launching attacks on Planned Parenthood (in fact, I suspect the anti-abortion movement will adopt this tactic sooner or later, given that, to them, it's about saving lives), or radical-left groups using similar tactics to silence those they deem ideologically unsound? Indeed, if such tactics become mainstream, we could look forward to a future where people install cause-affiliated DDOS software on their computers as they once wore badges or ribbons, and debating one's opponents taking a back seat to the far less taxing and more fulfilling activity of shutting them down.
French-American relations have suffered another blow, thanks to Paris being inundated with tourists looking for scenes from the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown's repackaging of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail in thriller form. When told that the places depicted in the book don't hide the secrets of the Holy Grail and the Merovingian bloodline of Jesus, many tourists become abusive and accuse their guides of covering up the truth for the Catholic Church. Or just steal the signs pointing out that the Da Vinci Code is fiction.
In other news, the EFF is not actually an anarchist terrorist group. (No, that'd be the Cypherpunks mailing list.)
Nokia have made available VST plugins simulating their mobile phones; the Nokia Audio Suite contains a softsynth which can simulate a number of phone sound chips, and an effect which can simulate the tinny little piezo speakers of those phones. They're ostensibly for ringtone composers, but there's nothing stopping musicians from using them. Unless, of course, the musicians in question don't use Windows.
Cambridge geneticist Aubrey de Grey believes that, with modern medicine, people alive today may live to be 1,000; and the people include some who are currently in their 60s.
If it happens, because of the resources that masses of people not dying would consume, I imagine that life extension will end up being rationed; perhaps not by a totalitarian regulatory framework, but merely by being so prohibitively expensive to allow only the ultra-rich to afford it. Of course, there could be life-extension grants by governments or private foundations, allowing society's living treasures to remain living, though the politics involved in those could well result in venal, corrupt or superficially popular people winning life extension whilst politically unpopular visionaries are left to go the way of all flesh. Perhaps, ultimately, it will be automated into a reality-TV-style format, with audiences across the world getting to choose, through the internet and mobile phone voting, who gets to live forever.
2004/12/5
William Safire looks at current youth slang (via gths). Though I thought that "crunk" meant parent-scaringly extreme in an aggressively sexualised way, like one of the growing numbers of porn videos by rappers, rather than merely "crazy drunk". (And does anybody actually use "dropping the kids off at the pool"? It sounds about as contrived as "crimping off a length".)
The 10 Least Successful Holiday Specials Of All Time (via substitute):
Ayn Rand's A Selfish Christmas (1951)
In this hour-long radio drama, Santa struggles with the increasing demands of providing gifts for millions of spoiled, ungrateful brats across the world, until a single elf, in the engineering department of his workshop, convinces Santa to go on strike. The special ends with the entropic collapse of the civilization of takers and the spectacle of children trudging across the bitterly cold, dark tundra to offer Santa cash for his services, acknowledging at last that his genius makes the gifts -- and therefore Christmas -- possible.
A Canadian Christmas with David Cronenberg (1986)
Faced with Canadian content requirements but no new programming, the Canadian Broadcasting Company turned to Canadian director David Cronenberg, hot off his success with Scanners and The Fly, to fill the seasonal gap. In this 90-minute event, Santa (Michael Ironside) makes an emergency landing in the Northwest Territories, where he is exposed to a previously unknown virus after being attacked by a violent moose. The virus causes Santa to develop both a large, tooth-bearing orifice in his belly and a lustful hunger for human flesh, which he sates by graphically devouring Canadian celebrities Bryan Adams, Dan Ackroyd and Gordie Howe on national television. Music by Neil Young.
2004/12/4
The decline of the US dollar takes its first victim, as Apple make their US iMacs 110V-only, doing away with their world-ready multi-voltage power supplies, presumably to keep Europeans paying the higher European price. I wonder how they compare to Australian prices; after all, Australia's mains voltage is 240V, and the Australian cost of living (and average wage) is relatively low.
2004/12/3
In the background of a protest rally, Ukrainian pop music sounds a lot like Stock/Aitken/Waterman Hi-NRG from the 1980s.
2004/12/2
US Citizenship and Immigration Services has denied a Filipino man residency because his wife had had a sex change 24 years earlier, and thus was legally a man, making their marriage unlawful. The funny thing, though, is that the wife had been legally living as a woman in the United States for the past 24 years, and had been recognised as such on her US citizenship certificate.
Meanwhile, the CBS and NBC are refusing to air a church's television advertisement as it's "too controversial". The controversy has to do with the advertisement implying acceptance of gay and lesbian couples.
And in Alabama, a lawmaker has proposed a bill to ban novels with gay protagonists from public libraries, to protect children from the "homosexual agenda". The bill will also prohibit books which suggest that homosexuality, or any lifestyle prohibited by Alabama's sodomy laws, is natural.
Meanwhile, a recent report claims that abstinence-only sex-education programmes, as promoted by the Bush Whitehouse, are riddled with inaccuracies, including claims that touching a person's genitals can lead to pregnancy, AIDS can be transmitted in sweat or tears, half of gay male teenagers in the US are HIV-positive, condoms don't work, and a 43-day-old fetus is a "thinking person".
A modicum of common sense in Canberra; the ruling Tories have rejected a national internet porn filter, as demanded by Family First and Tasmanian religiot senator Brian Harradine, on the grounds that it would drive up costs without necessarily solving the problem. Let's hope they stick with this approach.
Curiously enough, Australia has a notionally more liberal internet regime than Britain; the UK has a national internet firewall, as do Singapore, China and Saudi Arabia, only it is currently only used against child pornography sites. What will happen the next time, say, a former MI6 agent publishes his memoirs abroad and the D-notices start flying, however, may be another matter.
2004/12/1
If you pass a computer shop and see a package of blank DVDs bearing the Commodore chicken-head logo, retro hipsters, think twice about buying them.
I recently bought a spindle of 10 Commodore DVD+Rs (for £6), only to find out that they don't work with my DVD burner (a Pioneer DVR-107D). Well, they half work; it can write them perfectly well, just that it can't read anything off them afterwards, and nor can my iBook. (Oddly enough, the Pioneer drive has no problems with other DVD+R media, including Verbatim.)
So now I have a spindle of 8 unused Commodore-brand DVD+Rs which are of no use whatsoever to me.
The U2 vs. Negativland iPod, a strictly unofficial extra-limited-edition black iPod, consisting of an U2 iPod preloaded with the Negativland back-catalogue and with a book on the consequences of the U2-vs.-Negativland sampling lawsuit, in a special commemorative box. Only one has been produced (by an artist in Brooklyn), and all proceeds from its eBay sale go to copyright reform group Downhill Battle. (via bOING bOING)
I just got around to watching Shaun of the Dead, the latest zombie flick to have come out of Britain in the last few years. It was entertaining enough, in a lighthearted way; a cross between a smugly feel-good britcom (it is, after all, from Working Title, who are responsible for most of the British films with mass appeal over the past decade or so) and an early Peter Jackson splatter film; blood, guts, middle-class relationship-issue angst and huge dollops quintessential Englishness. As one would expect from Working Title, it's a stylish package, with meticulous attention to detail (even the cheapness of the zombie effects was undoubtedly art-directed to the last detail, footnoted with references to John Romero and the like), and packed with elements to appeal to as many segments of the audience as possible. It's set in a reasonably leafy, suburban part of North London, considerably more middle-class and pleasant than the high-rises of 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle's edgier brit-zombie flick), and doubly more so than the Ken Loach-esque kitchen-sink grimness of Dead Creatures (the best of the recent wave of British zombie films, in my opinion), and also is a much lighter affair (don't expect meditations on the dark side of human nature or the plight of those who fall between the cracks; this is essentially a feelgood flick; having said that, the film's take on the lasting influences of the zombie phenomenon, with the undead being pressed into service-industry jobs and TV game shows, were amusing, and possibly worthy of expansion).
The cast featured some familiar faces to watchers of recent British TV comedy; one I noticed (from the credit) was Look Around You's Peter Serafinowicz as the barman; Black Books' Dylan Moran also made an entry as an irritatingly smug prig of a housemate.