Who am I to refuse the universe?

Rage, rage against the plying of the shite*

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:03:56 GMT

Enjoyably happy-angry things I've been reading, and failing to watch.

First, on RATM vs Cowell. K-Punk, my favourite over-the-top theoryhead londoner blogger, gives it the treatment you'd expect. But I prefer cannons_at_dawn, who has this to say:

I would love to see the seething boiling whirlpool of chips on the shoulder of the British public wash Rage Against the Machine to the top spot, there to earnestly quote Franz Fanon at their enemies until they give in, sobbing, and promise to buy Fair Trade
...
The collective impetus to make one’s voice heard in this particularly pointless arena is sadly unlikely to translate into participation in, say, next year’s general election. Or at least not unless some enterprising soul decides to exhume Screaming Lord Sutch.

What it will do, however, is demonstrate that there still exists a demographic which clings limpet-like to the hull of bloody-mindedness, prepared to momentarily stir themselves in the interests of nudging the seat of mainstream popularity with a heated toasting-fork

Earlier entries are also great fun. Including my new favourite description of the way the world ends: "a cardigan-wearing Geography teacher farting in a human face forever".

Meanwhile, the Independent has a surprisingly good article rant about Copenhagen, by Joss Garman. I'd not previously heard of Garman (he's young, and I've been abroad), but he seems to strike just the right balance of being furious without simply condeming mainstream politicians en masse.

And over in the day-job, we have another film out from VODO, free to download over bittorrent:

Boy meets girl -- on OkCupid. Boy introduces girl to (fictitious) social filesharing site, The Lionshare. Girl digs site, but doesn't dig boy. Boy mopes around the city, never thinking the Lionshare would be the thing that would lead her away from him.

The Lionshare is an important kind of film for all of us, because it's the kind of film 'anyone' could have made -- 'anyone', that is, who takes it seriously, writing dialogue (and in-jokes) prised straight from their own lives, the backdrop of their own homes for scenery, friends as actors and their own experiences as scenarios. These stories are ours, and this is the start of a new kind of cinema.

I confess I've not yet managed to watch it (still not in the right state of mind to settle down with a film :-)). On the whole, though, people seem to like it -- and not just because it's free. If you do watch it, I'd be interested to hear what you think about it.

*not my pun, but how could you not repeat that?

University protests

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 19:15:16 GMT

Student protests: have there been an unusual number of them going on this year? I've seen next to nothing about them in the media, although from word-of-mouth they seem pretty damn huge:
In France, strikes effectively shut down the entire university system from February to May. That's the longest student strike ever in France -- longer than '68, for instance.

And now, Austria and Germany are on the go. It started with with the occupation of the University of Vienna in late October. That sparked a large movement across Austria and Germany, which is claiming occupations of 80-odd univeristies. Today they've also been protesting at a meeting of state education ministers in Bonn -- apparently with some success.

Obviously there's always a low-level simmering of student protest, and it tends to be a dog-bites-man story that doesn't much inconvenience anybody. The protesters are also monumentally incompetent at simplifying their message (which, very roughly, is about education becoming more driven by exams and money, to the detriment of actually learning anything). And I'm not convinced by attempts (common around here) to connect it to the protests in Greece and Iran; those aren't really 'student' protests, no matter how prominent students are in them.

[this was going to be a post about going to the occupied Freie Universität yesterday, but I got sidetracked. Briefly, there was excellent music, and I got to re-meet my ex-housemate Lara -- who, apart from being generally fantastic, has drawn the most wonderful picture of me. I will post photos, just as soon as I find somebody to take them for me :)]

Talking to a Stranger

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:41:07 GMT

Has anybody heard of, or even seen, 'Talking to a stranger', a BBC drama from 1966? Somebody put several long clips up on youtube, and they're incredible. Seriously; watch them, then rewatch for all the nuances you missed first time round. I can't remember ever seeing a psychological drama half as good on television, or even on film or in the theatre.

It centres on 'Terri', played by Judi Dency with a rushing stream-of-consciousness performance that gives the complete tour of her mind within a few minutes. There's something of Sally Bowles in her (Dench performed in Cabaret a couple of years later). Both have the same vulnerable extraversion, fuelled by terror that everything will fall apart if they stop moving. For Terri that's intertwined with anger, despair, religion, paranoia and guilt. All this rushes out in perfectly-drawn conversations with her brother and flatmate. Terri selfishly oblivious to them, condescending of their quiet lives, almost unable to believe in them as real people -- but with envy constantly creeping in just below the surface.

Again, I can't quite believe how good it is. Watch it! And this is just from a few clips. I'd love to see the entire thing, but it only seems to be available as part of a massive, expensive box-set of the complete works of Judi Dench. Here is one review.

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 13:02:40 GMT

1) The Oubliette, a very impressive group of art-squatters. Currently occupying a building in Leicester Square, ffs. Previous squats: the former Mexican Embassy on Mayfair, and a language school on Oxford Street. And they're Doing Things™ in the buildings.

2) Crooked Timber searching in vain for political novels. Even CT's collective erudition doesn't turn up much, at least in the Anglophone world. This is odd; surely politics should be the perfect backdrop for fiction? Constant conflict of duty, ideology, loyalty, and self-interest. Articulate, self-aware characters continually mythologizing their own lives for public consumption. A prefab Greek chorus of pundits and journalists. Day-to-day politics may be dull, cynical and idea-free, but that doesn't stop it twisting people in fascinating ways. It's hard to believe that nobody is doing anything with all that material. So, what excellent political novels should I be reading?

EU puts bag over head

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:20:06 GMT

I'd like to imagine the whole implausible campaign for Blair as EU president as a carefully-generated storm, bouncing in Baroness Ashton as a consolation prize. But then I can't see anything about Ashton that would justify such Machiavellian shenanigans*. So perhaps she just happened to be hanging around in Brussels at the right time?

* As far as I can see, her only vague connection with foreign affairs before last year is a brief involvement with CND. I truly don't understand this habit of dumping politicians into policy areas they know nothing about.

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:56:54 GMT

David Howarth is standing down at the next election?!

He's one of the few really, really good MPs -- and he vanishes after a single term? *sob*

Mon, 12 Oct 2009 22:08:19 GMT

WTF:

Today's published Commons order papers contain a question to be answered by a minister later this week. The Guardian is prevented from identifying the MP who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found.
...
The only fact the Guardian can report is that the case involves the London solicitors Carter-Ruck, who specialise in suing the media for clients, who include individuals or global corporations.

Via Warren Ellis, disturbingly enough. This whole affair could have come straight out of Transmet.

Anybody know what's going on? All the speculation I've seen so far says it's about Trafigura. But how could it even work from a legal standpoint?

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 21:31:21 GMT

I appear to have no hair. This wasn't exactly the haircut I was looking for.

Oh well, I'll just have to find something else to hide behind.

ETA: Maybe I should try getting it dyed, if I could manage that in a way that would work on dark hair, and wouldn't eventually need to be grown out and cut. That, or a piercing somewhere.

Heading West

Sat, 11 Apr 2009 15:10:03 GMT

I've just noticed the main section headings at the top of the Guardian website:

    * UK
    * World
    * United States
    ...

yes, the US gets its own section rather than being crammed in with the rest of the 'world'. There's no separate top-level section for Europe.

I wonder if it's because they get a lot of USian readers online, or because nobody has yet managed to get the British interested in Europe.

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 09:47:00 GMT

"Only 53% of American adults believe capitalism is better than socialism."(source)

Also: "Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided"

Unrelatedly, Jenny Holzer is on twitter - perhaps the one celebrity who should be. [don't know who Jenny Holzer is? Read her inflammatory essays]. Now we just need to get Abdal-Hakim Murad on there too, and the thing starts to have a purpose.

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 18:15:09 GMT

I've spent Far Too Long (TM) following today's protests in Georgia. Don't laugh, it's a longstanding obsession, caused largely by the fact that Georgia is small enough that it is possible to follow most of the english-language news there, but with a tendency towards the utterly batshit insane which could make even a hardened diplomat giggle, Plus, it's somewhere I'd love to live, if I thought I had any chance of learning the language (I don't. It makes Hungarian look simple).

Anyway, this has helped me finally get a handle on Twitter (where I am perspectivelute. Blame Rudolf II). Once I started thinking of it as an inferior version of irc, it started to make sense. I still don't like it, but I can't really criticise twitter and still bemoan the lack of twitter irc channes, can I? If anybody knows a decent political IRC channel, let me know. Please. Or maybe I should create one...

For those of you not paying attention: in the past few days, Moldova has had massive protests. Some of the protesters (who are mostly young and pro-western, with all that implies) have been communicating via twitter. This is immensely exciting to a certain kind of pundit, who turned this into the main feature of the protests. The Georgian government noticed this, and very slickly started up their own twitter account yesterday. [The Georgian government are unbelievably slick when it comes to playing up to the Western media. I guess it's because they're all very young, and educated in the US. Still, compared to any other government on the planet, they're stunning]. A couple of Georgians and a slightly larger handful of interested outsiders pile on, and we more-or-less manage to pick over the news. i.e. exacly what would happen in irc, but with a hideous interface.

Anyway, upshot of the protests: ~50,000 people, no violence, no passers-by beaten before dying, no likelihood of the government toppling, come back tomorrow for the smaller, angrier version.

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 14:20:10 GMT

Travel now fixed: I'll be back in the UK again May 13-18. Other than sashagoblin's birthday on the Friday, my plans are pretty empty (Bifest is on the Saturday, which I am considering). As always, suggestions gratefully received.

I'll then be spending 2 days in Dublin, largely because the flights ended up cheaper that way.

In other news, it's perhaps a little unfair that the police are being called murderers for shoving Ian Tomlinson around just before he died - but in the context of police being apparently pretty rough with protesters, who can be surprised that somebody ends up seriously hurt.

Meanwhile there's a big protest in Moldova, which is some confusing overlay of youth/age, pro/anti-Romania, and internationalist/nationalist, plus poverty, anger at a fair(ish) election won by an obnoxious government, and a decent dollop of geopolitics. In Georgia, the opposition are about to try and bring down the government, with a decent chance of success. And in France, universities are two months into a strike (longest since '68), but nobody seems to have noticed. Interesting times.

LOL Georgians

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 20:24:25 GMT

Last year, your brother ran for president. He lost. Do you:
a) get over it
b) run for office yourself
c) Lock yourself in a cell, watched 24/7 by TV cameras. From here, host a daily talk show. Refuse to leave until the president steps down. [No, really]

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 16:20:05 GMT

This is pretty horrific. Not just judges taking bribes, but judges taking bribes from private prisons to give children jail sentences there. In other words, people were being locked up as a side-effect of a scheme for prisons to drum up more business:

Hillary Transue, 17, who appeared in Ciavarella's courtroom in 2007 and spent a month in a wilderness camp for building a MySpace page that lampooned her assistant principal, was elated that her record would be expunged.
....
Youths were routinely brought before Ciavarella without a lawyer, given hearings that lasted only a minute or two, and then sent to detention for offenses as minor as stealing change from cars and writing prank notes.

there's seditious libel, too

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 09:51:49 GMT

Apparently in addition to civil defamation laws (libel and slander), Britain has something called 'criminal defamation'. This is a Bad Thing:

Proof of truth is a full defence to a civil defamation claim. The reason for this is fairly obvious: one should not be able to protect a reputation one does not deserve. Absurdly, those charged with criminal defamation must not only prove the truth of their statements, but also that publication was for the public benefit.

The law isn't used much, and doesn't get much attention. But according to Richard Ingrams, himself once charged with criminal defamation, it is "quite frequently used to prosecute people who wrote defamatory letters to the police, though such cases seldom received any publicity."
Besides, rarely-used bad laws are in some respects worse than always-used bad laws, in that they give the authorities more powers to attack people they don't like.

Now Evan Harris, a Liberal Democrat MP, is trying to abolish the law, via an amendment to the Criminal Justice Bill which will be voted on on Monday. Given the minimal coverage (just Ingrams and a letter in The Times), and the fct that it's being pushed by a single backbencher, I wouldn't have held much hope for it getting anywhere. Except, Evan Harris was instrumental in getting rid of Blasphemous Libel last year.

Unfortunately, I can't think of much I can do to support Harris' amendment, given that the vote is on Monday and I live in the wrong country. Hence, writing about it here, in the vague hope that one of you will know more about me than the law (not a high bar), or have some idea what to do about it.

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 19:56:44 GMT

Here is a nice, if oddly-titled, list of likely consequences of the recession:

5: Glory days for evangelicals. Bad times are boon times for evangelical churches. Economist David Beckworth of Texas State University has crunched U.S. church attendance numbers and found that congregation growth at evangelical churches jumped 50 percent during each recession between 1968 and 2004.

[which I suppose means that the evangelical churches are always growing, recession or not :( Maybe if the atheists sang more...]

Also, the weather seems to be marking the alleged start of Spring tomorrow, by carefully looking warmer than it is. I keep on opening the window, regretting it, then doing the same two hours later. I'll never learn.

oh, and New Mexico has just abolished the death penalty:)

Lazyweb: printing

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 13:42:01 GMT

I don't own a printer, nor do I want to. On the rare occasions when I need something on paper, I pop into a net cafe, or cajole a friend into printing it for me. This gets a bit pricy/cheeky when it involves more than a few pages. Also, it takes far too much time and faff.

Somewhere, there must exist a company that will accept documents by email, print them, and post me the results. But I've not been able to find any. The print shops I can find are geared either towards making glossy full-colour brochures, or to printing lots of copies of the same document.

Does this kind of print-and-post service exist? Where?

Trivia

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 10:53:40 GMT

If we are wired to like salt, and salt gets added to most processed food to improve the taste - why does salt-water taste so unpleasant?

Or is it just sea-water that tastes foul? Would water with slightly less salt, or with less other gunk, taste nicer? Should I experiment?

Obsessions of the year

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 21:47:50 GMT

I'm not writing a summary of what I did this year - it'd be dismally short, if not just plain dismal. Instead, I want to record some of the little things I spent a couple of days getting excited over, but mostly didn't write much about here.

January: I honestly don't think anything excited me in January; as far as I can tell, I spent the entire month moping around feeling sorry for myself.
February: Crusties. Ginsberg. Jared Diamond. Penny Red
March: Art. China: Wang Hui and other writers, and hours spent reading Chinese websites with google translate and a character dictionary. Jorn Barger, uncomfortably.
April: Edith Sitwell. The soul of man under Socialism. An intense and inexplicable obsession with bananas in art.
May: Naomi Klein. Naomi Wolf. Virginia Woolf. Cosma Shalizi (well, I'm always obsessed by Cosma. But this month in particular).
June: Tax havens. Economic history. Art history.
July: Marionnettes. Neukölln. Erik Davis.
August: Manga. Work-spaces.
September: electronic music. Mental health. Grant Morrison (again; always)
October: Situationism. Chinese foreign policy. Berlin.
November: Couchsurfing
December: Cooking. German grammar. Who knows what else - there's almost a week left.

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 16:31:53 GMT

Next year's dubious employment scheme for backbackers: impersonating oil executives at Chinese trade fairs:

The 2008 China International Petroleum Equipment and Technology Exhibition concluded last Friday in the eastern city of Dongying. 3000 guests from over 40 countries attended and everything appeared to run smoothly. Yet the majority of the foreign delegates were hired just to make the event look "international".

[via Marginal Revolution]

Independent Minds

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:50:06 GMT

The Independent have moved their blogs to LJ today. Livejournal may be creaky, ancient, and possibly steam-powered, but compared to what the other UK newspapers are using it's space-age technology. It has threaded comments, for a start, which might give us a chance in hell of ignoring the inevitable flamewars.

Still, they managed to thoroughly botch the launch: bits not working, nothing to help their old readers adjust to LJ, and - most impressively - a near-total absence of new content today. It's hardly inspiring when only a couple of the journos can cough up a post for that first day - when, for once, somebody might be reading.

Presumably, it'll improve over time. Meanwhile, has anybody found anything genuinely interesting on the Independent blogs?

Postmetropolitan

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 10:41:48 GMT

Warren Ellis fans: what should I read by him? I loved Transmetropolitan, but I've been pretty disappointed by every other Ellis I've looked at. Freakangels seems to have nothing unexpected in it; Global Frequency was cardboard characters rushing through repeated "race against time, then a big gunfight" plots. Crooked Little Vein: I plannd to buy it, but standing in the bookshop, flicking through pages of wooden, cliched text, I abandoned the idea.

Has Ellis done anything as good as Transmetropolitan? Or, while I'm at it, are there other comics so blisteringly fantastic that I should dump Ellis and go read them instead?

Also, guys: witch-hunts are bad, mmkay?

spiritual thirst

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 14:37:23 GMT

Today I'm being unashamedly cheerful about Obama; fuck the begrudgers.

Not-quite-relatedly, palmer1984, < lj user="aldabra"> and others, have long been muttering about how nobody on the left has anything constructive to say about the economic crisis. I mostly agree - but perhaps the folks who've spent every mayday shouting about Precarity might have been barking up exactly the right tree, after all.

Meanwhile, I'm planning to spend the evening translating an article about things being untranslatable. With luck, the paradox will lead to a moment of zen enlightenment, rather than just hours of head-scratching and dictionary-flipping.

Words

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:04:48 GMT

Mini-announcement: I've started writing occasional bits about Berlin on this group blog. It's pretty dead over there, but I figured getting involved might be a way of goading myself into getting out more. Also, there's surprisingly little online in English about Berlin, despite ever-growing hordes of expats, so even shitty little semi-posts can pretend they're worthwhile.

Also, and unrelatedly, I'm increasingly impressed by these translations and reviews of the European press.

manga

Mon, 27 Oct 2008 16:32:37 GMT

I mentioned I was translating an article on manga; it's now online. Essentially it's an eminent French academic - and manga fanboy - explaining why manga is so popular in France

I'd be fascinated by what people make of it; not just emmav and the rest of the manga fans, but also the larger crowd who love Transmetropolitan &c. Because a good chunk of the argument is precisely what Warren Ellis, Grant Morrison, and Alan Moore have spent decades grumbling about, and fighting against: the fact that a lot of Western superhero comics are really, really bad - slow-paced, unimaginative, unable to imagine readers who aren't boys or nostalgic men. And I'm not convinced that's true any more: manga may be more inventive than mainstream comics, but is it really more inventive than all the fringe stuff that's popped up since the 80s?