Life of a Rat

Out of Light - cometh Darkness

2011-07-15T04:35:00.000-07:00

Out of Light – cometh Darkness

1. “These recordings may be seen as a notation of our deadminded society, but not as a reaction against it, we will all become ambient dead heads, if not...” (Archon Satani, In Shelter, liner note, 1994)

If not, then ellipsis. The conditional clause of fact, followed by an open-ended ellipsis, where not only the conjunction between a conditional present and an effected future (then...), but the whole of future time itself is omitted – is a good way to immerse oneself in a description towards a functional definition of a difficult form of a “popular” underground music (I write popular because it is, in critical terms, usually excluded from the domain of “high” culture, or “serious” music, being more aligned with other popular underground genres, eg, industrial, death metal), that would seem to defy the very notion of popularity a priori: I write of so-called ‘dark ambient’ music.

2. Your attention is drawn to a notation of the future as ellipsis, as a potent form of signifying a coming-into-being that is never-yet, and may well never be, as a danger:

The future can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with the constituted normality and only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity (Derrida, 1974: 3).

This ellipsis of the future, signifying danger (becoming, in Archon Satani’s space, dead headed), also dislodges the comfort of the present, and of presence; of the representing object, and its relation to the object represented, of the sign versus its referent. Hence the need for a notation, obtuse of signifying directives, not yet as a denotation and decoding, full of revealed meaning, of a certain type of society; but only of the function of recording qua art in reality, over and against symbolised reality, and even without any metaphysical reality. Archon Satani refuse permission for their recordings (not yet historicised as music, nor art) to be seen and hence, to be read as a reaction qua art against society: “we will all become ambient dead heads...”

3. In refusing music, and art, and reaction as historically revealed, politics are also seen to be refused. The future is one where the listener-subject will become as dead as the given inanimacy of the environment that surrounds her. Fundamentally psychoanalytic desires – those hinged upon death and sex may be in nuance in such a statement. In that case, this is not music with a message, a will to change the world, it is not resistance a la Theodor Adorno against regressive listening, it is not vibrant, it is not constructive, it is not essential, it’s not high art, it is not even supposed to be music yet, with all the ideological imports that the word ‘music’ carries, and may well never be. It is just a notation, a form of writing, transcription, a recording. But to that extent, it must be added that it appears as such already given within the universal ideological written document that is usually named as reality. These recordings are neither transparent signs – across the surfaces of which one may easily interpret the messages, nor opaque signs – seeking to problematise notions of reference, representationality, or even the position of the speaking subject. The recordings are just discrete bits submerged within the general recording called ‘the environment’. And it must be emphasised that their discretion is lent them mainly by the signs of commodification which surround them – here, the compact disc, the cover art, the credits, the track-titles, the band’s name, the price tag which informs me that I paid $26.95 for these recordings. All these commodifying instances lend these recordings a certain productive, cultural, musical value which directs the way in which they are listened to, which in fact makes them that much easier to accept as, at least, ‘recordings’ and not just background noise. The ellipsis, however, remains – an internal slippage and excess, a trace, within the notion of recording and its product itself - and hints that they are, after all, just noise, a part of environmental excess, and it is in this very manner that they manage to actually be a notation of a certain society, rather than simply a reaction against it. The future to be fashioned is never anything that is to be found, it just always might be, or it might not be, in death, and danger, and to hope for more is to succumb to a cynical nihilism of the present. In this sense the recordings offer a moment of affirmation...

4. Similarly, Time Machines (better known as Coil) on their self-titled disc from c. 1999 direct the listener to the idea that, “Artifacts generated by your listening environment are an intrinsic part of the experience”. Once again, what is affirmed is no longer all in the music, is no longer all generated by music, is not a simple or even more complex expression of the music’s ‘inner form’, but is the problematisation of the distinction between presence and future – so as to affirm a historical moment in preference to history as a ‘grand scheme’, a relation between music and the environment in which listening is done; so as to affirm the social – but which environment music traditionally has no relationship with, which it’s supposed to transcend. In such a direction, perhaps the existential as opposed to aesthetic authenticity, but also the reifying, and stultifying principles of repetitive listening, which tend, admittedly, to make much popular music into more or less relevant pieces of nostalgia, but nonetheless static and ossified in terms of the present moment, (ie formally complete) are violated. These principles must be aborted where the listening environment (never static, never repeatable) becomes an intrinsic part of the (musical) experience:

5. ...the emphasis on the artifactual element in art concerns less the fact that it is manufactured than its own inner constitution, regardless of how it came to be...[Artworks] speak by virtue of the communication of everything particular in them...it is precisely as artifacts, as products of social labour, that they also communicate with the empirical experience that they reject and from which they draw their Inhalt [content]...If art opposes the empirical through the element of form – and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation – the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content (Adorno, 1997: 5)

It is by this appeal to the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content, through a self-consciousness of the mediating process between form and content, that Time Machines pose a challenge to the idea that aesthetic value is ahistorical, already given, whether in the inner form, or upon the postmodern ‘surface’. Time Machines would return us to the value of a cultic symbolism.

6. Once again, in fact, the hyper-loaded term ‘music’ is avoided. It would seem that ‘dark ambient’ albums often avoid the simple term of music, in order to dislocate this very loading itself. Once one is sure that one is listening to music, much else flows automatically. The very term ‘music’ already classifies and categorises the experience in such a way that it becomes instantly ossified, assimilated into wider cultural experience in predictable ways that rob the experience of any potential which might invoke the metaphor ‘spiritual’. It is by disturbing the phenomenon of music, by radically unsettling it, by ‘deconstructing’ it if you like, that something, anything might occur. If we don’t all turn into ambient deadheads... who knows? The only other clue to the functionality of the listening experiences invoked by playing Time Machines’ CD is that these are “4 tones to facilitate travel through time”. With the challenge to aesthetic value as ahistorical comes also a challenge to conventional narrative practices, to the inevitable forward, ‘progressive’ flow we have constructed as being the force of history (into the future), which force itself is traditionally written as ahistorial, supposedly the highest aesthetic value. But if this is, in fact, not a given, then the concept Time Machines would also suggest that if time and history are produced (by a certain political machine), it must follow that they be ideological. In short, the truth is there is no simple historical ‘life force’ – progress is a sham, one should dream instead of time travel.

7. If resistant moments in pop music (such as ‘grunge’ or ‘punk’), so often read in a political context, always end up being sacrificed to hegemony, assimilated into the mainstream, it is because they always seem to be expected to change the world: “Music seeks to change life; life goes on; the music is left behind; that is what is left to talk about” (Marcus: 1989, 3). If it’s an affirmed and consistent life, life as self-fulfilling presence, as stable present, past and future which is being challenged, it’s by using an inadequate terminology which, while it may resist the structures in the dominant language, is nonetheless intrinsically dependent on that language without any consciousness of this dependence. In such instances music in the capacity of music is a functional tool, ready-made, the language of which is taken for granted – music itself may become distorted, but it is never yet ‘deconstructed’. It is always so associated with a Utopia, or more recently with anti-Utopia, so far lifted out of its environment, that its form tends to choke it. The question of the future, whether it might be in fact, nothing more than an abyss, is never really raised. Whilst resisting structures, resistant strains in popular music never seek to fundamentally question the actual structural foundations of the languages they speak, nor do they seek to radically historicise these structures. Too often ( and for example in grunge music), seriousness becomes parody. Irony becomes sarcasm, which becomes cynicism, which in turn melts into a hopeless despair (Kurt Cobain being the most obvious symbol of this).

8. But perhaps this is moving too closely to political speech. After all, ‘dark ambient’ recordings are not yet asking about direct political motivation or goals, they are asking questions about the generalised structures of utopia, about the fundamental definitions of music, about the meaning of the listening subject within an environment; in the above case, about the idea of travelling through time using tonal facilitation.

9. Perhaps this is a reason why ‘dark ambient’ works are often engrossed with abyssal, massive and fantastic spaces: such spaces are fundamentally indeterminate. The cover of the Time Machines CD returns us to art as cultic symbolism: it is simply a black ellipse with the words TIME MACHINES above it, against a grey background.

It recalls to me George Grosz’s comment on Dada: “Our symbol was nothingness, a vacuum, a void.” But this isn’t just about a nihilistic void, nor a naïve void that would pretend to triumph by standing on its own, resisting any point of meaning. Rather, this void tries mostly not to fall back into what Barthes called the trap of essentialism (in Mythologies) – unwittingly coming to represent what is being rejected, ie, the essence of things, by attempting to represent nothing. This void here, in any case, is placed below the words ‘Time Machines’, against a grey background signifying the highest state of entropy, of equilibrium. Here the void is firmly placed as a signifier within a system and structure – but one that presents itself as something to be played around with: on the inside cover the theme is repeated, now the background is black, the ellipse is white, suggesting an egg, maybe, and in its centre is a sign whose meaning is indeterminate, it could be an astrological symbol for one of the planets, but it isn’t. Nonetheless, the abyss is now given a momentary centre, perhaps from which to commence one’s time travels, but the centre’s meaning is unknown: its signified is as wide open as that of the result when artefacts generated by the listening environment do in fact become an intrinsic part of listening, whether they be as mundane as the sound of the vacuum cleaner next door, or as allegedly exotic as the sound of one’s heartbeat while under the influence of psilocybin.

10. Brian Lustmord is another charter of listening experiences, whose work is concerned with abysses, darkness, reverberation and space. With Lustmord, we move closer to the idea of a project within listening – of direct, discrete, even central affirmation. Not just concerned with notation itself, the album The Place Where the Black Stars Hang (1994) is concerned with “...a very real need to uncover the magical graphs and ciphers that unseal the cells of... eldritch dimensions”. Works prior to this (eg Heresy, Paradise Disowned) were concerned with what I would be best termed an aural ‘deconstruction’ of western judeo-christian principles. The mingling and mixing of vastly reverberating christian chants with pipes, machinery, gongs, a shawn, ‘noise generation’, ‘acoustic treatments’ and ‘digital loops’ on Paradise Disowned re-configured and undermined traditional notions of canonical music’s function as a mainly liturgical tool for godly worship and reaffirmation/reification of immutable dogma, while Heresy is a work so intense that it deserves an essay unto itself. The Place Where the Black Stars Hang poses a challenge to orthodox scientific methodology as the new dogma and religion of the (post)enlightenment era, and does so by referring to a certain cosmological space, “the space between space... and the infinite darkness thereof, where metaphysical transgressions prevail.” Also invoked is microcosmic space, “...where DNA is the ultimate parasite, and life itself is but a vibration”. This evocation of vast spaces, both cosmological and microcosmic, affirms absence rather than brute presence, vibration rather than expression. In form also, the western musical tradition of tightly structured time signatures, clearly defined harmonies and melodious pitch variations, so enamoured of musicologists of the Canon, is utterly denied. It seems that Lustmord is (by negation) most clearly articulating (western) music’s alignment and intimate relationship with ideological structures and practices. Rather than seeking to revolutionise these through force and violence (not that these do not have their own particular articulations within the ‘genre’, but that is another discussion...) he is seeking to create, by way of abyssal, cavernous aural environments, a re-opening of the question of truth, of the future, of the course of human evolution usually taken for granted. This is not yet saying there is or there is not truth, or a future, or evolution, but is asking after, even interrogating the very structures which make such saying possible. In making ‘music’ out of deep space or metastatic resonance, one is taken to a very different place than by either traditional western classical or popular music. With Lustmord, it may be appropriate to talk of a Kristevian signifiance. In affirming the abyss, emptiness rather than presence, vastness as opposed to centre, in affirming ‘metaphysical transgression’, Lustmord, like other ‘dark ambient’ composers may be said to be fundamentally unsettling the traditional syntax and order of western music, using a fundamentally radical way of creating ‘music’ – that actually goes beyond codal transgression into a deep rupturing of the code itself. The traditional elements of the score, the orchestra, the band, the song, have all been replaced – they have a completely different kind of presence. In place of ‘instruments’ we have thermal radiation, electron particle interaction, metastatic resonances – a new language, for not many listeners could assign these ‘instruments’ discrete semiotic meanings, let alone identify these sounds ‘naturally’ (How to recognise hearing an aural representation of electron particle interaction? What should it signify, like the cello signifies this sad emotion, or the harp that gentle one?) It is of note that one theme or device that is always employed in Lustmord’s works is elaborate, lengthy reverberation, often with times of twenty seconds or more. But of course it goes without saying that this is just one interpretation... A music that appeals to a vast abyss must to an extent, remain that; as well as an open wound in discourse...

11. Similarly, David Myers of Arcane Device is concerned with such re-conceptualisation of music, as can be heard on Envoi in Cumin (1993). Perhaps one of the most subtle works that may be classified ‘dark ambient’, the ellipsis here transforms itself into an infinitely polysemous loop, fascinatingly engaging itself with the idea, so current in contemporary theory, of the eternally sliding, slipping signifier. Here the loop is closed, like the linguistic system, the producing device sees its own output as its input, it feeds upon itself, figuring itself according to Myers, as a snake eating its own tail, where as a result, “...the snake’s body becomes not a single solid, but a vast interpenetrating web” (liner note). For 75 minutes a single loop lasting between seven and fifteen seconds is repeated, but the loop, continuously fed by itself, is never the same – a ‘music’ is produced, for the system which encloses it also guarantees that infinite difference, unending variation ensues. Perhaps this is the most ‘hopeful’ (in the traditional sense) and affirmative (in the deconstructive sense) of ‘dark ambient’ pieces I have come across. After 75 minutes the loop fades away, much like an ellipsis. But it could well have gone on for ever, never repeating itself, never finding a centre, neither bowing to utopia, nor to homogeneity, but “allowing electrons to create a self determined shape and dynamic, showing their place as an element of great nature”, which might be a good analogy with what many humans would like to make of their own lives.

BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

Adorno T.W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory (eds. G. Adorno and R. Tiedemann) (new trans. and ed. R. Hullot-Kentor) London: The Athlone Press.

Derrida J. (1976) Of Grammatology (trans. G. C. Spivak) Baltimore: John Hopkins UP.

Myers G. (1989) Lipstick Traces: a secret history of the twentieth century Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

PHONOGRAPHIC REFERENCES

Arcane Device (1994) Envoi in Cumin Compact Disk. Almada: Play Loud.

Archon Satani (1994) In Shelter Compact Disk Waldassen: Dark Vinyl.

Lustmord (1984) Paradise Disowned Compact Disk. Amsterdam: Soleilmoon.

________ (1990) Heresy Compact Disk. Amsterdam: Soleilmoon.

________ (1994) The Place Where the Black Stars Hang Compact Disk. Waldassen: Side Effects.

Time Machines (1999) Time Machines Compact Disk. London: World Serpent.

Inland Empire: A Brief Commentary

2011-04-10T15:38:00.000-07:00

In our incessant and never-ending drive to make sense of the human project of existence, what is more often than not lost it seems is an appreciation of the subtleness of ontology, the absolute weirdness and absurdity of Being which always lurks just below the every-day imagination. To me, a David Lynch film invites you to sit back, relax, suspend the constant narrative-making impulse that rules everyday life, tune out and just become totally absorbed in that which lies just below the surface of human existence – that weirdness, that sense of dread – the dread of the suspicion that that which we affirm as reality is in reality itself just so much story-telling, an illusion lurking at the edge of an infinite abyss of nothingness; that existentialist realm of “Not-Being” from which 100% of the human population has come and back to which 100% of that same will return.

Take the rabbit scenes in Inland Empire, where three characters dressed in rabbit costumes deliver dead-pan, serious but obtuse dialogue highlighted by canned laughter, after the fashion of your typical sit-com. Most reviews of Inland Empire cannot seem to make any sense of these scenes, why they are in the film, what the rabbits are doing and how they may or may not relate to the Polish characters in the upstairs room into whom they magically dissolve. But perhaps the rabbit scenes are best read as a mordant critique which is simultaneously humorous in an absurdist way for all its intensity; a critique of that narrative drive which turns the extraordinary and unexpected reality of everyday existence into a clichéd, banal and in a radical sense, mundane set of stories and lines whose structure, syntagm and conclusions, whose cardinal functions are already totally known and which seem to perpetuate themselves by a kind of fundamentalist evangelical auto-propagation; light entertainment that repeats incessantly and constantly on our TV screens informing us, by way of attempts at comedy, that reality constructed as a clean narrative with beginning, middle and end; introduction, body and conclusion is the safest and surest, though ultimately terribly dreary way to write human existence. As Shakespeare once noted “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.”

I recently watched Lost Highway again before sitting down to Inland Empire a third time. I remember how unsettlingly awesome and weird that film seemed at the time. I’d never encountered anything quite like it before, but looking at it now, after Inland Empire; it seems like a totally ordinary film in the sense that it pretty much makes sense. There’s nothing that weird about Lost Highway anymore, indeed it seems downright conventional after the total mind-fuck that is Inland Empire.

I won’t make an attempt at a synopsis, as that would be giving in to the temptation to make some kind of linear narrative sense of a film which, if it does nothing else, commands you with certain force: THOU SHALT NOT attempt to turn Inland Empire into any kind of linear narrative. I’m not sure if David Lynch has read Roland Barthes, but Barthes’ unique method of post-structuralist textual criticism seems to apply itself almost perfectly to this film. What we can analyse are themes, memes and rhemes – such as proposed in S/Z. Where lexias dominate and the ideal text is reversible and infinitely interpretable. If there is one consistent signpost as to the manner in which to derive the (non-)meaning of David Lynch films, it seems to be the perverse way Lynch uses what Barthes called catalytic functions in his discourse. Catalysts in a discourse do just that, they serve to speed up, summarize or anticipate events in the narrative. When we see a catalyst we semi-consciously mark it in the narrative as a driver in the narrative whose specific function, even if its meaning be delayed, will notwithstanding soon be made clear in order for us to neatly make sense of everything that we’ve seen, heard and read. Classic examples of these in Inland Empire are the symbol “Axxon N.” that we see painted on walls and the portent references to a certain time of day – after midnight.

We almost cannot help but read these as clues whose catalytic function in the narrative will become clear and provide us with the key to the code. Except they never do. There is no key in the end. What appear to be catalytic elements turn out to be perhaps cardinal functions in the discourse, or worse yet, perhaps just ornaments designed to lead us further down the rabbit hole. The point being, that the distinction is classically a binary one. We are so used to dividing up narratives into catalytic and cardinal functions that we are in danger of failing to see the film for what it is – a continuous series of catalytic functions: indices and pieces of information for which relate only negatively to, indicating an absence of, cardinal functions. In other words, there are no nuclei, there is no certain story to be found in Inland Empire. What we have instead is a continuous, uninterrupted 3 hour stream of discourse, whose purpose is simply to maintain phatic contact between the narrator (the film) and in this case viewer (the audience), and nothing more. In other words, whose purpose is manifestly just to keep you watching the film, and nothing else. No messages, no sermons, no truths: just aesthetic impulse. The purpose here is not to tell a story whose meaning and interpretation is finite and decidable by everyday conventions, but to narrate a set of indices and sets of information in order to create moods and feelings, emotional responses: those relating mainly to situations appearing ominous, portent, eerie, surreal, incomprehensible, supernatural and even horrific to some extent.

The whole cardinal/catalytic paradigm is here suspended, the syntagm is dissolved and we are invited in every sense into a dream world full of foreboding and menace, but at the same time, if you are willing to just let go for a few hours, mind-blowingly amazing. Freud hinted that the symbolism of dreams is reversed as it were. In dreams time becomes space and space becomes time, every object stands for another object but the ordinary waking code is suspended to be replaced by the secret code of the unconscious. That is why dreams confuse us so much. Inland Empire invites us to interpret, at endless length, and in doing so, perhaps come to some kind of clarity or realization of the nature of our own identities and how fragile they often can be. If nothing else, if you watch this film open to these contexts and these textual approaches, you will almost certainly be compelled to watch it a second, and a third, and a fourth time: the surest mark of a successful film. If however you are not open to these kinds of textual approaches and prefer a clearly coded, explicitly linear narrative (and not suggesting there’s anything wrong with that at all) then this film will almost certainly confound you and I would recommend rather renting a horror film like “They” or “Pitch Black”.

10 Reasons Why I Am Looking Forward To Turning 40 in 2012 [And You Should Too]

2010-12-11T20:47:00.000-08:00

1. If it were 100 years ago, we probably wouldn't be looking forward to celebrating turning 40 - we'd be already dead or getting ready to die: the average life expectancy back then was a little over 45.

2. Just when we thought we were totally over the hill, the 80s are cool again - but we know better, having grown up in them, that they weren't cool at all and get to secretly laugh at all the stupid dumb kids who think they were.

3. Somehow it's all okay, because, unlike at 30; no matter how hard you try to make it feel like it matters again, it just doesn't seem important anymore.

4. Our teenage idols [for me: The Cure, Madonna, Nick Cave, The Jesus & Mary Chain, Kate Bush, New Order &c.] will always be and look 10-15 years older than we will.

5. We have now not only total freedom but also the means and experience to do and think whatever we want and not give a shit. No one can tell us what to do. Instead we can look forward to telling others what to do. Remember how restrictive and totally controlled by others life seemed at 15?

6. We got to grow up in & live through what may well yet turn out to have been the most prosperous, peaceful, liberal and technologically advanced period in history. We never wanted or lacked for clothes, food, medicine or stuff; we got to see both the invention and benefit enormously from the dramatic evolution of the home PC and the internet as well as reap the benefits of the social changes of the 60s and 70s that have given us personal and material freedom and access to such a wealth of information at our fingertips that even our parents could but dream of.

7. We don't have to hang out with young people anymore.

8. We're old enough to appreciate vinyl and cassette as more than just a silly fetish or a "coolness" symbol, we can feel genuine nostalgia for them.

9. By the time global warming really kicks in and overpopulation, the end of the oil supply, plus the pressure on scarce resources leads to conflict and misery on a global scale affecting even the first world, we'll either be too old to give a damn or dead.

10. We're the epitome of Generation X. We'll always be cool because we never ever gave a flying fuck in the first place.

The Gay Marriage Debate & Love of Christians in Australia

2010-08-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

Apparently some 57% of Australians polled, supported the legalization of gay marriage in 2007. That number is probably higher in 2010.

So why is it that on this particular issue Australia is lagging so far behind the rest of the world? What does it say about Gen X Australia that our first female, atheist, de-facto partnered Prime Minister, Julia Gillard staunchly opposes gay marriage and that, worse yet, Australia's Minister for Climate Change, who is both an out lesbian and a member of the Labor Party is more interested in maintaining the status quo and going along with caucus than using her ministerial position to promote gay and lesbian rights and is actually also on the record as - would you believe it - opposing gay marriage: a position about which Senator Bob Brown, leader of the Australian Greens, and also an out gay man, rightly expressed his horror.

If you think about it, Bob Brown is right to be outraged. As we all should be. Every Aussie, gay or straight. How on earth can an openly lesbian Cabinet minister who also happens to be of Asian descent possibly oppose the legalisation of gay marriage?

It's as if we went back to the 1967 referendum which gave indigenous people the right to citizenship and we had an Aboriginal minister saying they opposed the recognition of Aborigines as people because supporting Labor Caucus was more important than fighting for human rights. Or if we went back to White Australia days and Ms. Wong supported excluding Asians from migration to this country because supporting Labor caucus was more important than justice and equality.

It's really that bad!

The implications from the ALP for gay people are profoundly disturbing and I can't believe Ms. Wong's cynical, thoughtless and heartless stance has not been pounced upon and made into much more of an issue in this very dour campaign by a media much, much more interested in that bitter old fart, Mark bloody Latham (*massive yawn*).

The Chaser Team lampooned Minister Wong well on their Yes We Canberra! show on Thursday:

So what's going on here really? Why, when well more than 50% of Australians actually support gay marriage do Left wing social "progressives" like Julia Gillard and Penny Wong, herself a lesbian for God's sake, feel the need to speak out against it?

I have a feeling that it shows how much traction the Christian vote has managed to gain, in the wake of a Gen X electorate which seemingly ostensibly has no obvious values or monumental ideologies left. The voice of the Christian Right is getting louder and louder in Australia. More importantly, this voice tends to emanate from blue-collar, outer suburban marginal electorates which political parties of both persuasions desperately need to win over in order to win elections.

In other words it doesn't matter what 80% of Australians think, because we all live in "safe seats" whose outcome is decided and whose opinions are therefore irrelevant to the outcome of the election. It's those 20% of Australians who live in marginal seats whose voices really count and MPs will do anything - even sell their soul to Satan, as Wong so obviously has - to gain the vote.

It has nothing to with principles, or values, or standing for anything any more because the Parties feel that this generation of voters don't have any of these - except for the Christians. And therefore it is safer to pander to those Christians and keep gay marriage illegal while removing all other forms of discrimination in order to keep everyone happy. Well, grumbling, grudgingly quiet anyway.

What's really so sad about this is that in many areas, Australia used to be a world leader. For example, it was one of the first countries to give women the right to vote. One of the first to grant workers a decent minimum wage. Australia used to be socially progressive. Of course it wasn't quite as progressive when it came to recognizing that Aborigines were Australian citizens - that took until 1967, when Australians at a national referendum overwhelmingly denounced their cowardly elected leaders and said what's what.

Maybe this is another issue that will in the end need to be decided by a referendum, where the Churches and the Australian Christian Lobby and countless petty minor interest groups can't sway political opinion. This is an issue where the Australian people should make up their own minds - surely we are mature enough to be trusted to make the right choice? Then, whatever the result, the government can simply say "the people have spoken." What stronger mandate could you ask for anyway?

But noooooooo....."leaders" like Gillard and Wong just do not have the guts. In this cynical 2010 election campaign it's the Cardinals, and the Evangelists, and the Bishops and the Marginal Seats which decide what's best for the rest of us.

Worst Names Ever!

2010-07-21T23:46:00.000-07:00

For Whom To Vote If You're On The Dole

2010-07-21T12:54:00.000-07:00

It's election time again, so as usual both Parties are throwing around money left, right and centre like clowns throwing candy at kids at a birthday party. What fun.

It's early days yet - the election having been called just last weekend, but already it looks like schoolkids and their parents will get a cash break, especially private school kids; this phenomenon otherwise being known as "middle class welfare", or welfare for people who tend to complain about how bad they have it because they took out a 700 thousand dollar mortgage on an expansive suburban house when they really shouldn't have and now demand society take care of their kids. Bludgers haha.

But what about those of us genuinely on the dole for whatever hard luck story we have to tell? What's in it for us? Well, neither party, in fact no party - not even the Greens - is saying anything about dole bludgers, so you have to look under the radar for the hints.

If you are on the dole you may have noticed some changes to the way you "report" (that means, hand in your fortnightly form) recently. The previous Coalition government brought in all kinds of "proactive" things such as making jobseekers fill in "dole diaries", increasing the amount of jobs searched for declared on the fortnightly form from two to four, meeting various kinds of "mutual obligation" requirements, such as working for the dole which somehow never seemed to be mutually re-obligated by being offered a job.

Under the Labor government however, things have, very quietly, got simpler. OK, so there's no big increase in payments, but it would take manna from heaven for that to ever happen in this country. Notwithstanding, the Labor government has quietly got rid of the dreaded and useless waste of paper that was the "dole diary", where you had to record 10 jobs a fortnight for up to 3 months only to have a petulant Centrelink officer glance at it and throw it in the waste bin (literally). Better yet, this Labor government has got rid of the arbitrary requirement to physically shuffle in to a dole office and hand in a form to some dour looking, condescending public service fat (actually, literally obese, in 80% of cases) cat once a fortnight in order to receive a payment.

You can as of now, do it all on-line, and just declare that you have been looking for work, instead of putting down the obligatory 4 jobs whose phone numbers you looked up in the Yellow Pages and which no one ever bothers to check anyway & which is just wasting everyone's time really. But mostly the jobseeker's time in that they always had to physically make time to come in to fill out the form and travel in to the office - time which could be better spent looking for work after all. Or watching the cricket on Channel 9, or drinking beer and writing poetry, or however it is you fill your bleak, empty days whilst on welfare.

Seriously though, I think this is a brave thing for Labor to do - considering that in our climate of virtually full employment, a lot of those on the dole right now are people who are genuinely sick and cannot get a disability support pension, because their condition has not "stabilized" (ie they are not at death's door, gasping their last breaths just quite yet), nor get sickness allowance since that no longer exists (thanks Howard) - or are newly arrived people, refugees likely, who are in a high state of stress coping with learning a new language, recovering from the trauma of war and maybe losing loved ones, and getting used to our cities and whose last need is, seriously, to learn how to fill out a dole form, unless it is a legislative requirement, which it thankfully is no more.

Watch Your Back! The Nanny State Is At It Yet Again.

2010-06-21T22:53:00.000-07:00

Far out. As if a mandatory internet filter weren't bad enough, now the government wants to block you from accessing the internet altogether if you don't have the right anti-virus software and firewall installed on your machine.

NO THANKS. I already have an excellent anti-virus program and an excellent firewall in place. It's called my brain. And the operating system it runs on is not Mac OS X Leopard or Windows 7. It's called COMMON SENSE. Something the people who wrote this, people of my own generation unfortunately, seem to have extremely little of.

I'm not shelling out $100 on stupid A-V and firewall software whose only function will be to slow my machine way down and chew up a whole lot of resources.

In fact, I can't believe the stupidity of the proposals that keep flying about in this country of late - mandatory internet filtering, banning skateboarding and roller-blading after dark (Qld.), banning energy drinks because they contain caffeine (NSW), getting parents and teachers to "spy" on what kids do on the net and what SMSes they send in order to "protect" them from paedophiles (NSW), and now this.

I'm sad that my generation of officials is so incredibly stupid to keep coming up with these outrageous proposals. Grow up folks, and use some of that common sense God's given you.

CATS & BIRDS

2010-06-17T19:09:00.000-07:00

My little tuxedo cat caught his first bird yesterday. I'm pretty sure it was a common myna although I know next to nothing about backyard birds so can't say for sure. Anyway, I was pretty surprised that he'd actually caught it. He's about 18 months old but up until now he's been absolutely bloody hopeless at catching anything, let alone a bird. He doesn't have the patience. Usually, as soon as he sees a bird or some birds he runs right at them, forgetting to stalk them and they have ample opportunity to fly away and laugh at him. Seriously. I hear them go "ha ha ha!" :)

Anyway up until now I've usually left the window open during the day so Maxie the cat can jump in and out. So that meant of course that he dragged the poor bird right into my bedroom. There were feathers all over the place and it was bleeding a little as well. So I put the cat outside and locked him out (poor thing, he was crying utter doom when he found himself locked out) and then something quite surreal happened. I thought it was going to be a nightmare catching the bird and either letting it go or calling the animal ambulance to take care of it, but I simply walked up to the frightened little thing, and he let me pick him, carry him out and it wasn't until I got right to the fence at the edge of our front yard that it flew away out of my hand. I'm so glad it was still okay to fly otherwise I don't know what I would have had to do. But it was quite amazing - like this little wild bird somehow knew I was rescuing him from the cat and going to release him. What do you think? Can wild animals sense these things?

The Trains, The Bloody Trains...

2010-06-07T03:27:00.000-07:00

As a frequent user and advocate of public transport (I don't own a car) in Melbourne, I have to laugh at the state of the Met system here. Melburnians do nothing but grumble and gripe at their trains, trams and buses. And it's understandable. The system is a shambles. The signalling system is old and out of date, timetables make no sense but have to be followed because services are too infrequent and overcrowding, by Australian standards anyway is often an issue at peak hours. Is there any merit to the system? One good thing about it is that it's pretty cheap to travel and because the system is generally such a shambles it's really friggin' easy to ride for free. Often whether you pay or not is totally your choice. For example I travelled to Southern Cross Station the other day (one of the two big central stations) and the far-left barricade had been casually left open and unstaffed. What's the point then of going through a barricade with a ticket? This is the norm at suburban stations and pretty common even at Flinders Street Station, Melbourne's "Grand Central Station". The only risk is getting caught by one of Melbourne's Met Gestapo (Ticket Inspectors) with an invalid ticket during your trip, but now that Myki has been introduced you can get around them really easily again as they haven't got any equipment with which to check whether you've validated these smart-cards or not. It's just like the good old days of the Met scratch tickets (see right).

With these tickets which were still around in the late 1990s, you would scratch off the appropriate month, day and time (if applicable) when you boarded the train, tram or bus. Of course, especially on trains, and then on trams when the conductors were got rid of in 1994 you would just keep your ticket "virgin", and then hastily scratch the appropriate squares if you happened to see an inspector coming your way. After some "experimentation", I figured the best thing to do was to buy a daily ticket and scratch off the appropriate month but leave the date unscratched. Bus drivers only ever glanced at your ticket and waved you through (I have never in 16.5 years seen an inspectors board a Melbourne bus, although there are myths & legends, circulated by The Met probably, about them boarding buses), and if inspectors boarded a train or tram you could quickly scratch off the date before they got to you.

Of course you had to be a bit wary and on guard for this to work right. I remember one time I hadn't seen any "Met Gestapo" folk for literally months and had pretty much forgotten all about my scratch ticket, was sitting at the front of the carriage daydreaming and some inspectors walked through the door coming right for me, and in my panic I scratched the wrong date. With a very red face I said I'd mixed up my days. Of course both me and the inspector knew exactly what I was up to, but, perhaps because it was 9.30PM on a Sunday night, she just said "Make sure it doesn't happen again", and let me off.

In any case, back to 2010. Melbourne is the only city I know of where to get from one side to the other side (say, East to West) of the city you often have to go around something called the City Loop. The loop is a collection of five CBD stations [Flinders Street, Parliament, Melbourne Central (which despite its name is not really "Central Station" which is Flinders Street - it's just named so after the shopping complex it sits under), Flagstaff and Southern Cross] and trains usually run around the loop, either when they depart Flinders Street or before they get to Flinders Street. I hate the City Loop. It's confusing and a waste of time. Often you have to plan beforehand which Loop station to get off to switch lines because otherwise you will end up going around the Loop twice, or thrice if you're a tourist, before you actually get out of the city again. And sometimes you just have to anyway. Like yesterday, I caught a train from Balaclava (East) to Sunshine (West). The Sandringham (Balaclava) train was a Loop train which went from Richmond via Parliament, Central and Sth Cross before terminating at Flinders St. Then I realized I had to get on a Watergardens train to get to Sunshine. Suddenly I realized if the Sandringham train was a loop train then the Watergardens train would be as well, but the other way. So, at which station should I alight? I was still trying to decide at Central but by then it was too late so I just got off at Sth Cross. The Watergardens train came 5 minutes later but going the other way around the Loop, so in the end it wouldn't have mattered which station I got off at. Because I had to go all the way around the Loop again to get out of the CBD.

Today was the first day of a new timetable implemented by Metro and the reason I'm writing this is because of a critical article in The Age dissing the new timetable. I found the article quite funny, because I think they somewhat jumped the gun - I mean it's a bit unfair to poor old Metro to be trashing the new timetable after just one day. Especially when some delays were caused by a passenger falling ill at South Yarra station (see left). It reminded me of the Metro service in Shanghai. Now I'm not going to praise the subway system there although many people do. That's because I lived in the outer suburb of Chuansha for a while, something not many foreigners do, so most of them don't know what they're on about when they gush about Shanghai's brilliant train service. Try living out in the real 'burbs (I don't mean Pudong) and then see what you think. I still find it astounding that the government there chose to spend one billion US dollars on a stupid maglev train from the airport to the nearest subway station rather than expanding existing lines to suburbs which desperately, and I mean desperately needed them. You should have seen some of the buses I caught from Zhang Jiang (end of Line 2) out to Chuan Sha. Man, these crappy, old buses with zero air-conditioning were always packed to utter capacity. It was just bloody ridiculous, especially in summer. I tried a couple of times and then just did the rich, arrogant foreigner thing and reverted to taxis.

Anyway, The Age seems to blame poor old Metro for delays caused by passengers falling ill. It just reminded me of an incident in Shanghai where some random guy jumped in front of a train and died. They had the scene cleared in 15 minutes and services restored. In Melbourne it would have taken 15 hours. But of course Shanghai is a city where public transport is not an environmentally friendly, politically correct option, that you only use when you're in a particularly conscientious mood. It's the fastest and most efficient way that 16 or more million people have of getting around. In the iiner city at peak hour - forget about a taxi if you're going 4 or 5 km - it'll take you an hour and a half to get through the traffic, never mind that taxis are cheap in China. The same distance by subway will take 5 minutes (and it will only cost you 40 cents instead of $15). In other words, the Shanghai subway is vital. That's why trains run every 2 minutes all day long and even then they are still totally packed at almost every station. But not so here. As long as the car is the government's preferred mode of transport and Vic Roads is ultimately in charge of public transport funding, the system here will remain the second, third-rate shambles as it is now. You got to realize, the public officials in charge just don't care about all the grumbling and complaining. They don't want more people getting on trains and ditching their cars because ultimately that will mean less money for roads. And that's the very last thing they want.

However...that being said I also think it has something to do with the culture generally here. The Chinese, you know, are, like super-hero efficient. When they want something done, they get it done. I think that's why they're so uninterested in convoluted European ideas such as representative democracy. I mean, Jesus, how can you get anything done that way? Seriously. (And you got got to feel totally sorry for the people running Metro Trains, who are in fact Chinese, trying to deal with the bureaucratic monster that is the Department of Transport - they must have long torn their hair out already haha.) Apart from the fact that there's a massive conflict of interest as regards public transport (VicRoads funding it for example), the reason everything's such a shambolic mess is because we're just too laid back and lazy to do anything much about it. We have too much of a "near enough is certainly good enough" attitude here. Some really effective and efficient solutions have been proposed, such as scrapping the City Loop for example and having all trains running direct, which would unclog the whole system and allow for many additional services as well, but imagine the unholy democratic furore that would follow. Literally everyone and his dog would be grumbling and whining about having to follow a new timetable; the media would have a total field day and it would probably take a decade to get the legislation passed through our democratic parliament and processed by the bureaucrats who, in any case, would no doubt do everything in their power to block it as it would in fact mean a fast, reliable, train service which, remembering that they're VicRoads folk, is the last thing they want to see.

Ah well, that's life in Aussieland. As long as there's iron ore in the ground and the Chinese are buying it, she'll be right mate...

Should The Government Filter The Net?

2010-06-02T12:08:00.000-07:00

The latest Fairfax (SMH, The Age) online poll asking whether the government ought to filter the internet has so far had an incredible 88,118 responses, of which 99% responded: "N-O".

But does the Minister In Charge Of Turning Australia Into A Communist Dictatorship give a rat's arse?

Course not. He's still as determined as ever that Australia will have a mandatory internet filter, no matter what the public thinks of it.

Vox populi? What's that?? Here's proof that representative democracy is a total sham when you have arrogant Ministers pursuing their own agenda with scant regard for what the voters actually think or want.

HAPPY 30TH BIRTHDAY PACMAN!

2010-05-24T23:35:00.000-07:00

When I turned 30 I was very moody and gloomy about it all. Being an ex-Goth and all meant that I went through all the major life crises earlier, more often and more intensely than everyone else which meant I was going through another major mid-life crisis (my 3rd, or maybe 4th even) around the time I was turning 30. Thankfully I have grown out of all that and couldn't give a flying f**k about getting older any more. That's mainly because I have way more money and a much better sex life than I ever had in my 20s hahaha. The follies of youth.

Anyway lil ol' Pacman also hit the big 3-0 the other day and I wanted to wish him a Very Happy Birthday as Pacman was one of those big life-defining and life-changing moments back in the 80s, a decade which more and more seems like ancient history.

Pacman also holds the distinction of being the only video game I have ever completed. Usually I can't stand video games. I don't have the patience to learn the skills to play a particular one. Most of them seem like a totally convoluted waste of time to me, either that or a pointless bloodbath of shooting non-existent imaginary monsters for no particularly good reason. I can't stand looking for secret clues and finding hidden objects to complete levels in which I'm usually totally lost after 30 seconds. But for some reason Pacman totally hooked me. I kept munching those Power Pills and chasing those ghosts and got totally lost in the mazes until suddenly - game over: I had completed every single level. I couldn't believe that I'd actually done it: had actually completed a whole computer game, every single bit of it.

Google celebrated also by creating a totally interactive and playable Pacman Google Doodle, which they have thankfully archived at a special web page for the pemanent enjoyment of Pacman players.

MY TAKE ON LOST'S SIDEWAYS TIMELINE [SEASON 6]

2010-05-24T09:10:00.000-07:00

Everyone's talking about what exactly the alternate reality also known as the flash-sideways timeline in Season 6 of Lost actually constitutes. What is this reality, where apparently as a result of the H-bomb being exploded by Juliet back in 1977, Flight 815 never crashed at all, there were never any Losties, nor Others nor is there even any island left for them to crash on and have all those adventures even if F815 still happened to fail? What is this timeline where everyone's lives turned out totally ordinarily and totally differently? Is it all just dream? Is it purgatory? This is my take on it.

First of all, they are not flashes-sideways at all. Both what happens on the island in 2007 and also what happens in LA in 2004 are actually journeys into two parallel universes created when Juliet exploded the H-Bomb in 1977, at which point the universe split into two separate and thence totally unconnected realities. Just like in real life, we, the viewers are the observant gods bringing a quantum wave function into existence, but here we bring them into two separate existences: one set in LA in 2004 where there is no island, no Jacob and nothing else and where F815 never crashed and the other (what most people consider the main one) set in 2007, where there is still an island, and so still a Jacob and all the rest. When Juliet detonated the H-Bomb, an infinite number of probable outcomes could have resulted. In the real world, I mean the really real one in which we live only one of those infinitely probable outcomes can become reality - the one in which we live, but on a TV show like Lost, we get to follow two realities at once. Cool huh?

The first alternate timeline flashback we see is where Flight 815 hits turbulence but then lands safely at LAX. This ALT event is actually, as far as dates/times are concerned simultaneous with the time of Season 1, Episode 1 where Flight 815 also hits turbulence and crashes on the island in the original timeline. Except they now happen in two different universes or realities.

Juliet detonating the H-Bomb and the island getting blown up is actually not even the first parallel universe to have been created in Lost.

The original split was created long before that, when Ben moved the island and the remaining Losties started travelling randomly through time {actually no, it was even before that, when that fatal button was not pushed, the hatch imploded, and Desmond started travelling through time - remember we were warned the world would end if it didn't? Seems like most of us forgot though] and in fact a number of parallel universes would have been created, at least one for every instance during which they shifted through time - but the bomb exploding was the pivotal moment as far as the narrative goes and it has led to two separate outcomes which are both followed in Season 6.

There are not two timelines in Season 6 though. There is just one. The alternative timeline created when the Losties got stranded with the Dharma collective in 1974. The original pre-season 6 timeline is now totally gone. It does appear though that there have been two outcomes in two separate realities created by Juliet detonating the bomb. In one, set in 2004 the island has sunk, Flight 815 hits some turbulence and safely lands at LAX. In the second it is 2007 and the remaining Losties have been thrown forward from 1977 back onto the island in the present which has not sunk even though the bomb has exploded. Both exist side by by side if you like, without any connection to each other, a condition peculiarly permitted by Quantum physics (the more prosaic versions of it anyway).

The thing is, these two divergences couldn't last. Eventually the universe had to re-stabilize itself and the alternate one had to go. This theme is supported by Eloise Hawking telling Desmond, way back in S3/E8, that the universe always has a way of "course-correcting", a theme which is expanded on when Desmond unsuccessfully tries to save Charlie from death by variously altering future outcomes.

As for the outcome set in 2004 in LA, once all the Losties have been re-united in the church in the finale episode, the timeline where Flight 815 never crashed was completed and therefore collapsed back into the quantum aether from where it came so to speak. This is just totally my idea though really. The only solid proof we have for that is a bright white light enveloping the re-united Losties before they fade out. It could be that a big truck just drove by at that moment and shone its headlights through the windows and after they all hugged and cried and kissed they went home and lived happily ever after. We may never know.

In any case, as Christian Shephard explains to Jack , they were "moving on". In fact the whole purpose of the 2004 flashbacks in Season 6 was to have the universe successfully complete the necessary process of "course-correction" after Jack and Juliet created the major disruption of blowing up the island meaning in the alternative reality which that event created, Flight 815 never crashed and so on and forth.

So why am I hooked on this quantum physics parallel universes theory? Because it would seem to make the most sense within the overall context of Lost. To support the instances of time-travel in the narrative the show invokes exotic electro-magnetic radiation and ideas borrowed from Einstein's Theory Of Relativity to make the idea of time-travel plausible. In other words, it's certainly not magic or anything essentially spiritual.

For example, one of the props used in relation to the physicist Daniel Faraday who knows most about how the time-travelling is occuring is the Minkowski Diagram which describes the properties of space-time in Special Relativity and also plots objects which can travel backwards in time.

It also is the most plausible theory scientifically. If you did travel back in time and changed the past then two parallel but both equally real universes would evolve as described by quantum theory and the infamous Schroedinger's Cat thought experiment which shows that all possible realities exist simultaneously as more or less probable at all times, but only collapse into visceral, ontological reality if someone observes and measures them - an act of interaction. Us interacting with the cosmos is actually what keeps it real. The "many worlds" interpretation is still the most compelling way out of this obvious paradox and applies excellently to Lost as well, even though there are no direct references to quantum theory.

(Schroedinger's poor Cat is both dead and alive at the same time; two outcomes, two universes existing side by side, both as real and valid as each other in a state of superposition.)

In the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, when we sample a particular instance, that instance becomes the real thing to us, the observer but the wave function describing all the other possible outcomes does not collapse. They are just no longer available to us. In Lost however, we get to see three different samples or outcomes which have been caused by the time-travel antics of the Losties.

Of course in the second post-1977 outcome the island is still there and it's 2007 presumably and there also are Jacob and the Black Smoke and the rest of them and the Others led by Dogen and the drama leads to its final conclusions.

The different timelines that we follow in Lost are actually the single universe in a state of superposition caused by the backward time-travel events in the series.

The only thing not at all very scientific is the idea of the Losties in ALT gradually "remembering' the original reality where they all crashed and lived on the island. (Which hadn't even properly happened yet in the simultaneity of the original timeline - just before the very last scenes of Lost, Claire again gives birth to Aaron, which means the very last moments of Lost in the post-bomb timeline correspond with the time of Season 1 Episode 20 when she originally gave birth to him.)

In any case, even so, the three parallel universes "original timeline" and "alternative timeline 2004" and "alternative timeline 2007", could have absolutely no connection or communication with each other. No matter and no information whatsoever, including memories and intuitions could pass between one and the other. Not even ghosts or spirits, if they existed could pass between parallel universes. The First Law of Thermodynamics absolutely demands this conservation, and even ghosts, apparitions, smoke monsters and memories are subject to it.

Actually, there is also no need for course-correction of the Universe and no actual possibilty of a parallel universe disappearing into white light. If a parallel universe did exist because of an instance of retarded interaction (ie a backwards time-travel event), then it would exist just as much as ours does for the rest of its history. We'd just never have any awareness at all of its existence and no way of discovering it. However, Einstein's stern dictum about nothing travelling faster than the speed of light pretty much means we can be sure there's no parallel universes floating about in cosmic closets. Although there is the problem in quantum physics of so-called "spooky action at a distance" of course, but I digress...

However, Lost is of course full of stuff like Destiny and Fate and deja vu and uncanny coincidences, so we'll give them poetic license there; but, as far as all the purgatory theories go: I doubt the writers would appeal to anything as concretely religious and unscientific as purgatory or as cliched as dreams for that matter.

So as for the ending, all the timelines are real after all; except for the post-bomb 2004 timeline (if you follow my theory) which was only real for a while, until the self-correction was resolved and the 2004 post-bomb timeline collapsed back into the quantum foam, and in reality there were now only three original survivors who definitely, finally, made it off the island: Kate, Sawyer and Claire in addition to Miles, Richard and Frank whom we also see flying away. Whether they made it back to safe land we'll never know. Whether Desmond ever got off the island we'll never know either.

Ultimately, what I find very ironic is how willingly and happily everyone latched on to the "religious" explanation of a spiritual limbo or purgatory to explain the sideways timeline story of Lost rather than consulting science, which can explain it just as well and much better in fact, which explanation, if Lost's writers ever choose to break their radio silence I believe they will confirm. It reflects kind of sadly on our consumerist, logo driven world when all you have to do is throw in a church and some religious symbols and everyone suddenly thinks they are looking at the "after-life".

At least there's sequel material there: The six folk who left can crash on another mysterious island with strange electro-magnetic space-time warping powers and then maybe they can all hook up somehow with Hugo, Ben, Rose and Bernard and anyone else who was left if there was, maybe by teleportation; and so the fun can start all over again, ha ha.

Cigarette Excise Up By 25%

2010-04-29T13:08:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon the federal government announced without warning that effective as of midnight, April 30th, the excise on tobacco would increase by some 25%. This means that you will now pay $6.55 in tobacco excise on a packet of B&H 20s like in the photo. (Then you have to pay GST as well). The tobacco excise is now 32.775 cents per cigarette, or $409.71 per kilo of tobacco if you prefer rollies.

Although I feel sorry for the small proprietors who got all of 8 hours notice and hence probably spent most of the night calculating the new prices and re-labelling their shelves, personally it doesn't worry me that much any more as I no longer smoke. but it does worry me for another reason - these constant excise hikes and advertising/packaging restrictions forced upon us by a well-meaning but busybody health lobby without any requirement of scientific proof that said restrictions and taxes will have the desired effect.

Head of the government's Preventative Health Taskforce, Rob Moodie, suggests there will be one million less smokers by 2020 as a result. But gives no evidence for such a dramatic figure (it's estimated there are currently around 3 million smokers).

Worse yet, what if there are more smokers instead? It was also reported in the papers yesterday, rather embarrassingly for the likes of Moodie, that since 2004 tobacco sales have actually gone up. That's new graphic warnings, 6 monthly automatic price hikes and shock-tactic television campaigns notwithstanding!

[The image to your left is a mock-up of the proposed plain packaging of cigarettes set to take effect in 2012. This is what a packet of Winnie Blues - the quintessential Aussie smoke - will look like after that.]
So, if the uptake of smoking does actually increase will that result in a reversal of the excises and restrictions and a serious review of PHT public policy? Of course not. This policy of tax hikes on tobacco and ever greater restrictions on tobacco advertising has been in place since the late 1980s and it has never been reviewed at all, nor has anyone seriously asked whether it's had a whole lot of success in cutting down smoking or not. After all, if it looks like a tax grab and sounds like one... The government has come clean that it needs an extra $5 billion dollars to fund its Healthcare Reform Package and smokers will be the ones paying for it with this tax hike. But it could backfire. Because what if, this time around, the tax hike actually has the effect it's ostensibly meant to have and causes smokers to quit in droves? Where will the money come from then?

Which brings me to the next point: what really worries me is that we can be pretty certain that it won't stop there. There's not much more the government can do about tobacco short of outlawing it, so watch the PHT put its interfering paws on alcohol next, and then junk food. Actually, the calls for a Volumetric Alcohol Tax along with health warning to be placed on alcohol have been growing increasingly steady over the last 12 months. That's going to be much less popular and much harder to get through, as wine and beer do not nearly have the same stigma attached to them as tobacco does. The opposite in fact, wine and beer are essential components of most social occasions, from romantic dinners in expensive restaurants, to an after work drink at the pub with the mates, to backyard BBQs on the weekends, to a quiet evening in front of the telly. If the PHT gets its way and the volumetric tax is put in place, it will see a 4 litre cask of wine increase from about $15.00 to a whopping $35.00. Beer will also increase in price, though not quite as dramatically - a slab costing $45.00 now might cost $55.00. I doubt the electorate will forgive any government which dare do that.

One argument for the volumetric tax is that the way alcohol is currently taxed in Australia is irrational and convoluted, and such a tax would simplify this system, providing a level playing field. This argument is actually quite sound, except for the fact that if a volumetric tax were introduced the Health Taskforce would make sure the alcohol tax regime remained just as convoluted as ever. That's because under a real volumetric tax system, spirits and premixed drinks would actually substantially come down in price. But of course the PHT has already stated it will oppose any fall in the price in any kind of alcohol, fair trade and level-playing fields be buggered.

[SOME BORING NUMERICAL FACTS ABOUT THE ALCOHOL EXCISE SCHEDULE: Currently most kinds of alcohol, inc. beer and spirits are excised according to a rate per litre of alcohol, but these rates vary wildly depending on what you're drinking, while wine is taxed at a flat rate of 29% of the wholesale price although the first 1.17 million litres are excise free - meaning small independent vineyards can effectively sell wine excise free.
The latter two points are why so many wines are so much cheaper than everything else. Currently a 4L cask of wine whose price before value added taxes are applied is, say, $10 would then get an alcohol excise of $2.9 and a GST of $1.29 making the retail price $14.30.
But if you're a small vineyard then you get the WET back so the retail price is only $11.30.
Compare that to full-strength beer which is taxed at around $42 per litre of alcohol and spirits (except for brandy) which are taxed at around $71 per litre of alcohol. Brandy is taxed at around $66 per litre of alcohol because of an old law encouraging local grape growers. That means 4 litres of beer (a little less than a six-pack) with 5% alc/vol attracts a tax of $8.34 regardless of the wholesale price and a 4 litres (a litle less than 6 bottles) of spirits at 40% alc/vol will attract a tax of $112. You can understand why spirits are a lot more expensive but it seems beer brewers get a really bad deal out of all this, especially as more and more small, independent, local brewers start up. ]

Why does the PHT so badly want a dramatic tax hike on alcohol? The main reason here is also a lot more controversial than with cigarettes. The PHT argues that because a certain percentage of the population abuses alcohol, and some people are alcoholics, therefore every Australian who drinks alcohol must pay more for it in order to discourage those who abuse it. You can see how this is different from cigarettes. Most smokers are addicted and there is no such thing as a safe level of smoking. However not everyone, probably not even most people who drink alcohol are dependent on it and there does exist a safe, responsible level of alcohol consumption. Naturally most people would consider it really unfair that everyone has to pay high taxes on a product that only some people cannot consume responsibly. So it's going to be much, much harder for the Health Taskforce to convince the government, which has to then convince the electorate that a volumetric alcohol tax is really ultimately in everyone's best interests.

Nevertheless, the PHT is a powerful organization, with an incredible amount of totally unquestioned and never scrutinized authority and I have no doubt it will get its way eventually. In any case, the extra revenue is just too much of a temptation for any government to resist indefinitely. For tax to a government is as heroin is to a junkie - the more you have, the more you use; the more you use, the more you need.

Who knows, sooner or later a significant amount of we consume will be in plain packaging and taxed to the point of unaffordability...for the sake of public health of course - the new moralism.

Is Dutch The Coldest Language In The World?

2010-04-24T07:21:00.000-07:00

Never mind the unpleasant sounds, vaguely reminiscent of Klingon speech, that penetrate the air when two Dutch speakers are conversing with each other in their little spoken native tongue, there's something else not quite kosher about Dutch.

Just about every language has a simple, direct way for a lover to express love for her or his beloved. It's probably the phrase people are most familiar with in the widest variety of languages. In English we say "I love you". Simple: SUBJECT (I)-VERB (love) -DIRECT OBJECT (you). Most languages follow a similar, even identical pattern, languages as diverse and distant as Icelandic: "Ég elska þig" to Vietnamese: "Anh yêu em".

French: Je t'aime. Chinese: "我愛你". German: "Ich liebe dich". Russian: "Я люблю тебя". Norwegian: "Jeg elsker deg". Thai: "ฉันรักเธอ".

Three little words. 1,2,3: I love you. Everyone that is, except the Dutch. That's right. Dutch is such a Nordic, cold, dark and heartless language that there is simply no direct way to say you love someone, or anyone, or anything for that matter. In Dutch you can choose between of of either two indirect, vaguely unsatisfying constructions:

1) The adverbial construction, "Ik heb je lief", where the verb is "to have" and the adverb is "dearly". The closest English translation would be something like "I hold you dear" with the meaning as in the phrase, "By all you hold sacred, by all you hold dear". [More accurately you could translate this literally as "I have you lief". "Lief" is an a rarely heard adverb meaning, "gladly", "willingly", as in "I would as lief eat pizza tonight as I would eat Chinese."] Pretty unsatisfying really, no?

2) The phrasal verb construction, "I hou van je", which transliterates as "I hold of you" and whose denotation of love is, like most phrasal verb constructions, entirely idiomatic and seems like nonsense to the outsider. I don't think I have to comment. Saying you love someone by referring to the action of holding them metaphorically is a very piss poor way of expressing your deep devotion to another really. If you think about it, it's kinda like that episode of The Simpsons where Homer buys Marge a bowling ball for her birthday.

Dutch has no problem when it comes to expressing hate though. If you want to say you hate someone, it works just like in English: "Ik haat je". But, strangely, unlike Dutch's closest language relatives, German "Ich liebe dich" and English "I love you", you cannot say something simple like "Ik lief jou" in Dutch. That's to express love in such a simple direct way is simply beyond the bitter icyness of the Dutch heart.

The Dutch? Icy and cold? (I hear you protest).

But I thought that was the Germans with their clinical industrial efficiency and their way of making you feel one foot tall with nothing more than a sneered "Ha!".

Or the Norwegians maybe with their 24 hour winter nights and their awful sounding Satan worshipping death metal bands.

But the Dutch? They're all fun lovin' hippies!

Well I say to you, the proof is in the language. I say, don't buy all that tolerance and weed-smoking, free love hippy crap that the Dutch are so fond of promoting to the world! It's just a facade to make more money from tourism. Underneath that fun-loving exterior is the cold, calculating, profiteering, Calvinistic Dutch heart, which has made a state religion out of a form of Christianity (Calvinism) which believes that God chose exactly who'd go to heaven and who would burn in hell for eternity before He even made the universe and there's f**k all anyone can do about it; which practically invented the Protestant work ethic which imputes deep guilt to you if you do not work yourself to death and on the other hand deep shame on you if you dare enjoy or show off the fruits of your labour in any way; which can still be so conservative that in certain small regional Dutch towns driving a car is illegal on Sundays as by doing so one is breaking the command to Keep The Sabbath Day Holy.

Of course, as a Dutch citizen and native Dutch speaker, I write all this with a grain of salt, salt which, if I could, I would cast down in righteous Dutch Reformed Church (Gereformeerd, not Hervormd!) anger onto the ice of the frozen Dutch heart in the vain hope it might melt.
LOL. A language with no means to say "I love you". Honestly, what kind of language is that?

[PS - Calvinism 101 - Calvisnism, for those who have never heard of the word, is one of the early forms of Protestant Christianity. Just like, in revolt of the Roman Catholic Church Germany got Lutheranism, England got Anglicanism, so Holland and Scandinavia got Calvinism.

1) Total depravity means everyone is totally bad, bad like Hitler, totally, going to hell, bad. Period.

2) Unconditional Election means that although everyone is totally depraved, long long ago God decided He didn't want His whole creation just ending up burning in hell, I mean that would just be a total waste of time, so He chose, ie, elected some people to be saved. It would later become apparent that these chosen ones were all members of The Dutch Reformed Church. By the way, that's "The Dutch Reformed Church", not "The Reformed Dutch Church", and beware!...the difference is as big as the Grand Canyon is wide!

3) Limited Atonement means that seeing as God had already elected those who would go to Heaven and those who would burn in hell before the very creation of the Universe, there was no need then for Jesus to die for everyone's sins when he came down to Earth. I mean that would just have meant so much more hard work and suffering for Him. No, He just had to die for the sins of the chosen members of the Reformed Church. Everyone else's sins remain unatoned and they can all rot in hell. Especially Catholics.

4) Irresistible Grace that means if God happens to have elected you then you are going to Heaven, whether you like it or not. You are like a moth to the flame, a fly in the spider's web. It doesn't matter if you happen to actually enjoy and be quite ethically happy with your depraved, debaucherous, lecherous, drug-fuelled, sinful lifestyle. It doesn't matter if you are Chairman Mao, Jeffrey Dahmer, Adolf Hitler or Humpty Dumpty. If God's chosen you, then repentance and off to Heaven it is with you.

5) Perseverance Of The Saints means that basically since you never really chose to believe, but rather God chose for you, actually since no one really has any free will at all, it follows that anyone who has ever been chosen to be saved, can never lose their salvation. Even if you say "No! That's it! I'm converting to raving, anarchic-counter-imperialist communistic-socialist Satanistic virgin-sacrificing Atheism this minute!" It doesn't matter dude. You're still a Christian. Better yet. It turns out you're a Calvinist. You just don't get to have a say.]

Flashback: The Sisterhood - Gift

2010-04-24T05:28:00.000-07:00

Anyone with pretences to being a "Goth" in the 1980s would most likely also have been a fan of, in any case would definitely have been very familiar with The Sisters Of Mercy. The band that is, of course; not the Roman Catholic order of nuns.

Comprised mainly of Andrew Eldritch, Wayne Hussey and Craig Adams there was what may or may not have been, depending on whom you believe, a very acrimonious split of the band around 1985 with Hussey and Adams departing to form their own act and Eldritch left behind.

Hussey and Adams re-formed and started playing as The Sisterhood, a name on which Eldritch was not too keen, claiming it was too close in morphology to The Sisters Of Mercy. In any case, rather than fighting about it for an extended period, Eldritch quickly recorded and released this album under the same name "The Sisterhood", thereby effectively beating Hussey and Adams to the legal rights to play under that name.

Once again, depending on whom you believe, Eldritch by doing so with this release also won a race against Hussey/Adams run by their record company WEA, the winner of which would be the first Sisters member to release any new material after the split. The prize was 25,000 pounds Sterling as a recording advance. It is alleged that the recitation of the numbers "two-five-zero-zero-zero" on the first track "Jihad" refer to this amount and there may well be truth in what has become something of a Goth legend.

This also tied Eldritch to WEA as The Sisters Of Mercy (a fact which he apparently regretted later, and possibly led to the demise of the band - bad relations with the company that is), and he went on to release two more studio albums as The Sisters Of Mercy, the first Floodland (1987) was made with Patricia Morrison as the only other band member, while the second Vision Thing (1990), which was also the last studio album was made with a full band and drew much more heavily upon hard rock than anything Goth. Some time after that the band just kind of disappeared as far as putting out new material is concerned, with Eldritch claiming, interestingly, that releasing albums in a rock band was not all there was to life. Notwithstanding, the Sisters have been and are still around, playing live shows.

Eldritch, seemingly like just about any other successful band labelled "Goth" (eg The Cure, Siouxie & The Banshees, The Damned etc.), has always abhorred that label (unsurprisingly) and insisted that TSOM was just a rock band, although listening to Floodland again (even just looking at the cover), I think people could be excused for applying the label.

As for Gift, Eldritch himself apparently never thought much of it, being as it was quickly recorded as a stunt mainly to stop Hussey and Adams getting the rights to the name "The Sisterhood". However, the album features Alan Vega, of the legendary proto-punk band Suicide on keyboards and vox and Lucas Fox, drummer in the just as legendary metal band Motörhead on drums and vox as well as Patricia Morrison on bass and vox and James Ray on guitar and vox.

Ironically it somehow became something of a sought-after rare "classic" on the electronica scene (maybe in part due to Vega's input - though that is just me speculating), as its synth bass and drum machines seemed in retrospect to be eerily prescient of the German techno scene that would emerge out of the house/acid house music revolution a few years later.

In any case, the album achieved its goal: Hussey & Adams of course re-formed as The Mission and certain sources claim that the whole "Gift" episode was actually just an elaborate publicity stunt to kickstart the Hussey & Adams career as The Mission.

In any case Gift by The Sisterhood has long been deleted and hard to find. So here's a link to a rip from glorious 1980s vinyl, if you'd like to hear this album once more, for old times sake:

GIFT - THE SISTERHOOD

Northern Territory UFO Invasion Makes It To Roswell Museum

2010-04-20T07:02:00.000-07:00

Life at the Top End must be really weird, wonderful and exciting. Imagine waking up to find a story about a UFO invasion splashed over the front page of the day's newspaper. (This one is dated 20/04/10)

For those not familiar, the NT News is not quite the NT's version of News Of The World. It is actually Darwin's leading and only "serious" daily newspaper. And it's not just UFO invasions that make headlines up there. Amongst the day's leading stories include a crocodile found squatting a swimming pool, a baby born in a car park, a NASA balloon the size of the MCG coming to land near Alice Springs, another crocodile, this time a 4.5 metre one terrorizing fishermen...Gee and that's all on an insignificant April Tuesday.

Like I said, life must be one wild adventure up in Darwin. I can't wait for my next holiday there!

Hot Hot Hot!!!

2010-04-20T00:32:00.000-07:00

Phew! Are we enjoying one hell of an Autumn here down under in the South-East. It actually got to 29 degrees today, on the 20th of April, more like what you'd expect in the middle of summer. Most of the month has been this way. The average here in April is 10-20 degrees but it's shaping up to be around 13-23 degrees, as you can see from this graphic below (click to see detailed view).

I'm sure climate scientists and farmers are not very happy at all but there's one really good thing about it. I'm not a fan of hot weather at all but this very extended summer means there has been no need to pull out the heaters yet which is great considering the last electricity bill saw energy prices increase by a whopping 18% in one hit. It was $295 when it would have been $240 without the increase which is apparently urgently needed so the companies can build yet more dirty, polluting coal-fired power stations. Aaaah...life just goes on don't it?

So anyway, in celebration of this delightful Indian Summer weather we are enjoying here's an oldie, but a goodie:

THE CURE - HOT HOT HOT!!!

The Dole Bludger

2010-03-25T07:20:00.000-07:00

A dole bludger is: a person (other than oneself or one's very immediate family, usually younger and considered less deserving than oneself) who is perceived in any way to be living off the proceeds of other people's work by receiving money under any sections of Australia's universal welfare provisions, whether legitimately or less legitimately so.

The word bludger is grammatically a so-called 'false analysis' of the verb "to bludgeon" - originally a bludger was a low thief roaming around in small gangs who had no problem using extreme violence by [bludgeoning] their victim.

Time, history and in a large part politics prevailing, the term came to mean firstly that, anyone who was educated, or even just a white collar worker, was bludging their arses off the hard sweat of real working men; who were earning their hard yakka by doing real mens work like plumbing and mining and bashing fags and Asians and other such wholesome Australian activities.

If you even knew the meaning of such words as "philosophy" or "poetry" or "proletariat" you would be suspected of being a bludger. Seeing as being called a bludger is about as bad a being accused of molesting little girls by sodomic rape in this country, Australia's renowned reputation for being the dumbest industrialized country in the world (only rich because it has lots of raw minerals to sell to China (which of course is a country just bludging off good old Aussie sweat; seeing as how they are slanty-eyed commie Chinks) starts to make a whole lot of sense.

Later on, the Australian economy became more white-collar oriented, and as dull men in suits became more common the term was employed to alienate and denigrate anyone unfortunate enough not be working and in receipt of the new welfare system payments created of course by those bludging Canberra bureaucrats for the benefit of Whitlam voting commie dole bludgers.

These days, anyone in receipt of any kind of welfare whatsoever is by government decree (see Mal Brough, Employment Minister, 2002) a dole bludger in which case you would do best to feel deep, deep shame and not show your face in public, seeing as you have become yourself a bludger unable to return a shout at the pub lest you let your little ones go without bread tomorrow. And we all know very well that if you do shout that beer your little one will be the ones to suffer. Such shame on you!

Interestingly, aged pensioners are not just yet labelled as dole bludgers; perhaps just because they are old and frail, blind and deaf and sick, and many of them live in nursing homes. Don't be surprised though if the government should label them as such and order them back to work if it has another bad public moment (like in 2002) trying to cut welfare payments (by $60 a week) in the future.

After all, Mal Brough and the Howard government already ordered all 50-67 year olds back to full-time work, or work-for-the-dole, back in 2005. Seeing as this lot was just a bunch of dole scabbing bludgers.

A vote for the Liberals...

Paranormal Activity: Hyperbolic Nonsense

2009-12-08T06:58:00.000-08:00

Today, I had a choice of four movies that I wanted to see at the local cinema. Where The Wild Things Are, 2012, The New Moon and Paranormal Activity. Actually I really wanted to see Lars von Triers's Antichrist, but I couldn't be bothered travelling to the city for it (it's on limited release at the the art-house kinos in the trendy Chardonnay socialist inner suburbs where such fare is more welcome than out here in the povo western burbs).

Anyway, I ended up choosing Paranormal Activity, mainly because the reviews for 2012 were very bad and it goes for 160 minutes and I was feeling tired, even though I quite enjoy big, bland CGI SFX movies, 160 minutes is a long time without a cigarette. Where The Wild Things Are wasn't a goer because I just wasn't in the mood for deep, possibly heart-tugging emotionally laden brilliance. I want to be bright, chirpy and alert when I go see that one, as no doubt it will be a very special movie. The New Moon is getting pretty good reviews here, but, I dunno, I'm not convinced about it yet. I'm a 37 year old male, not a 17 year old female, so I might be rather disappointed, although a good vampire flick I've always liked.

That left Paranormal Activity which got the short straw as it has 82% on Rotten Tomatoes and Margaret gave it 4 stars (though David only 1 - which should have sounded a big warning; but Margaret's such a nice, bubbly person, while David strikes me as bit of a killjoy, I always want to follow her movie advice, against my better judgement). From what I could gather it looked like a kewl little horror flick that delivered the goods.

Boy, was I wrong.

I wish I'd also bothered to check what Jim Schembri had to say about it, as I have never ever disagreed with one of his movie reviews, not in 15 years. I would have saved myself 11 wasted dollars and 90 wasted minutes of my life.

This movie is utter rubbish. It didn't even slightly jar me even once. I didn't even feel the faintest tingle or tremor of fright. The premise of the film is pretty tired anyway and that should have been enough not to see it. In the end, story concerned, it's basically The Exorcist with all the logic, drama, existentialism, humanity, theology, fear, horror, ontological dread, acting, scripting, soundtrack, screenplay, gore and horror drained out of it. Instead of a fight to the death by way of the mystery of the Roman Rite of Exorcism backed up by the awesomeness of the Roman Catholic Church we end up with a "psychic" who says "it's gonna be ok", when you just know it's not, and a "demonologist" who runs away like a frightened chicken because he senses bad aura. Blah. What remains, pretty much, is the familiar Ouija board as a bad cliche and a lifeless corpse of a film, where instead we are being promised a shocker demon that will frighten us out of our wits.

It might have been scary but for three things that totally wreck the film:

1.) The "home movie" found footage style of shooting - as in Cloverfield and The Blair Witch Project. It worked enough of the time in Cloverfield to convince me, because the drama and action often enough made me forget who was supposed to have shot the footage and how it was supposed to have been shot. For a film to work you need to be drawn into it, to forget that you're watching a screen filmed through a lens: the whole concept of "suspension of disbelief" functions around that idea. The problem with this film is that we are constantly, obviously, painfully, in every way imaginable reminded that we are watching home movie footage filmed on the two main characters' video camera. The character Micah also (literally) does most of the shooting. He's actor and cameraman, two in one. We see him more than once vainly shooting himself in the bathroom mirror. He's forever playing with his camera and both he and Katie, his possessed girlfriend, constantly refer to it. When Katie has a total breakdown and ends up curled up on the hallway floor, sobbing hysterically, does Micah drop the camera and rush to her aid? No way: he moves up to her and films her close-up while she's wailing away and then takes time out to place the camera on the ground and position it correctly before attempting to console her. It's infuriating and you just feel like screaming at this character (even as you again become conscious of the artificial narrative device): For God's sake, forget the frigging camera for 5 seconds and go look after your beloved girlfriend!

There are moments early on when the camera work, and hence screenplay and script become totally indulgent, if only because they have nothing at all to do with whatever story there is. Micah tries to get Katie to striptease for the camera. She flat-out refuses even though he promises he'll do anything she wants. Just as well Katie refused. Would have been more embarrassing than any demon possession. Micah later lies to her that the camera is switched off when they are just about to have sex so that he can try to film them "doing it". You start to wonder if this an exercise in cheap sexual voyeurism rather than a horror movie before shit happens. If it was supposed to get some laughs, it didn't work in my cinema. If it was supposed to set up Micah's ugly selfish narcissism, I guess it works.

More than once Katie begs and pleads with Micah to turn the damned thing off, but does he? No of course not, because then there wouldn't be any movie for us to watch any more. It all comes over as very, very contrived.

The constant referencing of the fact that this is meant to be home movie footage is convincing in that you end up being constantly aware that you are supposed to be believing this is home movie footage - but refuses to let you be drawn in to the film in any way that lets you forget that you're watching video tape whatsoever. You cannot help but be a totally self-conscious spectator for 90 long minutes to a couple's mundane domestic dramas, even if it involves the lure of a three-some with a demon.

2. For whatever reason, any suspense is totally destroyed because every time something "scary" happens, the film loudly and proudly announces 20 seconds beforehand that something "scary" is just about to happen, which totally and utterly destroys any fright factor the movie might have had. This is the worst thing about the film - mainly because even on the limited budget there was no reason to do this. It's just not horror when you are (again) literally warned loudly to expect something to jump out at you. Every single time a paranormal event occurs, it occurs in exactly the same way. The couple go to bed and we are treated to some sped up video tape, as we obviously don't want to hang around watching three hours of them sleeping before the demon decides to make its presence known. Suddenly, at 2.34am or 3.36 am or 4.15am the tape slows to normal speed and we all know something "scary" is going to occur in exactly 15 seconds. To make it worse, at these very points the movie makers decide every time to insert the only "soundtrack" of the movie - every bloody time! This consists of an ominous low rumbling from the subwoofers, practically telling the audience: Show's starting right now! Do not go for a toilet break!! So whatever does happen - pretty lame stuff by the way: like slamming doors, footprints in talcum powder, knocking sounds, a scream, meh, whatever - is loudly and clearly pre-announced, destroying any and all cinematic tension there might have remained. And it all happens in the same location at the same time of day. Yawn! There's only one incident, the one with the Ouija board where the setting is changed but so what, we still have the subwoofers sounding like a fire alarm telling us to get ready for a "fright", and then anyway, of course something, anything is going to happen when there are Ouija boards involved.

3. There's no script. Literally (again). The whole movie is "retroscripted" which means the actors were given an outline of the scene and told to make up the dialogue on the spot while the scene was being shot. As far as I'm concerned this makes for half-rate acting of totally forced and fake emotions and dialogue. It's more or less the stake in the heart of the movie. The acting's crap and forced. The actors' reactions are overdone and cliched. Micah is more concerned with whether his camera is running or not than whatever hell his girlfriend's going through. Frankly, if my partner was as insensitive as he is, I would have stabbed him too. "Retroscript" is exactly why our Grade 12 Film & TV group got a C+ for our final movie project - because we were just too lazy to write a real script, meaning we had to make it up on the spot.

Yes you can absolutely tell this was a film made for $15,000 because it's total crap. The lack of a script, the need to loudly announce every significant moment and constant, incessant, extremely irritating references to the mode of viewing: home movie camera, turns this film into drivel. Compared to such wrenching horror classics as The Exorcist (which this film basically tries to be a variation on), this is positively the worst film I have ever seen.

Then again, perhaps this film could be read as a kind of early 21st century The Exorcist. It has that kind of sensibility about it. In an age where filming the demon, possibly so you can upload it to YouTube is more important than getting rid of the demon, it's perhaps little wonder PA's demon is rather camera shy. Perhaps PA does have something to say about our times:

In The Exorcist everything was very monumental; theologically and existentitally definitive: Regan was clearly possessed by a demon, a spiritual agent of the devil and the clear-cut and only final solution was to cast out the demon by invoking the awe-inspiring power of Jesus Christ (some of the most horrific scenes occurred when the name and blood of Jesus Christ were invoked against the demon) through the rites and liturgy of the Catholic Church, on the agency of an experienced and qualified priest.
In PA nothing is clear or explained; the word "demon" has little if any theological or any other significance at all apart from a vague reference to some pictures in a book that looked like it was picked up in a New Age shop. We absolutely have no idea what it is or why it's there. The self-styled psychic and demonologist have no power, are weak and useless in the face of an unseen and unexplained evil presence. The demonologist runs a mile in fear as soon as he gets near Kate and Micah's place. What a waif. Compare that to old Fr. Merrin in Exorcist, who has a determination and heart of steel and knows exactly what he's dealing with. He's so inspiring, you just wish he'd been your parish priest.
In The Exorcist there are no home video cameras, no "firewires", no laptop computers, no pre-occupation with recording everything for whatever reason. The only recording device employed is a tape recording of the demon speaking backwards to see what it is saying. There is good narrative reason to bring in the tape recorder here because it's the only way to understand what the demon is going on about. The demon, in the safe knowledge no else is watching is extremely visual and very demonstrative.
In PA everything is recorded by Micah, but for no apparent purpose or reason other than as a cinematic device; so that we as an audience can watch the movie as "found footage". But that doesn't explain why he had to make all that footage, all day long every day, except if you make up the narrative fact the guy's just another camera freak who would have probably posted every demonic moment up on YouTube as soon as it had happened so all his online friends could follow it. The demon, knowing the whole world will be watching it, suddenly becomes very camera shy.
In The Exorcist there is narrative depth: it is made clear why Regan becomes afflicted and possessed by a demon. She messed around with a Ouija board which acted as an opening, a kind of gateway for the demon to possess her. As the demon is clearly cast in a Judaeo-Christian mould, this makes sense, as the Bible, OT & NT, clearly says that messing around with the occult opens you up to affliction and possible possession by evil. Hence the reason for the exorcist. It all makes narrative sense.
In PA there isn't anything really. Why does Katie get possessed? There's no narrative "opening". She hasn't done anything. People don't just get possessed for nothing in the essentially Christian literary tradition of the West. (Take Faust as a template for example, or Christ Himself for that matter - tempted by the devil.) Why not Micah? After all, he's the one messing around with Ouija boards and cameras and microphones and waveforms, challenging the demon in just about every way possible. He's the one who should get possessed then as he's the one flirting with danger. Katie doesn't even want anything to do with it. Or is it only girls who can get possessed by demons in the 21st century?
In The Exorcist there is a wrenchingly existentialist ending, as the doubting and lost Fr. Karras, in despair of how to cast the demon out, offers his own soul as a hostage to the devil (an actual practice in RC exorcism, though not with such dramatic consequences), in order to free Regan and tragically sacrifices his own life.
In PA there is existential nothing. We can't even be sure if Katie's just totally had enough of Micah's obsession with his precious camera and has taken drastic revenge, or if the demon is having its day. There is literally no ending except that the footage has run out because Micah is no more. There's no rationale, no meaning, no resolution and no reason.

Welcome to 21st century postmodernism then? LOL. Nah, I just think the film makers even though they claim to have done lots of research on demonology before shooting the film, actually have little understanding of the rather more important concept of narrative logic & flow.

It's not a take on media-hyped 21st century culture at all. It's just a really badly conceived film.

What really, totally confounds me though is why people everywhere have been so taken in by the hype and how on earth this piece of sub-standard nonsense got 82% on Rotten Tomatoes. Really. In any case in the Sunshine cinema I was in, no one jumped out of their seats or left in fear. Not even once. There was a hell of a lot of sniggering and giggling happening though.

No stars.

YOU START FEELING OLD WHEN:

2009-11-23T22:08:00.000-08:00

1. When the crap on the floor after your haircut is half grey.
2. The hangover lasts for 3 days instead of 3 hours.
3. There's just a few tufts & stray hairs instead of crap all over the floor for the hairdresser to sweep up after your haircut.
4. Sound bites from annoyingly conservative politicians sometimes sound quite reasonable.
5. You dig out that awesome EBM/darkwave album from 1994 and it sounds like noisy shite.
6. You find yourself spending as much time in your trakkie daks as your jeans.
7. Wrinkles appear on parts of the body other than the face.
8. Chasing a pizza and a DVD on a Friday night sounds like a much, much better idea than chasing Es and tail at Club Latest Fad.
9. That routine medical check comes back positive for something or other.
10. You see teenagers walking down the the street and the sight of them really, really irritates you for no particular reason.
11. Ads for funeral insurance pique your interest.
12. You start to wonder if maybe violent video games and pornography might be not such harmless phenomena after all.
13. Songs you grew up with are getting played not just on FM classic radio, but also on AM classic radio.
14. All your friends on Facebook have spouses and/or kids, except for you.

30 Great Songs From The 80s (According To Me)

2009-10-14T07:00:00.000-07:00

The 80s were the decade that defined music for me, just because I grew up in them. I'm not going to say stuff like "it was the best decade eva" or "they just don't make them like they did back then. Mate.", because then I'd end up sounding just like the baby boomers who said the same thing about the 60s in the 80s, whom we all derided with malevolent, satanic scorn. Ha! Us Gen-Xers will never succumb to such crass nostalgia no matter how many retro clubs open up in the city.

Notwithstanding such affairs, this is a list. Because I am bored and have nothing better to do. Of my Top 30 80s songs. In no particular order other than that in which they came to mind.

1. Close To Me - The Cure
2. True Faith - New Order
3. Flood I - The Sisters Of Mercy
4. Shivers - Boys Next Door (actually 1979, but I'm letting it in)
5. Armenia (Live) - Einstürzende Neubauten
6. Blood From The Air - Coil
7. Necropolis - SPK (no link! will have to upload hehe)
8. Burn For You - INXS
9. New Song - Howard Jones
10. How Soon Is Now? - The Smiths
11. Hell's Bells - AC/DC
12. Kerosene - Big Black
13. Where Is My Mind? - Pixies
14. Barbados - Models
15. Trick Of The Light - The Triffids
16. With Or Without You - U2
17. Never Let Me Down Again - Depeche Mode
18. Running Up That Hill - Kate Bush
19. Beatrix - Cocteau Twins
20. October (Love Song) - Chris & Cosey
21. Persephone - Dead Can Dance (no link sorry)
22. Bring On The Dancing Horses - Echo & The Bunnymen
23. Icehouse - Flowers
24. Beat It - Michael Jackson
25. O Superman - Laurie Anderson
26. Do The Headless Chicken - Headless Chickens
27. We'll Fall Apart - (The World Of) Skin (aka Swans)
28. Dead Eyes Opened (Original) - Severed Heads
29. And She Was - Talking Heads
30. Hall Of Mirrors - Siouxsie & The Banshees

Two Rare Aussie Tracks By Girls: Do.Re.Mi and Divinyls

2009-10-09T03:23:00.000-07:00

Okay, a few weeks ago, I uploaded two classic and rare Aussie New Wave 12" mixes by the Models and the Machinations, so it's only fair that I also post two classic Aussie New Wave 12" mixes by bands with female performers.

I just got the extended mixes of Man Overboard by Do.Re.Mi and Pleasure & Pain by the Divinyls. Both are excellent examples of mid 80s Australian New Wave pieces, slightly alternative, somewhat raw, dark and brooding, but also massive commercial successes (well, here in any case).

Both songs cracked the Australian Top 20 in 1985. Pleasure & Pain reached no. 11 in Australia and no. 76 in the USA (They had a much bigger hit in the USA in 1990 with I Touch Myself which went to no. 4 there) and Man Overboard went to no. 5. These are the very rare 12" extended mixes of both tracks. They just don't make 'em like this anymore.

Follow the links just below and enjoy!

(Copyright disclaimer: I am making these available on the premise that these tracks and others I available here were originally limited edition releases and have all been deleted from their labels' catalogues more than 20 years ago, and hence do not constitute intellectual property "theft" as no one is losing money from the distribution of products that have not been available for sale in over two decades.)

Man Overboard - Do.Re.Mi

Pleasure & Pain - Divinyls

The Loudness Wars (aka The Volume Wars)

2009-09-20T03:15:00.000-07:00

Recently I have totally changed my listening habits, not in terms of what I listen to but rather how I listen to it.

I usually play my library through Winamp which is a great, because highly customizable if that's what you like, free media player. I had a digital sound processor installed called Audioproc which claims to and does enhance your music through a range of compression effects, which ultimately makes your music louder as well as normalizing the volume. It was my solution to that nagging problem with MP3s whereby, because individual albums and tracks are mastered by individual mixers, you're constantly reaching for the volume knob to equalize the volume over different tracks. Audioproc also gives added overall "oomph" to your music by using, what it claims are high-quality multiband audio dynamics processors that utilize the same multiband compression/expansion/limiting technology that expensive professional broadcast hardware is based upon.

In other words the kind of compression technology that FM broadcasters use to make their crappy 56 kbps equivalent broadcasts sound much better and louder than they otherwise would. The problem was that after a while I had a feeling I was no longer enjoying my music as much. I noticed I was getting tired of listening to my music and it all sounded flat and the same; my volume problem was fixed but now there was no dynamic range any more because of the overloaded compression processors.

I had also noticed that more recently recorded music and MP3 downloads of old tracks tend to sound much louder than my CDs and especially vinyl from the 80s and 90s, but I thought it was just because of improved technology for a while. Then, surfing the web, I happened to come across a phenomenon called The Loudness War. Basically it's literally a war between bands and their engineers and labels to make their music sound as loud as possible in order to get an edge on the radio mainly, basically by turning up the volume as much as physically possible on the mixer without it causing obvious distortion. They use a horrible processing technique called "brickwall limiting" which actually allows for hard clipping, which means that if the signal goes over its limit it is simply clipped by allowing no more variation in the character of the output signal (what you hear). What this means is that the really loud parts of the songs sound harsh and flat. Actually, distortion is even allowed to leak through although only in very small bursts and masked by other sounds so that you, hopefully, won't notice it. (Have a listen to MGMT's Electric Feel to hear this effect in a really obvious manner. MGMT do this kind of audible clipping on purpose though - it's actually part of their sound, or so they claim.) Of course making the song loud overall reduces its dynamic range a whole lot which quickly leads to listener fatigue as a constant unvarying loud noise is unnatural and tiresome to the human ear.

I was quite shocked that audio engineers would do this just so that record companies can get a theoretical edge, therefore leading to a theoretical increase in profits at this terrible expense as regards the original quality of the music. I also realized that my own filtering of my music through Audioproc was seriously compromising the quality of what I was listening to and decided to switch it off and manually run everything through something called Replay Gain which also normalizes the volume of your MP3s but without compromising the original quality of the recording in anyway. However, it's rather tedious doing so I must admit compared to simply running a compressor.

However, doing so has made me realize I've slowly been dragged into listening to second-rate music (as far as mixing quality goes) without even realizing it due to this phenomenon of the Loudness Wars and the fact that I listen to everything on my computer or MP3 player these days. I've been paying a lot closer attention the my music and suddenly I'm seeing it everywhere, even applied to bands which otherwise have impeccable musical standards. Have a listen to the CD master of Sigur Ros's Ara Batur off their latest release for example. As the track reaches its crescendo, the pumping and breathing artefacts of over-compression become clearly audible as each instrument seems to struggle to be louder than its neighbour. And as the track features lead vocals, a choir, an orchestra with crashing cymbals as well as the band you can imagine the ugly distorted cacophony this results in. Now I realize why their latest album just didn't seem as soaring and sweeping as previous releases. Doing some visual analysis of the audio signal it appears Sigur Ros's albums are being mastered louder and louder with every new release. How can music possibly soar and sweep when it's all been expanded already and then compressed back into the box of its maximally possible limits? The whole way through? All the variation and emotion is gone; the whole work sounds dull, flat, harsh and lifeless.

It was all finally too much when I bought Shoplifters Of The World Unite And Take Over by the Smiths off the album The Sound Of The Smiths from Big Pond Music today. When I played it it just sounded, well, ugly. Much too noisy and just plain wrong. Nothing like the DVD mix I saw last night which is why I went to buy it in the first place as it wasn't in my library. I ran it through replay gain and it had to be reduced by a massive 9 dB in order to reach the reference level! That's impossibly loud for a song recorded in 1988 and released on vinyl originally. So I looked on BitTorrent for a version off the original 1987 release Louder Than Bombs and downloaded that for comparison. This time it only had to be adjusted by 0.5 dB to reach the reference level. The bass in the online store version is loud and angry and in your face, whereas in the original it's much further back in the mix, well behind the vocals and guitar. All the punch of the snare drum was gone and in the chorus the snare drum was pumping heavily as the whole signal was clipped to keep it within its limits.

Here are waveforms of each of the two tracks just below. I reckon you can guess which one is the version affected by the Loudness War and which one is the original. These record labels and their engineers are killing our music for a quick buck. This war needs to stop.

Notice how the top waveform (which is the molested one) constantly hits the "1.0" edges of the box. These edges reflect the physical possible maximum that the wave can reach. When it exceeds this limit (which it's constantly doing) the signal has to be limited and "clipped" off, resulting in distortion. Notice in the lower original, the peaks are well within the available space for the waveform. These peaks represent the snare drum, and it's clear and has all its original punch. You can hardly make out these peaks in the molested example, and when you can they all clip. Ugly stuff.

Check out this video demonstrating the effect of the loudness war on music at YouTube for another demo.

The Music Industry, Capital, The Means Of Production And Reproduction

2009-09-10T00:30:00.000-07:00

The Music Industry, Capital, The Means Of Production And Reproduction

Vinyl Inner Sleeve circa 1981

March 4, 2007 at 8:01 pm

I was watching a recent interview with Blixa Bargeld from German rock band Einstuerzende Neubauten last night, and he mentioned the late capitalist vagaries regarding copyright and the technology of reproduction. He stated that the music industry is going to hell. How he hadn’t yet quite thought it through, but how he thought copyright should only apply to music that benefits humanity, unlike, according to him, 98% of music does at the moment. That, in any case, current developments in file sharing technology make a joke of copyright. Echoes of Adorno (another Central European wary of silly illusions) there; and of course the question of just which music would constitute the 2% benefiting humanity, kinda goes begging (presumably Blixa’s own would be included in that). That’s because nowadays, if anyone dared raise the spectre of a theory of aesthetics in which the value of art is based on something inherent to it, he would still be shot down in flames by soldiers in the Postmodernism Crusade. Which may not just quite yet be a bad thing, as the old institutions of music haven’t just as yet been totally Spiritualized according to the Postmodern Ideal (after that Hegelian fashion). In any case, lots of people still buy CDs and engage in exchange with the music industry. I even know some people who still respect copyright just because they have an old-fashioned respect for the Law.

But an interesting point is raised notwithstanding, as there’s no doubt that the music industry is indeed on its own particular Highway to Hell, what with the totally unbelievable leaps and bounds in the technology of reproduction that we have witnessed over the last decade. Ten years ago, I was still taping stuff off the radio onto cassette. Not being much of a technological innovator myself, the idea of playing music on my computer, let alone downloading it from the internet didn’t even occur to me in my wildest dreams (after all, back then it would still take a good two minutes just to load a page with some lyrics and photos of your favourite band down into your browser and my hard-drive in 1997 had a capacity of some 36 MB - that's right Mega Bytes not Giga Bytes). Nowadays, we have things like BitTorrent, single file P2P, MP3, CD burning and DVD burning: all stalwarts of computer age reproduction. If I feel like revisiting the Twin Peaks TV series like I did last weekend for instance, I could just go onto a torrent search site like BT Junkie, look it up, wait 18 hours and there’s the whole 32 or so episodes on my computer for me to watch at my leisure or burn as VCD/DVD. Or, indeed, if I feel like downloading all of Einstuerzende Neubauten’s back catalogue I only have to wait about 7 to 8 hours on my ADSL connection. And then there it is, waiting to be transferred to my MP3 player, or burnt to CD. [Update: now that ADSL2+ has become ubiquitous it's possible to get your downloads in 25% of the times just listed.] In terms of quality and availability we have come almost impossibly far within the space of just ten years. Such rapid progress has rocked the foundations of the music industry which has reacted aggresively and has basically gone berserk, suing grandmothers and even dead people for illegal downloading and file sharing. Bad PR move, but surprising? Not really.

That’s because in capitalist terms, as far as the music industry is concerned, the means of production has all but been stolen from the hands of those who held it: the record companies. Or so they would have you believe. Except that it was never really a means of production in the first place, it was always a means of reproduction really. The music industry needs to be split into two distinct categories: those who produce the music (the artists, the musicians, the composers, the performers) and those who mass-reproduce the music for the consumer (the record companies). Before P2P and file sharing and alternative forms of mass reproduction, indeed before digital reproduction in general, the only options for it were the vinyl record and then later the cassette tape. The cassette tape in fact represents reproductive technology in transition – but more on that in a minute.

A brief historical analysis: At advent, there was performance and manuscript (and before even that, just memory and tradition). Composers would write music, that music would be performed “live” and people would go to concerts to see it being produced, in a very original sense of production. People were actually making music when you listened to it, and they would be paid for their work of playing instruments. Music was written down by composers on paper in the format of a music score, who presumably, would be paid a commision if they weren’t actually conducting their own music, which was the preferential thing in the bad old days of authenticity and psychologism. However, in the age of writing, people die before records expire. Written records not having expired, to reproduce it you needed a conductor and players of musical instruments to interpret what was on the score. The reproduction of music was all accomplished in abstract, symbolic forms back then. On the practical level, in order to actually hear music, it still had to be performed though. Conceivably, a really, really smart human being would have been able to read a score and “hear” the music in his head, thus bypassing the means of musical production, but for most of the human race, listening to music being reproduced meant shelling out cash to hear it being peformed.

Then along came the vinyl record. Now there was a way of recording the actual performance in a way such that anyone with a record player could reproduce a performance any time they wanted to hear it, anywhere that a record could be made to spin. Now we have reproduction, not in a symbolic or abstract manner, but in a manner which directly corresponds to or represents the original performance and music could be disseminated to the masses anywhere and everywhere. In other words, there was a massive paradigm shift, from the symbolic to the iconic.

On some level, I could stop right there. Everything we know about reproducing in 2007 is a direct outcome of this massive paradigm shift, the ability to record, reproduce and disseminate the actual event itself as opposed to representing it symbolically on paper. Any MP3 is just a glorified 78RPM single. The difference between the vinyl record and the MP3 is that a vinyl record was neither that cheap or easy to make. To do it you needed quite a bit of expensive, hard-to-get stuff. For this reason, a music “industry” sprang up, which catered to the needs of the masses. Record companies recorded, manufactured and distributed records and the masses bought them and the equipment on which to play them. There was nothing evil about this of course. It was the best cost to ratio solution available. Without it we probably would never have seen rock ‘n’ roll or punk or jazz or blues on the scale that we did. I wonder what Adorno thought of vinyl qua product itself in fact? Regardless of whether, as John Cage showed us, there was anything on it or not?

However now we have a profit making industry, with capital, controlling the means of reproduction of music. Except of course, they never saw it that way. For them, it was literally, a means of production. For them the music could never be primary or paramount – it was the piece of plastic the consumer took home that was paramount. Hence, copyright, for every piece of plastic that is copied in some way is also likely a piece of plastic that is not sold. But I’m digressing.

Next along came the cassette tape. And its associated equipment the cassette player/recorder. By the late 70’s, portable stereo cassette recorders had become fairly cheap and blank cassettes were taking off. I know this because I remember my parents getting one of them in ‘78 or so (when I was 6) and me buying my first ever Philips C90 blank cassette for a rijksdaalder ($2.50) in Holland and quickly proceeding to tape all my favourite songs off the radio. Illegally of course. But here’s the rub – and here’s where the big record companies should have taken notice in the first place.

Suddenly, there was the ability to make stereo, good quality recordings of records or radio in your own home with a little portable machine. Sound familar? That’s because it is. And even though it was theoretically illegal for little seven year old me to copy stuff from the radio or from records, as these recordings had copyright invested in them, who seriously is gonna police such stuff? In any case, cassette copies reproduced an inferior, much reduced quality version of the purchased reproduction and cassettes tended to get chewed up by the cassette player and generally wear out pretty quickly. Also, you could only make one copy at a time for your mates, copied in real-time (or “2x writing speed” if you had a hi-speed dub machine as was common in the 80’s, although the quality would be rather bad). No real threat then. Nonetheless, by the time I was in late high school, it was everyday common practice for me and my friends to be swapping copies of albums with each other all over the place, copyright (which none of us had ever even heard of) notwithstanding, and for every copy that was made, the record company didn’t sell one. Unless we got really taken by what we heard and had to have the actual album itself, which was quite often the case.

Record companies should never have gotten into the cassette market. Cassettes were always terrible quality and by selling them as legitimate formats, terrible sounding things that they were, they just formally legitimated a bourgeoining culture of copying. Notwithstanding its limited scope, by 1980 a culture of copying was firmly entrenched. Of course, to get the real thing, you still had to buy that piece of plastic, vinyl (preferably) or pre-recorded cassette. Although the quality of cassettes could be dubious at best compared to their copied counterparts, and the covers were total crap, there was still vinyl. No one could reproduce vinyl on vinyl and the fact that a vinyl record album was 12 inches in diameter, which meant its cover and cover art was also 12 square inches big made it something worth buying. Because what you bought couldn’t be reproduced. You couldn’t just go and make a vinyl copy of your vinyl because the equipment to make vinyl records was and still is just too expensive for almost everyone to afford. So, basically, because anyone over the age of 17 realized that vinyl was far superior to cassette in terms of quality, coyright was relatively safe.

Then along came digital music in a big way, circa 1989. CDs of course have been around since 1984, but 1989 is the year I remember them really taking off. CD players dropped to around $160 for the first time and me and lots of my friends converted. No doubt about it, the sound quality of CDs is far superior to either vinyl or cassette and they are much more versatile and long-lasting. But you couldn’t copy them except onto cassette. But we were dreaming of the day when a CD-recorded would be released. Although we didn't actually think one ever would be. We just assumed the record companies would sue the shite out of whoever dared manufacture a CD-dubber before any such machine ever got to market.

To cut a long story short, by 2000 there was MP3 and along came the legendary file-sharing service Napster and P2P technology. As I said, a culture of copying was already long entrenched thanks to the cassette tape and the cassette recorder. Suddenly, you could copy your CDs as MP3s and share them on the internet, and better yet, you could download other people’s copies over a phone line.

Now the record companies were lost. The means, not of production (because that will always ultimately belong to the musicians and composers themselves) but the means of reproduction were really and seriously taken out of the hands of the record companies for the first time. Now it was possible to distribute and share high quality copies of your music with total strangers, with anyone who cared to search for the file you made available on the sharing network. Suddenly the right to copy, copyright, became a real, present, public and serious issue for the first time since the technology to copy and distribute as well, on a mass scale was available, not just to record companies, but to everyone with a computer, a 56.6kbps modem, a phone line and a CD collection. And for all their lawsuits and legal action, the record companies haven’t got anywhere since. Got a BitTorrent client and an ADSL connection? Seven years ago it took on average two hours to download one 5 minute songs as an MP3. Now it takes 2 hours to download 3 or 4 albums on average with BitTorrent and ADSL. [Update Sep 2009: With ADSL2+ now the standard, it now of course takes only about 15 - 20 minutes to download an album when you've got got speeds going in your BitTorrent client.] You can’t take everyone to court. Copyright is a lost cause… That’s because the companies thought their capital was the means to produce a piece of plastic + copyright. But it wasn’t. They only ever had the means to reproduce. And you don’t own that…

What that means is that when you buy an album by Madonna you a buying a reproduction of an idealized original event: a musical performance. That performance concluded, the companies reproduce it and sell it to the public via a particular format. However the only capital really involved on their part is the studios, the recording equipment and the reproducing equipment and the pieces of golden plastic that sit on your shelves. Copyright implies that when you buy such a piece of plastic, you only buy the right to play it back to yourself, not reproduce it yourself even though you can. This was fine in the era of cassettes when reproduction quality was pretty awful. But now that we can make indistiguishable copies of the original on our home computers, and share them with anyone in the world, for free, bypassing the whole established system, and yep, record companies, are, in Blixa Bargeld’s apt words on their way to hell.

So what of the future? Will copyright just become an outmoded fossil of the primitive past? Probably. How can it do anything else? You can’t just ban capital like the technology to reproduce because you don’t like it, which is the irony of the free market, I guess. Although the record companies have tried everything in their power to restrict us from copying and sharing our music collections, the fact is that the capital involved on their part, on which they relied for an industry has now become available to everyone with a personal computer. Bad luck. What remains though is the capital belonging to musicians and composers: the art (or artefact, or ability) of making, composing and performing original music, and that is why perhaps what Blixa said about 2% of musicians retaining copyright is not so silly after all. However, it will be more like musicians selling their music to a small audience of core fans and focussing on live performance, rather than copyright being based on aesthetic theory. Interestingly, Blixa & the Neubauten have set up a supporters' website by which to evade and bypass the record companies. Their goal is to make an album which will be released only to fans who have paid money directly to them to hear the album. This is the way of the future. And it’s a great way really. It means the unhealthy pop cult of the mega-star which peaked in the 80’s with Michael Jackson, Madonna and Prince is well and truly over. Interestingly, since then Michael Jackson has died, Madonna just keeps going to ever-diminishing returns and Prince has more or less embraced the internet.

This great reproductive levelling will mean that people with real talent will get noticed not because someone in a company boardroom decides they should, but because people actually want to hear them. Even ITunes is a great star in the sky in this respect. I find I pay for music which is unavailable anywhere else, which is not available via other channels, and I am quite happy to pay for what I consider real high quality music – but I believe this is my choice when I am paying, not for a performance, but for a re-production of one. There is a complexed ethics at work here. I feel really good when I pay for an album by a small, independent band directly to their website, because I know my money is going straight to the band and those who helped them make the art, not to to fill the wallets of greedy record company execs. I feel much less sure about where my money's going if I buy through ITunes or BigPond Music. I do know that in that case maybe only 5 to 10% of my money is going to the producers of the content though. You have got to be extremely cynical about record companies when in relation to the internet digital media market they insist on charging artists for things like "shipping costs" and "product insurance" (in case your shipload of CD sinks, it's insured) even though the downloader pays for "shipping costs" (internet traffic costs to their ISP) and a shipload of MP3s just can't get lost and destroyed. Pretty atrocious behaviour I would suggest.

As for a live performance, that great concert, you can’t ever reproduce that – that’s why musicians will always keep on playing. Long may they live, and live music performance, and let’s get reproduced music back where it belongs: into the Nietzchean realm of the Appolonian.

The Richard Dawkins Illusion

2009-09-10T00:11:00.000-07:00

This is an old post that once was lost but now is found.

[Original date: 12 March 2007]

Reading Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion, you can’t help but conclude that Dawkins has a terrible bee in his bonnet when it comes to religion. I was looking forward to reading this book, as Dawkins is an intelligent scientist and a talented writer, but in the end I came away disappointed, to say the least, and not at all convinced.

As the New York Times aptly stated, reading this book feels akin to watching a Michael Moore film. The God Delusion can be summed up as an unrelenting barrage of anecdotes, examples, arguments, lists and stories intended to prove once and for all that God does not exist and that religion itself is, more or less, utterly evil. However, (and I’m more or less of an atheist myself), I don’t know of a single Christian who has come to their faith simply by way of argument or being convinced by examples. To that extent, what this book suffers from most is a reliance on exemplification which at times almost feels obsessive. Below the surface assault of examples and anecdotes, there’s a feeling of extreme frustration, almost desperation that Dawkins conveys with regard to religion.

The problem with exemplification is that it tends to generalization and converse fallacy of accident. Particular examples are not necessarily identical to the general points they are supposed to demonstrate, at best they are textual interpretations of instances or events which may or may not have actually occurred. To this end, it is of some concern that on more than one occasion Dawkins seems to rely on hearsay to support a point. On pages 238, 239, Dawkins refers to the story of US evangelist Pat Robertson blaming Hurricane Katrina’s destruction of New Orleans on the fact of God’s displeasure that Ellen de Generis (a lesbian) lived in New Orleans (p. 239). Dawkins states in a footnote that it is unclear whether the story is true or not but it doesn’t matter, because people believe it’s true. Which is a rather strange thing to say in a book which attempts to argue that belief must submit itself to scientific truth. Wouldn’t that be rather like arguing that it doesn’t matter whether God exists or not, because lots of people believe he does?

In any case, you can prove anything you like by using examples. Do we live on a flat Earth around which the sun revolves? Sure we do, just look out your window. For example.

Proving that faith is evil or that God does not exist requires a lot more than shooting a barrage of individual anecdotes and arguments through a slit to see whether the emerging pattern is like that conforming to the behaviour of a wave or a particle. Dawkins’ approach comes across like that of the postmodernist (a comparison I’m sure he would not appreciate): it’s all surface analysis, dehistoricized, decontextualized, and deferring deeper questions of epistemology.

Indeed, this is another big problem with the book. Dawkins is hellbent on undermining the epistemology of faith, but takes his own epistemology: that of the scientific method, entirely for granted. Not for a moment is there any question that scientific truth, is, if not equivalent due to its incompleteness, then definitely on the road to Ultimate Truth. Notwithstanding, Dawkins is in fact strongest when he writes as a scientist about his own areas of expertise, those to do with science. His explanations of the power of natural selection to account for how life came to be so incredibly complex and diverse without needing to invoke instantaneous creation by a God casting magic spells form the most convincing part of the book. This forms the first part of Chapter 4, rather presumptuously titled “Why There Almost Certainly Is No God”, and you can tell Dawkins is definitely on home ground here.

This follows on from Chapter 3, in which Dawkins refutes various logical arguments for God’s existence. This chapter also reads well, but it’s covering old ground really. I don’t know anyone (except the most dedicated Catholic dogmatist perhaps) who still tries to argue that God exists by means of logical arguments. Dawkins also mentions the problem of evil, listing a number of unonvincing arguments, such as that evil is supposed to make us nicer people by teaching us patience and forbearance, or that evil is the result of a cosmic battle between God and Satan, the winner of which hasn’t quite yet been decided. Unfortunately though, Dawkins throws out the most sophisticated argument for the existence of evil along with the bathwater: that the knowledge of good and evil, and the capacity to choose between one or the other is a necessary outcome of being created as conscious agents with free will. This practice of throwing the really good arguments out with the banal is a typical ploy of his in this book, and a frustrating one for those who grapple in a deeper way with such questions, and symptomatic of the kind of postmodern “surface analysis” I referred to before.

The second part of Chapter 4 attempts to extend the natural selection argument to the sphere of cosmology. The basis of Dawkins argument that there almost certainly is no God, is that if God exists he must be incredibly complex, much more complex than the Universe he created, and that therefore arguing that God must exist because the Universe is so complex and intricate does not explain anything because you just move the problem one step backwards. Having explained the universe by means of a complex God, you then need to explain how this complex God came into being. As I mentioned, to account for the origin and complexity of life on Earth, Dawkins argues natural selection is a much better and more convincing tool than invoking God. And as I said, Dawkins sounds most plausible writing in the field he knows most about. He repeats the crucial point that life on Earth did not evolve by time + pure chance, as many Creationists refuting the theory of Evolution claim, but that natural selection directs life towards greater and greater complexity. And it sounds convincing.

When he tries to explain the existence of the Universe itself though, invoking the Anthropic Principle, he already becomes much less convincing. The Anthropic Principle does make sense, up to a point. Its scope is limited though. No matter how rationally put, it seems to me little more than an ingenious tautology. But a tautology by any other name…

The Anthropic Principle argues, “However it came to be, life must have evolved on Earth because we are here to talk about it”. No matter how eloquently stated, I cannot shake the suspicion that this is akin to saying “a duck is a duck”. To actually explain anything, you are then obliged to argue the relative probability (which Dawkins attempts to do) of life being created by God versus life spontaneously appearing and then evolving by means of natural selection. As I said, the argument for natural selection is quite strong and convincing compared to that of God magically creating everything on Earth in seven days. But when it comes to accounting for the Universe itself, Dawkins falls back on speculative cosmological theories invoking the Metaverse (the speculation in String Theory that our Universe is just one of an uncountable number of universes existing in some kind of “metaverse”) to support the Anthropic Principle: our Universe just happens to be a viable one in an uncountable number of nonviable universes, and because it is so it supports the evolution of complex life-forms and if it were not so we wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

Indeed, Dawkins cautions that the idea of the Metaverse “is hated by most physicists. I can’t understand why” (145). One reason is that the Metaverse is an inefficient and complex means by which to explain the complexity of our own and is at risk of violating Occam’s razor. The more worrying one is that the existence of other universes is simply out of the reach of observable evidence: information simply can not flow between universes without breaking all the known laws of Physics, so we will never know for sure whether or not if this Metaverse really exists or not. Which makes the idea of a Metaverse sound rather like the idea of God which Dawkins is at such pains to discredit, just an impersonal and passive one. Unfortunately this is where Dawkins more or less ends the chapter on why there almost certainly is no God, by arguing for a Metaverse instead (with the qualification that it is just a “hypothesis”, but then Dawkins worrisomely qualifies many of his arguments in this way, then going on to make them anyway as if they’re quite plausible really.)

The second part of the book is unfortunately not nearly as interesting as the first. Dawkins begins by arguing how religion and morality came to exist in a world governed by the laws of evolution. His ideas are basically grounded in those of memes and genes. I won’t go into them here, you can read them for yourself. The main problem with his argument and his biggest blind spot in the book is that by explaining the existence of religion and morality by means of science, the whole thrust of his book: that religion and faith are inherently evil, seems to be totally undermined. If religion and morality are the result of impersonal, ultimately biological evolutionary processes then I utterly fail to see how Dawkins can be so vehemently against religion. It would seem rather like being vehemently against animals of prey ruthlessly killing weaker animals. It might feel rather unpleasant and nasty to some that, say, big cats tend to brutally kill bovidae to survive, but this is just an outcome of genetic selection. No one in their right mind would call lions and tigers “evil” for doing so, and if religion is just an outcome of memetic selection I fail to see how religion can be accused of being any more or less evil. Following Dawkin’s line it’s at best just an example of a successfully evolved meme.

The chapter on the roots of morality is, for me, the weakest chapter in the book. In his case study in the roots of morality (222-226) Dawkins severely risks falling into equivocation and amphibology when using our capacity for language as a simile for our capacity for morality. On page 223, he invokes the (disputed) theory of Universal Grammar, whereby morality is built into our brains just like the “underlying deep structure of grammar is universal” because it is built into our brains. At best one might argue that the deep function of grammar is universal, and this is rather different than a deep structure. This is beside the point though.

The equivocation comes a little later when Dawkins quotes Hauser saying that “Driving our moral judgments is a universal moral grammar, a faculty of the mind…the principles that make up our moral grammar fly beneath the radar of our awareness” (223). Now, as linguists will tell you, the structure (or function) of grammar is not at all identical with a particular grammar itself, and confusing the structure of grammar with grammar itself by then referring to a hypothetical “moral grammar” is not what I would expect from a writer such as Dawkins whose whole premise is the supremacy of science, logic and rationality to explain the world around us. To extend the argument to its end, any particular “moral grammar” might be totally different from any other, even opposite (if taken seriously, you might speculate a “moral grammar” in which evil is a virtue for example), without invalidating the idea of a “universal structure of morality”. As Dawkins is rather trying to argue that we are all good at heart though, he seriously slips up here. I happened to pick up on this because I happen to know a fair bit about linguistics, but it makes me wonder where else Dawkins makes such blatant errors in argument in areas I don’t know so much about.

Dawkins then comments on the argument that if there is no God to make them there can be no moral absolutes to derive. Strangely though he leaves the argument unsatisfactorily hanging, drawing out the differences between absolutists and consequentialists and then stating that “the preferred source of absolute morality is usually a holy book of some kind…” (233). That’s OK, but it doesn’t tell me anything new at all and seems only put there to deflect the original question: What to do in a world without God in which we can transcend our evolutionary instincts and in which we are conscious to choose between good and evil. At least Sartre was brutally honest when he said that in the end, it really doesn’t matter if you choose to run over the old lady crossing the street. Without absolutes and an arbiter to enforce them, the most you can say is that any act is “authentic”.

Dawkins’ idea of God seems very narrow-minded, and from this point on the book descends into setting out to demonstrate how nasty, evil, hateful, vengeful, jealous, callous and vicious the God of the Bible is. He does this by citing example after example after example from the Old Testament of stories which prove how utterly debased and depraved Biblical morality is and what a dirty old man God is. The problem is not so much that these stories exist and that any well-read Christian knows them (without drawing general moral conclusions from them), the problem is that Dawkins’ misguided exemplification comes to the fore here. He focusses, by examples, exclusively on the nastiness in the Old Testament and totally ignores the positive aspects of Old Testament religion. I’m not going to refute by giving counter-examples, you can read the Old Testament for yourself and make up your own mind, suffice to give one verse from it: “He has shown you, O man, what is good. What does Yahweh require of you, but to act justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8).

He then goes on to say the New Testament, while an improvement, wasn’t that much better. Dawkins provides various arguments for this, none of which hold much water. He says that Jesus’ commandment to love your neighbour was only intended for fellow Jews and argues that Jesus was a devotee of in-group morality and would be turning in his proverbial grave if he knew about Paul going and preaching to the Gentiles, citing a paper by John Hartung to back up his claim. This is just plain not true. Dawkins seems to know his Bible pretty well, so it surprises me that he would ignore the verses of the Great Commission where Jesus pretty clearly said: “Go into all the world and preach the good news to all creation. Whoever believes in me will be saved…” (Mark 16:15-16). These hardly sound like the words of a devotee of in-group morality to me. Dawkins seems to get almost hysterical when discussing the meaning of Jesus’ death and atonement for sins. I quote: “I have described atonement, the central doctrine of Christianity, as vicious, sado-masochistic and repellent” (253). Personally, whatever I might think about the atonement, I find such language bordering on the offensive and hardly exemplary of someone who purports to be a rational, reasoned, level-headed scientist.

The rest of the book is mainly devoted to numerous anecdotes and examples of how evil and hateful Christians and Moslems really are, mainly by referring to acts of extremists of fundamental Christianity and Islam. While I don’t deny there some totally indefensible and horrific acts are committed by followers of religion, such acts are certainly not exclusive to religion as Dawkins on more than one occasion wishes us to believe. I can’t find it right now, but in the chapter “What’s Wrong With Religion”, analyzing conflicts caused by religion and the phenomenon of suicide bombings and terrorism, Dawkins claims that never a war was fought in the name of atheism. This may well be true, but it seems a matter of semantics to me, and it totally neglects the fact that hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Christians (and followers of other religions and beliefs) have been oppressed, tortured and killed in the name of socialism, which, like it or not, is officially an atheistic institution.

Besides I have yet to meet a Christian (and I’ve met lots of them) who actually supports things like blowing up abortion clinics or decapitating homosexuals. They’re just not that common and I get the feeling Dawkins has made way too much of the far-right fundamentalist movement. By far the majority of Christians I’ve personally met are in fact good, loving, honest, sincere people struggling with the mundane issues of life just like the rest of us.

Once again, I could go on and on, but beyond this there is not much left of the book really. It descends into a totally unconvincing argument that religion is a form of child abuse and…well…you get the drift.

To cut it short, from someone as intelligent and usually entertaining as Dawkins, this book is a really big disappointment.

Two Rare Australian Tracks: Models (Evolution) and Machinations (My Heart's On Fire)

2009-09-04T18:15:00.000-07:00

I am posting here two very incredibly rare remixes of two in any case rare Australian songs. Whether or not anyone else is interested in these tracks is irrelevant to me, it's taken me since 1993 (seriously) to find these two 12" singles again. I actually found both of them in Brisbane at the Record Market in the city in 1992 and got them for $1 each along with many, many other 12" singles. I was 20 back then and the CD was just really taking off. I don't know what made me do it - just youth, fancy, flight, whatever, but I ditched my whole record collection with my brother who promised to take good care of them but then thought it was a good idea to let his friends use my records as frisbees. And never did quite see the incongruity in doing so. Dickhead.

Anyway. Most of the really rare ones I have recovered, including these two. And here they are. I know someone will look for them, because I'm always looking for this kinda stuff ;)

LINKS:

Evolution (Extended) - Models

My Heart's On fire (Extended) - Machinations

Are We Entering The Twilight Zone???

2009-09-04T08:31:00.001-07:00

Haven't posted much recently, but two rather surreal stories caught my eye recently which I thought were worth paying attention to, which just goes to show how ridiculously crazy Australian governments are getting about regulation and how the nanny state just continues to grow and grow.

1) Queensland has banned rollerblading, skateboarding and foot scooting after sunset. Just like that. Ostensibly because such types, rather like ghosts or vampires, have the magical power to suddenly become "invisible" at night which makes them a threat and a menace to everyone. However, Transport Minister Rachel Nolan is desperate not to be seen as a party-pooper, assuring us it's for these people's safety and that she's not out to spoil anyone's fun. Well, I'm sure a hundred thousand teenage kids agree with you there Rachel! No doubt there will be a call for night-time scenes in Tony Hawke's Playstation games to be censored next. Oh Queensland. What would Australia be without you. You're so incredibly reactionary in such a cute way.

2) Moving a little further south, New South Wales, not wanting to be beaten by Queensland has also proposed some new bans. Not wanting to be outdone by its friendly rival up North, the NSW proposal is to remove the popular energy drinks V and Red Bull from store shelves everywhere for having too much...sugar? Nope. For having too much caffeine... WTF???

Primary Industries Minister Ian McDonald self-righteously froths and foams: “It’s simply unacceptable that these products, clearly marketed at youths [notice the big gaff - this guy's obviously a total old fart who just doesn't get "young people", seeing as he's still using the politically incorrect term "youth" in 2009 - Jesus, even when I was a "young person" that was already a big NO-NO. Get it together McDonald!], have appeared in the market so the Government has taken immediate action to get these illegal products off the shelves.”

But, good Lord, what next? Why just V and red Bull? They've been around for years now. Is it possible that NSW going to ban coffee next? I mean V and Red Bull contain about as much caffeine as in a standard cup of coffee. The V website states that there's about 78mg of caffeine in a 250ml can of V, while an average cup of instant coffee contains about 100mg. According to the ABC's Quantum web-site (a reliable enough source IMO), the real average for coffee is closer to 85mg (which is still more than V).

Are NSW cafes serving espressos then next on the list? But why now? Caffeine is and has been legal for ever everywhere in the world, including in NSW, so I'm just wondering if McDonald didn't walk into work the day he announced it having smoked one too many bongs and become totally confused, mixing up the drug "caffeine" with the drug "alcohol", about which there is endless talk of higher taxes and more regulation lately.

Because I just cannot think of any other explanation for suddenly deciding to ban two perfectly legal soft drinks other than that the bloke has totally lost the plot. It'll be interesting to see if the plan is successful or not.

(Disclaimer: Life Of A Rat is a regular drinker of V-white and thoroughly recommends mixing it with a double shot of Tequila as an instant hangover cure.)

A Deep, Dark Ambient Drone Gift From Heaven

2009-06-07T06:45:00.000-07:00

"Substantia Innominata - Sing the Song of the Unknown"

...is a series of 10" vinyl records being released on the Drone Records label. For someone like me, who's not only a fan of the drone and deep ambient music genre but also a fan of the old vinyl record (not because I think they sound superior or anything like that - that's just BS - but just because they are so much more visceral to play, not to mention the superior artwork; besides, I'm a nostalgic dork), this is a gift from the gods and as soon as found about the existence of this series I went ahead and blew my budget and bought all 10 records so far released (cost me EU200,- or some crazy price like that - dun wanna think about it).

The music ranges from the spiriually sublime, reverend, almost sacred drones on Voice of Eye's contribution Substantia Innominata, titled after the series, to the disturbing, frightening drones on RLW's contribution Contours Imaginaires. Another standout so far, being Hum's drones released as The Spectral Ship, although I haven't had a good chance to listen closely to the

whole set yet to figure out which are the best.

The artwork itself on each of the covers is amazing and beautiful and all the records are coloured in various hues, from white to blue to yellow to brown. If you're into drone and dark ambient this is definitely a must have!

More info at the Substantia Innominata site!

A lower quality preview of the whole series thus far is available below (format: m4a, 96kbps). I didn't get around to tagging the files, so you'll have to get the info from the site yourselves. Better yet if you're a fan of drone, buy into this series!

Substantia Innominata preview link

Pornography: Re-heat

2009-05-14T16:50:00.000-07:00

This is something for old and faithful fans of The Cure

Especially for those who love the early so-called "Trilogy" from the early 80s, comprising the 3 albums Seventeen Seconds, Faith and Pornography.

The official title of this album is Lágrimas De Miedo 14 - Pornography: Re-heat and is actually cover of the whole of The Cure's classic 1982 release "Pornography", this release was given away with Issue No. 14 of Fear Drop magazine, which issue was devoted to a short study in the form an essay about the same album.

Faithful in terms of the original vision for the album, the treatments here are harsh, cold and experimental, much harsher and more difficult than even the original in fact.

Nadja get the ball rolling with a 10 minute treatment of "One Hundred Years", slowing down the original to half speed and almost crushing it under a massive wall of guitars: all drone, distortion, reverb and feedback, with Aidan Baker's vocals buried way in the background so that the track almost dissolves in its own excess, almost like a heroin overdose. Nadja draw out and emphasize to extremity the feverish guitar riffs of the original version. It's my personal favourite off this collection of treatments.

Dirge follow with a metallic, thrashing cover of "A Short Term Effect", once again slowed down and clocking in at over 9 minutes, stretching the original song to focus right in on its dissonant and abysmal mood.

Savage Republic follow next, covering the only single off the album "The Hanging Garden" and stay quite faithful, honing in on the complex tribal drum patterns. The melody is sacrificed though for a harsh monotone vocal, well drawing out the implicit violence of the original.

Wild Shores are up next with "Siamese Twins" which is given experimental surgery. Not much of the original remains at all. The rhythm is entirely replaced, the accompaniment is replaced with electronic noises of indeterminate origin and the vocals are "sung" in monotone by a cold, emotionless speech synthesizer. The effect is quite disturbing as "Siamese Twins" is perhaps the most ostensibly emotional song on the album, in terms of traditional broken romance themes.

Year Of No Light are up after that with "The Figurehead", and I have to say I was rather disappointed with this interpretation. The original orbits entirely around the brilliantly articulated and developed guitar melodies/riffs over a complex rhythm pattern - at an almost classical depth - but unfortunately Year Of No Light decides to turn these into a tangled, almost indecipherable mess where the basic structure of the song becomes almost impossible to follow. More than once I couldn't make out what part of the song I was listening to. The vocals also are re-arranged and placed back in the mix, but not quite far enough, so that you're constantly trying to follow them, rather than just giving in, letting them go and dissolve as was the impulse with Nadja's interpretation. The overall effect is messy, uncoordinated and sounds like a drunken rehearsal. Maybe that was the intention, but it doesn't work in my opinion. Maybe I just need to give it more time. It will probably end up becoming my favourite track after a while, knowing how I go with albums.

After that enter Kill The Thrill with "A Strange Day". This re-working is the most faithful to the original. They retain the tempo, the rhythm, and even the arrangement of the original, though expanding the sound somewhat, with all its synth chords and guitar riffs. De Benedetti's vocals sound much more harrowed and gravelly than Smith's on the original, conveying the same angst but in a more sombre, serious way in a very continental conjuration of Angst.

Penultimately appear Troum doing "Cold". They ditch the rhythm section of the original, choosing to retain and focus on the keyboard parts in order to fully extract the dark ambient (dare I say Goth) potential of the original. The vocals are whispered here rather than sung to accentuate their dark portent.

Finally there's Japanese experimental act Contagious Orgasm with the title track "Pornography" and Hashimoto here settles for a deconstruction retaining connotative elements of the original - the backmasked vocals, sounding like they're coming over a phone connection here; the weaving melodic riffs here played on what sound like oboes and strings rather than keyboards and distorted guitar against the one note per bar base line (as opposed to bass), although the baseline melody has been re-arranged. These are underscored by electronic parts and once again, a speech synthesizer doing fragments of the lyrics in Japanese perhaps? I don't know really. The original musical and melodic structures are dispensed with. Only something of the form, nothing of the substance of the original track remains.

Which is a good way to close this album as this tribute is very faithful to the album's form and its structure but extremely experimental and playful with its substance or its content, which makes it a thoroughly fascinating experience to listen to!

Link to fileshare: Pornography: Re-heat by Various Artists

Who Made Who (Special Collectors Mix) - AC/DC

2009-05-03T05:05:00.000-07:00

Do you happen to be an AC/DC fan? I didn't used to be when I was a teenager. I was much too pretentious, aloof and Goth to admit to liking anything by a band as boganish as AC/DC. There were a couple of tracks I couldn't help tapping my pointy black suede boots along to, no matter how hard I tried to stop myself though. These were Hell's Bells, You Shook Me All Night Long (you still can't grow up in Australia without getting to know that song) and Who Made Who?

Now that I'm old, I can appreciate what a cool band AC/DC are. I even own Back In Black and the unfairly maligned Fly On The Wall by them. And one other thing I picked up, which I have since realized is probably on of the rarest AC/DC items around. it's the 12" single release of Who Made Who? and it includes the only ever 12" extended remix of any AC/DC song ever made. If you're a fan, you need to have this obviously, so here it is:

Download: Who Made Who? (Special Collectors Mix) - AC/DC

Streaming Preview:

Health Warning: Sexed Up Teens Out Of Control!!

2009-05-02T07:46:00.001-07:00

It sounds like something out of William S. Burrough's The Wild Boys.

PARENTS will be urged to snoop on their children in a bid to halt an alarming rise in the number of teenagers sending sexual images of themselves via mobile phone..." reports The Sydney Morning Herald today.

Community Services Minister, Linda Burney is apparently "horrified" that teenagers are sending naughty pix of themselves via mobile phone and whereas the government advice was previously to respect teenagers' privacy and let them do their thing on the net it has suddenly done an about-face and decided that parents need to snoop, spy and generally act as Big Brother to everything their adolescents are doing on the internet, lest they send off an MMS or upload a photo that potentially damages not only their future career prospects, but also destroys their chances of ever having a boyfriend/girlfriend, will "become part of a young person's 'digital footprint', lasting forever", as well as leading them to being raped by an evil, axe-wielding child rapist, if I read the honourable member's anxiety levels correctly.

Yet another moment in the ongoing saga of child porn hysteria? Methinks so. I mean, at 36, I'm sorta over the hill, but I remember in my heyday we may not have had mobile phones or the internet, but there was notwithstanding sex all around. Lots of it. The fact is, teenagers have always been fascinated with and having sex and these days they just exploit sexuality all the better for having modern technology to do it with. I'm not saying young people should go gung-ho and send naked shots of themselves to all and sundry or even that's it's a good idea to send a sexually explicit picture of yourself to anyone full stop. Definitely not the brightest idea considering most teenage relationships last about two weeks on average.

But where is the evidence that doing so will damage your future prospects or lead to sexual assault? I'm not saying that it's impossible that sending explicit MMS messages of yourself won't lead to any of these things, but is there any hard evidence that doing so will? Is there an epidemic of sexual assaults on teenagers by serial child rapists because they're being idiots about how they use their MMS features? Not one shred of evidence is in fact cited in the article.

Except for the incident related in the last paragraph:

"In New Jersey, a 14-year-old schoolgirl has been accused of distributing child pornography after posting nearly 30 nude pictures of herself on MySpace.com - charges that could force her to register as a sex offender if convicted."

Well, of course if the state is going to convict you, punish you and force you to register yourself as a sex offender for sending nude pics of yourself then it follows that doing so could be self-damaging. But it's the state that's doing the damage, not anyone else. The Minister does a brilliant Newspeak take on this incident:

"Everyone needs to understand that, first and foremost, it is illegal to take sexual photos of children and young people and it is also an offence to pass them on. Young people do not often think about the consequences of their actions. What they now think is an innocent joke or just flirting can be very damaging if it falls into the wrong hands."

In plain English this would read, "Teenagers need to understand it's illegal to take sexual photos of themselves and pass them on, because adults like me are totally and hysterically morally outraged by the idea that teenagers could even think about sex, let alone engage in its activity."

And it goes without saying that the evil perpetrators here are 100% totally out of control boys and the victims are all pure, innocent, but dumb, gullible girls being pressured. Which is an insult to the modesty and decency of most boys and the intelligence of most girls.

I mean if we're criminalizing kids and punishing them for making "child porn" of themselves instead of focussing on hunting down the real bastards abusing kids out there, what the hell have we come to? I reckon people like the Minister could do with a good sit-down on the psychoanalyst's couch. But first of all before that she needs to go out and get herself a brain.

Kids are kids. One of the things about being a kid is that you tend to end up doing childish, silly, irresponsible things. That's part of growing up. Turning kids into sex offenders for being childish is about the most crazy and mule-like way of thinking I've ever heard of. It could only be invented by the zany Americans, and as Australian Ministers, with their repressed Victorian-era baggage just aren't smart enough to think of such convoluted ways of dealing with a problem, lazy Australian Health Ministers subsequently eagerly adopt US-style practice without a momen't reflection. Does anyone really seriously think that apart from pandering to a conservative electorate and avoiding spending any money on practical things like "edyookaishun", snooping and spying teenagers is actually going to be a Solution To The Problem?

Close To Me [Extended Version] - The Cure

2009-03-30T17:38:00.000-07:00

My all-time favourite song and remix would have to be this 1985 classic - Close To Me, by The Cure. This is the original extended version released on 12" single which I picked up off eBay. I'm making it available here because it's such a cool song and I know it's totally deleted from WMG's catalogue and has been for more than 2 decades now, ie unavailable to purchase anywhere in the whole infinite universe. If you're a Cure fan and have stumbled on this and you don't have this in your collection yet, hope you enjoy it!

Link 1 "Close To Me [Extended Remix]" by The Cure

Link 2 "Close To Me [Extended Remix]" by The Cure

Economic Meltdown

2009-02-25T00:14:00.000-08:00

Michael Pettis, professor of finance at Peking University:

"The world doesn't need more stuff to sell," explains Professor Pettis, "it needs more buyers."

Maybe we don't need either more stuff or more buyers. Who knows, what with the constant warnings about climate change, the need to conserve and cut back on our extragavagant consumption habits, maybe this financial meltdown is actually bitter medicine that will do us good in the end.

Since forever it seems everything has been geared towards economic growth and increased prosperity. This makes total sense, in theory anyway, for the majority of the world living in poverty for whom these terms probably mean very little, but for us living in rich, developed nations the question ought to be, how big can we get anyway? We've been so sucked into the ideologies of materialism and conspicuous consumption that we're like total zombies. Everyone wants to get super rich, and expects to do so, without even for a moment thinking about why we want to get super rich in the first place. It's a dull cliche: "money doesn't buy happiness", but it's not a dumb one.

How much more can we all buy, consume and throw away before we're happy anyway? Before it all comes tumbling down? Well, looks like we just found out.

Of course if we all stopped spending it'd be total and utter disaster. But I hope maybe we're set to go back to a slightly simpler life for a while, and maybe it will do the whole planet some good.

It's cruel of course. Because every factory that closer will cause hardship for its workers. But will also be one less factory polluting the environment. I just hope in the end those responsible for this almighty mess end up paying for it, but I'm not holding my breath after hearing that Wall Street bankers paid themselves some $18 billion in bonuses at the end of 2008, just after getting a $700 billion bailout. The world sux, don't it.

The Thought Police Are Coming

2008-12-12T22:08:00.000-08:00

A fascinating story was posted at New Scientist yesterday about scientists inventing mind-reading software that might soon be able to record even your dreams.

At this stage it's pretty crude, as these things always start out, but already an image of the word "neuron" can be constructed from scratch just by scanning the brainwave patterns of someone looking at it. Crude maybe, but that's pretty full on if you think about it.

The leader of the project, Yukiyasu Kamitani also recognizes the ethical implications:

Kamitani is well aware of the negative potential of the technology.

"If the image quality improves, it could have a very serious impact on our privacy and other issues. We will have to discuss with many people - not just scientists - how to apply this technology," he says.

Well, stuff that I say. I mean, this is perfect - it's a total godsend for the authorities and the government! Think about it: a thought scanner in every home! If anyone so much as thinks or dreams about prohibited matters such as terrorism, euthanasia, child porn or what a boofhead Kevin Rudd is, the Australian Federal Police will be able to detain and arrest them before even the remotest possibility of a crime being committed is realized. Who could ask for more?

Thought Crime can finally become reality. George Orwell had no idea what a good thing he was on to.

SPOT THE DIFFERENCES:

Schadenfreude...

2008-09-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

is a German word which tranliterates as damage-joy and translates as the less than pleasant practice of taking pleasure or satisfaction in the misfortunes of others.

I am at serious risk of Schadenfreude here, but after a lifetime of doubt at the irrationalism of religion, this story about a Baptist Church college teacher, and obviously a Christian, who took his students on a 3 week tour of Thailand to teach his students about compassion and community service getting struck by lightning and killed is just too full-on.

I think it actually makes the statement offered by School Chairman Rod White "Our hearts and prayers go out to the family " tip over from irony into cruel sarcasm. Like, the last thing you would want to do is pray to the God, on whose service he was there in the first place and who then let him get struck by lightning and die. Right? Well, unless you're a Christian and as irrational as a gambling addict who's going to win the jackpot, today, finally.

It's just too much. If ever you needed proof that there just is no God and that we are all together on this trainwreck of existence then this would have to be a contender for first prize.

My Thing For The 12" Single [Warning: Nostalgia Alert]

2008-09-19T05:52:00.000-07:00

Appropriately, when I was 12 years old I discovered the 12" single. Until then life had consisted of 12" LP's (Long Plays, ie full length albums played at 33 & 1/3 Revolutions Per Minute [RPM]) and 7" singles (little brothers of the album played at 45RPM). 7" singles (or 15.5cm singles - as WEA unceremoniouslyand totally unsuccesfully tried to dub them - some things never change, ie, the way record company execs are just total geeks) had just two tracks and were a teenager thing, after all on a $13 a week paper round, whole entire albums took quite some discipline to acquire, which I had none of. Then, one day on the radio I heard this strange and unusual version of a song I really liked. Except, instead of being 3 minutes long it was more than twice as long, in fact closer to 7 minutes! I was instantly hooked. How totally perfect! My favourite song, but twice as long. But what was this strange format they were playing on the nightly 1422 3XY Hottest 10? I soon found out it was a 12" remix, and thus I discovered the 12" single rack at the record shop, until then totally invisible to me. I quickly developed something of a fetish for 12" singles and remixes, being the pervert that I am. I had to get every single extended remix I could lay my hands on, whether physically from the shop or off the radio. Thankfully 3XY was very liberal with the 12" singles on Saturday nights, unlike every other radio station in Melbourne, and I got many a remix on cheap Coles brand tape in extremely shoddy mono AM sound thanks to their totally cool DJs. Thank you Saturday night programmers on Saturdany night 3XY in 1985/1986 - you have no idea how much influence you've had on me!! But sometimes it got a bit much. I remember one night spending 4 hours just hoping to get hold of the extended remix of Invisible Touch by Genesis. I knew there was one, but they just wouldn't play it! Goddammit!! It was driving me crazy! I finally rang up the station and demanded to know why they were playing every thing else available as an extended remix except that bloody song. Apparently the record company had never sent them a copy. Oh well. It was 1986 after all. But over the years I've wondered why I was so totally into 12" (vinyl, that is). I mean, a lot of these remixes leave a lot to be desired - a whole lot of them are mixers (people) turning up faders (knobs) of individual tracks, and well, ho hum, so what. On the other hand, I have been buying up quite a few of these pieces again, and now I think I might know why - it's because of all the pre-CD disc formats, the 12" vinyl was by far the superior in terms of sound quality. we had a pretty decent streo at home and I mean, take a close look, it's one song, on a plate spun at 45RPM (instead of 33RPM), usually short enough to take perfect advantage of the sweet spot - the audio quality is far superior to that of the competing formats at that time, the 7", the 33RPM LP album or the cassette tape. Fuck, it was no fetish, I was just a little audiophile in the breeding, haha. Interestingly, as soon as I got a CD player I pretty much lost all interest in vinyl - proof enough that analogue is not magically warmer, or sweeter than digital -until now that is, when nostalgia is taking hold, and I am compelled to stalk 12" racks in record shops once more, except now everthing is second hand, although at least blessedly free of any inflation over 20 years. I'm paying the same now for a 12" single as I did in 1985 LOL, except now I have a lot more money.

Too Close For Comfort

2008-09-06T15:39:00.000-07:00

I really enjoy searching out difficult and challenging music, and every so often I happen across something which totally blows you out of the water. I usually steer well clear of metal as it's not a a style of music that has ever impressed me much, so excuse me for coming across the style of doom/drone metal really late. Just recently I have been exploring this type of music and a lot of it I really like. I've always been quite a fan of drone in general, for example Spacemen 3, Coil's Constant Shallowness Leads To Evil and their release as Time Machines as well as ambient/atmospheric drone such as just about everything by Lustmord as well as lots of stuff post-rock is all music I have a lot of time for. So the other day I happened upon the new album by the Fuck Buttons, which has to be a classic drone album as well as contender for an album of the year award.

Anyway, being in the mood, I typed in the tag "drone" in that most wonderful of websites Last FM and apart from being introduced to Have A Nice Life, Rosetta and Nadja, early yesterday morning the drone tag stations just happened to play a track called Too Close Enough To Touch by a doom metal act called Khanate. Wow - talk about something else. How to describe these guys? I guess you could say that this is the band you might go see live at the local on a Friday night if you were living in the pits of hell. Khanate take difficult music to whole new extremes. Their stuff is despair, ugliness, hopelessness, depression, isolation and brutality violently mixed up, shaken around and vomited out through your sound system. There is nothing redeeming, nothing cathartic, nothing affirming about anything they do. Their most important work - 2003's Things Viral - is a chaotic mix of horribly downtuned grunge guitars, subwoofer exploding bass and extremely.........................bloody.................slow........................drums. In fact against Alan Dubin's vocals, the rest of the band sounds like it's lurching around in the final throes of death, ready to collapse into and drown in its own abysmal aural void at any given moment. And when the album draws to a close it does not do so with some kind of purging, cleansing wall of noise - it simply disintegrates altogether into a screech of feedback and desperate drumrolls as Dubin makes his last stand, wailing over and over "Visions! Sicken! Sicken!!" Then, suddenly without warning, it's all over.

Yet, it works. Sparse, minimalist, totally ugly and agonizingly slow (the album only has 4 tracks, 2 of which near the 20 minute mark in length) there's a crispness, a dichotomous, paradoxical cleanliness to the production and arrangements which may be the only dim ray of light and hope which marks this work. Hope banished to the badlands of pure structural function, now there is something really special. Against this, as I wrote, fight Alan Dubin's tortured, menacing vocals, and he is really something else when he sings. Constantly at the forefront, he keeps what's left of anything that remotely sounds like music together from total collapse, sounding something like a cross between a manic depressive Bon Scott [AC/DC] sedated with Serapax and Peter Jackson's Gollum in a really dangerously foul mood. Dubin screeches and screams, then suddenly he whispers and then disappears altogether for a minute or two, letting James Plotkin and fellow band players stagger and falter inebriatedly onwards, only to return screeching, his voice now run through processors, making him sound almost unbearably sinister; reminiscent of a demon on LSD. Yep, Khanate are really something else.

Of course, the question begs to be asked - Why would anyone want to enjoy something that is so dark, down and depressing?

It turns out it's in the structure of the sound after all - there is a glimmer of hope there. What I like about Khanate is what they do with pure energy, and whether it's dark or bright, happy or depressing is ultimately irrelevant and of little consequence- exactly what a sage of the Tao te Ching might suggest. In fact, this is Zen meditation music for people who know the dark is just as important as the light.

The Tao doesn't take sides - it gives birth to both good and evil...When the great Tao is forgotten "goodness" and "piety" appear... I think this goodness and piety is in the spirit of mauvaise foi which Khanate totally smashes to bits. If they have one virtue it's a kind of extreme ontological honesty. They are the best antidote to pretentious and insincere compliments and moral platitudes. Okay, I might be getting a bit pretentious there myself, invoking the Tao and all, so I think I'll leave you to conclude for yourself.

What I really like about Khanate though is that just when I'd actually given up hope, just when I thought there was nowhere else to go with rock 'n' roll, that it really had all been tried before, along comes along a band that just blows you right away.

Check out their video for Too Close Enough To Touch just below, and see what you think.

The 2008 Communist Party of China Olympics

2008-08-21T20:41:00.000-07:00

(Image by "Rebelbase" courtesy of FreeRepublic)

The 2008 Beijing Olympics. Huh - What of it? Should have been called the 2008 CCP Olympics for all anyone got a chance to get into the Olympic Spirit. If there is one thing the CCP has be totally credited for and immensely proud of it's, in typical commie fashion, utterly and totally crushing the Olympic Spirit once and for all.

Well done Mr Hu and Mr Wen! You've achieved what you set out to do - total and utter submission of every aspect and expression of the Olympics to the complete and absolute control of the Almighty Communist Party Of China.

And for patriotic Chinese reading this - please note well that I am referring only to the Communist Party of China and do not thereby intend to imply or want to be misinterpreted as implying in any way that I thereby refer either to the People of China or the Historical Nation of China which are two totally separate entities, in all ways distinct from the CCP which parasitically and satanically continues to siphon the very life from your noble human souls in my opinion. I have total respect for the people of China and for China as a country and a culture. I have no respect whatsoever for repressive totalitarian regimes.

Consider the following as proof that any shred of humanity and spirit has been exorcised from the Olympic Games:

As widely reported in the international media, the CCP ordered several large hotel chains under threat of loss of operating license, to install invasive security systems in order to spy on (foreign) guests staying during the Olympics, which included monitoring of email and internet usage.
On top of that though, not so widely reported, UK intelligence chiefs John Evans of MI5 and John Scarlet of MI6 warned all visiting officials back in July to be wary of so-called "honey traps" planted by the CCP - basically, attractive female agents planted to seduce foreign officials and get them back to the officials' hotel rooms in order to steal information and also, to be wary of the fact that hotel cleaning staff could be CCP agents using a variety of excuses to enter foreigners' rooms up to five times a day. This isn't conspiracy theory folks, this is from MI5 and MI6.
400 Chinese girls had to strip naked as part of the application process to work at the Opening Ceremony. They were also subjected to 13 hours a day of 'smile training'. (Epoch Times)
Foreign clergy were banned from serving athletes in the Olympic Village and were replaced with local CCP sanctioned Chinese clergy, many of whom could barely speak English. This especially became an issue for the Americans after the murder of the father of the coach US men's volleball team. After intense pressure the CCP relented and allowed a chaplain who spoke fluent English to enter the village. (Washington Times)
The CCP, being so paranoid about the possibility of spectators becoming trouble makers decided, in their infinite wisdom, that the best solution would be to keep most seats empty, leading to the bizarre situation of sold-out Olympic events with empty stadiums. When (and what else did they expect for heaven's sake???) the rest of the world started demanding to know what was going on, they filled up the seats with "cheerleaders" - no doubt all of them carefully screened and approved by the Public Security Bureau beforehand.
An armed tank in front of the media centre - just to let the pesky media know who's boss. I couldn't have imagined a more poignant and aesthetically perfect Orwellian 1984 moment. It brought tears to my eyes. Well done.
The Yang Peiyi lip-synching scandal - did they really expect us to believe that Lin Miaoke was anything but totally devastated? But it was in the 'national interest'! You mean in the interest of some sexist, backward Politbureau prick. I mean, Mr. Hu & Mr. Wen, for God's sake, what do you take us Westerners for?? A bunch of dumbass donkeys so zoned out we can't tell red from green??? WAKE UP!!!
The cancellation by the Beijing Olympic organisers with the scandalous backing of the IOC of the daily press briefing after the media insisted on asking questions about things like air quality, pro-Tibet protests, amd a million other awkward "nit-picking" (according to the now infamous Wang Wei) issues that it is reporters' jobs to raise.
The sentencing of two elderly women, one of whom is almost blind, to a year's Re-education through Labour, for daring to apply to protest about the loss of their house at the officially set aside public space for protests during the Olympics. According to the New China News Agency, 77 applications were made for peaceful protests at this state sanctioned protest space which was set up by the CCP especially for people to voice their concerns during the Olympics and for which the IOC hailed and applauded the CCP. Not one of the over 77 applications was successful. Not a single protest has actually been staged there. (According to Wang Wei, all the disputes for which the applications had been lodged had been already resolved, so there was no need to make use of the space after all. Jeez, they got a lame excuse for everything don't they. And the pollution in Beijing? Oh yea, that was caused by too many fairies in the back of the garden farting apparently.) And the elderly couple's crime? "Disturbing the public order". At least the PSB bureau which served the notice of sentence was apparently so embarassed at having to serve it they are letting the couple serve their sentence in their home rather than sending them to a concentration, sorry, re-education camp; to be tortured to death, sorry I mean, liberated through invigorating hard work.

And on and on and on it goes.

The IOC is the Whore of Babylon
(see the Book of Revelation for more info)

And how does the IOC respond? Well the IOC said its job is to be concerned about the smooth running of the events themselves (ie, they're not even really interested in what happens off the field, like in the rest of stadium space) than 'side-issues'.

Oh sorry, actually, the IOC meant to say it is more interested in making sure there is absolutely no threat whatsoever to the countless millions of dollars it has received and will receive for Olympic viewing rights. As long as everything looks okay on TV then everything is okay, as far as the IOC is concerned. And the Olympic Spirit?

Get real...grow up - STUFF the Olympic Spirit - what are you, a moron?? There's money, truckloads full of money at stake here after all. (And on that note, what the fuck are professional sports players such as Aussie tennis player Lleyton Hewitt doing at the Olympics anyway? Since when did tennis become an Olympic sport? Oh, right, since the IOC started worshipping Mammon.)

Art and The Abject

2008-08-07T01:08:00.000-07:00

The world of art is in trouble again, this time not because of paedophilia and child abuse, but because one of the judges on the Blake Prize panel, which is a prize for religious art, resigned after the executive officer changed the verdict and made a work by Adam Cullen the first prize. I actually agree with most of what the aggrieved judge, Christopher Allen had to say about the matter. Cullen's work is indeed kinda boring, a cheap thrills piece that says next to nothing about religion. Which is probably the idea, postmodern and cool and all. As Cullen so sensitively put it, "it's just a Jew on a cross". Yea. Of course. It's just a Jew. On a cross. How Cullen manages to somehow magically, eerily and totally evade 2000 years of history is beyond me. But, anyway, fair enough, crucifixes are everywhere and they are kinda dull and to make Cullen's work, which comes across as a not very inspiring caricature of the crucifixion the winner seems to work, in appropriately postmodern fashion, without any rationale whatsoever. Ho hum.
What is interesting though are the general questions about aesthetics the two duellers raise. One reason Allen quit is because he believes that art should be moving. Actually, inspiring, rich, enduring and suggestive are the adjectives he uses. This is interesting because we haven't heard those kinds of things in the field of aesthetics for a long time. Allen obviously believes that religious art should be, well, religious. In tone at least. Like, reverential. Cullen on the other hand is even more hopelessly idealistic, cynic that he wants us to believe he is. He give his game away when he says, "you know, you take up art where language fails you." Yes, quite. Very Nietzchean indeed. But hang on Cullen, if you then want us to take your crucifixion piece seriously on that level then I can only conclude that you are on a level of abject despair and hopelessness that is no longer interesting but has become nothing but tired pastiche. Jew on a cross indeed. But a Jew who had words to speak at least. Better words than your kinda teenage rebellious slogan "Only woman bleed". I mean Alice Cooper? Come on, if you wanna be so pop at least reference something cool.

Aesthetics is neither about religious fervour or empty idealism. Aesthetics is about the contradiction between what we want the world to be and what actually punches us in our guts. To this extent I am totally on Allen's side. Cullen's work doesn't even wink at you, let alone punch you in the guts. I mean compare Cullen to a real pusher of boundaries, Dali's crucifixion and you'll get the point, I'm sure:

go foetus go

2008-07-22T18:21:00.000-07:00

Just recently I've been totally getting into the music of Foetus, which is basically Jim Thirwell's abiding project. It's totally blown me away. It's weird, sometimes bands can pass you by your whole life and then, one day, you suddenly sit up and take notice and it toally rocks your spirit. There's no reason I should have neglected Foetus for so long. Thirwell has collaborated with many of my favourite acts, including people like Coil, Nick Cave, Ministry and Nine Inch Nails and heaps more. A couple of Foetus tracks have been sitting in my library for ages and occassionally they'll pop up in a playlist but I guess his music just didn't strike me. Til now. It's like certain music chooses you - it waits until you're in the right state to receive it and then it devours you. Or maybe the fact that Thirwell often uses big band and jazz elements in his work didn't fit my narrow-minded conception of what "industrial/experimental" music ought to sound like. I dunno, whatever. In any case, I'm totally into Foetus right now. I'm listening to it all day long, like a teenager who's just discovered his favourite band of all time, haha. I was thinking about what album to buy next the other day and it occurred to me that I have no Foetus albums in my collection at all. This seemed rather bad to me, it made my library incomplete somehow. So I bought the album Love, more or less on a whim. And fell in love. Then I got hold of four more or albums, Flow, Hole, Gash, Thaw and Nail, as you do these days with DSL boradband connections and finally also purchased what I've decided already is a masterpiece; his latest release, Damp. I can't find a good link for it, but the whole thing is available to buy at the Foetus website, linked to above.

What's so good about Foetus then? Well, it's definitely not to most people's tastes but I think it's genius. Complex arrangements, instrumentations and orchestrations, the way he mixes and mashes up just about every musical genre ever invented, from trance techno to big band to classical to metal in a celebration of industrial style musical jouissance, his hilarious, piercing acidic lyrics. I dunno, better you listen for yourself, because it doesn't matter. Most people find Foetus totally unpalatable - I don't want to come over pretentious, but Foetus is really for the few who think too much, are easily bored, so inclined and need a whole lot more than the daily clutter you hear on FM radio.

My fave track at the moment is Chimera [clicking on link is strongly recommended! Go on - I know you want to]. It's a cocoon of perfect contradiction and dichotomy - tender and acidic, beautiful and totally insincere, a pastiche of longing and desire. Total genius! ;-)

Watch that Ibuprofen now!

2008-07-20T22:45:00.000-07:00

Took some Nurofen Plus (four, exactly) to quell a hangover the other day. My God. My liver didn't like it at all. It went into toxin overload and swelled up like a balloon and the pain...man, I hope I never ever get hepatitis.

I've heard warnings before about what ibuprofen can do to your liver but never took them very seriously. Nurofen Plus is a special kind of Nurofen you can get here. It's laced with 14mg of codeine per pill. Obviously, that's not heaps, but still a significant amount of opiates you can get over the counter without a doctor's script. So to stop people shooting them up, they are heavily scored with chalk. I'm sure that doesn't do you any good whatsoever either.

As usual, at first I thought it was just me who got into trouble with this but apparently not so according to this article at:

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,23022299-1702,00.html

Nurofen Plus - medicine not to mess with...especially after you've been drinking.

Untitled Poem

2008-06-19T20:53:00.000-07:00

Sliding down routine
This terrifying cosiness
The sky a mediocre grey
Stuck in ochre stains of the democratic sun
Incanting the murmuring breeze

Is this all there is? he dreams,
floating affray, drifting away in an aura boat,
babbling out in apostrophe, assonance and appearance
Divined cliche of floating dreams
His ochre voice and muttering a
grey intonation of the sheepish sun

Let me be disturbed
worshipping voodoo haystacks and tattoo spirits
Piercing gods insisting desire
Another way to sing
Of the gloom and all pervading heaviness of meaning

Let me not be ashamed
Nor let my enemies triumph over me

Cold Winter My Ass

2008-06-11T04:34:00.000-07:00

MEDIA WATCH: Don't you just love weather stories? Especially ones that make predictions about the coming season. The Bureau makes a few offhand comments about the coming winter expected to be "business as usual" [their stats are saying there's an even chance of a normal winter] and the ski resorts say they're looking forward to a "bumper season" [well of course they would be, snow is how they make their money] and the next thing you know, the headline in The Age is "coldest winter in a decade". Talk about extrapolation [and dodgy journalism]. My prediction: for a dry, sunny, warm winter and within the next fortnight we might even see some all-time June high temp. records broken. Why? Coz the BOM is bound (I don't mean in a bad way, I mean it just has to stay objective and as close as to the actual data as possible - it has to be as credible as possible) to ignore Global Warming effects, but it's exactly these that are giving us the massive blocking highs and sissy cold fronts which will gave Melbourne no less than 19 degrees today and more to follow...

Read the hyperbole

Update 22 August.

So what actually happened? Well, June panned out with an average of 10-16 degrees, against the usual 7-14 with just 14mm of rain against the usual of 49mm but about average sunshine...thus, so much for the bumper snow season in June.

July was a bit closer to normal with 7-14 degrees against the longterm normal of 6-13 with almost the normal amount of rain (for a change) and a fair bit more sunshine than usual. Not bad for the ski resorts, but nothing outrageous. Business as usual.

August looks like it's going to be slightly cooler than usual - panning out at 7-14 degrees against the longterm 7-15 degrees (although everyone's screaming about how unbelievably bloody cold it is! - shows you how quickly we get used to Global Warming haha, last year in August it was 9-17, with 6.5 hours of sunshine a day versus the longterm 4.7 hours; which is well above the longterm norm, but I noticed no one said a word about how bloody warm and sunny it was for winter!) Good for the ski resorts no doubt, but bumper season? Hardly.

Með suð í eyrum...

2008-06-11T04:05:00.000-07:00

These days I'm not much of a fan any more, except when it comes to Icelanders Sigur Ros. Whenever they do something interesting like putting out an album or a DVD or touring I go all adolescent and get very excited with anticipation. Which is kinda a nice feeling. So I'm very happy that at the moment said Icelanders are up to lots of stuff. They're just about to put out a new album called [in English] With a buzz in the ears we play endlessly. And it's available right now as a hi-fi [128 kbps] audio stream at Last FM! Cool or what :)

You can also stream it from their website although the quality isn't as good as at last FM. And you can watch the video to the first single Gobbledidook which features lots of naked people running around in a forest [very profound I'm sure] as well downloading a 320 kpbs MP3 of the first single all gratis! Obviously the Rosses are not afraid of the internet or sharing their music for free which is a good thing I reckon.

Best of all they're doing a world tour and coming to Melbourne Australia on August 1st. Should be great! Cool, cool, very cool.