Sam Moore 1935 - 2025
35 minutes ago
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
'Games Perverts Play'
As Oscar Wilde may have said, ‘everything is about sex, except for sex itself. Sex is all about power’.
How do we experience the power struggles inherent in our sexual encounters and relationships? Who dominates and who submits, and why? How does power seep out of the physical and into the psychological? What happens to power when we get dressed and go back into our ‘real’ lives? Is there pleasure without power? Is there power without exploitation?
The writers at Games Perverts Play have explored all of these questions and come up with some interesting, arresting and downright disturbing answers.
I am delighted to be presenting work here once again by the talented Mark Simpson, Marc Nash, Dan Holloway , and Penny Goring .It also gives me great perverse pleasure to be sharing new writing from Marc Horne and Robert James Russell. This is the first public showcase for an exciting young voice in North American – what do we call it these days? Literature?- Elliott Deline
Some of the pieces are illustrated with photography by the amazing Caroline Hagood, Chris Floyd, and Steve Zeeland
I don’t much care for power. If ever I come to possess it I just want to drop it immediately, like a hot brick. But thankfully when in the right hands, power can be very exciting indeed. I hope when you have finished reading and looking at the pieces here, you will agree with me.
Your humble editor,
Quiet Riot Girl
‘Language is Power’ – Roland Barthes
HERE
Libya crisis may save Nicolas Sarkozy from electoral humiliation
"The French do like to have their president play world statesman," mused one diplomat in Paris last week, before France's Mirage and Rafale fighter planes had taken to the skies. "A good crisis," he added, might be just what Sarkozy needs.
He certainly needs something. A week ago he was staring at polls so ominous some analysts wondered if he'd even make it into second place in next year's presidential contest. One survey put Sarkozy behind both his most likely Socialist opponent and Marine Le Pen, the new leader of the far-right National Front founded by her father, Jean-Marie. Sunday's cantonal elections were expected to bring more bad news for the president's UMP party...
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Jonathan Freedland @'The Guardian'
What’s in a Name? ‘Odyssey Dawn’ is Pentagon-Crafted Nonsense
Each command within the vast Defense Department apparatus is given a series of two-letter groupings that they can use for their operations’ two-word sobriquets. Under the system, U.S. Africa Command, nominally in charge of the Libya strikes, was given three different sets of words that it could begin the operation with. “These words begin between the letters JF-JZ, NS-NZ and OA-OF, and those three groups give about 60 some odd words,” explains Africom spokesman Eric Elliott. “So the folks who were responsible for naming this went through and they had done recent activities with NS and they went to O.”
Using the O series of letters, Africom officials picked out “Odyssey” for the first word. The second word is picked “as random as possible because that’s the goal of these operational names,” says Elliot. Africom pulled out “Dawn” for its second word and the resulting combination, “Odyssey Dawn,” is devoid of any intended meaning, Elliott insists.
The modern system for assigning names to operations, exercises and the like came out of bad PR experiences in the Korean and Vietnam wars, according to Lt. Col. Gregory Sieminski’s brief history of “The Art of Naming Operations,” published in Parameters in 1995. Nicknames like “Operation Killer” during the Korean war and Vietnam’s “Operation Masher,” Sieminski wrote, caused controversy when reported in the press. As a result, the Pentagon issued its first guidelines restricting how nicknames can be formed in 1972 and created the two-letter system in 1975.
Combatant Commands still have to be careful about what words they pick under the two-letter system. Official guidelines prohibit “well-known commercial trademarks” in operation nicknames, as well as ”exotic” or “trite” choices. Nicknames can’t be spelled similar to or sound like codewords. And in a reflection of the negative impact of “Killer” and “Masher,” Pentagon wordsmiths aren’t allowed to use terms that convey “a degree of aggression inconsistent with traditional American ideals or current foreign policy.” They also mustn’t give offense to American allies, “free-world nations” or any “particular group, sect or creed.”
Mistakes can still happen while following the rules. An Army unit in Honduras once labeled an operation in Honduras “Blazing Trails,” which in Spanish can translate to “Shining Path,” the name of Peruvian terrorist group.
The two-letter system isn’t the exclusive way to pick an operation and exercise names. For larger operations, like the first Gulf War’s operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield, commanders have picked names that sound good to them or influence public opinion — something Sieminski dates to the renaming the invasion of Panama to “Just Cause” from “Blue Spoon.” Some lesser operations, like a 2004 roundup of insurgents in Kirkuk called “Operation Slim Shady,” also don’t seem like they would have passed through the Defense Department’s official guidelines.
Coalition partners in the no-fly zone have their own operation names, as well. Britain’s Defence Ministry labeled its participation in the no-fly zone “Operation Ellamy“; Canada’s efforts are called “Operation Mobile.” Ever a patron of the arts, France seems to be the only coalition partner going for the poetic route. It calls its operations in Libya “Harmattan,” referring to a “hot, dry wind that blows from the northeast or east in the western Sahara.”
Adam Rawnsley @'Wired'
Index of Code Names
Jel & Odd Nosdam live improvs @ The Crosby 1/28/11
Born David Madson in Cincinnati, OH, in 1976, producer Odd Nosdam first began experimenting with looping as a teenager, which eventually led to the purchase of a Dr. Sample and eight-track player while he was a student at the Art Academy of Cincinnati. Soon he was working with future labelmates Doseone and Why? (with whom he formed cLOUDDEAD), and in 2001 his debut, Plan 9: Meat Your Hypnotist, came out on Mush Records. Odd Nosdam then moved to California to become part of the Anticon team, producing albums for many of its members and releasing his own No More Wig for Ohio in 2003, Burner in 2005, and Level Live Wires two years later. Pretty Swell Explode, an album of remixes and rarities, followed in 2008, containing remixed versions of Boards of Canada, Serena Maneesh, and Black Moth Super Rainbow, as well as some of his own unreleased work. In 2009, Anticon reissued T.I.M.E. Soundtrack, a CD of Odd Nosdam compositions used to score a 2007 Element skateboarding video.
Although the first instrument young Jel (born Jeffrey Logan) played -- much to his chagrin -- was the cornet, as soon as he had saved up enough money he bought his first (and only) drum machine/sampler, the SP 1200, when he was in high school. He began to dedicate most of his time to beat-making, and while at college he worked at the Northwestern University radio station, where he was eventually put in contact with MC Adam Drucker, or Doseone, with whom he connected instantly. Jel dropped out of school in 1996 in order to better focus on music, and two years later Dose's debut, Hemispheres, which featured two tracks produced by Jel, came out on Dose's fledgling Anticon label. The following year the duo released Them as the band Themselves, and both, as part of Deep Puddle Dynamics, along with Alias, Sole, and Slug, began working on the record Taste of Rain...Why Kneel? That album didn't end up being released until 2002, the same year that Jel's solo debut, Greenball, came out, with 10 Seconds following a few months later. In 2003 the Meat and Oil EP was issued, and in 2006, after Jel moved from Mush, the label that had released most of his solo work, to Anticon, Soft Money hit shelves.
Marisa Brown
How Deaf People Think
Those who were born completely deaf and only learned sign language will, not surprisingly, think in sign language. What is surprising is those who were born completely deaf but learn to speak through vocal training will occasionally think not only in the particular sign language that they know, but also will sometimes think in the vocal language they learned, with their brains coming up with how the vocal language sounds. Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign language. Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one’s own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads.
For those deaf people who are not completely deaf or wear devices to allow them to hear somewhat, often represented in deaf circles with a “little d”, rather than “big D” as in those who are can’t hear at all, will often experience more vocal language in their “inner voice” in proportion to how much they can hear.
Interestingly, deafness is significantly more serious than blindness in terms of the effect it can have on the brain. This isn’t because deaf people’s brains are different than hearing people, in terms of mental capacity or the like; rather, it is because of how integral language is to how our brain functions. To be clear, “language” here not only refers to spoken languages, but also to sign language. It is simply important that the brain have some form of language it can fully comprehend and can turn into an inner voice to drive thought...
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Decade old unreleased David Bowie album leaks
Back at the turn of the century, David Bowie re-recorded a number of his lesser-known songs, and planned to release them along with some new material on an album called Toy. The album was slated for a mid-2001 release, but due to problems with Virgin, Bowie’s record label at the time, it never saw the light of day. A number of the songs from Toy were included on Bowie’s 2002 album Heathen and as B-sides to its various singles, but a large portion of Toy still remained unreleased.
Until now, that is.
Sunday afternoon, a decade after its planned release, a 256 kbps quality torrent of the full-length album was leaked online. Consisting of 14 tracks, and running a little over an hour long, the album is the closest we can get to “new” Bowie material.
The tracklist is as follows:
1. Uncle Floyd
2. Afraid
3. Baby Loves That Way
4. I Dig Everything
5. Conversation Piece
6. Let Me Sleep Beside You
7. Toy (Your Turn To Drive)
8. Hole In The Ground
9. Shadow Man
10. In The Heat Of The Morning
11. You’ve Got a Habit Of Leaving
12. Silly Boy Blue
13. Liza Jane
14. The London Boys
The torrent is quite easy to find.
Ad break #15 (2011 Australian Earth Hour)
Local advertising for Earth Hour has ditched green messaging in favour of comedy this year, with a story about three friends in the outback who are besieged by a swarm of moths after neglecting to switch their lights off. The spot, created by Leo Burnett Sydney for WWF, debuts tomorrow, six days before the event on March 26th at 8.30pm.
The end frame of the ad features a web address where visitors can “go beyond the hour” by sharing stories with people in other countries about what they are doing to tackle climate change.
The campaign press release assured that no moths were harmed during the making of the film.
Using humour contrasts the approach taken in the global 2011 Earth Hour ad, shot in Sydney in February by Leo Burnett Chicago, in which people holding coloured squares form shapes and words, with the message that “it’s time to go beyond the hour” and do more than turn the lights off once a year.
@'mUmBRELLA'
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