Tammy Payne – A (very) Small Collection
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Tuesday, 14 June 2011
The geography lesson of Gay Girl in Damascus
The tale of the lesbian blogger in Damascus who turned out this weekend to be a married American chap studying at Edinburgh University will surely be told many times over. Here is a news story lightly wrapped around a bundle of talking points: what spurs someone to create and maintain a false identity ("Tonight, Matthew, I'm going to be Amina Abdallah Arraf al Omari, emblem of street-protesting Syrian womanhood!"); the nature of personal attachment in the era of Web 2.0, and how the internet has democratised that old-fashioned pursuit, the media hoax. How appropriate that Tom MacMaster should claim to be doing a postgraduate degree, because his is the stunt that will launch a thousand research fellowships.
Listening to MacMaster's interviews yesterday, one other issue nagged away at me: what the hoax tells us about the importance of geography.
To the blogger, his distance from the Arab Spring was merely incidental. "The reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely," he airily told Radio Scotland. The fact that he knew the studentville of Edinburgh's Newington far better than the Middle East was beside the point.
And sure enough, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog features very little local detail. True, there's the odd reference to Friday prayers, the Druze, a lover called Zina and all manner of other variables that can swiftly be cut and pasted from Wikipedia. But of the scenery that surrounds Amina, of the journeys that she would have to make to get to her marches and her dates . . . there is next to nothing. The message to western readers is clear: this woman thinks like you, blogs like you and appears to have sex like you. She is foreign only in name.
This is the big lie that underpins all the little fibs dreamed up by MacMaster. It can be summed up thus: in the age of mass technology and almost unprecedented international trade we are becoming more alike – and our local environments are of diminishing significance. Geography mattered in 1914 and 1939 and all the way up to 1989; but now we live in a global village.
This has been the promise of this wave of globalisation, and smarter people than MacMaster have made a lot of cash from it. Thomas L Friedman and Frances Cairncross produced bestsellers titled The World Is Flat and The Death of Distance. In the early 90s, the economist Richard O'Brien pretty much made his career proclaiming "the end of geography".
One way of reading the financial bubble is as a story of people who believed the same thing as MacMaster: that geography was just an inconvenience to be worked around. So you had Northern Rock, a former building society in Newcastle that wanted to be a major bank on high streets and used global financial markets to speed the process up. In Iceland, you had a small clique of businessmen, pumped up on testosterone and cheap credit, who went out and bought up swaths of foreign businesses. Then came the crash and the return of those old local constraints.
It's the British Treasury that had to bail out Northern Rock; it's the government Reykjavik which has to haggle over the cash its banks owe foreign savers. Shoppers who once enjoyed only the benefits of globalisation, in the form of cut-price tellies made in China, can now feel its downside as the property slump in Nevada makes it harder to get a mortgage in Newbury.
Even during the bubble, how interconnected your world was always depended on who you were. Sure, it may have been easier than ever for financiers to fly from London to New York – not so for would-be asylum-seekers hoping to get from Sangatte, say, to Kent.
It's the limits of the globalisation story that have helped drive some academics back to geography and to what is now called "the spatial turn". Anything that comes out of academia labelled "the 'something' turn" generally involves creasing your forehead over some hardback quoting Foucault, but one excellent new history book makes the case for taking local differences more seriously.
In Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram sets out the case for considering the importance of where events happened, rather than only the when and why.
Investigating history's "crime scenes", the Manchester academic upends some of the most cherished popular notions of how big changes come about. He traces the immediate origins of the British Labour party, for instance, to a factory in Bradford making velvet.
In 1890, just before Christmas, the owner of Manningham Mills imposed a 35% pay cut on workers. The largely female workforce wanted to go on strike, but were resisted by the men leading the local trade unions.
So the women organised themselves, and went door-to-door in Bradford and Leeds raising a war chest of £11,000. Barred from the usual meeting houses, they gathered in open-air ice rinks. It was the limitations placed on the women's free speech, and their harassment, that turned a tussle over wages to a much broader movement. The result, three years later, was the creation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford.
Whether it's anti-Mubarak protestors gathering in Tahrir Square, or British university students clustering in commons rooms, the scene and the setting cannot be divorced from each other, and some specifics cannot be wished away. That's the lesson Tom MacMaster is learning the hard way this week.
Aditya Chakrabortty @'The Guardian'
Listening to MacMaster's interviews yesterday, one other issue nagged away at me: what the hoax tells us about the importance of geography.
To the blogger, his distance from the Arab Spring was merely incidental. "The reality is that I have been in contact with a lot of people inside Syria and I have been following things very closely," he airily told Radio Scotland. The fact that he knew the studentville of Edinburgh's Newington far better than the Middle East was beside the point.
And sure enough, the Gay Girl in Damascus blog features very little local detail. True, there's the odd reference to Friday prayers, the Druze, a lover called Zina and all manner of other variables that can swiftly be cut and pasted from Wikipedia. But of the scenery that surrounds Amina, of the journeys that she would have to make to get to her marches and her dates . . . there is next to nothing. The message to western readers is clear: this woman thinks like you, blogs like you and appears to have sex like you. She is foreign only in name.
This is the big lie that underpins all the little fibs dreamed up by MacMaster. It can be summed up thus: in the age of mass technology and almost unprecedented international trade we are becoming more alike – and our local environments are of diminishing significance. Geography mattered in 1914 and 1939 and all the way up to 1989; but now we live in a global village.
This has been the promise of this wave of globalisation, and smarter people than MacMaster have made a lot of cash from it. Thomas L Friedman and Frances Cairncross produced bestsellers titled The World Is Flat and The Death of Distance. In the early 90s, the economist Richard O'Brien pretty much made his career proclaiming "the end of geography".
One way of reading the financial bubble is as a story of people who believed the same thing as MacMaster: that geography was just an inconvenience to be worked around. So you had Northern Rock, a former building society in Newcastle that wanted to be a major bank on high streets and used global financial markets to speed the process up. In Iceland, you had a small clique of businessmen, pumped up on testosterone and cheap credit, who went out and bought up swaths of foreign businesses. Then came the crash and the return of those old local constraints.
It's the British Treasury that had to bail out Northern Rock; it's the government Reykjavik which has to haggle over the cash its banks owe foreign savers. Shoppers who once enjoyed only the benefits of globalisation, in the form of cut-price tellies made in China, can now feel its downside as the property slump in Nevada makes it harder to get a mortgage in Newbury.
Even during the bubble, how interconnected your world was always depended on who you were. Sure, it may have been easier than ever for financiers to fly from London to New York – not so for would-be asylum-seekers hoping to get from Sangatte, say, to Kent.
It's the limits of the globalisation story that have helped drive some academics back to geography and to what is now called "the spatial turn". Anything that comes out of academia labelled "the 'something' turn" generally involves creasing your forehead over some hardback quoting Foucault, but one excellent new history book makes the case for taking local differences more seriously.
In Streetlife: The Untold History of Europe's Twentieth Century, Leif Jerram sets out the case for considering the importance of where events happened, rather than only the when and why.
Investigating history's "crime scenes", the Manchester academic upends some of the most cherished popular notions of how big changes come about. He traces the immediate origins of the British Labour party, for instance, to a factory in Bradford making velvet.
In 1890, just before Christmas, the owner of Manningham Mills imposed a 35% pay cut on workers. The largely female workforce wanted to go on strike, but were resisted by the men leading the local trade unions.
So the women organised themselves, and went door-to-door in Bradford and Leeds raising a war chest of £11,000. Barred from the usual meeting houses, they gathered in open-air ice rinks. It was the limitations placed on the women's free speech, and their harassment, that turned a tussle over wages to a much broader movement. The result, three years later, was the creation of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford.
Whether it's anti-Mubarak protestors gathering in Tahrir Square, or British university students clustering in commons rooms, the scene and the setting cannot be divorced from each other, and some specifics cannot be wished away. That's the lesson Tom MacMaster is learning the hard way this week.
Aditya Chakrabortty @'The Guardian'
‘Paula Brooks,’ editor of ‘Lez Get Real,’ also a man
Paula Brooks from LezGetReal is a Man – Straight Man Fraud in the Lesbian World
Burial - In McDonald's
"we just did this for a laugh and to test out the camera so don't get too worked up! :)
my love for burial is limitless and did not intend to disrespect his work."
(MoogDnB, the director)
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Tyranny in NYC
Wasteful
The vast majority of arrests in New York City are for low-level offenses, such as misdemeanors like possessing a small amount of marijuana or violations like selling umbrellas or flowers on the street without a license. By any criteria, almost none of these activities could be considered dangerous or predatory. At worst, most city residents would view them as public nuisances.
Police officers and other criminal justice personnel -- judges, court officers, district attorneys, public defenders and correction officers -- spend hours every day, if not their whole workday, processing these cases. And these law enforcement officials are preoccupied with these seemingly insignificant cases day after day, week after week, month after month and so on.
According to the Drug Policy Alliance, just one category of arrests -- for possessing, not selling, small amounts of marijuana -- costs New York City $75 million per year.
Ineffective
The aggressive arrest-driven policing applied in New York City aimed at minor offenses has effectively caught up hundreds of thousands, perhaps actually millions, of individuals in the criminal justice net in recent years. Last year, for example, the city’s police made over 370,000 arrests. Most of these arrests occurred in New York’s low-income communities of color -- for example, although the majority of people who use marijuana are white, 86 percent of the individuals arrested for marijuana possession last year were black or Latino...
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Robert Gangi @'AlterNet'
A Conversation With Saudi Women's Rights Campaigner Wajeha al-Huwaider
Wajeha al-Huwaider is perhaps the best-known Saudi campaigner for women’s rights, human rights and democracy. She has protested energetically against the kingdom’s lack of formal laws (the Koran is it) and basic freedoms and in particular against the guardianship system, under which every female, from birth to death, needs the permission of a male relative to make decisions in all important areas of life—education, travel, marriage, employment, finances, even surgery. In 2008 a video of her driving a car, which is forbidden for women in Saudi Arabia, created a sensation when it was posted on YouTube. Al-Huwaider is a strong supporter of the June 17 Movement, which calls on Saudi women to start driving on that date, and made the celebrated YouTube video of its co-founder, Manal al-Sherif, jailed for nine days in May for driving. While this interview was in preparation, she was briefly detained by the police when she tried to visit Nathalie Morin, a French-Canadian woman held captive with her children by her Saudi husband.
Why the driving protests? And why now?
The issue of women drivers has remained unresolved since the driving protests of 1990. Just before the launching of the June 17 campaign, a group of well-known women and men signed a letter to the Shura, or Consultative Assembly, asking to reopen the discussion. It was rejected. That was the spark for the current protest of Manal and the other women. The issue never goes away...
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Katha Pollitt @'The Nation'
Monday, 13 June 2011
Grime's 100 Club Moment
It's somehow appropriate for its DIY ethics that the seminal moment in the history of modern British urban music is a four-part YouTube clip. Ripped from a home-made, long out-of-print DVD called Conflict, one cameraman films a tiny box-room full of young grime MCs, performing on pirate station Deja 92.3 FM, high up on a rooftop in Stratford – only yards from what is now the Olympic site.
Filmed on a summer evening in 2003, over 40 minutes, 15 or so members of legendary crews Roll Deep, East Connection and Nasty Crew squeeze into the makeshift studio – an all-star cast akin to getting the Sex Pistols, the Clash and the Buzzcocks on the same bill. This was, in fact, grime's 100 Club moment – and thanks to the internet, we can all pretend we were there. As Roll Deep's DJ Karnage builds momentum with the instrumentals, the microphone is passed from MC to MC, from legends Wiley and D Double E to a 16-year-old Tinchy Stryder, to forgotten early heroes Demon and Sharky Major. The video is notorious for its dramatic climax, when a 17-year-old Dizzee Rascal nearly comes to blows with an MC who was then as hotly tipped as he was, Crazy Titch. The whole cast is a litany of possibility, of foiled and realised ambition; the future of British pop music at the crossroads. Eight years later, Dizzee is a global superstar with four No 1 singles to his name; Crazy Titch is serving a life sentence for murder.
Seen from this distance, the poignancy lands with the clinical punch of a Wiley snare: Dizzee Rascal now wants nothing to do with the music that first made him famous – he won the Mercury prize for Boy in Da Corner only months after this video was recorded. In 2011, Dizzee is collaborating with Shirley Bassey and Shakira; shadow-boxing backstage at Hyde Park with Prince Harry, while Titch resides at his grandmother's pleasure.
The videos, with a million or so YouTube views, findable by Googling Roll Deep Conflict, are a window on to an extraordinary era in British musical history. In one 10-second bit of hosting, Wiley accounts for the now-vanished trinity that created grime, and gave the British pop zeitgeist its platform: radio, raves and riddims. "This is Deja 92.3 FM … hold tight the raving massive, don't forget Eskimo dance ... hold tight Danny Weed, hold tight Target". This was a time when pirate radio was a hub for a whole (teenage) community – the geographical horizons as narrow as the musical ones were broad: "That's where I'm from, Bow E3," Wiley sprays into the mic. "I'm like the 38 bus, because I never turn up."
It also tells a story about grime at its musical peak: a stage before, or perhaps exactly when, the ego of MCs began to take over. Prior to that, anyone with a mic in their hand was first of all answerable to the beat, to the producer-DJ auteur, and pirate radio was all about "rolling out" the instrumentals – building a steady, if restless momentum. The MC was a performer, but also a host: a master of ceremonies, but also, in the parasitic sense, possessed by those extraordinary early grime beats and their macabre, avant-garde minimalism. As Wiley spits, "I'm futuristic, quantum leaping/there's no defeating/E3 tiger – see me creep on the riddim like a spider/kill them with a 16-liner". You wouldn't know it to hear 2011's shiny electro collaborations with the likes of Calvin Harris, but grime "spitting" is supposed to be twice the speed of hip-hop rapping: typically, you had just 16 bars to show your skills, before passing the mic to the next MC – a rule that made grime the most thrilling, ADD-friendly onslaught of a genre. Andy Warhol should count himself lucky he got 15 entire minutes to make an impact.
As the energy mounts, Crazy Titch is bopping with cartoonish energy, face screwed up at the sheer meanness of the track playing underneath, his blitzkrieg of bars including the lyric "Draw for me, you'll be on the 10 O'Clock News" seconds before the fight with Dizzee breaks out. When the scuffle starts, it could almost be a scene from EastEnders – apt, given the location. The music cuts out abruptly, and amid the clamour of raised voices and bravado we hear "step outside!", "leave it, man" – you can almost hear Pat Butcher telling them "he's not worth it!". Wiley is immediately in between the two callow young MCs – the godfather of grime, the paternal statesman who cares more for the scene than his own career. They are pulled apart, and everyone spills out on to the rooftop, silhouetted against the east London gloaming, as friends attempt to calm them down.
Three years later, Titch was sentenced to life imprisonment for his involvement in the murder of 21-year-old Richard Holmes, a senseless crime supposedly connected to a disrespectful grime lyric. In that Deja FM set, Crazy Titch is captivating, going 100 miles per hour, arms pumping, grinning ear to ear – it's not a stretch to suppose that the gleeful, relentless energy he displays on the mic came from the same place as his manic, unhinged tendencies.
"Forget all this, man, forget all this," one MC is heard saying after the fight breaks out, attempting to defuse the tension. He meant they should forget the beef – and soon enough, they did. But a great deal else was forgotten with it.
Dan Hancox @'The Guardian'
...worst headline of the year award winner btw!
Talking to Machines
We begin with a love story--from a man who unwittingly fell in love with a chatbot on an online dating site. Then, we encounter a robot therapist whose inventor became so unnerved by its success that he pulled the plug. And we talk to the man who coded Cleverbot, a software program that learns from every new line of conversation it receives...and that's chatting with more than 3 million humans each month. Then, five intrepid kids help us test a hypothesis about a toy designed to push our buttons, and play on our human empathy. And we meet a robot built to be so sentient that its creators hope it will one day have a consciousness, and a life, all its own.
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ASC Presents Deep Space Mix 20
01 – Ø – Unien Holvit
02 – Gas – Untitled 3 (Pop)
03 – Alva Noto – Interim (For Dieter Rams)
04 – Dadavistic Orchestra – Strung Valve Checkout
05 – Mr Smith – Deterioration
06 – Loscil – Névé
07 – Kangding Ray – Apnée
08 – ASC – Lunar Industries
09 – Ø – Koituva
10 – Biosphere – Les Fleurs Du Mal
11 – Deaf Center – Lamp Mien
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Bodytonic Podcast - Ghosting Season
Ghosting Season is Gavin Miller and Thomas Ragsdale.
It was born in 2011 out of the foundations of worriedaboutsatan, the band they have toured and recorded as for over half a decade. They play London this Friday with Demdike Stare at the Lexington.
Ghosting Season Website
Tracklist
1 - Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm
2 - Byetone - Plastic Star (Session) (Ghosting Season edit)
Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm (parts)
Nine Inch Nails - Closer (Ghosting Season edit)
3 - How To Destroy Angels - BBB (Ghosting Season edit)
Byetone - Plastic Star (Session) (parts)
4 - Pantha Du Prince - Behind the Stars
How To Destroy Angels - BBB (parts)
5 - Fairmont - Flight of the Albatross
6 - Ben Klock - Ok
Fairmont - Flight of the Albatross (parts)
Function - Disaffected (parts)
Jonas Kopp - Michigan Lake (Ghosting Season edit)
7 - Modeselektor - B.M.I
Joby Talbot - A Yellow Disc Rising From the Sea (Ghosting Season edit)
Nine Inch Nails - Closer (parts)
Function - Disaffected (parts)
Kraftwerk - Elektro Kardiogramm (parts)
8 - Ghosting Season - Dead Man's Switch (Ghosting Season edit)
9 - Apparat - Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv remix) (Ghosting Season edit)
10 - Telefon Tel Aviv - The Birds (Ghosting Season edit)
Jonas Kopp - Michigan Lake (Ghosting Season edit)
Apparat - Arcadia (Telefon Tel Aviv remix) (parts)
11 - Ludovico Einaudi - The Planets
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