Imagine that, on Sept. 12, 2001, an outraged Angelina Jolie had pulled out a pad of paper and some drafting tools and, all on her own, designed a sophisticated new missile system to attack al-Qaida. Now imagine that the design proved so innovative that it transcended weapons technology, and sparked a revolution in communications technology over the next half-century.
Believe it or not, this essentially happened to Hedy Lamarr. Often proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” the 26-year-old Lamarr was thriving in Hollywood when, in mid-September 1940, Nazi U-boats hunted down and sank a cruise ship trying to evacuate 90 British schoolchildren to Canada. Seventy-seven drowned in the bleak north Atlantic. Lamarr, a Jewish immigrant from Nazi-occupied Austria, was horrified. She decided to fight back, but instead of the usual celebrity posturing, she sat down at a drafting table at home and sketched out a revolutionary radio guidance system for anti-submarine torpedoes.
This unlikely tale is the subject of Richard Rhodes’ new book, Hedy’s Folly. Compared to his other works, like the magisterial (and quite hefty) The Making of the Atomic Bomb, this book breezes by in 272 chatty pages. Rhodes succeeds in the most vital thing—capturing the spirit of a willful woman who wanted recognition for more than her pretty face—but he skims over the deeper questions that Lamarr’s life story raises about the nature of creative genius.
Lamarr—born Hedwig Kiesler—came from an unremarkable, even boring bourgeois family in Vienna. As a girl, she accompanied her father, a banker, on long walks, absorbing his detailed explanations of how printing presses, streetcars, and other modern marvels worked. Rather than pursue a technical career, though, she became an actress. While still in her teens, she starred in the notorious 1933 film Ekstase, which reportedly included the first onscreen depiction of a female orgasm. A sudden star, she married the plutocrat Fritz Mandl, an arms manufacturer and Nazi lickspittle who spent much of his marriage buying copies of Ekstase and destroying them...
Contemporary liberal discourse advocates tolerance of a diversity of sexual orientations and behaviors, provided that the principle of informed consent can be shown to have been respected. Borrowing an extreme test case used by the sexologist John Money—the reciprocally chosen lust murder pact—this theoretical article examines the limits of liberal ideology for sexual ethics. Using as its illustrative material the case of Sharon Lopatka, a Maryland woman who instigated her own sexual murder in 1996, it demonstrates that the phenomenon of being murdered for pleasure problematizes commonplace assumptions about the legitimacy to consent. The discussion recalls and refreshes existing debates in feminism and the politics of sadomasochism and reads them alongside the rhetoric surrounding the ethics of medically assisted suicide. Consenting to murder for pleasure is revealed as a formulation that exceeds the terms of informed consent as it is currently understood and thereby constitutes an ethical and logical aporia. In a final section, the phenomenology of consensual murder is explored via a reading of the dynamics of sexual activity and passivity in philosophical accounts by Jean-Paul Sartre and Martha Nussbaum, and a fictional text by Muriel Spark. Download PDF (750.9 KB) Via
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The seventh show in the Cyrk series ‘Pattern Compulsions’ curated for Resonance 104.4FM, is an exclusive mix by a pioneer of mutant music, Mark Stewart (Maffia, Pop Group)….
Mark Stewart and his first band The Pop Group blasted out of Bristol in 1979 with the wired, avant future-funk manifesto of their ’We Are All Prostitutes’ single and Y debut album, redirecting their punk energy into the political arena, supporting campaigns such as Stop SUS. Stewart’s blood-letting vocal torrents rode disembodied funk grooves and fearsome free jazz skronking, continuing into 1980’s For How Much Longer Do We Tolerate Mass Murder? album. As punk and its post-punk derivative got more formularised, the Pop Group struck further out, before imploding, leaving Stewart to hitch up with Adrian Sherwood’s On-U Sound, probably the most cutting edge operation of that period, Stewart immersed himself in the sonic possibilities of dub reggae and mixing desk mayhem on 1982’s Jerusalem EP [which included the unsettling but still uncannily prescient future-funk of ‘Welcome To Liberty City’] and his first solo album, the following year’s Learning To Cope With Cowardice.
Stewart was also fixated with the early hiphop he heard in the States, bringing back goldust-like tapes of New York’s groundbreaking hip radio stations, typically going to the source and procuring the Sugarhill/Tommy Boy rhythm section to join his Maffia [and also become Tackhead]. His next three albums – 1985’s As The Veneer Of Democracy Starts To Fade, 1987’s Mark Stewart album and 1990’s Metatron – are regarded as epochal future-shocks, blueprinting industrial [Ministry kingpin Al Jorgensen and NIN’s Trent Reznor citing him as a major influence] and trip-hop [’Mark Stewart, he‘s my chaos‘, says Tricky]. The latter album saw him hijacking techno for another uniquely-personal flight which, by Stewart‘s idiosyncratic in-breeding process, manifested later that decade in cyber-punk and the work of former flat-mate Tricky, proto-dubstep another creation. [“Most dubstep kids, Burial and that, they love all that stuff me and Adrian were doing”].
After 1996’s Control Data, Stewart glanced back at his past achievements with 1998’s We Are All Prostitutes Pop Group compilation and soon after his 2008’s Edit album he was the subject of Toni Schiffer’s documentary, On/Off – Mark Stewart: From the Pop Group To The Maffia.
Reflecting now on an unmatchable track record of anarchic pioneering and seismic influence which prodded Nick Cave to declare, ‘Mark Stewart changed everything‘, he says, “I thought I was making funk music, but a track on Veneer Of Democracy supposedly inspired all the American industrialists, like Front line Assembly and Skinny Puppy, while another track supposedly inspired the Bristol kids. It happens all the time. I’ve got this nonchalance that nothing is sacred so I’ll crash a Slayer guitar line with Rotterdam gabba beats. For me, it’s like colours. I grew up doing montages; like I did this collage of Ronald Reagan’s head on this gay porno cowboy. In fact, I’ve never really grown up at all. I’m still trying to put round things into square holes.”
On the 25th November Mark releases a double A side 7″ – ‘Children Of The Revolution’ / ‘Nothing Is Sacred’ – Ultra-violently noisy and perfectly capturing the restless mood on today’s global streets from London to Libya, Children of the Revolution can be heard on Mark’s mix here for the first time. The album will be out early in 2012 and features a stellar cast including cult film-maker Kenneth Anger, original Clash/PiL guitarist Keith Levene, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Richard Hell, Gina Birch from the Raincoats, Tessa Pollitt from the Slits, all of Primal Scream amongst many others…
Tracklist-
1.) Mono log
2.) Starform
3.) Activist – DJ Bone
4.) Nothing is Sacred – Mark Stewart
5.) The Ventures
6.) Sufferer Skank – Ranking Joe
7.) Back Off – Jonny Osbourne
8.) Rude Boy – Rihanna (Crispy Remix)
9.) Children of the Revolution – Mark (Bolan) Stewart
10.) Mars – Helen Forsdale
11.) Daddy Love – Trash Women
12.) Robing and the Hoods
13.) Henry Thome
14.) Benny Joy
15.) Wondrous Place – Billy Fury
16.) It’s Gonna be Me – Davis Bowie
17.) The Day the World Turned Blue – Gene Vincent
18.) Die Herren Der Welt – Hildegaaard de Kneif
19.) Funk Knows
20.) Is this the Future? – Fatback Band
21.) Quardrent Six
22.) Vox Dei
23.) Mono Logue https://www.facebook.com/Cyrkk http://www.cyrk.org/v2 Via
Bonus:
During the Los Angeles Police Department's forcible removal of the Occupy LA protest last night, they chose 12 reporters and photographers to represent the media as a whole.* This is called a "media pool" -- and it used to be a fairly time-honored, if oft-derided, way of dealing with very specific types of situations. The original idea was that a select group of mainstream media journalists go into a military engagement, report their observations to a larger group, and then everyone could write from the same observed facts. Growing beyond its military borders, the media pool concept has been deployed during political conventions, high-profile trials, and in a few other cases. In all cases, though, as summarized in the Encyclopedia of Television, the pool "offers those who employ it a way to manage media coverage."
It strikes me as significant that the compromise developed in the 1980s after the media was barred from covering the invasion of Grenada. It also strikes me as significant that we use the term "compromise" to describe it. The first and second meanings of compromised come into play: "to settle a dispute by mutual concession" and "to weaken (a reputation or principle) by accepting standards that are lower than is desirable."
All of that brings us to last night's media pool. The LAPD deployed this old-school method in a decidedly 20th-century way. First, they didn't select a single web-based publication or alternative news outlet. Instead they allowed the Los Angeles Daily News, Los Angeles Times, Reuters, AP, the big four television outlets, and a two radio reporters. Anybody not in that group -- which would include reporters for every website not affiliated with a newspaper in Los Angeles, not to mention all citizens performing acts of journalism -- were told that they would be arrested if they came too close to the eviction area.
The LAPD forbade their pool reporters from reporting the events live. (Update: See bottom of the post for details. The restriction was more akin to a kind of tape-delay than an embargo.) This helped to neutralize a key informational advantage that Occupy protesters have exploited. As confrontations with police begin, they are able to use the emotional imagery from those events to draw more support in real-time. Of course, in this case, there were some people writing about the events in real-time and others livestreamed, but only if they were willing to risk arrest...
