Mark Fisher in conversation with Michael Schapira

Full Stop travels to the U.K. and the world of politics today to speak with blogger, teacher and author Mark Fisher about the mordant pleasures of cultural critique. Fisher has been running his blog, k-punk, since 2003, where he writes about politics, philosophy, literature, music, and cybernetics. In his recent book, Capitalist Realism, Fisher explores “some of the affective, psychological and political consequences of the deeply entrenched belief that there is no alternative to capitalism.” And what’s more, he’s a man of discerning taste, as evidenced by the fact that he made a point of finding time during his first trip to New York City to head out to Coney Island and pick up a Warriors shirt for his young child. Pay attention to one of the more insightful voices out there today!
Can you describe in broad strokes where Capitalist Realism came from?
There were a number of threads running through my blog, and one of them had to do with politics. Not politics in some distant sense, but politics particularly in relation to my working life, which through a lot of the early years of the blog was as a lecturer in philosophy and religious studies at a further education college. (Ed. note: a further education college is similar to a community college in the U.S., but most students would be 16 to 19 years old.)
One of the stories that came into the blog a bit and sits behind Capitalist Realism is the story of recovery from depression, which was a large trajectory of my life in that last decade. Having done a doctorate in philosophy and literature, I was mentally destroyed in lots of ways and felt pretty useless and unemployable. Very burnt out, I found it very difficult to read any serious work. It was teaching and blogging that actually rehabilitated me. Teaching sort of re-engaged me in the world. When you are doing postgraduate research you can feel very disconnected from the world and your work can feel very pointless. But with teenagers you really have to front up because they won’t let you get away with much nonsense; they will interrupt you every 90 seconds, etc. It was difficult, but it was also an excellent grounding and initiation back into the world.
Alongside that I started blogging. Blogging was a bit like when Zizek says that you can’t sit down and think that you’re going to write a book. You have to think that you’re just going to write a few paragraphs, and then the paragraphs will build up and build up and suddenly a book forms. In the same way, blogging for me started off as not being that serious. The dead heavy weight of scholarly responsibility can interject and cause you think that you can’t possibly write on anything unless you looked at every possible source, which is of course impossible, but nevertheless you still feel the guilt and weight that goes along with that. The blog didn’t really have that. It was just a different space. I didn’t have that weight and responsibility and maybe I could just try out some ideas.
Your rehabilitation from depression seemed to be coextensive with a growing realization of the problems racking higher education and public services in the wake of New Labour. Can you describe the political context of your book a bit for American readers?
What I started to notice very strongly in my working life were the changes that had happened over this period. In lots of ways, Capitalist Realism is really a study of what it was like to work in public services under Blairism and New Labour. We could assume that the neoliberal right would push the interests of business, but we couldn’t necessarily assume that a notionally left-wing party would be doing this as well. There is a certain novelty about that, or rather we take it for granted now, but we ought not to in lots of ways.
What I was experiencing firsthand under New Labour was the imposition of a whole battery of new measures, particularly to do with self-surveillance. For example, [as teachers] we had to fill in 50-60 page long logbooks with “strategies for improvement,” bullet pointed, etc. The year in which I was made redundant, we were required to fill in “Active Schemes of Work.” No one really knew what this meant. This is kind of the Kafkaesque nightmare of these things. Everyone is second-guessing what they think the bureaucratic authorities might want to see. The bureaucratic authorities themselves, when they emerge – these would typically be the Inspectorate, employed by the government to come and check up on colleges – wouldn’t necessarily know either what exactly was required. These people were always interpreting this set of bureaucratic criteria that are slightly Talmudic. It would be one thing to have a set of clear and determinate demands that you could meet. But it is another thing to have this vague legalese, which is capable of multiple interpretations, and which is also guaranteed to maximize the anxiety of everyone who is involved.
It was really the encounter with these kinds of procedures that was one of the main starting points for the work that went into Capitalist Realism. Beginning in a raging exasperation, in writing the book I was able to see these kinds of things as systemic as opposed to just affecting me...

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Michael Schapira @'Full Stop'

Grievous Angel - Lickle Friction

Iain Sinclair: Secret Writing

Shortly before her untimely death 1997, novelist Kathy Acker interviewed Iain Sinclair in London. It is, to our knowledge, the last article written by Acker, which reveals her fascination in the magical potential of abstract fiction.

WALKING
The precision. I remember the excitement of reading White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings – my first Iain Sinclair experience – though I don’t remember where and when. And yet every word of Sinclair’s, herein lies his style, is always positing when and where. “There is an interesting condition of the stomach,” begins White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, “where ulcers build like coral, fibrous tissue replacing musculature, cicatrix dividing that shady receptacle into two zones, with communication by means of a narrow isthmus...” This is Sinclair territory, be it of the body, the emotions, the soul or the environs, the city. Craggy, deeply fissured or painful. Remember: fissures in the earth lead to the underworld, sinister and magic.
Sinclair territory is one in which the word both describes and is what is described. Say “cicatrix” out loud and that sound is the ulcer, the hole in the earth; the sound “musculature,” rolling you from one location to the other and so denying fissure, is the unbroken or “replaced” earth.
In White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings, Nicholas Lane, a contemporary book-dealer in London, not only has an ulcer, but is defined by it. Here is an example of how Sinclair hears rhythm and uses it to create. Listen to this description of Nicholas Lane: “To call him thin would be to underdescribe him. His skin was damp paper over bone. Nothing could get into his intestine so he functioned directly on head energy. An icicle of pure intelligence.” There are four sentences. The second would mirror the perfect balance of the first if its predicate wasn’t a little too long. The third sentence is long and imbalanced; note the dependent clause. Lengthening sound and imbalance grow and explode, in the last sentence, into a spark, a phrase, not even a full sentence, but, like the first sentence, perfectly balanced.
Mind you, I am not speaking about formal structure. I’m speaking about vision. In these four sentences, Sinclair is describing an ulcerated landscape. Balance in the body of the bookseller, of the landscape, occurs when the mind is separated from its body. Sinclair has cut into both the living being of Nicholas Lane and of London and opened them to our sight. We experience sound: we see. A visionary is he or she who makes vision happen.
When I was a child, I read my first ‘adult’ authors, Dickens and Blake. The pages of their books exploded open in my mind a visionary landscape called London. “Under the grass stain, the altar. I dreamed a new dream, meadows of fire.” – White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. This is the usual announcement of the visionary. To dream is to see. To see is to make, to bring into being. I can write only by reading and listening, says the visionary, for one makes only when one is made. Thus the angels Blake saw.
Listen further to the language of White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings: “Nights all up in that tower room, windows blinded, looking out all across the roofs; not nobody on the streets, was there? Little drink, fag, like, if I wanted, go out on the parapets, I do; go where I like, walk, Flower and Dean, Thrawl, Heneage, Chicksand, walk cross the river if I wanted, nobody else, not never touched the ground.” Walking prose. To walk is to travel; to travel is to see. The eye, the I cannot stay still because in their beings neither the eye nor the I is still. What is movement? It is language itself. Connection. “No man is an island.”
There are two kinds of hedonists. Those who separate body and mind and so turn affairs of the body into matters of dead meat. Then, there are those who equate pleasure and wisdom. Sinclair goes for the latter type of hedonism. In Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair finally does exactly as he likes, gets rid of made-up plot, that old bourgeois contrivance so beloved by the publishing industry. Goes for what is intrinsic, in pleasure, language and movement. Rhythm. Writers are musicians who work in the crossovers between image and sound and meaning. That crossover named language. Let the literary be concerned only with its own grave.
He began in poetry. Lud Heat, 1975; Suicide Bridge, 1979. The novels started in 1987 with White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings. “When I wrote White Chappell,” Sinclair says, “as I had previously done poems and short stories: writing by hand on big pads of paper. I was scared of not being able to read my own handwriting so on the old typewriter I had back in those days I would type everything up quickly, crudely, not making any changes. Then I would rewrite the whole on a totally different machine, a golfball typewriter. After that I sometimes rewrote the last version by hand. I noted the changes in this text and then typed it all out. Each level of change was based on a different technology.”
We’re sitting in the pub next to the premises of his current publisher, Granta. The pub is upmarket, with posh food and a view of the canal that runs through what is currently one of the trendiest sections in London. Handbags here cost at least 200 pounds a shot. The canal below us is full of trash. “My writing totally changed,” Sinclair continues, “when I began Lights Out For The Territory. For the first time I was writing from the beginning on a word processor.”
Sinclair is talking only about how he writes, not what he writes. Very un-Anglo-Saxon. Imagine book reviews that have no interest in recounting the plots of the novels they’re criticizing. The whole literary industry might collapse. Forget that. Now I’m equating process art and walking. Iain based Lights Out For The Territory on various walks of his through London. “Did you write as you walked?” I ask the tall, slightly sinister-looking ex-used-book dealer.
“I made notes. I scribbled notes. I wrote letters to the machine.” He reconsiders. Things aren’t that simple. “It’s more like possession. You see, all the writing I’ve done is a kind of possession. You prepare yourself for the state of possession by research or by walks or by... whatever... by reading. It may take a long time and it may take no time.”
Sinclair begins talking so fast I can barely keep up with him. This is his music. “I had been planning the material for White Chappell since the early or mid-’70s. I kicked it around in my head for 15 years! Changing it and changing it. Then, when it was time to write it down – whoomf! – I wrote incredibly fast. In the next two novels, Downriver and Radon Daughters, I set out to do something completely different. Six stories that were connected up to sites. To let through the voices of the victims.” One of the characters in White Chappell is Jack the Ripper. “I felt that White Chappell had been too phallocentric. This time I wanted woman and place to come through.”
I’m wondering if women and site are connected and if so, how? But I can’t find the space to break into Sinclair’s language.
“I went to look for the first site, the one where a pleasure boat named The Princess Alice had gone down. Practically everyone on it had drowned. I wanted to write about a woman who had survived, though her children didn’t, and then a few years later she was one of the victims of Jack the Ripper. I went to the wrong site and blundered into another whole series of stories....”
Walking is a listening method. Sinclair walks to listen to the stories that have been and so are in the city. He’s searching for buried treasure. He’s hunting down London’s identity.
“There were these stories waiting to be told. In the long run, actual walking isn’t necessary because it’s all walking.” It refers to writing. Everything does in the world of creation. It and they. “They are all journeys. Journeys aren’t necessarily walks.” Sinclair is fascinated by London’s conduits: trains and the river. By James Joyce: in Dubliners and of course in Finnegan’s Wake Joyce gave him possibilities for mapping, for exposing this city. Every map is a narrative. A story or series of stories are revealing themselves.
To be able to go on this treasure hunt the writer must prepare himself, herself through training. “It’s shamanistic in a way.... For a long time you must train yourself to write in ways that are fast and accurate. You test yourself to see if you can make mental notes that mean something, represent something. More important is learning how to move into areas of force, of information and energy in which there are stories that need to be released.”
Later on Sinclair will say to me, “You fall into structures that are magical, potent, and if you get them perfect, it makes things change in the world...”

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Kathy Acker @'21C'

Also From the 21C archives:

The Beat Goes On: Acker on Burroughs

Wild Girls: Acker rewrites Burroughs

Kathy Acker on Cronenberg & Sterling

Surface City: Acker on Gibson

FBI Aspires to Be the Stasi

Bilderberg 2011: Mandy's nature walk

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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'

‘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

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been the focus of much public criticism in recent months. Elected officials and editorial writers have expressed concern and outrage over matters ranging from the city’s response to snow storms to the appointment of Cathie Black as the city’s Education Chancellor to the payroll scandal at the city’s Department of Employment. A policy area where the mayor has mainly escaped criticism and where it is long overdue is a truly objectionable practice of the Police Department, namely our city’s wasteful, ineffective, unjust, illegal and starkly racially biased arrest methods.
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'

♪♫ Bombino - Tar Hani

ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald

If only Republicans were willing to say things like this when the rights in question were ones other than gun rights: http://is.gd/T7IiRq

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'

The Wikileaks Revolution Is Here To Stay

The Whistle-Blowers of 1777

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'I wanted to see combat as IDF soldier,' Israeli arrested for espionage in Egypt told Haaretz in 2006

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!

Gay Girl in Damascus: Tom MacMaster defends blog hoax

(AUDIO)

Talking to Machines

What can machines tell us about being human? This hour of Radiolab, Jad and Robert meet humans and robots who are trying to connect, and blur the line.
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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♪♫ Mellowhype - 64

Computers in our Lives (1980)

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U.S. pressuring Netanyahu to accept Obama's peace plan

Feds' policy on reading WikiLeaks docs 'incoherent,' critics say

Drug Bust

Writing The War On Drugs

What if American law enforcement agents arrested more than six hundred drug dealing suspects in more than twenty cities across the country in just two days and nobody noticed?
On February 24, that’s exactly what happened as raids targeted drug gangs in cities all over the United States. In two days, 676 people were arrested and authorities confiscated $12 million, 282 weapons, ninety-four vehicles, and large packages of drugs.
It was one of the largest operations against drug cartels operating in the United States in recent years. These gangs were allegedly part of the vast structure that moves millions of dollars worth of drugs out of Mexico and into American neighborhoods in hundreds of cities. But did anyone notice?
As the arrests and seizures were reported by the DEA, FBI, and local law enforcement agencies, the front pages in the cities where the operation unfolded were concerned mostly with the latest developments in Libya, thousands of miles away. The arrests made in their cities, of people selling drugs to their residents, did not seem to have the same news value. For papers like the Los Angeles Times, The Arizona Republic in Phoenix, The Dallas Morning News, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Chicago Tribune, The Denver Post, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Detroit Free Press, or the Newark Star-Ledger, news of the arrests did not make their front pages, even though these cities were part of the operation.
The New York Times ran a small teaser on the front page (their main story is here, as did the Houston Chronicle, where the raid resulted in a shootout and a local cop was wounded. Only a handful of papers, like the San Antonio Express-News,The San Diego Union-Tribune, El Paso Times, and in cities along the Rio Grande Valley gave the story some space on their front pages.
Watching from across the border, this was shocking. Raids against drug cartels and coverage of criminal activities surrounding the drug trade frequently jump to the front pages of Mexican newspapers. We experience the war on drugs every day through the violence employed by the cartels trying to control territories across the country. It has left almost 40,000 people dead in its wake.
But in Mexico, whenever raids or arrests don’t make the front page, the reason is frequently not lack of interest, but an abundance of caution. In the past four years, drug cartels have killed more than ten journalists, kidnapped dozens more, and carried out scores of attacks against newspaper offices or TV stations with gunfire and grenades. The objective: burying coverage of their activities.
I know this because I am a newspaper editor in Mexico, and in the past few years I have learned to take into account more than the news value of a crime story. But as far as I know, no threat exists against the US media—and so, the fact that such a significant raid against local drug gangs didn’t make the front pages of the local newspapers looked kind of strange...

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Javier Garza Ramos @'CJR'

Dupes and subversives: the banal dross in ASIO files

F.B.I. Agents Get Leeway to Push Privacy Bounds

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is giving significant new powers to its roughly 14,000 agents, allowing them more leeway to search databases, go through household trash or use surveillance teams to scrutinize the lives of people who have attracted their attention.
The F.B.I. soon plans to issue a new edition of its manual, called the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, according to an official who has worked on the draft document and several others who have been briefed on its contents. The new rules add to several measures taken over the past decade to give agents more latitude as they search for signs of criminal or terrorist activity.
The F.B.I. recently briefed several privacy advocates about the coming changes. Among them, Michael German, a former F.B.I. agent who is now a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that it was unwise to further ease restrictions on agents’ power to use potentially intrusive techniques, especially if they lacked a firm reason to suspect someone of wrongdoing...

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Charlie Savage @'NY Times'

ioerror Jacob Appelbaum 
It appears that the old COINTELPRO tactics are happening in America to people who associate with me. In the dead of night. Free country, eh?

TV-B-Gone

HERE
Via
B-Warned: If you ever start talking to me about what drivel you watched last night, I will get up and leave...

Libya and Its Sweet, Sweet Crude

Britta Froelicher

Via

‘A Gay Girl in Damascus’ comes clean

Obama's Secret Afghan Exit Formula

The Ampersand

♪♫ Spatial AKA Orchestra - Ghost Town + Interview w/ Jerry Dammers

Decoder (1984)

With:
F.M. Einheit
Christiane F
Bill Rice
Genesis P.Orridge
William Burroughs
Info
(Thanx SJX!)

'Gay Girl In Damascus' Turns Out To Be An American Man

Over the last several months, Amina Arraf, a blogger who said she was Syrian-American and went by the name Gay Girl In Damascus, captured the world's attention. Her blog caught on just as the protests against President Bashar al-Assad of Syria became widespread and the crackdowns more violent.
On June 6, it all came to a screeching halt when Amina's cousin declared on the blog that Amina had met the fate of many bloggers in authoritarian regimes: Assad's police had taken her into custody. Whether she was alive or dead, no one knew.
As soon as "Free Amina" groups popped up on Facebook and the State Department began looking for her, the story began to seem a lot like fiction. No one had ever talked to Amina. The Guardian published a profile of her June 7 that included a picture they soon found out wasn't Amina but of a Londoner called Jelena Lecic. The biographical details in her blog posts did not check out. Amina Arraf couldn't be found in any public records in Georgia or Virginia and the names of her father and mother also turned up nothing.
Today, the Gay Girl In Damascus blog ended the mystery, posting an apology that revealed Amina was in fact the work of Tom MacMaster, an American from Georgia whose university records show is in a medieval studies graduate program at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland.
On the blog, he wrote:

I never expected this level of attention. While the narrative voıce may have been fictional, the facts on thıs blog are true and not mısleading as to the situation on the ground. I do not believe that I have harmed anyone — I feel that I have created an important voice for issues that I feel strongly about.

The revelation came hours after NPR approached Britta Froelicher, his wife, with some evidence that connected her with Gay Girl In Damascus. Other news organizations appeared to be zeroing in on the couple, too. Over the past week, we've been talking to people who kept in contact with "Amina." Some of them had been in contact with this online persona for as long as five years.
We obtained hundreds of e-mails from a Yahoo! group called thecrescentland that was administered by the online persona. The group has since been removed. One of the people on that list, however, provided us with a mailing address the online persona had given them. The website The Electronic Infatada connected the address with the owner Tom MacMaster.
Sandra Bagaria provided us pictures that Amina had sent her during their six-month friendship in which they exchanged some 500 emails. We found that nine of them matched pictures uploaded by Froelicher in 2008 to a public album that has since been made private.
We matched up the pictures of a trip to Syria visually, then compared the data embedded in the pictures and found all of them contained the same time stamp and all of the pictures contained the same focal length, aperture and exposure time.
The only difference we found in the photo data was that the pictures posted to Picasa were edited using the photo editing program iPhoto, whereas the pictures sent to our source were the originals from the digital camera.
Many the details in the emails also corresponded with MacMaster's life. In his emails to the Yahoo! group for example, Amina shared detailed observations of Edinburgh and a great deal of knowledge of the Atlanta area. In other emails Amina wrote about getting a post graduate degree at the University of Edinburgh.
Another clue came from Paula Brooks, the executive editor of a lesbian news site called LezGetReal. Amina began blogging on her site before she started her own blog. Brooks told us she confronted Amina at first, because the IP address that came up when she accessed the LezGetReal site traced back to Edinburgh, not Syria, where Amina said she was.
Amina told her through email that she used a proxy. Brooks accepted that explanation until this story started breaking. Late last week, she checked her server logs and found that the IP address was from Edinburgh all 135 times Amina logged in. That is highly unusual if one uses a proxy.
Froelicher told us by email that the she and her husband were on vacation. She pointed us to the statement on the blog, which they published a few minutes after emailing NPR.
"We are on vacation in Turkey," she wrote, "and just really want to have a nice time and not deal with all this craziness at the moment."
In interviews with Washington Post, before the announcement was put on the blog, MacMaster denied any involvement with the blog:

"Look, if I was the genius who had pulled this off, I would say, 'Yeah,' and write a book," said MacMaster, reached in Istanbul, where he is vacationing with his wife, a graduate student working on a PhD in international relations.

On the blog, MacMaster said he created Amina to illuminate the story of the Middle East for a western audience. In a lot of ways, the accessibility of the blog was likely the reason it got so much attention. Since February, it has been filled with posts that are dramatic and compelling and full of action. Amina had love interests and a father with failing health. She was a gay woman living in a country where being gay is illegal. She was a girl with close ties to the Assad regime but with heartfelt sympathy for the aspirations of an oppressed people. She spoke against Assad and his iron fist with literary flair and with an unflinching and courageous tongue.
"I only hope that people pay as much attention to the people of the Middle East and their struggles in this year of revolutions. The events there are beıng shaped by the people living them on a daily basis. I have only tried to illuminate them for a western audience," wrote MacMaster on the blog.
"This experience," he continues, "has sadly only confirmed my feelings regarding the often superficial coverage of the Middle East and the pervasiveness of new forms of liberal Orientalism."
Eyder Peralta and Andy Carvin @'npr'

The Devil and John Holmes