Thursday, 20 October 2011
Family hits out at US in fury at fate of Anwar al-Awlaki's slain son
Anwar al-Awlaki’s family speaks out against his son’s death in airstrike
ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald
Just utter TERRORIST!! RT @deviatar How will US justify drone killing of Awlaki's 16-yr old son & his 17-yr-old cousin? is.gd/bzSPS5
America - I am fugn speechless...
America - I am fugn speechless...
McKenzie Wark
I sat down with Dr. Wark in his office at the New School, where he is an Associate Professor of Culture and Media. We discussed the legacy of the Situationists for a new generation of revolutionaries, the resonances and ambiences of Occupy Wall Street, and the role of protest in the absence of politics.
In the preface to The Beach Beneath the Streets, you mentioned being part of radical political and bohemian movements as a youth.
Well, it was a bohemia of no great significance, Sydney. I’m originally from an industrial town with a great labor movement tradition, so I was fortunate to be trained by people in a town with a labor movement who still controlled the waterfront, the steel unions and things like that. I think that was a really good education to do things like covertly hand out literature to steel workers. To later have “occupied” the front lawn of Parliament House in Canberra at the age of 17 was also a wonderful thing. I discovered at the age of 17 the weird way that cops twist your arm when they are trying to move you along; you can’t not move when they’ve got your arm in that weird hold. And of course I immediately got off the steps of the Parliament House because I’m a coward, so I don’t want to oversell this, but even having a minor part in a minor provincial bohemian and political world was a really good preparation for writing about the Situationists.
How long has The Beach Beneath The Streets been percolating? I think the success of the book is that you are able to paint the picture of the Situationist milieu and give the biography of a movement, instead of reducing it to a few key players.
It took a long time to write, and there [were] a couple of abandoned book length manuscripts along the way. I never wanted to do a biography. One was arranged alphabetically like a dictionary, but it just wouldn’t write itself. There is a book length chunk of this thing that just didn’t work, so I had to throw the whole thing away and start all over again. But it’s kind of liberating to do that. It’s been going on for years and in some ways The Beach Beneath the Street is a prequel to some books that I wrote in the early part of this century — A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. These were détournements of Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, respectively. I wasn’t satisfied with my footnotes to that, so this was a kind of excavation of what I thought was living and dead in the Situationist International.
The ideas that stretch across this period seem to be really congealing in your writing about Occupy Wall Street.
Even before this stuff I was interested, on the one hand, in the concept of the spectacle — which is treated as this evacuation of historical time and complete nullification of any kind of practice. There is a link there from Debord to Jean Baudrillard. On the other hand, no one reads those later chapters of Society of the Spectacle, which are about the total opposite. They are about détournements and possibly a somewhat limited notion of workers’ councils, but nevertheless certain kinds of practice. So I was always interested in moments that punctured the spectacle. In my first book I wrote about Tiananmen Square in 1989 and on the Wall Street crash of 1987. It never occurred to me that the politics of occupation practiced in Tiananmen Square could actually be applied to Wall Street. I wrote this book that’s got the two pieces, and I didn’t put them together. To the credit of David Graeber and a few other people, they figured it out that you can occupy an abstraction by occupying this place called Wall Street that doesn’t exist.
This also passes through May ’68, which was also a dual occupation. It was an occupation of the factories and parts of the Latin Quarter. But the two are never put into communication, and that’s its downfall, in a sense...
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Michael Schapira @'full stop'
Wednesday, 19 October 2011
It’s funny how fickle fame can be
The software is an operating system called Unix and the record of how it achieved its current unacknowledged dominance is one of the great untold stories of our time. It emerged from Bell Labs — the R&D facility of AT&T, the lightly regulated monopoly that ran the US telephone network for generations.
Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson were two bright Bell programmers who had been assigned to work with MIT on the design of a complex multi-user operating systemn - Multics. In the end, the plug was pulled on the project, with the result that Bell Labs found itself with two pissed-off hackers on its books. Back in the lab, Ritchie and Thompson decided that they would just have to build the operating system themselves. So, in a fantastic burst of creativity they wrote Unics. Inevitably the ‘cs’ became ‘x’ and Unix was born...
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Dennis Ritchie: The other man inside your iPhone who created Unix
Occupy Wall Street: Jesse Jackson Helps Save Medi-Tent from Cops
As the Occupy Wall Street movement readies for a march against police brutality today and another event for the same cause on Saturday, tense faceoffs continue.
Last night the Rev. Jesse Jackson Jr. arrived at the protests' central location downtown just in time to save the medical tent from potentially being evicted by the NYPD. Reports Gothamist:
Things got tense again for a moment at Zuccotti Park last night when the NYPD tried to take away the Occupy Wall Street medical tent (which is against the rules) before no less than Jesse Jackson showed up. Yup. Fresh from DC, the civil rights activist swooped in just before midnight and appears to have helped persuade the NYPD not to remove the tent just yet (the human chain around it probably didn't hurt either).
The NYPD, for its part, says that officers were just making an inquiry about the tent but that they did not demand its removal..
The NYPD isn't just in the spotlight for its treatment of protesters. At Colorlines, Jorge Rivas has the low-down on the latest racist policing scandal in New York--and it's quite horrifying...
Tuesday, 18 October 2011
tomwaits Tom Waits (ANTI-)
The new @tomwaits album ‘Bad As Me’ is streaming now, check your email or go here to request an invite: badasme.com
The Melanie Iglesias Flip Book
The Melanie Iglesias Flip Book is a stop motion video made up of approximately 2,000 photos featuring Melanie Iglesias changing into different outfits. Photographed by Michael Creagh in just one take. No photos have been retouched.
Via
Monday, 17 October 2011
From Dust To Dust (Burning Man 2011 Time Lapse)
(For prints and access to raw images signup at http://bit.ly/nWIisM)
From dust to dust, this time lapse covers over 5 weeks including the preparation of the event, from before the trash fence erection and after basically everyone except for DPW trickles out. Other than a few occasional pauses, the main event goes by at a rate of 3 hours every second.
Haruki Murakami: 'I took a gamble and survived'
1Q84, Haruki Murakami's new novel, is 1,000 pages long and is published in three volumes. It took the author three years to write and it is possible, on an 11-hour flight from New York to Honolulu, to get through about half of it. Murakami looks crestfallen on receipt of this news – the ratio of writing to reading time is never very encouraging for a writer – and yet if anything tests a novel's power to transport, it is reading it at the back of economy on a full flight over long haul. For those 11 hours, you disappear wholly into Murakami world.
We are in the presidential suite of the Hyatt, Waikiki, overlooking an ad-perfect beach framed by mountains. Murakami, who at 63 still looks like an adolescent skateboarder, divides his time between homes in Hawaii, Japan and a third venue he calls Over There. This is where he disappears every morning while writing his novels, a place populated by the kind of characters who have come to define the Murakami style: enigmatic, deadpan, full of big emotions sheared flat by repression and presented with a detachment that, unusually for a novelist who sells in the millions, has given him a cult-like status. Before I leave for Hawaii a friend confesses his enthusiasm for Murakami is partly based on a desire to be the kind of person who likes Murakami.
"I don't think of myself as an artist," says the author more than once in the interview. "I'm just a guy who can write. Yeah."
Murakami's cool benefits from an un-nerdy background running a jazz club in his 20s, and his equally un-nerdy Ironman routine. As he detailed recently in his memoir What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, Murakami rises at 4am on most mornings, writes until noon, spends the afternoon training for marathons and browsing through old record stores and turns in, with his wife, at 9pm. As a regime, it is almost as famous as his novels and has the clean, fanatical air of a correction to the mess of his 20s. It is also the kind of discipline necessary to crank out 1,000 complicated pages in three years.
To Murakami, built like a little bull, it's a question of strength. "It's physical. If you keep on writing for three years, every day, you should be strong. Of course you have to be strong mentally, also. But in the first place you have to be strong physically. That is a very important thing. Physically and mentally you have to be strong."
His habit of repetition, whether a stylistic tic or a side-effect of translation from the Japanese, has the effect of making everything Murakami says sound infinitely profound. He has written about the metaphorical importance of his running; that to complete an action every day sets a kind of karmic example for his writing. "Yes," he says. "Mmmmm." He makes a long contemplative sound. "I need strength because I have to open the door." He mimes heaving open a door. "Every day I go to my study and sit at my desk and put the computer on. At that moment, I have to open the door. It's a big, heavy door. You have to go into the Other Room. Metaphorically, of course. And you have to come back to this side of the room. And you have to shut the door. So it's literally physical strength to open and shut the door. So if I lose that strength, I cannot write a novel any more. I can write some short stories, but not a novel."
Is there an element of fear to overcome in those actions every morning?
"It's just routine," he says and laughs loudly. "It's kind of boring. It's a routine. But the routine is so important."
Because there's chaos within?
"Yeah. I go to my subconsciousness. I have to go into that chaos. But the act of going and coming back is kind of routine. You have to be practical. So every time I say, if you want to write a novel you have to be practical, people get bored. They are disappointed." He laughs again. "They are expecting a more dynamic, creative, artistic thing to say. What I want to say is: you have to be practical..."
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Emma Brockes @'The Guardian'
ioerror Jacob Appelbaum
The United States is a fascist police state; it used to be hyperbole to say but now we can cite issue after issue to support that statement.
Israel planning thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem
On Tuesday a reparcelization plan was published for Givat Hamatos, in south Jerusalem. The plan calls for building 2,610 residential units, one third of them as part of an expansion of the Palestinian village of Beit Safafa, on the southern border of the capital.
The land included in the construction plans is owned by the state, which holds ultimate authority over the project. Objections or reservations to the plan must be submitted within 60 days of the plan's publication. A report about the intention to establish the neighborhood reached Washington and European capitals on the eve of the Sukkot holiday, sparking criticism from U.S. and European officials.
While the Jerusalem District Planning Council vetted development plans for other Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, it is the Jerusalem Municipality that must make the decisions about Givat Hamatos. Given the right-wing composition of its planning and building committee, swift approval is expected. Even if Netanyahu were to give in to international pressure he would have a hard time halting the project. Yet the fact that the Israel Lands Administration has released the plan means the political leadership has the authority to freeze it at any stage, even if the Jerusalem city council approves it.
Right-wing activists are likely to object to the idea of using public land to build more housing for a Palestinian neighborhood. Beit Safafa suffers for severe overcrowding, and very few building permits have been issued for the neighborhood.
The plan to build 1,700 homes for Jews in Givat Hamatos is more ambitious than the 1,100 new residences planned for Gilo, which earned a sharp rebuke to Netanyahu from German Chancellor Angela Merkel as well as criticism in Washington.
Building the new neighborhood in Givat Hamatos would impede an agreement with the Palestinians based on the framework proposed by President Bill Clinton and frustrate attempts to create territorial contiguity between Palestinian neighborhoods in the Jerusalem area.
The scope and location of the plans conform to the Housing Ministry's E1 plan, designed to connect Jerusalem with Ma'aleh Adumim. For years Israel has not taken action to implement this plan owing to stiff opposition articulated by the United States. The Givat Hamatos plan also accords with other initiatives to expand Israeli power and control in East Jerusalem beyond the 1967 Green Line while creating a settlement belt including the expansion of Gilo and Har Homa in the south and Pisgat Ze'ev and Ramat Shlomo in the north.
Akiva Eldar @'Haaretz'
Israel plans new settlement of 2,600 that will isolate Arab East Jerusalem
Mordot Gilo in Context
Ai Weiwei's Snake Makes Huge Statement
Ai Weiwei created this 55-foot-long undulating snake using 360 children’s backpacks, which he found at the deadly 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Sadly, the backpacks belonged to children who died because of the poor building code, which was attributed to local corruption. As you can imagine, fashioning bags into a wicked symbol of Chinese lore certainly sends a loud statement to the entire world.
Via
Abandoned
"Abandoned" and its accompanying soundtrack were commissioned by The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation to raise awareness about the economic hardship family farmers face in the increasingly industrialized American agriculture system.
In the film, director David Altobelli tells the story of three boys exploring an empty house late one night. The boys break into a farmhouse that was clearly abandoned in a hurry some time ago. As the three explore the house - and even begin to vandalize it - one boy slowly comes to see that the family that lived there was not so different from his own. He realizes that the house they are trashing could foreshadow the future of his own family's farm and home. A frightening moment in the house sends the boys running back to the comfort of their still-functioning farms.
On the soundtrack, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs covers Willie Nelson's country music classic "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys."
For more information about The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation visit http://www.cultivatefoundation.org
In the film, director David Altobelli tells the story of three boys exploring an empty house late one night. The boys break into a farmhouse that was clearly abandoned in a hurry some time ago. As the three explore the house - and even begin to vandalize it - one boy slowly comes to see that the family that lived there was not so different from his own. He realizes that the house they are trashing could foreshadow the future of his own family's farm and home. A frightening moment in the house sends the boys running back to the comfort of their still-functioning farms.
On the soundtrack, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs covers Willie Nelson's country music classic "Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Cowboys."
For more information about The Chipotle Cultivate Foundation visit http://www.cultivatefoundation.org
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