Fools Dance – They’ll Never Know EP (12″)
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Friday, 30 December 2011
Dot-dash-diss: The gentleman hacker's 1903 lulz
Yet before the demonstration could begin, the apparatus in the lecture theatre began to tap out a message. At first, it spelled out just one word repeated over and over. Then it changed into a facetious poem accusing Marconi of "diddling the public". Their demonstration had been hacked - and this was more than 100 years before the mischief playing out on the internet today. Who was the Royal Institution hacker? How did the cheeky messages get there? And why?
It had all started in 1887 when Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of the electromagnetic waves predicted by James Clerk Maxwell in 1865. Discharging a capacitor into two separated electrodes, Hertz ionised the air in the gap between them, creating a spark. Miraculously, another spark zipped between two electrodes a few metres away: an electromagnetic wave from the first spark had induced a current between the second electrode pair. It meant long and short bursts of energy - "Hertzian waves" - could be broadcast to represent the dots and dashes of Morse code. Wireless telegraphy was born, and Marconi and his company were at the vanguard. Marconi claimed that his wireless messages could be sent privately over great distances. "I can tune my instruments so that no other instrument that is not similarly tuned can tap my messages," Marconi boasted to London's St James Gazette in February 1903...
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Paul Marks @'New Scientist'
Destroy
'Yes.'
'Tell me,' she said.
'The urge to destroy is a creative urge.'
'This is also the hallmark of capitalist thought. Enforced destruction. Old industries have to be harshly eliminated. New markets have to be re-exploited. Destroy the past, make the future.'
- Don DeLillo
Cosmopolis (2003)
Is Don DeLillo really prescient?
Peace on Earth...
'I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.' - Gandhi
Occupy Facebook
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson...
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Thursday, 29 December 2011
thiefotime Doug Weir
last night's Will Self point of view on the media landscape, well worth a listen, audio: http://t.co/Uh6u3FiV text: http://t.co/LJm41Hxs
last night's Will Self point of view on the media landscape, well worth a listen, audio: http://t.co/Uh6u3FiV text: http://t.co/LJm41Hxs
The Firm
UK photographer Jocelyn Bain Hogg spent ten years documenting organized crime life, from the activity of British gangsters in South London to their exile in Tenerife, Canary Islands. With unprecedented access, these glaring images capture the storied villains at home, salacious private parties, unlicensed boxing matches, business talks ,and funerals of the “the old-school Godfathers of British crime” whose deaths would fracture and decentralize the social order within these underworld societies. The Firm was completed in 2001, re-visted in 2008, and is now on view at London’s Foto 8 Gallery through January 14.
“These are not the faces of criminals who hide behind the facade of respectability or the corruption of political influence. They are, in fact, the real thing, men who hold their head up when challenged, and who seek no false redemption in the face of public vilification...”
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Wednesday, 28 December 2011
Tuesday, 27 December 2011
Iain Sinclair reviews Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield Ford
Old Stratford, transport hub, retail cathedral, birthplace of the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, drew me back with its intimations of a new England, a city state outside time and beyond culture. Compulsory diversions have been arranged, systems of barricades and cones, to funnel random pedestrians through chasms of glass and steel towards the shimmering illusion of the Westfield oasis. It took something special to make me reach for my camera, all the evidence had already been logged and relogged. Just as my futile presence, in its turn, was captured on hours of security tape, scans from overhead drones.
Walking away from the revamped container stack looking over the Olympic stadium, I found something worth recording. The poster with the smirking, corkscrew-haired young woman chosen to promote another meaningless development opportunity had been customised with black pennies over the eyes, stickers announcing: "SAVAGE MESSIAH". Was this a band paying their respects to Henri Gaudier-Brzeska? (Savage Messiah is the title of a biography of the sculptor, by HS Ede, published in 1931.) Or was it an art school tribute to the subversive dynamism of Blast and Wyndham Lewis? In a shallow, fast-twitch period we thrive on commodified speed-dating, quoting the quote, Xeroxing energy sources to make them into marketable brands. If Ede's book was not the inspiration, perhaps the neo-Vorticists of Stratford had chanced on Ken Russell's 1972 film with the same title, scripted by the poet Christopher Logue, and featuring Dorothy Tutin and Scott Antony as the fated pair, Gaudier and his Polish lover, the troubled Sophie Brzeska?
The mystery of the defaced poster was solved when I discovered Laura Oldfield Ford's samizdat pamphlets, recording moody expeditions, pub crawls, mooches through the kingdom of the dead that is liminal London. Even the author's name seemed like a serendipitous marriage of Blake's Old Ford and the poet Charles Olson's notion of open-field poetics (the contrary of the current fetish for enclosures). The original Savage Messiah "zines" are serial diaries of ranting and posing among ruins. Ford delivers the prose equivalent of a photo-romance in quest of a savage messiah with attitude, cheekbones and wolverine eyes. A feral, leather-jacketed manifestation of place.
Collided into a great block, the catalogue of urban rambles takes on a new identity as a fractured novel of the city. Slim pamphlets, now curated and glossily repackaged, have an awkward relationship with their guerrilla source. With a formal introduction and a cover price a penny short of £20, it is difficult to sustain the swagger of the throwaway form, strategically manipulated to look like dirty sheets on which you can smell the ink, glue, semen and toxic mud. The structure depends on a steady drip-feed of quotes from JG Ballard, Italo Calvino, Guy Debord, Walter Benjamin. White men all, festering in elective suburbs of hell, where they labour to finesse a paradise park of language.
Moving beyond this relentless Xeroxing of the entire genealogy of protest from Blast to Sniffin' Glue, by way of Situationism and psychogeography, Oldfield Ford displays authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain. She is a necessary kind of writer, smart enough to bring document and poetry together in a scissors-and-paste, post-authorial form. Like so many before her, psychotic or inspired, she trudges far enough to dissolve ego and to identify with the non-spaces into which she is voyaging. "This unknown territory has become my biography." Her story is eroticised by the prospect of riot, anecdotes teased from smouldering industrial relics. The "euphoric levitation" of brutalist tower blocks. Post-coital reveries from "an ugly night on ketamine in a New Cross squat".
Alongside the standard tropes of entropy tourism, talk of "mystical portals", Heathrow as a "mesh of paranoia", Oldfield Ford experiences sudden illuminating shifts of consciousness. "The air is perfumed, the sky pink. My hair is loose, unkempt, I am in a red dress descending into the chlorine scent of a disused pool." Ballardian riffs anticipate plague, soul sickness, breakdown of the social contract. "There wasn't a fixed point where the malaise started." In the end, it's about walking as a way of writing, recomposing London by experiencing its secret signs and obstacles.
When writers identify with the city that feeds and sustains them, they become plural. They abdicate originality. Sophie Brzeska, after Gaudier had been killed in the first world war, embarked on a London walk as random and driven as anything undertaken by Oldfield Ford. As Ede reports: "She walked all through the night … talking and swearing more loudly than ever … a strange, gaunt woman with short hair, no hat, and shoes cut into the form of sandals. She felt the world was against her."
@'The Guardian'
Max Cooper RA 281
1. Underworld - To Heal (PIAS)
2. Tim Hecker - Chimeras (Kranky)
3. Max Cooper - Echoes Reality - Si Begg Remix (Traum)
4. Ripperton - A Skilift Upstairs The Sleeping City - Max Cooper Remix (Systematic)
5. Kollektiv Turmstrasse - Was Bleibt - Jimster Instrumental Mix (Connaisseur Recordings)
6. Agoria - Panta Rei - Max Cooper Remix (Infine)
7. Lusine - Every Disguise (Ghostly International)
8. Vaetxh - Mass (King Deluxe)
9. Mono Electric Orchestra - Blunt Force Trauma - Max Cooper Remix (TBC)
10. Jimmy Edgar - Uniform (Citation) (Warp)
11. Giom - Techno Idiots (Lost My Dog)
12. David August - Peace Of Conscience (Diynamic)
13. Amon Tobin - Bedtime Stories (Ninja Tune)
14. Extrawelt - Titelheld (Cocoon)
15. Vaetxh - Cuntpressor (Detund)
16. Andrew K - The Doppler Effect - Max Cooper Remix (Vice Versa)
17. Hot Chip - I Feel Better - Max Cooper Remix (Flash)
18. Ben Frost - Killshot (Bedroom Community)
19. The Flashbulb - Undiscovered Colours (Alphabasic)
20. Hiatus - Third - Max Cooper Remix (Last Night On Earth)
21. Underworld - To Heal (PIAS)
2. Tim Hecker - Chimeras (Kranky)
3. Max Cooper - Echoes Reality - Si Begg Remix (Traum)
4. Ripperton - A Skilift Upstairs The Sleeping City - Max Cooper Remix (Systematic)
5. Kollektiv Turmstrasse - Was Bleibt - Jimster Instrumental Mix (Connaisseur Recordings)
6. Agoria - Panta Rei - Max Cooper Remix (Infine)
7. Lusine - Every Disguise (Ghostly International)
8. Vaetxh - Mass (King Deluxe)
9. Mono Electric Orchestra - Blunt Force Trauma - Max Cooper Remix (TBC)
10. Jimmy Edgar - Uniform (Citation) (Warp)
11. Giom - Techno Idiots (Lost My Dog)
12. David August - Peace Of Conscience (Diynamic)
13. Amon Tobin - Bedtime Stories (Ninja Tune)
14. Extrawelt - Titelheld (Cocoon)
15. Vaetxh - Cuntpressor (Detund)
16. Andrew K - The Doppler Effect - Max Cooper Remix (Vice Versa)
17. Hot Chip - I Feel Better - Max Cooper Remix (Flash)
18. Ben Frost - Killshot (Bedroom Community)
19. The Flashbulb - Undiscovered Colours (Alphabasic)
20. Hiatus - Third - Max Cooper Remix (Last Night On Earth)
21. Underworld - To Heal (PIAS)
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