from The New Atlantis
The book is modernity’s quintessential technology—“a means of transportation through the space of experience, at the speed of a turning page,” as the poet Joseph Brodsky put it. But now that the rustle of the book’s turning page competes with the flicker of the screen’s twitching pixel, we must consider the possibility that the book may not be around much longer. If it isn’t—if we choose to replace the book—what will become of reading and the print culture it fostered? And what does it tell us about ourselves that we may soon retire this most remarkable, five-hundred-year-old technology?
We have already taken the first steps on our journey to a new form of literacy—“digital literacy.” The fact that we must now distinguish among different types of literacy hints at how far we have moved away from traditional notions of reading. The screen mediates everything from our most private communications to our enjoyment of writing, drama, and games. It is the busiest port of entry for popular culture and requires navigation skills different from those that helped us master print literacy.
Enthusiasts and self-appointed experts assure us that this new digital literacy represents an advance for mankind; the book is evolving, progressing, improving, they argue, and every improvement demands an uneasy period of adjustment. Sophisticated forms of collaborative “information foraging” will replace solitary deep reading; the connected screen will replace the disconnected book. Perhaps, eons from now, our love affair with the printed word will be remembered as but a brief episode in our cultural maturation, and the book as a once-beloved technology we’ve outgrown.
Christine Rosen
More here
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
The 50 Most Loathsome Americans 2008
from The Beast
42. O.J. Simpson
Charges: Jesus H. Christ, man. You literally get away with murder, to the astonishment of anyone capable of tying their own shoes. Then you write a book, coyly framed as “hypothetical,” in which you explain slicing and dicing your ex-wife and some poor shlub by describing her as a pain in the ass. You know the whole country is still gunning for you. And yet, you feel it sensible to try your luck one more time, because some guy in Vegas is selling a football you signed? Sure, O.J.’s sentence was too harsh to believe he wasn’t being punished for previous crimes of which he was acquitted, but did anyone think that wasn’t going to happen? O.J. could get 33 years for pissing on a tree, and he knew it, so at a minimum the whole “gimme my shit back” caper was unbelievably stupid, the product of a life in which consequences are things that happen to other people. At least now he can get to work on his next book, “If I was an idiot who got himself locked up for life after skating on a double homicide.”
Exhibit A: "I'm O.J. Simpson. How am I going to think that I'm going to rob somebody and get away with it? Besides, I thought what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas."
Sentence: Ghost of Howard Cosell narrates the remainder of OJ’s life: “This man, once a man of greatness, now a man fallen, disgraced, disgusting, reduced to defecating in an unenclosed, seatless toilet, in close proximity to other convicted felons, the indignity apparent on his sad, rapidly aging face. What an incredibly pitiful story is his.”
11. Rush Limbaugh
Charges: The father of modern stupidity, Limbaugh spins reflexively, never struggling with issues, because he knows his conclusion must favor Republicans, and his only task is finding a way to get there. In other words, he may or may not actually believe what he’s saying, but it’s beside the point. His job is not to say what he thinks, but to instruct his listeners on what they should think. If the facts don’t agree, he can always change them, as his “ditto heads” are already armed against the contrary evidence with the all-purpose “liberal bias” attack. “Rush is right,” as the slogan goes, and all those nerdy reporters in the “drive by media” are lying, because they secretly love terrorists. It’s this creepily worshipful, breathtakingly infantile abdication of intellect to a blatantly dishonest hypocrite that makes Limbaugh’s audience so goddamn sad. These pathetic, insecure, failures of men look to Rush as the champion of their impotent rage, helping them to externalize responsibility for their own deficiencies, pinning the blame on those darn liberals and their racial and gender equality.
Exhibit A: You have to marvel at the sheer ignominy of someone who coins the term “Obama recession” two days after the election.
Sentence: Tiny speaker implanted in his inner ear which blares Randi Rhodes 24-7.
10. Bernard Madoff
Charges: Normally, the idea of a bunch of billionaires getting robbed blind for believing in a free lunch would amuse the hell out of us, but Bernie Madoff stole a lot of money from charity endowments, and is responsible for two suicides so far. Here’s a tip, Bernie: If you’re running the biggest scam since the Catholic church, handling billions of dollars, and all it takes to get busted is that some of your marks ask for their money back, you really should take some of that money and set up an escape plan. Still, he gets some credit for making Mort Zuckerman look like a jackass. The real villains here are Christopher Cox and the SEC, who investigated Madoff eight times, the last time specifically on suspicion of running a Ponzi scheme, each time “finding” no wrongdoing, which begs the all-too-familiar question of the last eight years: Satanically corrupt or grossly incompetent? Either way, Madoff was finally brought to justice… by his kids.
Exhibit A: "In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules ... but it's impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time."
Sentence: Sold into slavery.
7. Dick Cheney
Charges: Still alive. The amount of medical resources devoted to keeping this black hole of decency operational could have cured cancer by now, but if they had, Cheney would make sure to keep it a secret. Since Watergate, Cheney’s been fighting to rehab Nixon’s image, and he has succeeded in a way, by showing us all just how much worse a presidency can be.
Exhibit A: “It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.”
Sentence: Eaten alive by baboons.
6. Hank Paulson
Charges: The latest practitioner of the real Bush Doctrine, which is indistinguishable from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. This time, it was Paulson, not Powell, holding up a vial of toxic mortgage backed securities, but the similarly election-panicked congressional reaction’s been the same—a panicked passage of whatever crazy late-term legislation the White House wants, namely Paulson’s 3-page “Gimme the money and go away” bill, plus $150 billion in anonymous pork, in one last massive federal theft on the way out the White House door, costing more than the entire U.S. space program for its 50 years of existence, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. Paulson’s initial spending plan was the financial equivalent of blowing into a broken balloon, and his typically Bushian demands for unfettered power seemed appropriate for a guy who looks and sounds like the ghost-melted Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Exhibit A: “It’s a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation.”
Sentence: Crushed by falling brokers.
5. Alan Greenspan
Charges: The mortgage meltdown may seem complicated, but it started simple, with Al Greenspan pegging the Fed fund rate at 1%. This made Treasury Bonds a fairly lame investment, and led to investors looking for other seemingly safe securities to buy, which led to a flourishing demand for mortgage-backed securities, which led to banks increasingly lowering their standards for mortgage applications, eventually giving liar loans away to anyone willing to take them, which used to be called usury. This led to a decline in the real value of these MBA securities due to high probabilities of foreclosure, but somehow they were still AAA-rated by credit agencies displaying either hopeless incompetence or criminal collusion. Even a monkey wouldn’t need a slide rule to see what would come next. But Alan Greenspan, super-genius guru of the glorious realm of the self-regulating free market, is totally flummoxed. Refusing to accept any blame for years as the housing bubble, long-predicted by out-of-favor economic realists, bloated and burst, only recently has Greenspan accepted even marginal responsibility, admitting only that he was “partially” wrong, professing a state of “shocked disbelief” that lenders couldn’t regulate themselves, and thinking to himself, “This isn’t how it worked in Atlas Shrugged!”
Exhibit A: “Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
Sentence: Recurring role as a senile great uncle on new C-grade sitcom “Krugman’s Krew.”
4. George W. Bush
Charges: It’s hard—believe us, we know—to keep coming up with new things to say about this brutally stupid narcissist, who may have ruined this country irrevocably and certainly has ruined a couple of others, mugging amiably all the way. If anything good comes from Bush’s reign of error, let it be the death of the notion that vitally important, life or death decisions that affect the entire world should be made with one’s “gut.” We used to think that incompetence was just a good cover story for this administration, an excuse that masked their deliberate criminality, but it turns out that Bush and his inner circle are both treasonous, corrupt warmongers and inept fools. One good thing about him, though, is that he has no real interest in politics, and probably won’t give a flying shoe what happens to the world when his term is up. As he once put it, ““History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Here’s to George W. Bush being history.
Exhibit A: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
Sentence: Detained in formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailer without charges or counsel, sodomized by Lynndie England, declared guilty by military tribunal, set adrift naked on a small ice floe in the Arctic.
3. Sean Hannity
Charges: This relentlessly repugnant McCarthyite tool really outdid himself this year, in an all-out quest to otherize Obama in any way he could. This paranoid pustule is able to find a liberal conspiracy lurking behind any mundane occurrence, even attributing Obama’s selection as Time’s Person of the Year, an event as predictable as sunrise, to a pay-to-play scheme. Hopelessly outmatched shill Alan Colmes is finally leaving his role as Hannity’s doormat; he will not be replaced.
Exhibit A: "I never questioned anyone's patriotism."
Sentence: Wrongfully convicted of murdering Vince Foster, based on evidence falsified by Jerome Corsi.
2. John McCain
Charges: McCain vowed to run a clean, respectful campaign, and then accused Obama of pushing sex ed for kindergartners, calling Palin a pig, hanging with terrorists, being a welfare-loving Marxist, being an arugula-loving elitist and pretty much everything but conspiring with the Borg—but he didn’t really mean it, and he didn’t use Reverend Wright, so we’re all supposed to think he’s swell. McCain lied so blatantly and constantly that even cable news bootlicks were compelled to fact-check him, to which he and his surrogates responded by insisting on the same lies. When pressed on the Nixonian onslaught of falsehood, McCain whined that he wouldn’t have had to be such a mendacious prick if Obama had only refrained from raising so much more money than him. McCain pretended to give a shit about America, and then he picked a vapid ambition-hound to succeed him. His response to the economic crisis might as well have been to punch himself in the face. In every way he could this year, McCain burned up all the credibility he had stored up from decades of shameless worship by the press, utilizing every tactic he ever decried, exuding a heady aroma of bullshit and Alzheimer’s, and displaying an unrequited obsession with Joe the Plumber, and he still wound up a failed Faust even the Devil didn’t want.
Exhibit A: "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."
Sentence: Every time anybody says the word “surge,” McCain is shot in the leg.
1. Sarah Palin
Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.
Exhibit A: Waving her embryo-loving credentials, in the form of her Down syndrome baby, at "But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."
Sentence: Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.
More here
42. O.J. Simpson
Charges: Jesus H. Christ, man. You literally get away with murder, to the astonishment of anyone capable of tying their own shoes. Then you write a book, coyly framed as “hypothetical,” in which you explain slicing and dicing your ex-wife and some poor shlub by describing her as a pain in the ass. You know the whole country is still gunning for you. And yet, you feel it sensible to try your luck one more time, because some guy in Vegas is selling a football you signed? Sure, O.J.’s sentence was too harsh to believe he wasn’t being punished for previous crimes of which he was acquitted, but did anyone think that wasn’t going to happen? O.J. could get 33 years for pissing on a tree, and he knew it, so at a minimum the whole “gimme my shit back” caper was unbelievably stupid, the product of a life in which consequences are things that happen to other people. At least now he can get to work on his next book, “If I was an idiot who got himself locked up for life after skating on a double homicide.”
Exhibit A: "I'm O.J. Simpson. How am I going to think that I'm going to rob somebody and get away with it? Besides, I thought what happens in Las Vegas stays in Las Vegas."
Sentence: Ghost of Howard Cosell narrates the remainder of OJ’s life: “This man, once a man of greatness, now a man fallen, disgraced, disgusting, reduced to defecating in an unenclosed, seatless toilet, in close proximity to other convicted felons, the indignity apparent on his sad, rapidly aging face. What an incredibly pitiful story is his.”
11. Rush Limbaugh
Charges: The father of modern stupidity, Limbaugh spins reflexively, never struggling with issues, because he knows his conclusion must favor Republicans, and his only task is finding a way to get there. In other words, he may or may not actually believe what he’s saying, but it’s beside the point. His job is not to say what he thinks, but to instruct his listeners on what they should think. If the facts don’t agree, he can always change them, as his “ditto heads” are already armed against the contrary evidence with the all-purpose “liberal bias” attack. “Rush is right,” as the slogan goes, and all those nerdy reporters in the “drive by media” are lying, because they secretly love terrorists. It’s this creepily worshipful, breathtakingly infantile abdication of intellect to a blatantly dishonest hypocrite that makes Limbaugh’s audience so goddamn sad. These pathetic, insecure, failures of men look to Rush as the champion of their impotent rage, helping them to externalize responsibility for their own deficiencies, pinning the blame on those darn liberals and their racial and gender equality.
Exhibit A: You have to marvel at the sheer ignominy of someone who coins the term “Obama recession” two days after the election.
Sentence: Tiny speaker implanted in his inner ear which blares Randi Rhodes 24-7.
10. Bernard Madoff
Charges: Normally, the idea of a bunch of billionaires getting robbed blind for believing in a free lunch would amuse the hell out of us, but Bernie Madoff stole a lot of money from charity endowments, and is responsible for two suicides so far. Here’s a tip, Bernie: If you’re running the biggest scam since the Catholic church, handling billions of dollars, and all it takes to get busted is that some of your marks ask for their money back, you really should take some of that money and set up an escape plan. Still, he gets some credit for making Mort Zuckerman look like a jackass. The real villains here are Christopher Cox and the SEC, who investigated Madoff eight times, the last time specifically on suspicion of running a Ponzi scheme, each time “finding” no wrongdoing, which begs the all-too-familiar question of the last eight years: Satanically corrupt or grossly incompetent? Either way, Madoff was finally brought to justice… by his kids.
Exhibit A: "In today's regulatory environment, it's virtually impossible to violate rules ... but it's impossible for a violation to go undetected, certainly not for a considerable period of time."
Sentence: Sold into slavery.
7. Dick Cheney
Charges: Still alive. The amount of medical resources devoted to keeping this black hole of decency operational could have cured cancer by now, but if they had, Cheney would make sure to keep it a secret. Since Watergate, Cheney’s been fighting to rehab Nixon’s image, and he has succeeded in a way, by showing us all just how much worse a presidency can be.
Exhibit A: “It is easy to take liberty for granted, when you have never had it taken from you.”
Sentence: Eaten alive by baboons.
6. Hank Paulson
Charges: The latest practitioner of the real Bush Doctrine, which is indistinguishable from Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine. This time, it was Paulson, not Powell, holding up a vial of toxic mortgage backed securities, but the similarly election-panicked congressional reaction’s been the same—a panicked passage of whatever crazy late-term legislation the White House wants, namely Paulson’s 3-page “Gimme the money and go away” bill, plus $150 billion in anonymous pork, in one last massive federal theft on the way out the White House door, costing more than the entire U.S. space program for its 50 years of existence, even in inflation-adjusted dollars. Paulson’s initial spending plan was the financial equivalent of blowing into a broken balloon, and his typically Bushian demands for unfettered power seemed appropriate for a guy who looks and sounds like the ghost-melted Nazis from Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Exhibit A: “It’s a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation.”
Sentence: Crushed by falling brokers.
5. Alan Greenspan
Charges: The mortgage meltdown may seem complicated, but it started simple, with Al Greenspan pegging the Fed fund rate at 1%. This made Treasury Bonds a fairly lame investment, and led to investors looking for other seemingly safe securities to buy, which led to a flourishing demand for mortgage-backed securities, which led to banks increasingly lowering their standards for mortgage applications, eventually giving liar loans away to anyone willing to take them, which used to be called usury. This led to a decline in the real value of these MBA securities due to high probabilities of foreclosure, but somehow they were still AAA-rated by credit agencies displaying either hopeless incompetence or criminal collusion. Even a monkey wouldn’t need a slide rule to see what would come next. But Alan Greenspan, super-genius guru of the glorious realm of the self-regulating free market, is totally flummoxed. Refusing to accept any blame for years as the housing bubble, long-predicted by out-of-favor economic realists, bloated and burst, only recently has Greenspan accepted even marginal responsibility, admitting only that he was “partially” wrong, professing a state of “shocked disbelief” that lenders couldn’t regulate themselves, and thinking to himself, “This isn’t how it worked in Atlas Shrugged!”
Exhibit A: “Parasites who persistently avoid either purpose or reason perish as they should.”
Sentence: Recurring role as a senile great uncle on new C-grade sitcom “Krugman’s Krew.”
4. George W. Bush
Charges: It’s hard—believe us, we know—to keep coming up with new things to say about this brutally stupid narcissist, who may have ruined this country irrevocably and certainly has ruined a couple of others, mugging amiably all the way. If anything good comes from Bush’s reign of error, let it be the death of the notion that vitally important, life or death decisions that affect the entire world should be made with one’s “gut.” We used to think that incompetence was just a good cover story for this administration, an excuse that masked their deliberate criminality, but it turns out that Bush and his inner circle are both treasonous, corrupt warmongers and inept fools. One good thing about him, though, is that he has no real interest in politics, and probably won’t give a flying shoe what happens to the world when his term is up. As he once put it, ““History, we don’t know. We’ll all be dead.” Here’s to George W. Bush being history.
Exhibit A: "Goodbye from the world's biggest polluter."
Sentence: Detained in formaldehyde-laced FEMA trailer without charges or counsel, sodomized by Lynndie England, declared guilty by military tribunal, set adrift naked on a small ice floe in the Arctic.
3. Sean Hannity
Charges: This relentlessly repugnant McCarthyite tool really outdid himself this year, in an all-out quest to otherize Obama in any way he could. This paranoid pustule is able to find a liberal conspiracy lurking behind any mundane occurrence, even attributing Obama’s selection as Time’s Person of the Year, an event as predictable as sunrise, to a pay-to-play scheme. Hopelessly outmatched shill Alan Colmes is finally leaving his role as Hannity’s doormat; he will not be replaced.
Exhibit A: "I never questioned anyone's patriotism."
Sentence: Wrongfully convicted of murdering Vince Foster, based on evidence falsified by Jerome Corsi.
2. John McCain
Charges: McCain vowed to run a clean, respectful campaign, and then accused Obama of pushing sex ed for kindergartners, calling Palin a pig, hanging with terrorists, being a welfare-loving Marxist, being an arugula-loving elitist and pretty much everything but conspiring with the Borg—but he didn’t really mean it, and he didn’t use Reverend Wright, so we’re all supposed to think he’s swell. McCain lied so blatantly and constantly that even cable news bootlicks were compelled to fact-check him, to which he and his surrogates responded by insisting on the same lies. When pressed on the Nixonian onslaught of falsehood, McCain whined that he wouldn’t have had to be such a mendacious prick if Obama had only refrained from raising so much more money than him. McCain pretended to give a shit about America, and then he picked a vapid ambition-hound to succeed him. His response to the economic crisis might as well have been to punch himself in the face. In every way he could this year, McCain burned up all the credibility he had stored up from decades of shameless worship by the press, utilizing every tactic he ever decried, exuding a heady aroma of bullshit and Alzheimer’s, and displaying an unrequited obsession with Joe the Plumber, and he still wound up a failed Faust even the Devil didn’t want.
Exhibit A: "In the 21st century nations don't invade other nations."
Sentence: Every time anybody says the word “surge,” McCain is shot in the leg.
1. Sarah Palin
Charges: If you want to know why the rest of the world is scared of Americans, consider the fact that after two terms of disastrous rule by a small-minded ignoramus, 46% of us apparently thought the problem was that he wasn’t quite stupid enough. Palin’s unending emissions of baffling, evasive incoherence should have disqualified her for any position that involved a desk, let alone placing her one erratic heartbeat from the presidency. The press strained mightily to feign respect for her, praising a debate performance that involved no debate, calling her a “great speaker” when her only speech was primarily a litany of insults to city-dwellers, echoing bogus sexism charges when a male Palin would have been boiled alive for the Couric interview alone, and lionizing her as she used her baby as a Pro-life stage prop before crowds who cooed when they should have been hurling polonium-tipped javelins. In the end, Palin had the beneficial effect of splitting her party between her admirers and people who can read.Exhibit A: Waving her embryo-loving credentials, in the form of her Down syndrome baby, at "But ultimately what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy."
Sentence: Hand-to-hand combat with Vladimir Putin and a pack of wolves.
More here
Boccaccio's Decameron teaches us how to survive the credit crunch
from The Guardian
Giovanni Boccaccio's masterpiece, set in far darker times than our own, is a hymn to the physical joys of life.
Giovanni Boccaccio's 14th-century literary masterpiece The Decameron may hold the recipe to defy these troubled times. Boccaccio's collection of 100 stories told over 10 days is set against the backdrop of a crisis that puts today's credit problems in perspective: the black death. He begins it with a harrowing piece of reportage on the plague in his city, Florence, describing how the disease spread across Europe in 1347-8, killing rich and poor alike in such terrible numbers that bodies littered the streets, the sick were shunned by their families, and funeral rites were abandoned. He paints a picture of a society on the brink of absolute disappearance - would everyone in Florence die? Everyone in Europe?
The moral is that people can be happy, prosperous and creative even in the worst of times: nothing quenches the life force.
Jonathan Jones
More here
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
The Hustle
Language is a shared resource and very few people are capable of original thought. It's fascinating how words and ideas oscillate, replicate, and mutate during their journey through the corrupting corridors of cyberspace and the mainstream media. Words are powerful, and the most potent, self-replicating memes dissociate themselves from their authors. Attribution is becoming irrelevant in our post-modern culture of assimilation and appropriation.
If you look at language and ideas in evolutionary terms then every advance is an incremental improvement on what's gone before. Language evolves organically. All we do is create a cocktail, mixing up the same basic ingredients and influences as everyone else. Hopefully, we can conjoin them in an interesting and deceptively novel way, and maybe garnish the concoction with an idiosyncratic little twist of our own. We use a magician's misdirection to create the illusion of originality, but we're little more than bartenders at the business end of the creative process. We synthesize the raw materials but the consumer filters the product through his own perception before passing on his interpretation of the experience to the next person in line.
We're not only custodians of the verbal tradition; we also have a duty to synthesize existing elements in new and surprising ways. We have to harness the true power of words and subvert the stiflingly narrow parameters and prevailing paradigms perpetuated by pop culture.
What I'm saying is that if you want to write, write, but do it for yourself and as an end in itself. Don’t emasculate your prose for commerce and don’t worry about the consequences. Don't be afraid to challenge people’s preconceptions and, most importantly of all, avoid perpetuating the empty catechisms, shallow ‘insights’ and lazy conjunctions of ideas and words that pass for contemporary discourse within our corroded culture. Bad memes are metastasizing exponentially, so take your words seriously. Making people think is tantamount to a subversive act these days.
Ewan McNaught as Frankie Sumatra by Nicola Cairns
thehustle
If you look at language and ideas in evolutionary terms then every advance is an incremental improvement on what's gone before. Language evolves organically. All we do is create a cocktail, mixing up the same basic ingredients and influences as everyone else. Hopefully, we can conjoin them in an interesting and deceptively novel way, and maybe garnish the concoction with an idiosyncratic little twist of our own. We use a magician's misdirection to create the illusion of originality, but we're little more than bartenders at the business end of the creative process. We synthesize the raw materials but the consumer filters the product through his own perception before passing on his interpretation of the experience to the next person in line.
We're not only custodians of the verbal tradition; we also have a duty to synthesize existing elements in new and surprising ways. We have to harness the true power of words and subvert the stiflingly narrow parameters and prevailing paradigms perpetuated by pop culture.
What I'm saying is that if you want to write, write, but do it for yourself and as an end in itself. Don’t emasculate your prose for commerce and don’t worry about the consequences. Don't be afraid to challenge people’s preconceptions and, most importantly of all, avoid perpetuating the empty catechisms, shallow ‘insights’ and lazy conjunctions of ideas and words that pass for contemporary discourse within our corroded culture. Bad memes are metastasizing exponentially, so take your words seriously. Making people think is tantamount to a subversive act these days.
Ewan McNaught as Frankie Sumatra by Nicola Cairns
thehustle
Monday, January 12, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Graeme Jamieson - Foot Traffic & Trampoline
Foot Traffic
Confined by the limbs of claustrophobia
Cursing quietly the uncertain of stride
Determined to cut through this disturbia
Dirty is every glance to the side
Goache is the current of the guileless
Grievance unto others but a mystery
Lost within fogs of listlessness
Lulled into a false sense of maturity
Publicly dispossessed of purpose
Positioning an unfathomable idea
Volunteering for a game of versus
Vacuous to the point of insincere
Unstudied in the movements of union
Unaware by selfish degree
Yearning only for a straight line to yon
Yes, neighbor, peripheral vision is deceased
Trampoline
The pollution of external dialogue
Spewing forth as a so-what aside
From a soddened, muttering mad dog
With only himself in which to confide
Perhaps he’s a sooth, a vagrant seer?
More than likely a hopped-up bum
Should I listen or laugh; why must I fear?
There is, after all, nowt wrong with asylum
But let's say I to engage Mister Gabber
If only through a squint of salvo
Would he smile at my counter-chutzpah
Or cut me down with spitting vitriol?
Yet if it's poetry, I would recognize it
If it is gibberish, I should know
But I could get stuck fast; best cut to the quick
I’m on the clock, in the end; places to go
Confined by the limbs of claustrophobia
Cursing quietly the uncertain of stride
Determined to cut through this disturbia
Dirty is every glance to the side
Goache is the current of the guileless
Grievance unto others but a mystery
Lost within fogs of listlessness
Lulled into a false sense of maturity
Publicly dispossessed of purpose
Positioning an unfathomable idea
Volunteering for a game of versus
Vacuous to the point of insincere
Unstudied in the movements of union
Unaware by selfish degree
Yearning only for a straight line to yon
Yes, neighbor, peripheral vision is deceased
Trampoline
The pollution of external dialogue
Spewing forth as a so-what aside
From a soddened, muttering mad dog
With only himself in which to confide
Perhaps he’s a sooth, a vagrant seer?
More than likely a hopped-up bum
Should I listen or laugh; why must I fear?
There is, after all, nowt wrong with asylum
But let's say I to engage Mister Gabber
If only through a squint of salvo
Would he smile at my counter-chutzpah
Or cut me down with spitting vitriol?
Yet if it's poetry, I would recognize it
If it is gibberish, I should know
But I could get stuck fast; best cut to the quick
I’m on the clock, in the end; places to go
Friday, January 09, 2009
Spandau Filet
Evolution Control Committee re-engineer Spandau Ballet's "True." Who said remixes never improve upon the originals?
Thursday, January 08, 2009
I haven't posted in a while.
I haven't posted in a while, I've been too busy doing stuff, important stuff - well, I cling to the delusion that it's important, even if in the general scheme of things it's sublimely inconsequential. Still, even allowing for relative inconsequentiality, this stuff I've been doing (making babies, doing business etc.) is, almost indisputably, more important than posting crap on this blog. Nevertheless, the veneer of productivity is starting to fade. I feel vaguely depleted by the (relative) absence of the unproductive, inconsequential and irrelevant from my life of late. As of today, I have a hankering to grasp the metaphorical nettle, seize the virtual day and post some more crap.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 1
Poster Boy for Post-lexia
A guy who thinks Shakespeare is "the geezer who directed that Romeo & Juliet movie with Leo DiCaprio in it" wins Big Brother. Imbecility is a vote-winner. Brian is the perfect poster boy for our media-corrupted, post-lexic society.
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 2
McCann Mania
The McCanns guilt, like the Portuguese police's competence, is still to be established. It should be transparently obvious, as its the axiomatic principle that our (and the Portuguese) legal system is based upon, that they're innocent until proven guilty, but the burden of proof, in the popular mindset at least, seems to have switched to the McCanns to prove their innocence.
The media-led lynch mob mentality metastasises exponentially. Trial by media, innuendo and, with the advent of the blogosphere, global gossip, is now commonplace. The media pendulum inevitably swings from hype to backlash. Rumour, conjecture, speculation and misinformation served up as truth, devoured by a voracious public's seemingly insatiable appetite for schadenfreude.
The Portuguese police don't seem to have much of a case, and appear to think that using their lackeys in the Portuguese press to spread vicious innuendos about the McCanns is a dignified way to discharge their duties. This is a tragic situation with far too many people rushing to judgement. The McCanns were, certainly, guilty of a terrible error of judgement in leaving their kids alone in that apartment, but some of the conspiracy theories, rumours and conjecture that are emanating from the press, both British and Portuguese, are patently absurd, not to mention libelous. The media, collectively, seem to be convulsing in pernicious paroxysms of hallucinatory hysteria.
I'll warrant the Keystone Cops could have conducted a more thorough investigation than the PJ and the misinformation being leaked to the press by "sources close to the investigation" is scandalous. If they devoted as much time to looking for Madeleine (or her body), securing crime scenes and handling such evidence as does exist more responsibly (than they seem to spend leaking salacious "information" to the Portuguese media) then they might have cracked the case long before now.
Once upon a time there was a maxim, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." In today's "idiocracy", every yob with a keyboard thinks they have a right to lob verbal boulders at whoever they please.
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 3
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Concerned investors queue round the block to withdraw their funds from "impecunious" Northern Rock. Material Girl Madonna needs to get hip to the postmodern zeitgeist: "We're living in a media-led miasma."
Poster Boy for Post-lexia
A guy who thinks Shakespeare is "the geezer who directed that Romeo & Juliet movie with Leo DiCaprio in it" wins Big Brother. Imbecility is a vote-winner. Brian is the perfect poster boy for our media-corrupted, post-lexic society.
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 2
McCann Mania
The McCanns guilt, like the Portuguese police's competence, is still to be established. It should be transparently obvious, as its the axiomatic principle that our (and the Portuguese) legal system is based upon, that they're innocent until proven guilty, but the burden of proof, in the popular mindset at least, seems to have switched to the McCanns to prove their innocence.
The media-led lynch mob mentality metastasises exponentially. Trial by media, innuendo and, with the advent of the blogosphere, global gossip, is now commonplace. The media pendulum inevitably swings from hype to backlash. Rumour, conjecture, speculation and misinformation served up as truth, devoured by a voracious public's seemingly insatiable appetite for schadenfreude.
The Portuguese police don't seem to have much of a case, and appear to think that using their lackeys in the Portuguese press to spread vicious innuendos about the McCanns is a dignified way to discharge their duties. This is a tragic situation with far too many people rushing to judgement. The McCanns were, certainly, guilty of a terrible error of judgement in leaving their kids alone in that apartment, but some of the conspiracy theories, rumours and conjecture that are emanating from the press, both British and Portuguese, are patently absurd, not to mention libelous. The media, collectively, seem to be convulsing in pernicious paroxysms of hallucinatory hysteria.
I'll warrant the Keystone Cops could have conducted a more thorough investigation than the PJ and the misinformation being leaked to the press by "sources close to the investigation" is scandalous. If they devoted as much time to looking for Madeleine (or her body), securing crime scenes and handling such evidence as does exist more responsibly (than they seem to spend leaking salacious "information" to the Portuguese media) then they might have cracked the case long before now.
Once upon a time there was a maxim, "let he who is without sin cast the first stone." In today's "idiocracy", every yob with a keyboard thinks they have a right to lob verbal boulders at whoever they please.
Stop the World, I Want to Get Off 3
Between a Rock and a Hard Place
Concerned investors queue round the block to withdraw their funds from "impecunious" Northern Rock. Material Girl Madonna needs to get hip to the postmodern zeitgeist: "We're living in a media-led miasma."
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
An "It" Girl's Guide to the Idiocracy
Big Brother's blatant favouritism towards vile, name-dropping narcissist/wannabe WAG, Charley Uchea is producing a plethora of conspiracy theories, but there is an inexorable logic behind Endemol's decision to turn their decreasingly-popular "reality" tv show, BB, into the grotesque soap opera now known as The Charley Show.The spin-off series is, allegedly, a “done deal.” Tentatively titled, “The “It” Girl’s Guide to International Diplomacy” it’ll see our newest reality tv “star” use her streetwise Sarf-London conflict-resolution strategies to solve a few of the world’s most sensitive political impasses.
First stop is Moscow, where Miss Uchea plans to put Putin in his place, once she finally gets the message that The Litvinenko Affair didn’t involve Chelsea’s new Russian striker getting a BJ under a table in Stringfellow’s VIP lounge. Well, they did send us Polonium-210, so sending them the equally toxic Charley could certainly be viewed as a proportionate response under international law.
Friday, July 06, 2007
Has the novel been murdered by the mob?
From TheGuardian.co.uk
For the last month, a deep, almost mournful, silence has hovered over New York publishing circles. After eight years and 86 episodes, The Sopranos is finished. No longer will it be acceptable to veer mid-conversation from Don DeLillo into David Chase's fictional New Jersey, where Cadillac-driving mobsters hack at each other with Homeric style. No more will we speculate on where Carmela Soprano buys her teal pantsuits.
From coast to coast, from white-wine sipping yuppies to real life mobsters, The Sopranos has had Americans talking - even those of us not familiar with the difficulty of illegal interstate trucking or how to bury a body in packed snow. While the New York Times called upon Michael Chabon, Elmore Leonard and Michael Connelly to resurrect the serial novel in its Sunday Magazine, critics were calling Chase the Dickens of our time. The final episode roped in some 11.9 million viewers. One major question, though, remains. Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel?
More here
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