I'm pretty vacantly browsing through some punk dvds at play.com, when a line of text grabs me like a dadaist bouncer intent on throwing me out with my definitions: Julio Iglesias is a punk rocker, it shouts!
Holy Sid! What will the ladies in the mosh pit say?
(detail of image found here)
My thoughts keep going back to Ghost Town - my rides through Chernobyl area. It is a remarkable, important, densely poignant document.
A gonzo photo-reportage made by a young woman of the former USSR riding her kawasaki ninja through the dead zone surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster area, it touches on many of the neuralgic points of a post-industrial psyche.
"It's like looking at stills from Survivors!", Marianna exclaimed when looking at the photographs. I had the same feeling. The same reaction. Thinking of the fictionalisation of fear filtered through media. In this case, a TV series from the seventies providing the key that opens the door to our understanding of the real embedded in images on a computer screen.
Flashback to the nuclear nightmares of my teens.
Fastforward to potential environmental disasters at the horizon.
What is apparent in these photos, hidden by empty roads, is our relative unimportance as a species in relation to the lifeline of our host planet, the place some call mother earth. We may be getting daily reports attesting to our power to fuck things up, but these images testify to nature's resilience. While radiation-related maladies are surely running riot across the local animal population (and I wouldn't be surprised if unicorns or new mythological beasts start to emerge from this neck of the proverbial woods) life continues run free like a wild horse.
But I do not wish to be pessimistic. This type of horizontal communication would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. The p2p exchange of experience and views across borders and personalities can help us shape the way we confront realities, the manner in which we construct the future.
We are a strange species indeed. Capable of such myopia, always pushing towards vision. We are curious little beings and we need stories like this one - they may just help us to grow.
Mr. Damon points to Citizen Kubrick:
"There are boxes everywhere - shelves of boxes in the stable block, rooms full of boxes in the main house. In the fields, where racehorses once stood and grazed, are half a dozen portable cabins, each packed with boxes. These are the boxes that contain the legendary Kubrick archive."
"Hi, kooky alterna-stripper! Why don't you come over here and say something about William Burroughs?" Lily Burana on stripping, writing and punk.
Digitally mediated urban space: new lessons for design (PDF 13.3MB) - a compendium of current trends in interactive city locations.
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Look fabulous, live well, do good. Stylish name, great tagline, sustainable project?
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Is it delusional to speak of animism in relation to technology?
Zed Nelson is an omnivorous photographer with a penchant for people and a keen eye for the idiosyncrasies of our age.
U.S. to police arizona border with drone aircraft: the technology used may be getting increasingly sophisticated, but the paradigm driving the war on illegal immigration is plunging us back into a re-interpretation of medieval mindframe and architecture - the drone becomes the crocodile in the aerial moat that surrounds Fortress USA. While the poor, well, they remain the same. Century in, century out.
NEC shares its vision for broadband and mobile style and near-future ubiquitous networking devices. There's some sexy looking concepts on show, but I couldn't help but recall a sentence (if I may be allowed to quote myself) I wrote a couple of years ago:"hype has always been at the heart of technology like a malfunctioning pacemaker".
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What are the unimportant things in life?
Seven mile boots: a cool, offbeat, flaneur-inspired porting of a fairytale concept. But red boots?
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Is this Asia's first location-based mass multiplayer mobile game?
"In Gunslingers, players experience the traditional mumbo jumbo espionage and tactical combat scenario with a slight difference? You get the whole of Singapore as your playing field! With a simple phone and Network Location Positioning Technology, players? real world movements are mirrored in the game world, allowing them to physically react with other online players. From the windy plains of Changi to the wet grounds of Jurong, everything in between is your battlefield. Free from the reins of the PC, engage other Gunslingers in a true real-time mobile gaming adventure."(grazie frangino!)
boomselection brings news of blazin' blip blop and blar & blee: R&B and hip-hop morsels served on a bed of mobile phone ringtones. Cooked up by 424 sound monster, this audio platter runs at around 1 hours and is available in mp3 in two parts, which can be savoured here:
part a
part b
Are we being existentially shortchanged by an economy of fear?
As Hamlet would have said had he been a marketing manager: "There are more products in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your placement."
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As I came across the image above (via), taken from the Love Goddess issue of the Girl Watcher (June 1959), I just had to dig out this quote from Pat Califia:
"When I look at pornography, it reminds me of the hundreds of figurines of nude women that turn up in the prehistoric strata of some archaeological digs. This vast outpouring of images of female mouths, breasts, vulvas, and buttocks being approached and filled by eager male and female hands, tongues, dildos, cock; the anointing of the female form with spit and oil and cum; and the atmosphere of abandon and need feel almost religious to me. It is as if pornography is a huge repository of male longing and adoration for women. Like any form of worship, it is flawed, but I detect at least as much curiosity about and admiration for women in pornography as I do misinformation, guilt, or rage. The woman in pornography is a triumphant goddess. She is the mysterious source of all pleasure, the powerful magnet that attracts every lascivious eye or itchy crotch. She cannot be denied. She always gets what she wants (and wants everything she gets). Who could ever be thick enough, long enough, pump hard enough to satisfy her insatiable sheath? Who could ever be worthy of her perfect body, her sultry glance, her silky skin? Certainly not those hairy, pot-bellied, fumbling, wise-cracking, sweaty-handed men who always get second billing in these adult epics"
(BTW, the quote is not from the interview link above, but from the introduction to the print book "Some Women" - Rhinoceros 1995)
Thanks to neural, I've just dowloaded the politics of information: the electronic mediation of social change (PDF 2.2MB). A cursory glance at its contents and bylines seems to indicate a promising read.
On a more technical note, the web intro to the ebook also makes an interesting point on the medium adopted: "Unconstrained by the hidden assumptions of print publication, where discursive weight is too often held in check by the literal weight of a fixed edition, this critical e-book is unapologetic in its length, its scope, and its degree of engagement." This is all well and good, but I fear that what is unconstrained on one front, finds itself tightly bound on another. Which is to say: how do I free myself from the leggibility constraints implicit in a 392-page PDF? Do I attempt the gargantuan, expensive and wasteful action of printing it or do I just skim read certain items? Somehow, I have yet to get a handle on handling ebooks, aside from filing them away in my "PDF library" folder to gather digital dust.
Cerebrally perverse simulations of simulations, safe for work porn is strangely sexy despite (or perhaps because of) its staged detachment. Its fully-clothed porn tableaux raising questions on what is considered offensive and obscene.
Cunt: a cultural history by Matthew Hunt.
(via purse lip square jaw)
