Two new blogs

Once upon a time there was an excellent blog called Volsunga. But its author got busy, or bored, and the blog vanished into the ether. It's now no longer even in the wayback machine, so far as I can see. But - the author has returned!.

Meanwhile, here is another new blog from another excellent person. I like this trend; the more blogs the better.

Tobias Rapp on Rammstein

Spiegel yet again, where Tobias "Easyjetset" Rapp has a delightfully cynical article on Rammstein finally getting their latest album (not quite) banned:

For the professional provocateurs it is almost a little offensive that a passé gay joke about homosexuals supposedly inserting hamsters into their bodies riled the censors more than earlier songs about the cannibal of Rotenburg and incest, or their Leni Riefenstahl video.

And he has the cultural situation of Neue Deutsche Härte precisely pinned down:

Rammstein, six East German musicians who played in various underground bands in East Germany, derived a successful business model from their understanding that there are no consequences for cultural rebellion in capitalism. Their recipe is simple: Cram sex and violence into a Dadaist vise (a technique that is probably most successful in "Pussy," with lines like "Blitzkrieg with the meat gun"), add layers of loud guitar music and synthesizer noise, and gurgle out the words in a deep, throaty voice.

MultiKulti fail

Also in Der Spiegel, polling of Turkish Germans:

Turks are the largest ethnic minority in Germany and make up almost 4 percent of the country's population. Yet only 21 percent of those polled feel happy to call Germany home.

Decline and fall

Paris-bashing is seeping gradually further into the mainstream:

"It is now well-known that Paris has lost all kind of European leadership to the benefit of towns such as London, Barcelona, Prague and Berlin, to which more and more French professional artists are going into exile,"

Gerry Adams and MLK

In a (month-old) interview with Gerry Adams, Johann Hari emphasises the similarity between Republican movements in Ireland and a cross-Atlantic counterpart:

.

Over the next few years, Catholics in Northern Ireland – stirred by the black civil rights movement in the US, and the dream of Martin Luther King – started to peacefully organise to demand equality.... "There was a sense of naiveté, of innocence almost, a feeling that the demands we were making were so reasonable that all we had to do was kick up a row and the establishment would give in," he says. But the civil rights marches were met with extraordinary ferocity. Protestant mobs attacked the demonstrators, and then the RUC swooped in to smash them up.

Following this line, the divergent outcomes for the two movements become a case study of the snowball effect of political choices. Also of the distortions of hindsight, which tends to elide the violent parts of the US civil rights movement, and the peaceful ends of Irish republicanism.

'Liberation'

Bobbed, geometric haircuts. Chunky jewellery. Vegetarian diets. Saxophone playing. Breathing exercises. Painting. Carving. Snapping with brand new 35mm Leica cameras. Dressing in the artiest handmade clothes. Attending arty parties. Ninety years on from the founding of Walter Gropius's legendary art, craft and design school, the female students of the Bauhaus appear to have been as liberated as young women today.

--- the Guardian

Trade secrets

I've just been reading an ancient JK Galbraith book. True to Galbraith's reputtion, it's packed with little facts and asides. I particularly love the British companies formed in the early 18th century, including one "for carrying on an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is" [p.43]

Philip Pullman writing on Athensius Kircher (in the form of a book review) is a treat, lightly linking him to the post-pomo cultural melange, and the return of magic:

Kircher lived on the cusp between the magical world of the Middle Ages and the rational and scientific world of modernity – as perhaps we do again today, except that we're going in the other direction. His half-sceptical, half-credulous cast of mind is very much to our current taste.

Qiu Xiaolong

Qiu Xiaolong is a bestselling Chinese author of crime thrillers. But his depictions of Shanghai as a city of crime and corruption haven't gone down well with the authorities.

Le Monde Diplomatique is in deepening financial trouble

German documents on wikileaks

Wikileaks seems to be getting a steady stream of German political documents, at the moment particularly concerning coalition talks. Unfortunately I'm no longer following German politics closely enough to figure out the backstory and meaning of the leaks.

New Europe

The Wall Street Journal is, judging by its website, one of the few media organizations to pay serious attention to Central and Eastern Europe. It's mostly paywalled, alas, but there is at least a dedicated [blog](http://blogs.wsj.com/new-europe/) for us shallow-pocketed types.

Class A blinkers

Simon Reynolds speaks truth:

one of my fiend heros (ex this parish) is said to have said that deconstruction did more damage to him than the drink and the drugs ever did.

My past life peddling MMORPGs to children made me deeply uncomfortable; I'd lump (some) online games in with twitter, religion, Marxist introspection and, yes, deconstruction as serious memetic dangers.

[written with a certain flippancy. Deconstruction has its uses, but too often it forms part of an inward-looking academic world unable to make much connection to the rest of reality. I'm very fond of those rare theorists who can harness deconstruction to achieve real-world ends]

media in spain

This is a notes-to-myself entry, in which I try to figure out the best online sources for Spanish news in English. There doesn't seem to be much, which I guess is useful encouragement to learn Spanish

• Guardian
  
• New York Times
  
• Google News
  
• Of sources aimed at expats, Typically Spanish seems to be the only one with any content at all. Euro Weekly News is low-volume and looks like repackaged wire copy.
  
• Barcelona: Barcelona Reporter has the most news (not much). Barcelona Metropolitan is an entertainment/lifestyle magazine; Barcelona Connect is mainly classifieds.
  

PS in the regions

The Parti Socialiste may be disintegrating at a national level, but according to AG it's much stronger at a regional level.

The second president

Forget who will be the first EU president. The more interesting question is, who will be the second? After 2+ years under the new constitution, what kind of figure would make a plausible president? Will interest groups trampled by the first president push for a low-key successor? Would the position -- having, as it does, few formal powers -- turn out to be of minor importance? Will the first president be re-elected again and again? (is that possible under the Treaty of Lisbon?) Will politicians start openly campaigning for the office, rather than putting up a public face of being surprised and honoured to be considered?

After the Irish referendum

This [via CT] is a good overview of the state of play on the Lisbon treaty:

But some diplomats say it is the foreign policy high representative who may emerge as the strongest figure in the new set-up.
....
The foreign policy chief will be powerful because he or she will not only speak on behalf of EU national governments but will also hold the title of Commission vice-president. The holder will oversee the EU’s multi-billion euro foreign aid budget and control a diplomatic service that will ultimately employ up to 3,000 officials.

Goth clubs in Berlin

[from a comment posted elsewhere]


There's a goth club listing at http://etoile.de/; Berlin is in the section 'PLZ-Bereich 1'. You can probably read through the genre descriptions and club addresses without needing much German.

The Kit Kat Club is -- well, if you've had it recommended, you probably have an idea. I like it, although I've not been since a couple of years ago, when it was in a different venue. [I stopped going after seeing a page on their site seemingly saying that they don't want Turks or feminists in the club. Probably it's just an unfortunately-worded page, but it didn't make me want to go back]

Also on the sex end of the spectrum, check out Insomnia. It's a fetish club, with a monthly goth night called 'angel in bondage'.

K17 is the largest and most regular goth club, with a big dose of metal and industrial. On a Friday or Saturday, they generally have four floors: one trad goth and 80s, one electro/industrial, and two small ones for metal. The venue is ugly as hell, but also huge.

If you fancy going out on a Monday night, Duncker is a lovely smallish club, with a lot of regulars and a friendly atmosphere. They (always?) have some kind of barbeque-type food in their back courtyard, and will keep going until Tuesday morning. I think there's also a small goth market there every other sunday afternoon (http://www.darkmarket.de/).

Other places: Kato is more rock-oriented, and has lots of smallish live gigs. ACUD and Sama-Cafe are squats (perhaps legalised; I'm not sure), which do goth/wave nights. They're incredibly cheap (to make them accessible to everybody; do pay a bit more if you can!). Expect plenty of shabby-looking punks and people out of their heads on (cheap) Sternberg beer.

Turkey and Armenia are set to normalize relations today. They're setting up a commission to establish the history of the Armenian Genocide (doubtless carefully skirting that term). Boy, that's going to be one of the most scarily politicised pieces of work going!

Hillary Clinton is witnessing the signing. Wonder if she's bringing with her Samanta Power, author of A Problem From Hell and once-and-future Obama advisor.

Le Figaro poll on whether Obama deserves the Nobel peace prize currently at 29% yes, 71% no.

Der Spiegel also pretty sceptical. Global Voices rounds up similarly bemused reactions from the rest of the world.

I like Obama, but this is ridiculous

Obama getting the Nobel Peace Prize? I can only add to the chorus of WTF. Looking back over previous winners, I see a lot of unexciting, so-so awards, but not that many out-and-out fuckups. Dare I say it, I think this is even worse than Kissenger. With Kissenger (also Arafat/Rabin/Peres), at least they were recognizing a warmonger belatedly trying to wind down a war. The Obama nomination doesn't even have that excuse.

books

I've just arrived back at my mother's place in Oakham, with the plan of spending a couple of weeks quietly working. And now, I realise, also leafing through the piles of books that have accumulated here. Books once read and forgotten; books I've been itching to look at gain for months or years; reference books I never have in the right place to refer to them.

I'm very much looking forward to getting to know them again.

FT on the French integration debate

On the never-vanishing topic of Islam in France, this article in the FT is pretty good.

Farhad Khosrokhavar, director of research at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, estimates that 15 to 20 per cent of French Muslims do not practise Islam at all. Fasting during Ramadan is considered a basic duty of the religion, yet only about 70 per cent of French ­Muslims even claim to do it. In short, European Islam has many of the same problems as European Christianity.

Via Art Goldhammer, unsurprisingly

This list of topics for a design magazine was composed in the year I was born. Nothing, it seems, has changed: they're still interesting, still important, still underexplored. Disappointing, that, it a way.

A collective spasm of high-level excuse-making

I am, like Art Goldhammer somewhat baffled by the French government treating the Roman Polanski as a matter of artistic freedom, rather than rape. There aren't many situations in which I'm on the side of Law and Order, but this must be one of them.

Making lists for fun and profit

This, to my utter surprise, is not just usable but something I'm honest-to-God likely to use. Wonders will never cease.

Looks like there's a new squat just outside Paris. Wouldn't count on it lasting more than a few days, but you never know.

Meanwhile I'm sat at home, already in bed (it's only 8:30), feeling uncertain and oddly morose. My life currently has a lot of moving parts, and I'm not entirely sure I have them all lined up. Alternatively, it could just be lack of sleep.

I feel a little sorry for the Porguese parliament. Elections are coming up on Sunday, and I'm struggling to find a single article about them in the French or British press. The German media, on the other hand, is giving them a fair bit of attention. Why the difference in interest? I have not hte faintest idea. German elections are happening on the same day -- but if anything, I would have expected that to divert attention away from Portugal. Mysterious.

[I fully expect that some other European country is holding elections this week, and I haven't heard anything about it]

films

Am I just noticing films more at the moment, or are there a lot of good new films floating around? I'm thinking of the following -- none of which I've seen, all of which I want to see.

• District 9 -- political commentary in the form of Science Fiction. i.e. what written SF has always been about, but with a budget.
  
• Neuilly sa mère, a comedy about the class divide in Parisian suburbs
  
• Inglorious basterds. The only WWII film I have any desire to watch
  

Momus in Paris

I seem to finally be running into a fair number of interesting places in Paris. So last night I finally saw Momus, the (currently Berlin-based) writer/singer, reading from the French edition of his new 'Book of Jokes'. The venue, La Société de Curiosités, is a comfortable looking one-room space. It's run as a private club, which I think is basically a legal hack so you're allowed to smoke there.

Poetry slams in Paris

Tonight I finally made it to the weekly French-language poetry slam at Culture Rapide in Belleville. Impressed. Very impressed. Aware that my being impressed counts somewhat less given the difficulty I had in following some of the French poetry.

Of everything I've seen in my 2+ months in Paris, this was the first event that really impressed me, that made me want to stay in town just to remain in its orbit.

Why did it take me so long to end up there? The same place also hosts a regular English-language slam, which I visited soon after I arrived. It wasn't actually bad -- just somewhat insipid, more like a poetry reading than the slams I'd come to love in Berlin. So I wasn't inspired to visit its French sister, at least not before August came and put everything interesting in Paris under wraps.

Accidental outing on facebook

Both important and unsurprising: your friendship network reveals your sexuality, with a pretty high accuracy.

Using data from the social network Facebook, they made a striking discovery: just by looking at a person’s online friends, they could predict whether the person was gay. They did this with a software program that looked at the gender and sexuality of a person’s friends and, using statistical analysis, made a prediction.

While George's work (among others) goes much, much further in pulling down illusions of privacy in networks. But sometimes we need the simple stuff to hammer home the basic point that it's more-or-less impossible to make your connections public, and still have any real form of anonymity.

[admittedly the first form, at least, is doing little more than mechanizing what happens socially in any case]

Segolene Royal's new website has received plenty of much-deserved mockery in France, but not nearly enough from the rest of the world. Go, admire the purple!

104

Just back from a film/discussion about a violence and arrests at a demonstration in Paris last March. I was somewhat underwhelmed by the film itself: riot-porn shot in black and white, with the sound turned way down. i.e. making itself look arty without using a great deal of art.

The discussion that followed, though, was excellent. Sylvain George, who shot the film, led it, with enthusiastic comments from a small audience consisting in large part of people who had taken place in the protest. Despite being too confused and tongue-tied to contribute to it myself, I was cheered up to find some fervent opinions being expressed for once.

My main reason for going, though, was an excuse to visit the arts centre 104. It's much larger and more obviously government-funded than I'd imagined*. It reminds me a little of the Tate Modern: a massive, deliberately under-utilised space, a painfully clean industrial conversion. By the look of 104, I imagine it's a former rail station or similar. Like a lot of places in Paris, it initially rubbed me up the wrong way by being too clean, too expensive-looking. But the programme of events is impressive, they're mostly free or reasonably priced, and it seems to be providing space for artists to work rtaher than just strut. I'd feel considerably more at home there if it had a decent covering of grime, but that's just my personal neuroses making themselves known.

* Actually, I suspect I'd confused it with somewhere else, such as a more self-organized atelier, but I can't disentangle my memories. Such is the problem of using numbers as names.

Troy Kennedy Martin died last week. Not a name I knew -- but I had repeatedly heard tell of Edge of Darkness, an impressively well-regarded BBC series from the 80s, which he wrote. So I settled down to watch it. So far (2 episodes in), I'm pretty impressed. Some irritating artefacts of its era -- the slow pace, the constant drinking -- but the plot is fascinating. More later, maybe.

This is a good case of why I'm occasionally uncomfortable with novels of ideas. Calvino's summary of logic vs. empiricism is neat -- but this is something I can read argued much more closely in textbooks and journal articles. Without the plot, what's the point.

[I'm aware that, between this and the last post, I seem to be arguing that thrillers are the only books worth reading. Maybe I should follow that...]

Twilight

A few weeks ago, I tried reading the first of the Twilight books. I fully expected to loathe it, and there are plenty of good reasons to do so. But there's something addictive about its fixation on a Mary Sue -- it becomes much more appealing than any non-cardboard characters would be.

In short, I enjoyed it. Had I been a neurotic teenager, it would probably have spoken more directly to me [as a neurotic twenty-something, the distance is generally a little too great].

But then, I also approved of the Da Vinci Code.

Penny Red starts her column in the morning star. Notable mainly for looking back to the 80s as a heyday of counter-culture. Given enough time, all things start to look good.

Videos to listen to

Things I've been listening to:

• Bruce Sterling on Augmented Reality [50m] -- not much shocking content, by his Sterling's standards, but pleasantly upbeat


• Lots of TED Talks. I've been unexpectedly disappointed by most of the recent ones. Possibly, as with OReilly conferences, my expectations are now so high that reality can only disappoint. Also, as John Robb speculates, corporate/financial backing may have steered them away from decent thinking on this year's Collapse Of Capitalism. [or perhaps, since we're currently in a hype-bubble of financial apocalypse, treating this as Just Another Recession is the forward-looking thing to do
  

Beyond the reality-based community

The Yorkshire Ranter:

I occasionally make the point that after the Left invented post-modernism, the Right operationalised it and rolled it out as a coherent political-media-aesthetic package. If your politics depends on disagreeing with objective reality, and persuading people to vote against their interests, there is a huge opportunity in the realisation that it's possible to have multiple competing truths. Setting the limits of debate, and controlling the language in which it is carried out, is a valid and proven strategy for power.

Similarly it's not entirely bogus to link the collapse of the centre-left today to the collapse of the far left in the 90s (which in turn came about from the collapse of the USSR). Eurocommunists, as well as being useful idiots for the Kremlin, were crucially also outriders for the social democrats. The Trots may have been loathed by the moderates, and may have lost them numerous elections one way or another, but they also forced them to confront serious issues. Here's hoping the pirates, the greens, and the non-party activists can fulfill the same purpose today.