Infected Mushroom, with some of those lyrics that, when heard as lyrics, sound like some kind of missing key. When written down, the magic fades into the air -- so imagine this to the background of some unusually determined and driving trance:

We gonna run run run
To the cities of the future
Take what we can and bring back home

From Bruce Sterling's compellingly-annotated Flickr set studies in atemporality, presumably a companion to his Transmediale speech:


What I love about this is that it's obviously part of that Strychnin aesthetic of steampunk victoriana and Gaimanesque fairy-tales, but has managed to bridge the gap between there and the real world. Oh what a world, where introducing punk into steampunk can be a revelatory gesture.

Valérie Pécresse achieves total obliviousness as regards racism:

A un homme d’origine africaine qui lui demande l’application de la loi sur les CV anonymes, la ministre répond en le renvoyant sur les bancs de l’école. Selon cette native de Neuilly-sur-Seine, “une lettre de motivation avec une faute d’orthographe a plus d’impact” sur un recrutement qu’une photo…

In other words, two wrongs make a reason to ignore the public.

[via AG, of course]

Spanking cliches: a transatlantic comparison:

The Cowboy spanking story is as American as apple pie, while the Schoolmaster caning story reaches its perfection on the other side of the Atlantic.

Interesting for the comments, almost as much as the post itself. It's somewhat odd how clearly I can see that neither of these appeal to me.

Activists and insurrectionists: an article that gives the most damning definition of activism I could imagine:

. Activism can be defined as any activity which petitions the support of leaders and policy-makers (for the liberal activist) or which petitions the support of “the people” (in the case of “anarchist” activists).

Converting realaudio streams to mp3

To pull a realaudio stream and convert it to mp3:


mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/b56realaudiog2.rm
ffmpeg -i out.rm out.mp3


[this uses mplayer to pull the stream, and ffmpeg to convert it to mp3.

Or, here's how to do it in one command-line:

mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile /dev/fd/3 -dumpstream rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/b56realaudiog2.rm 3>&1 1>&2 | ffmpeg -i - /tmp/output.mp3


Why do this? Mainly because I can then use vlc to play the audio speeded up, which is great for slow-moving radio shows.

Perhaps the most successful in a long line of attempts to justify and explain Twilight:

Because Edward Cullen is porn. Weird, pre-sexual, socially conservative, deeply repressed and fucked-up porn, but in a world where ladies’ sexy feelings are fenced in with shame and warnings of danger from Day 1, is it any wonder that porn which consistently ties sex to death and fear and the urgent need for repression is selling to the girls?

Shock Doctrine coming to Haiti

Heritage Foundation, via Naomi Klein, via some new facebook group:

"In addition to providing immediate humanitarian assistance, the U.S. response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti earthquake offers opportunities to re-shape Haiti’s long-dysfunctional government and economy as well as to improve the public image of the United States in the region."

oooh, a fantastic article in the NY Times:

we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness.

"Jahrelang wurde es angekündigt, jetzt ist es vom Tisch: Berlin bekommt kein flächendeckendes Wlan." [Morgenpost]. So we'll have to make do with freifunk

And here's the article from Le Monde. Love the half-hearted defence put up by the mairie:

"Le contexte actuel est difficile pour les professionnels de la nuit, mais il est excessif de dire que la nuit parisienne est morte. Auprès des étrangers, elle garde une excellente image."

These days, Paris-bashing is starting to seem too easy. Maybe in a decade or two, it'll be time to rediscover its good side ;)

Even the New York Times is getting in on the Paris-bashing party :)

John Harris musters more enthusiasm for centre-left policy wonks than I could ever hope to manage:

thousands of people know pretty much what a social-democratic, forward-looking and eminently electable Labour party might put before the voters – so why do so few people on the inside?

Sometimes, when I fail to mentally or technically filter them out, online ads really get to me:


This is from the friggin' Guardian

Cory Doctorow:

[Myspace] pages are made by people who know – to the femtometre – exactly how ugly they are. They are supposed to offend your sensibilities. They are intended to make designers weep. Their ugliness is a defence mechanism that protects them from being knocked off by marketing/communications firms, because most designers would rather break their own fingers than commit such an atrocity.

Der Spiegel's review of the decade is appropriately grim.

English-language German news site thelocal puts out a review of the events of 2009. Shorter version: a year of no significance.
Also, not entirely unrelatedly:

Germans have less faith in their political system than at any point in the post-war period, mainly due to what they see as a weak response to the financial crisis, a poll published Sunday showed.

Bruce Sterling's State of the World is back for another year. I swear, this is the only piece of punditry that ever seems close to grokking what's going on:

Campaigners succeed in getting bull-fighting banned in Catalonia:

As far back as 1909, Barcelona hosted Spain's first anti-bullfighting protest, and by 2004 more than 80 per cent of Catalans were opposed to the practice.

Sy Hersh's Nov 09 article on Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is not all that revelatory. But, given the last post here, it's hardly reassuring to read of the Pakistani president defending nuclear security in these terms:

"Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban. They’re British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?"

"until less than ten years ago, the locks on RAF nuclear bombs were opened with a bicycle lock key. " [BBC]

Admittedly, this looks like a case of auntie spinning their info as far as it'll go. e.g. no bicycle lock itself, necessarily, just the same kind of key.

Self-criticism:

A lot went wrong and my own sorry generation are largely culpable. Smug, lazy and intellectually self-satisfied; historically uneducated and therefore fixated on superficial understandings and re-stagings of the past; unwilling to risk seriousness, or rather, mistaking creative conservatism and po-faced self-absorption for seriousness; lacking sex, glamour, rage, resentment, a death drive, or anything vaguely fucking resembling a reason to make a mark upon the world – you, my peers, are possibly the most boring lot of Westerners since those born ‘tween the World Wars grew themselves up on Patty Boone and Georgia Gibbs.

Couldn't agree more.

More optimism from Hari, this time idolizing JJ & co:

It works. Look at Britain. Three years ago, eight new coal power stations were being planned, and the third runway at Heathrow was all but inevitable. A few thousand heroic young people took direct action against them. Now all the new coal power stations have been cancelled, and the third runway is dead in the water. Here in the fifth largest economy in the world, they have stopped coal and airport expansion. Politicians felt the heat. That was done by a few thousand people. Imagine what tens or hundreds of thousands could do.

I'm piously encouraged by Johann Hari's list of objects of emulation from 2009

Erdos as a guest

Paul Erdos, Tom Waits, and women in Philosophy:

But he wasn’t just moving from one university or research center to the next in a restless quest for mathematical talent. He was on the move so much because he was holy hell as a house guest. —He “forsook all creature comforts—including a home—to pursue his lifelong study of numbers,” the blurbs will tell you. Bullshit. He forsook the bother and worry of creature comforts. Other people cooked his food. Other people washed his clothing. Other people kept him from wandering into traffic. Other people woke him in time for his “preaching” appointments. Other people filled out his paperwork.

Brecht: if sharks were men

Linked, because it has slipped my mind for almost a year, and because it's highly entertaining (if a little obvious). If sharks were men:

There would, of course, also be schools in the big boxes. In these schools the little fish would learn how to swim into the sharks' jaws. They would need to know geography, for example, so that they could find the big sharks, who lie idly around somewhere. The principal subject would, of course, be the moral education of the little fish. They would be taught that it would be the best and most beautiful thing in the world if a little fish sacrificed itself cheerfully...

More romantics: Wordsworth

Wordsworth, however, is a poet I've never been able to make mean something. The main reason, probably, is that I have no time for the pastoral. I'd rather see allusive intensity in the cities I love than in a natural world with which I find no connection.

But the above-linked article by Adam Kirsch turns up other reasons. Apparently "many of what we now see as the Victorian virtues—earnestness, mature optimism, easy authority—are first incarnated in his poetry". And, perceptively:

If his first readers turned against him because he was undignified, today we are more likely to turn away from him because he is too dignified. He knows what he knows so surely, so completely, that he cannot think against himself; no poet besides Milton is as devoid of humor.
....

His emergence as the great, challenging poet of natural sympathy and his subsequent decline into dull institutional benevolence form one of the key instructive dramas of modern poetry.

And then, there's the politics. Shelley embodied it with Queen Mab and the Masque of Anarchy. Byron died for it in Greece, and even Coleridge kept up some level of political involvement through his life. Wordsworth did absorb the afterglow of the French Revolution, but as a spectator rather than an actor. "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive" is no attempt to change the world, just a thrilling to the work others were doing around him. And even here, argues Kirsch:

“The Prelude” was written as an act of convalescence from and penance for politics, which he finally comes to see as “a degradation” fortunately “transient”

[Kirsch, admittedly, then goes on to praise Wordsworth's "struggle to transcend the radicalism of his youth, to rescue its benevolent impulses while escaping its shallowness and intolerance".]

Celebrity duel: Kleist vs. Rilke

Have just emerged from reading Rilke's Letters to a young poet. Surprised by how much I like it, given that I've come to think of myself as basically unsympathetic to Romanticism. I'll chalk this one up to my general sensation of reverting to adolescence. But...

I tend to forget how late Rilke is. When he's writing, well over a century has passed since the revolution in France and Young Werther in Germany. The years since had been filled by the aftershocks and farcical imitations of one, and the gradual swelling and dissipation of the Romantic movement kick-started by the other. Kleist, for example, feels like he should be writing later than Rilke. just as Marx had seen and analyzed capitalism at the moment of its birth, perceiving and criticising the mechanisms of the next decades, so did Kleist perceive the opposition between Romanticism and the Enlightenment, and find their synthesis. I'm thinking of his essay on hte Marionette Theatre, which punctures the Romantic idealisation of youth and innocence, while describing how the essential Romantic intensity can be reborn through experience:

...grace itself returns when knowledge has as it were gone through an infinity. Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god.....we must eat again of the tree of knowledge in order to return to the state of innocence

Rilke, in 1903, is still a believer in innocence. His advice to the young poet remains at the level of "to thine own self be true", never touching on the possibilities of schizophrenic self-invention which now endure as the only conceivable engine of intensity in a time of post-modernism.

The Arabs: a history

The Arabs: A history, by Eugene Rogan, has just been published in hardback. The various reviews present it as an important work, perhaps even as a successor to Hourani's History of the Arab Peoples -- respected, but now somewhat long in the tooth. Hourani was Rogan's "mentor", whatever that means, but the younger historian has concentrated mainly on media and historical circumstances, in contrast to Hourani's excursions into "demography, trading patterns and literature".

Sadly, the reviews in the Guardian and Telegraph concentrate on the Arabs' contact and conflict with the West. I'm hoping this is just an artefact of the British newspaper industry, not of a narrow focus in the book itself.

My new favourite christmas tradition

BBC:

A giant straw goat - the traditional Scandinavian yuletide symbol - erected each Christmas in a Swedish town has been burned to the ground yet again.

Kunduz

In September, a German military cock-up killed 142 people. mostly civilians. Here is a lengthy article covering not just the details of the incident, but how politicians on all sides downplayed it in the run-up to the election, knowing how opposed the German public were to the war:

"Not a single politician or senior military official told the public the full truth. The subject was to be kept off the radar during Germany's fall parliamentary election campaign, so as not to ruffle the feathers of an already skeptical electorate. Now the incident has been magnified to a far greater extent than would have been the case if those involved had decided to come clean with the public in the first place."

Much as I love Germany's political system of consensus and coalitions, it does tend to result in situations just like this -- where the political class stand together against public opinion, and nobody has much incentive to rock the boat.

Lukashenko

Alexander Lukashenko has often been referred to as Europe's last dictator. All of a sudden, though, he seems to be on a push to rapidly liberalize Belarus' economy and turn it into a high-tech paradise. But is this socialist island really ready to attract Western investors?
[Spiegel]

This is really simple. Business isn't the opposite of dictatorship; it's something almost orthogonal to it. If one man's whim completely changes the government of a country, then it's a dictatorship. Obviously I'm glad his current passions encompass encouraging business rather than staging purges, but that doesn't make Lukashenko any less a dictator.

Laïcite

Ah, the ever-flexible French obsession with laïcite -- now showing its good side, as the language in which to condemn a statement that "when there are more minarets than Cathedrals in France, it will no longer be France".

Cities, spirits and Possession

I've been reading AS Byatt's Possesion the last few weeks -- lingering over it, because it's a rich enough book to spend time over, and because I can't think of anything else that could have the same effect. This passage (p.395) is a little at odds with the rest, but feeds into a big unspoken (and not terribly original) rant of mine on urban mythology -- that mesh between Hobsbawm, Grant Morrison, Hogarth, Mike Davis, Erik Davis, and a whole lot more:

A spirit may speak to a peasant like Gode, because that is picturesque, she is surrounded by Romantic crags on the one hand and primitive enough huts and hearths on the other, and her house is lapped by real thick mortal dark. But if there are spirits, I do not see why they are not everywhere, or may not be presumed to be so. You could argue that their voices may well be muffled by solid brick walls and thick plush furnishings and house-proud antimacassars. But the mahogany-polishers and the drapers' clerks are as much in need of salvation-as much desirous of assurance of an afterlife-as poets or peasants, in the last resort. When they were sure in their unthinking faiths-when the Church was a solid presence in their midst, the Spirit sat docile enough behind the altar rails and the Souls kept-on the whole-to the churchyard and the vicinity of their stones. But now they fear they may not be raised, that their lids may not be lifted, that heaven and hell were no more than faded drawings on a few old church walls, with wax angels and gruesome bogies-they ask, what is there?

Shocked to see some fire in the Independent:

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it's now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

By Joss Garman, who is apparently involved in Greenpeace and in Plane Stupid. I like him!

Idle Talk

Heidegger talks about how incessant chatter of culture and other public discourse harms and makes understanding difficult, because of its inauthenticity or "groundlessness", which he explains as talking about something "without previously making the thing one's own". [source]

The word you're looking for, Martin, is grok

Ban

Der Spiegel, like everybody else, pulls apart Ban Ki-Moon

Jacob Heilbrunn, a commentator for the respected American journal Foreign Policy, called Ban "the world's most dangerous Korean." The moniker is a terrible insult, since by rights it belongs to Kim Jong Il, North Korea's erratic dictator. But it's also a gauge of the disappointment currently reigning in the United States. Heilbrunn fears the UN is rapidly becoming irrelevant under Ban's stewardship. Ban's sole achievement is having attained his post, Heilbrunn claims, calling the secretary-general a "nowhere man."

Size limits on banks

Cutting the "too big to fail" knot: order that "no high-rolling investment bank can exceed 2% of GDP; no boring commercial bank can be bigger than 4% of GDP"

Urban recovery after a recession

Le Monde points out that periods of recovery from recession are crucial in the growth, or decline, of inequality between districts. It is now that new businesses are created, or not, in depressed areas, and when they can most easily be nudged by state intervention.

C'est dans ces périodes, paradoxalement, que les écarts entre les territoires risquent de se creuser, entre ceux qui végètent et ceux qui rebondissent vite. Dans ces périodes, aussi, que le gouvernement, rassuré quant aux risques d'explosion sociale, peut être tenté de réduire les moyens, déjà limités, consacrés à la politique de la ville pour les redéployer sur d'autres priorités.

Conclusion to conclusion to Renaissance

What is a gemlike flame, anyway?