interim

This blog is not dead, it is just recuperating following a binge of hellish proportions. In the mean time you can check out the comments section where there has been some alarmingly impassioned but ultimately inconsequential tittle-tattle, and then check out this footage of Dire Straits on The Old Grey Whistle Test. Back then Punk Rock was in and any A&R scout worth her shitty retainer would have been desperate to sign X-Ray Spex, but this Geordie pub rock band were great and at least someone at Phonogram could see beyond the next line of coke and signed them.

Krill

There is something definitely strange and perhaps vulgar about a funeral being announced as an event on Facebook. The tapeworm of social networking swallows up the only single human inevitable. The Blue Whale has no real idea that the flotsam and jetsam sieved through its baleen plates are living things, dying things, dead things. Funerals have always been announced. Notes in local newsagents and front windows; letters, cards, national newspapers even. It's the formula of Facebook that feels like someone has thrown a shitty plastic wreath into the works. 24 may be attending. 43 will be attending. 14 will not be attending. Bereaved relations want to contact everyone who cared about their loved one, but the sentiment is cheaply buggered by a web developer's macro marketing template. And it's nobody's fault.

Today I had another unsettling encounter with a small portable colour television. Clearing out my room, I uncovered what initially appeared to be the same villain that haunted my sleep one month back. But it was a different one. I was leant it half a year ago. I never got round to plugging it in. It was under the laundry basket, hemmed in by three empty gin bottles (time-lined, entropic: at first Tanqueray, then Gordon's, then Asda's) and countless Amazon packing cases. Moving house is stressful; according to some statistic of unfathomable origin it comes fourth after bereavement, unwanted pregnancy and divorce. My flatmate put it simply, "well, it's just change isn't it". It really is. According to animal experts of verifiable authority, changing the location of a dog or cat causes them more stress than changing their owner. For cats this seems obvious; everyone knows the Janus-faced little bastards don't give a shit about you. But dogs really do. They love you. They just get confused. When they wake up on a sink estate in Plymouth after five years in Royal Tonbridge Wells they will be bewildered. No more line-caught Yellow Fin Tuna steak for you, Muggins, it's mechanically-recovered lips 'n' flaps now. But that flesh-coloured shape on a stick that calls it by a new name is basically the same, as long it gives them plenty of attention.

We had five cats at one point. The smart ones died, leaving only Shitbox, and his mother, Mrs. Minkles. Were Shitbox to be transmogrified into human form he would quickly be recognised as a nasty right-wing thug. He still lives with his wretched, neurotic mum and he beats her up. He can't use the cat-flap. He sits there waiting for you to hold it open for him. Rather like Nick Griffin, he wears a suit and a mask and we're not fooled.

Someone took a shit on the front steps of my new flat. Exactly halfway down; it seemed planned; it seemed human. There is a porch beneath the steps with an electricity meter. They could have gone in there. I found an empty Benson and Hedges packet (underclass cigarettes according to my friend in marketing), fried chicken boxes and a syringe. A van goes round the area. 'Sex and Drugs Litter Rapid Clean Up Team' rather too proudly on the side; bubble lettering, graffito styles, community-friendly 'Hey Everyone!' (why not cameras and a documentary? Been done already), so I'll make a call and leave it to them. St. Paul's has its unfair share of problems, yet the rents are as extortionate as everywhere else on this island. The only people who benefit are the property developers and the debt traders. Switch everything for one day and then one night, just briefly, for Karl Marx's sake, for old times, go on. Some simple old-fashioned class war. Pimp their sorry smack-sick arses at 3 a.m. in the maddening cold then send them out again the next morning to clean up the mess.

"When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual. " C. Wright Mills


"He responded to others' claims that his behaviour was boorish by behaving even more outlandishly. Critics were disarmed when he admitted to even worse character faults than he in fact possessed.. " On the character of C. Wright Mills

Ghosts on camera

2007 is tucking itself into bed. Let us check upon the psychic health of the nation. How are we?

Now being tested in Bristol City Centre: Closed-circuit television cameras equipped with microphones and loudspeakers enabling surveillance officers (Randstad Employment Bureau temporary agency staff £6/hour-no benefits) to bark orders at their fellow citizens.

Meanwhile in New York, a new technology manufactured by Holosonic transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the sound is contained within your cranium.

Used to promote a television series about the paranormal, the issue widens from one of privacy to one of general public sanity. Religious groups, anti-capitalists, civil libertarians, secular-humanist anti-theists and the merely understandably slightly bewildered should quite rightly be absolutely furious about… well, we’re not sure how to put it.

In his book The Minority Report Phillip K. Dick describes a world where people are punished for crimes they have yet to commit, on the basis of a single incriminating brain scan. The technology is here.

Talented marketers (governments included) know what you want before you even know you want it. Face, voice, lip and body language-reading software can have you analysed, predicted and soothingly horse-whispered -if not blatantly coerced- into submission within seconds of arriving at the store.
“What did you do when you got back from work last night?”
“I watched a television program.. I think it was about ghosts...”
“What are ghosts?”
“....um… non-corporeal entities that bring us confusing messages from another dimension…”
“No. Those are called adverts.”

We can read each others intentions and predict each others behavior with some level of accuracy. We may soon be able to solve future crimes, eavesdrop on private conversations whispered in public, interpret suspicious body language and radically tailor advertising to each individual’s needs, dreams and desires, and broadcast a telepathically bespoke portfolio of glittering lifestyle products directly into each other’s minds. Total information awareness. Late night one-click buy-it-now Freudian slip. Your darkest desires delivered straight to your door and in the fog of the morning you come quietly and help the police with their enquiries.

If we are all given the technology is it fair game? As the National Rifle Association likes to argue after each hormonal killing spree, if everyone carried a piece they could have taken him down much quicker…

CCTV surveillance is very popular with the public. Violent crime, knifings and shootings are perceived to be on the rise in London and other UK cities; and this may well be the case. We assume that surveillance serves as a deterrent. Does it? In the black hole crack-hungry soul of the time-blind drug addicted bag-snatcher, a deterrent is as meaningful as a tomorrow. And the people who casually threw a TV through our front window last month didn’t give a moment’s thought to being spotted, because they were just really pissed. In a liberal democracy, privacy and liberty should be the norm, and any infringements upon them must be qualified on a case by case basis. But the new climate of security is making bold demands. He is confident. His voice is loud. He sounds like he knows what he is talking about. He must know something we don’t. But he may be the thinly veiled edge of a malignant wedge. There’s a line to be drawn, and toed, somewhere, but it is hard to stay focused.

For the mystics and Pantheists among us, this momentous blurring of the private and the public may just be more evidence for the fact that we are all the same person. But nonetheless, unfortunately, we are having a massive argument with ourself.

Happy New Year, and may your Gods, or not, be with you.

Hill vs. Boorman

Backwoods rednecks preying on arrogant city boys; John Boorman’s ‘Deliverance’ cast the mould, but ‘Southern Comfort’ is the superior film. Walter Hill’s tense and efficient action thriller sees a squadron of Louisiana National Guardsmen lose their way among the primal forces of the Bayou. Discipline and chain of command are negligible from the outset; on a simple training exercise, a cackling hothead fires a round of blanks at a group of Cajun trappers. The bickering, delusional toy soldiers are quickly out of their depth, hunted by a hidden culture that the American Dream told them nothing about. The pace is sharp and the script is smart. Powers Boothe and Keith Carradine quickly bond as two resourceful survivors caught in a clutch of hysterical machismo. ‘The Blair Witch Project’s debt to ‘Cannibal Holocaust’s faux-documentary style is well known; its gothic roots in Hill’s masterpiece less-so. The enemy is barely seen; it is ultimately the alien terrain of the swamp itself that swallows up the incredulous trespassers.

Sick as a Pike

I currently have bronchitis after three weeks spent gargling in continental Europe's elegantly tarred communal lungs. The new issue of Plan B features my essay on Rock 'n' Roll. It is part of an ongoing project to map the gutters, sewers and storm drains of the music industry.
















Pike are notoriously voracious carnivores and can be potential pests when introduced into alien ecosystems. When caught in the River Mole in the Eighties, fishermen such as my dad were instructed by Mole Valley District Council not to throw them back. You couldn't eat them, so you had to bin them. He cut one open to show me its disease-speckled liver. It was a bad fish. A bully. Throwing its weight around. It knew it was on the way out and it was going to take a few others down with it. Men standing on river banks with poles and lines and hooks are noble sentries in Gaia's gentle regime of self-regulation.



A small colour television set was involved in three separate crimes in the space of two weeks. First it was fly-tipped outside our house. A few days later, it was thrown through our front window. We dumped it back out on the street and it disappeared. Two days later it was found dropped off the bridge and onto the middle of the railway tracks at Montpelier station. There was a storm here last night. Fitful sleep; beneath the roar and moan, the sound of something rolling slowly back up the hill towards our house.

The Velvet Cell

New police proposal: microphones to be added to CCTV cameras

http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/ac_grayling/2007/11/walls_to_have_ears.html

"The parallel to eavesdropping on people's conversations is putting CCTV cameras inside their houses. I take it that at least most of us would object very strongly to the latter, even if in half a dozen houses round the realm some crazed fanatics were making bombs in their living rooms."

More 'threats to our liberty' to be countered by threats to our liberty.

One cannot ‘walk privately’ in a public place. By stepping outside one’s own home, one tacitly accepts that one will be seen by others. But one can walk down the road publicly whilst engaging in private conversation. Grayling is right: The parallel to eavesdropping on people's conversations is putting CCTV cameras inside their houses. To do so is to demolish the distinction between public and private.

Mike WM says in the Comment Is Free response to Grayling’s article:

Just run some speech recognition software on what each person is saying, cross-reference with the biometric data on file thanks to the ID card project to easily discover who each person is, and the information that can be gathered on each person in this fair country is amazing. Or, rather more accurately, terrifying. The pieces are nearly all in place. Are people going to see the jigsaw before they manage to finish it?

What is to be done? Most of the media is complicit in the notion that our privacy and liberty can always legitimately be curtailed in favour of our safety. But a man in solitary confinement is perfectly safe, provided he cannot find a way to hang himself. Without freedom and privacy, we may as well do so.

How much of your freedom are you prepared to compromise for the nebulous cause of 'safety'?

As ‘Knightly’ puts it:

I am afraid to say it is too late.

You are all doomed to be spied on, have your information sold to supermarkets and detective agencies working for your husbands and wives. Barely literate data entry clerks educated in sink comprehensives and paid the minim wage will confuse entries about you and rapists and murderers with similar names. You will be lynched by an angry mob when this information is disclosed under some spurious right to know legislation. Your credit ratings and criminal convictions will be available to council librarians who have tea with your mother. Your lives will become even more of a misery, than it already is, and to top it all you will be stuck in a traffic jam on the M25 and be fined for speeding due to an error in the number plate recognition software. Harriet Harman will tell you surveillance is needed to protect the rights of women, and use the information to increase cost of motoring. All the criminals will remain out side the system and untraceable, you on the other hand will be dragged through the bankruptcy courts for a parking ticket that was never issued correctly in the first place.

Leave now, it is your only hope.

But please don’t leave. Get involved. It isn’t too late.

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The woman who lives directly above me is a student. She is fat and always wears jogging pants. She is in most days, and most days she puts on a CD. Most days she plays the same song on constant rotation. Some nights when she gets in from the pub, and some mornings when she gets out of bed, she celebrates life by playing the song once more. High and mid frequencies are cut off by floors and ceilings, so all I hear is the same maddening, moronic bass line and retarded drum fills. When I am at my most vulnerable or short tempered, when I am hung over or sleeping fitfully, the woman upstairs is sure to be in her element.

The malevolent power of music has long been known to the authorities. The FBI used it in the Waco Siege. Interrogators at Guantanomo tried to break the will of captured terrorists' by playing the music of Christine Aguilera.

It is one thing to complain about loud music. It is another to demand that someone expand their record collection or face serious consequences. Knuckles whiten, the jaw tightens. What will it be? The mixtape or the baseball bat?

Piece Of Mind

In response to Alex's observation regarding my last entry title: yes; I translated 'Dude where's my country?' into the Queen's English. If the colonies made the effort to speak properly perhaps they wouldn't be in the mess they are in.

Ah... Michael Moore. What to do about Michael Moore. Scoring an instant own-goal by showcasing human-rights-ambivalent Cuba's apparently fantastic health services, he helps conservatives caricature modest leftist dreams as Stalinist nightmares. I don't doubt that your sense of outrage at poverty and corruption is genuine, but for God's sake man...

US television is awash with demented shiny-happy-people advertisements for antidepressant medications. Most can't afford them. Most don't even need them. To anyone who has grown up with something like the NHS -a patrician buffer between the patient and the drug companies- these look like the symptoms of a gradually encroaching Huxleyian dystopia. A buccaneer corporate state that rips you off with mind-altering drugs that you don't need; it's hard to think of a more morally outrageous scenario.

The thought police get all hard for justice

I LIKE MY COUNTRY CAN I HAVE IT BACK PLEASE

Here it comes.

Stash your Jess Franco movies Anton.

The bill proposing to ban 'extreme pornography' was overwhelmingly approved yesterday in the Commons.

I'll have to rip out those scenes of crimes photos from my books on Jack The Ripper. This legislation outlaws simulated images of consensual, legal acts; God knows what it will mean for real images of illegal ones.

Pictured: Armoured man homo-erotically grappling with a reptile, complete with phallic symbolism

The proposed legislation targets material depicting (i) bestiality, (ii) necrophilia, and (iii) serious violence.

Images will count as illegal if they are pornographic and real or realistic (if staged).

Those found guilty of possession will be charged and placed on the Sex Offender's Register.

Quick, excellent summary of the bullshit here:
http://www.backlash-uk.org.uk/summary0610.html




Get thee to a herbary

Away

I'm kind of 'on holiday' from blogging right now, trying to finish the third issue of Ultraskull (not work safe) and rehearsing for the upcoming tour. I have written an article about the state of live music in the UK; it will feature in the November issue of Plan B magazine.

Homework

Exercise 1 a

Read this excellent piece in Foreign Policy magazine.

"The 'War On Drugs' is immoral, absurd and fatally counter-productive, and major players on the world stage are finally daring to admit it." Discuss. (20 points)

For more on drug regulation strategies read the Transform FAQ.


Exercise 1 b

Study the image below. What is wrong with this image? (30 points)

Westminster… we have a problem…

The entire UK population and every visitor to Britain should be put on the national DNA database, a top judge said today. Today, Shami Chakrabarti, the director of the human rights organisation Liberty, warned against potential changes to how and when British authorities collected DNA data. "The DNA debate reveals just how casual some people have become about the value of personal privacy," she said. "A database of those convicted of sexual and violent crime is a perfectly sensible crimefighting measure."A database of every man, woman and child in the country is a chilling proposal, ripe for indignity, error and abuse."

Aided by insufficiently robust political and media opposition, the agenda has been fully re-set. The onus is now on the civil libertarians to explain why we shouldn’t have a government with total knowledge of our identities, rather than why we should. What is absolutely extraordinary is that while the public constantly state that they do not trust the government, that they believe them to be dishonest and corrupt; that scandals over dodgy dossiers, donations for peerages, and the I.T. shambles at the Child Support Agency have eroded public confidence in the government’s integrity and competence, they are still willing to grant them total information awareness of the biometric identities and behaviours of people who have yet to commit any crimes.

Leftists constantly complain how private corporations are able to track our spending habits and check our financial status without our knowledge or permission, but when it comes to handing massive powers to governments, many shrug their shoulders. These stats make shocking reading. We don’t like private corporations holding private information about us. We get all hot under the collar about it. We think they brainwash us with marketing, and make us buy things we don’t need or want. We think corporations are evil and exploitative. But private corporations cannot arrest people. They do not have armies. They cannot put people in prison. They cannot invade sovereign states without UN mandates. Contrary to what appears to have now become received knowledge, governments are more powerful and thereby more dangerous than any corporation on the planet. Clearly, Paternalism has been massively successful. We have learned to love Big Brother, but to be suspicious of anyone trying to sell us frozen food.

Biometric identity information will be inherited by each successive government. If you don’t trust this government, what the hell makes you feel you can trust a future one? How would you feel if the British National Party got into power? They have already won seats in local government. What makes you think governments won’t sell your DNA profile to private corporations? What makes you think the database would never be hacked? What makes you think the database would never become corrupted and that everyone with access to it will be both 100% trustworthy and never make a single mistake?

I don’t like to employ slippery slope arguments. They only work when it can be shown that the slope in question is slippery, and for the average Daily Mail editorial, slipperiness is usually assumed without argument. But it seems to me crashingly obvious that given the behavior of this government, past governments, and the likely behaviour of any future government, this slope is about as slippery as it bloody well gets.

The Liberal Democrats have shown themselves to be toothless. I wrote to my MP about a scheme in Yeovil, Somerset whereby bars and pubs would only allow entry to punters if they allowed their fingerprints to be placed on a shared database. This was a system set up in partnership with the local police in order to deter known troublemakers. The government plans to roll it out nationwide. Naturally, the scheme is enforced on the door by bomber-jacket wearing bouncers, who presumably know the intricacies of the Data Protection Act inside out. The Right Honourable Member for Yeovil, David Laws, and my Bristol West MP Stephen Williams, are both Liberals and oppose government plans for ID cards along party lines; but they assured me that this fingerprinting system was voluntary. What defeatist, Pollyannaish drivel. Pubs and clubs will obviously come under police pressure to join and they will do so. I’ve worked in bars, I know how important it is to keep good relations with the decent, hard working coppers who have a difficult job to do. Few bar managers in the country will be so awkward as to refuse to join the scheme. How can a voluntary scheme be anything more than a de facto compulsory scheme when the resulting situation is absolutely identical? This is how the police state comes in: by the back door, through creeping measures rushed through parliament under cover of alleged terror threats, resulting in ad hoc legislation that is quickly accepted as the norm and used as precedent for further intrusion.

This documentary by Henry Porter is useful. If nothing else, watch the disturbing last ten minutes. As a demonstration, a security analyst bugs and spies on Porter via his own mobile phone, intercepts his wireless internet connection and duplicates an electronic data chip he had implanted in his arm. The security analyst then goes on to very quickly crack the security code on the digital information chip on a new passport (the technology that will be used on the proposed ID cards), and reads all the information off it. Terrorists take note: here comes the gold standard for identity theft.

But most importantly, watch Adam Curtis’s The Power Of Nightmares. And try to remember that you are more likely to die in a car accident than by being blown up by a terrorist.