So I did Land of Kings last weekend. First point: this post of JWZ's, written about Homeless WiFi Fest....sorry, sorry...SXSW, has quite a bit of general validity. The points about not sticking to the schedule, not sticking around if someone is late, and not chasing the party, are all gold dust. I worked this out by following none of that advice.
On day one, we checked in for the wristbands, bounced off the new venue (Birthdays) which turned out not to be ready, and to the Shacklewell Arms to see some vaguely Kitsuné-ish French band, who were mediocre. I can recommend Hasan's for the kebabs, which were excellent even in the light of twitter updates from Alexandra Palace, where they'd finally got their finger out to tell us about the mayor.
Pressing on, we headed to the Vortex for the Mauritian folk-dub bloke (it was hard to say if he was playing or not), the Alibi for Dollop (forgettable and in fact only not forgotten by consulting the schedule), and the Servants' Jazz Quarters for someone with an outrageously silly band name who was actually very good. By this point, disenchantment with the whole project was setting in.
In fact, it had been feeling like work for some time, and my partner was getting into a multiple-walkout sort of mood, and in the end she wasn't up for day two. As the rules have it, day two was actually much better, and the line-up should have told me that. This time out I made a list (it's always the solution), with Is Tropical, Maurice Fulton, Speech Debelle, Hannah Holland, and the special guest who turned out to be Gilles Peterson listed as options.
I had to spend a week listening to a man in a white leather Schott Perfecto jacket yelling into a mobile phone in a mixture of Polish, Spanish, and what Ian Thomson called "a ghastly pimp's English" on the 87 bus - I couldn't work out if he meant it, as every so often he stopped speaking, listened, and replied "Yes. Yes. Of course. No. Yes." like someone's IT director - but even that didn't worry me much.
As it happened I didn't get away from the Brownwood/Peterson set until Tropical had done their thing and gone, due to dancing (someone thrust a DSLR at me, but as far as I know the photo didn't make the cut, and anyway I saw them last year at XOYO), but the Debelle gig was fantastic even if it involved perching on a flight case and hanging on to the DJ's PA stack. The cover of Tupac's "Changes" was special and amazingly nobody seems to have youtubed it.
I had to be back for an early start, to get down to the French polling booth, so more Hollande than Holland.
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Showing posts with label music. Show all posts
Sunday, May 13, 2012
Friday, March 16, 2012
Sunday, February 05, 2012
non-Thursday music link
Music!
Bonus extra:
If I scripted something to chuck random music links into a G+ hangout, would anyone listen?
Bonus extra:
If I scripted something to chuck random music links into a G+ hangout, would anyone listen?
Sunday, October 30, 2011
Sunday, October 16, 2011
non-Thursday music link
I think you'd have to be a perfesser to miss this point (h/t Jamie Kenny's twitter feed).
Well, a big dance hall implies big sound. That implies either electronic amplification, or before that was invented, a fuck-off big horn section. And either of those will help the dancing while cramping your conversation. (I SAID, HOW ABOUT ANOTHER DRINK!) In fact, the electric guitar was invented in the 1930s as a substitute for quite so many wind players providing the wash.
It's true, as William Baumol said, that you need as many people to play a concerto as you did in 1900 and the same isn't true of producing steel, farming, or running a phone exchange or a bank. Interestingly, the electric guitar was originally an attempt to substitute capital for labour in the music industry, with enormous unforeseen consequences.
Don't believe me? Compare the horns-as-power-chord here and the the rhythm guitar-as-horns here, although those are ahistorical. Anyway, it's not Thursday, so how about a music link?
But even Mass Observation conceded the startling contrast between the ‘mechanized barbarity’ of dancehall music and the wordless decorousness of the dancers’ movements. In order to request a dance, a young man would simply touch a potential partner lightly on her elbow, and they would move silently on to the floor. It was quite normal for partners to dance for hours without speaking to each other, before going their separate ways.
Well, a big dance hall implies big sound. That implies either electronic amplification, or before that was invented, a fuck-off big horn section. And either of those will help the dancing while cramping your conversation. (I SAID, HOW ABOUT ANOTHER DRINK!) In fact, the electric guitar was invented in the 1930s as a substitute for quite so many wind players providing the wash.
It's true, as William Baumol said, that you need as many people to play a concerto as you did in 1900 and the same isn't true of producing steel, farming, or running a phone exchange or a bank. Interestingly, the electric guitar was originally an attempt to substitute capital for labour in the music industry, with enormous unforeseen consequences.
Don't believe me? Compare the horns-as-power-chord here and the the rhythm guitar-as-horns here, although those are ahistorical. Anyway, it's not Thursday, so how about a music link?
Sunday, September 25, 2011
it wasn't Thursday, and still isn't, so...
So there was this thread with music. It went like this, and then like this, and this, then this, this, this, and finally this. Also a fair amount of stuff about shwi-vet Erik Lund and the most popular man in Britain. But mostly music.
Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for "oh yeah this is funky".
Meanwhile, someone defined a last.fm tag for "oh yeah this is funky".
Sunday, September 11, 2011
it's not Thursday, so...
Time for a non-Thursday music post.
And again:
In other "things that are good" news, I want one of these.
And again:
In other "things that are good" news, I want one of these.
In Cybernetic Revolutionaries, Eden Medina tells the history of two intersecting utopian visions, one political and one technological. The first was Chile's experiment with peaceful socialist change under Salvador Allende; the second was the simultaneous attempt to build a computer system that would manage Chile's economy. Neither vision was fully realized--Allende's government ended with a violent military coup; the system, known as Project Cybersyn, was never completely implemented--but they hold lessons for today about the relationship between technology and politics. Drawing on extensive archival material and interviews, Medina examines the cybernetic system envisioned by the Chilean government--which was to feature holistic system design, decentralized management, human-computer interaction, a national telex network, near real-time control of the growing industrial sector, and modeling the behavior of dynamic systems. She also describes, and documents with photographs, the network's Star Trek-like operations room, which featured swivel chairs with armrest control panels, a wall of screens displaying data, and flashing red lights to indicate economic emergencies. Studying project Cybersyn today helps us understand not only the technological ambitions of a government in the midst of political change but also the limitations of the Chilean revolution. This history further shows how human attempts to combine the political and the technological with the goal of creating a more just society can open new technological, intellectual, and political possibilities.
Friday, July 15, 2011
Vaz discovers the network
Dick Fedorcio is taking a little trip to Westminster to be quizzed. By Keith Vaz's committee. How times change - Keith Vaz as the standard bearer of public integrity. It's got to be more convincing to get your second chance after 10 years in the wilderness though.
Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed that the "#AskEdM" hashtag is a shamelessly obvious exercise in trolling? Think about it - how many people who aren't either political obsessives following up a story or just looking for a fight, or else full-time rightwing howler monkeys, ever hang out in Paul Staines's comments threads with all the coup fantasies and racebaiting and ZaNuLiebour and EUSSR? Nobody. Really.
So why not lure the torysphere out in the open, somewhere the majority can actually see them behaving in this horrible way? Like Twitter.
And if they notice it, they'll get angry and look an even more repellent herd of shit-smeared zombies. It's brilliant. As a side benefit, if Edelmans have managed to rig some network of semiautomated talking-points distribution bots, they're bound to show up there so they can be identified. And if you were looking for a list of horrible spamming arsewits, Mike Gigglers trying to be hipsters but stuck at the brown-dwarf stage, ZaNuLiebour dittoheads, and other membrane fauna...well, here's your chance to populate your blacklist. I added dozens. It was a lot of fun.
The only annoying thing is that as far as I know, although Twitter has "lists" that let you group other users and subscribe to their collected output (yeah, like XMPP Collection Nodes) it doesn't have the inverse operation. So you can't easily replicate the Team Cymru Bogons BGP feed and automate the process, even if we've already got a serviceable darknet.
Elsewhere, I put together a quick network diagram of the top Met-NI interactions. Nothing very surprising except that the commissioner is always sought after, and that John Yates appears to have an independent following with them (surprise!). Of course, your man Dick was probably at all the meetings in this chart.
Finally, some music.
You (Feat. Nina Sky) - Creep (Hannah Holland Remix) by Hannah Holland
Meanwhile, has anyone else noticed that the "#AskEdM" hashtag is a shamelessly obvious exercise in trolling? Think about it - how many people who aren't either political obsessives following up a story or just looking for a fight, or else full-time rightwing howler monkeys, ever hang out in Paul Staines's comments threads with all the coup fantasies and racebaiting and ZaNuLiebour and EUSSR? Nobody. Really.
So why not lure the torysphere out in the open, somewhere the majority can actually see them behaving in this horrible way? Like Twitter.
And if they notice it, they'll get angry and look an even more repellent herd of shit-smeared zombies. It's brilliant. As a side benefit, if Edelmans have managed to rig some network of semiautomated talking-points distribution bots, they're bound to show up there so they can be identified. And if you were looking for a list of horrible spamming arsewits, Mike Gigglers trying to be hipsters but stuck at the brown-dwarf stage, ZaNuLiebour dittoheads, and other membrane fauna...well, here's your chance to populate your blacklist. I added dozens. It was a lot of fun.
The only annoying thing is that as far as I know, although Twitter has "lists" that let you group other users and subscribe to their collected output (yeah, like XMPP Collection Nodes) it doesn't have the inverse operation. So you can't easily replicate the Team Cymru Bogons BGP feed and automate the process, even if we've already got a serviceable darknet.
Elsewhere, I put together a quick network diagram of the top Met-NI interactions. Nothing very surprising except that the commissioner is always sought after, and that John Yates appears to have an independent following with them (surprise!). Of course, your man Dick was probably at all the meetings in this chart.
Finally, some music.
You (Feat. Nina Sky) - Creep (Hannah Holland Remix) by Hannah Holland
Sunday, July 03, 2011
an update
I may have to update the scoring in this post. I went to see this over the weekend - too late as it happened, but I floaked it - and I have to say that it's not the project of someone torying-out. Far too 1945-68 British reasonablepunk.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
a theory of some people's moral sentiments
(Or, imagine you had to make a Homo economicus. Other than money, what chemicals would you immediately look up in Angewandte Chemie?)
So Dave from PR's constituency chairman was found dead in a portaloo at Glastonbury. Who now remembers William Hague in Notting Hill?
This made me think of something. There used to be a microgenre of writing in the late 90s that ascribed historical events to drugs. (Reader Richard J. occasionally threatens to write a history of the world titled Shitfaced: How Drunks, Junkies, Drink, and Drugs Created the Modern World or words to that effect, so it's not entirely dead.) I remember a piece in The Face (yeah, it would be) ascribing peace in Northern Ireland to the right pills.
But what if the polarity was reversed? If Michael Howard was right, but in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons?
Throw your hands in the air! You'll need the clearance from surrounding obstacles...
Because we're about to do some serious handwaving.
What if there was a long-term pathology of MDMA abusers in which serotonin production, or perhaps more likely sensitivity, was permanently compromised? This was a big official-line fear back in the 90s and not totally implausible.
Steroid abusers run the risk of losing their balls as the levels of androgens in their system are artificially kept high and therefore the negative-feedback control never kicks in to demand more production. This is why they shoot HCG - it's an alternate positive control - and hence why some of them can show up positive on pregnancy tests.
Similarly, keep a stimulus turned up long enough and the system will trim it out to deal with the new normal.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Paul Staines
What might be the symptoms? Well...you'll need even more space to wave your hands for this bit, but here goes. Permanently lacking in empathy, with lowered affect, and a tendency to blow up irascibly if challenged. Are you thinking what we're thinking?
Actually, I'm indebted to Owen "Owain the marxist architecture critic, see" Hatherley for this insight: like so.
Yes. Yes. Perhaps we could do a poll on which Mancunian music hero is likely to make it to the Tory A-List first and therefore derive some assumptions towards a dose-response curve. Hooky? Squire? Barney? Shaun Ryder? Bez? Tony Wilson? I know he's dead, but seriously, it's the Tories and I'm kinda surprised he never had a serious crack at electoral politics. (John Squire, for his part, repeatedly threatened to but didn't get enough tuit. But you're a long time retired as they say.) Surely they'd find him a constituency down near Jake Rees-Mogg's where the mere termination of his biological existence wouldn't matter too much.
Aetiology, Diagnosis...and Treatment
I don't know about treatment, but it should be fairly easy to devise a screening protocol based on demographic and biographical information and a few clinical markers. Not quite the Voight-Kampff test, but similar. Anyway it's too well known, especially in the target generation.
The good news is that the demographic bulge ought to be near its peak and things should get better from here on in. A bit like public pensions.
So Dave from PR's constituency chairman was found dead in a portaloo at Glastonbury. Who now remembers William Hague in Notting Hill?
This made me think of something. There used to be a microgenre of writing in the late 90s that ascribed historical events to drugs. (Reader Richard J. occasionally threatens to write a history of the world titled Shitfaced: How Drunks, Junkies, Drink, and Drugs Created the Modern World or words to that effect, so it's not entirely dead.) I remember a piece in The Face (yeah, it would be) ascribing peace in Northern Ireland to the right pills.
But what if the polarity was reversed? If Michael Howard was right, but in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons?
Throw your hands in the air! You'll need the clearance from surrounding obstacles...
Because we're about to do some serious handwaving.
What if there was a long-term pathology of MDMA abusers in which serotonin production, or perhaps more likely sensitivity, was permanently compromised? This was a big official-line fear back in the 90s and not totally implausible.
Steroid abusers run the risk of losing their balls as the levels of androgens in their system are artificially kept high and therefore the negative-feedback control never kicks in to demand more production. This is why they shoot HCG - it's an alternate positive control - and hence why some of them can show up positive on pregnancy tests.
Similarly, keep a stimulus turned up long enough and the system will trim it out to deal with the new normal.
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of Paul Staines
What might be the symptoms? Well...you'll need even more space to wave your hands for this bit, but here goes. Permanently lacking in empathy, with lowered affect, and a tendency to blow up irascibly if challenged. Are you thinking what we're thinking?
Actually, I'm indebted to Owen "Owain the marxist architecture critic, see" Hatherley for this insight: like so.
I like CIF's preponderance of ravey right-wing libertarians. 'MoveAnyMountain', 'TakeMeHigher' etc
Yes. Yes. Perhaps we could do a poll on which Mancunian music hero is likely to make it to the Tory A-List first and therefore derive some assumptions towards a dose-response curve. Hooky? Squire? Barney? Shaun Ryder? Bez? Tony Wilson? I know he's dead, but seriously, it's the Tories and I'm kinda surprised he never had a serious crack at electoral politics. (John Squire, for his part, repeatedly threatened to but didn't get enough tuit. But you're a long time retired as they say.) Surely they'd find him a constituency down near Jake Rees-Mogg's where the mere termination of his biological existence wouldn't matter too much.
Aetiology, Diagnosis...and Treatment
I don't know about treatment, but it should be fairly easy to devise a screening protocol based on demographic and biographical information and a few clinical markers. Not quite the Voight-Kampff test, but similar. Anyway it's too well known, especially in the target generation.
The good news is that the demographic bulge ought to be near its peak and things should get better from here on in. A bit like public pensions.
Monday, June 20, 2011
failure of a stinker review
So I went to this. Unfortunately I actually thought pretty much everyone was good. Damn good. Brilliant, in fact. So the spirit of this post is not available. By about midnight the floor had got to about optimal density - not quite to the point where you start worrying that you're going to be knocked down in the ruth or tread on someone important's head or catch a dreaded skin disease but well past the point of running at maximum efficiency. People kept packing in and the tall ones turned up. You know the ones - I first encountered them in a pub in Highgate, looking around and being amazed by the vast cliffs on every side blocking out the light.
Anyway, despite the inverse Randy Newman problem, the hit and hope photos over the wall of tall turned out a bit more fire and forget than I expected.
And I was asked for drugs - on the contrary to this post, I wasn't taken for a user but a dealer. I should worry that I'm being accused of progressively more serious offences, I guess.
Later I found out that someone had sent me a work e-mail while I was dancing. Gah, pales in comparison with the Frenchman I spotted peering at "courriels (professionels)" on a BlackBerry. Faut mieux laisser, quoi. The following isn't mine but the result of a cursory trawl.
Anyway, despite the inverse Randy Newman problem, the hit and hope photos over the wall of tall turned out a bit more fire and forget than I expected.
And I was asked for drugs - on the contrary to this post, I wasn't taken for a user but a dealer. I should worry that I'm being accused of progressively more serious offences, I guess.
Later I found out that someone had sent me a work e-mail while I was dancing. Gah, pales in comparison with the Frenchman I spotted peering at "courriels (professionels)" on a BlackBerry. Faut mieux laisser, quoi. The following isn't mine but the result of a cursory trawl.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
meet Project Lobster
My lobbying project has been entered in the Open Data Challenge! Someone posted this to the MySociety list, with rather fewer than the advertised 36 hours left. I was at a wedding and didn't read it at the time. After my partner and I had tried to invent a tap routine to the back end of Prince's "Alphabet Street" and had got up at 8am to make it for the sadistic bed & breakfast breakfast and gone back to help clean up and drink any unaccountably unconsumed champagne, and the only thing left to look forward to was the end of the day, I remembered the message and noted that I had to get it filed before midnight.
So it was filed in the Apps category - there's an Ideas category but that struck me as pathetic, and after all there is some running code. I pushed on to try and get something out under the Visualisation category but ManyEyes was a bit broken that evening and anyway its network diagram view starts to suck after a thousand or so vertices.
As a result, the project now has a name and I have some thin chance of snagging an actual Big Society cheque for a few thousand euros and a trip to Brussels. (You've got to take the rough with the smooth.)
The most recent experiment with the Lobster Project - see, it's got a name! It's got you its grips before you're born...it lets you think you're king when you're really a prawn...whoops, wrong shellfish - was to try out a new centrality metric, networkx.algorithms.centrality.betweenness_centrality. This is defined as the fraction of the shortest paths between all the pairs of nodes in the network that pass through a given node. As you have probably guessed, this is quite an inefficient metric to compute and the T1700 lappy took over a minute to crunch it compared to 7 seconds to complete the processing script without it. Perhaps the new KillPad would do better but the difference is big enough that it's obviously my fault.
As far as I can see, though, it's also not very useful. The results are correlated (R^2 = 0.64) with the infinitely faster weighted graph degree. (It also confirms that Francis Maude is the secret ruler of the world, though.)
The NX functions I'm really interested in, though, are the ones for clique discovery and blockmodelling. It's obvious that with getting on for 3,000 links and more to come, any visualisation is going to need a lot of reduction. Blockmodelling basically chops your network into groups of nodes you provide and aggregates the links between those groups - it's one way, for example, to get department level results.
But I'd be really interested to use empirical clique discovery to feed into blockmodelling - the API for the one generates a python list of cliques, which are themselves lists of nodes, and the other accepts a list of nodes or a list of lists (of nodes). Another interesting option might be to blockmodel by edge attribute, which would be a way of deriving results for the content of meetings via the "Purpose of meeting" field. However, that would require creating a list of unique meeting subjects and then iterating over it creating lists of nodes with at least one edge having that subject, and then shoving the resulting list-of-lists into the blockmodeller.
That's a lorra lorra iteratin' by anybody's standards, even if, this being Python, most of it will end up being rolled up in a couple of seriously convoluted list comps. Oddly enough, it would be far easier in a query language or an ORM, but I've not heard of anything that lets you do SQL queries against a NX graph.
Having got this far, I notice that I've managed to blog my enthusiasm back up.
Anyway, I think it's perhaps time for a meetup on this next week with Who's Rob-bying.
So it was filed in the Apps category - there's an Ideas category but that struck me as pathetic, and after all there is some running code. I pushed on to try and get something out under the Visualisation category but ManyEyes was a bit broken that evening and anyway its network diagram view starts to suck after a thousand or so vertices.
As a result, the project now has a name and I have some thin chance of snagging an actual Big Society cheque for a few thousand euros and a trip to Brussels. (You've got to take the rough with the smooth.)
The most recent experiment with the Lobster Project - see, it's got a name! It's got you its grips before you're born...it lets you think you're king when you're really a prawn...whoops, wrong shellfish - was to try out a new centrality metric, networkx.algorithms.centrality.betweenness_centrality. This is defined as the fraction of the shortest paths between all the pairs of nodes in the network that pass through a given node. As you have probably guessed, this is quite an inefficient metric to compute and the T1700 lappy took over a minute to crunch it compared to 7 seconds to complete the processing script without it. Perhaps the new KillPad would do better but the difference is big enough that it's obviously my fault.
As far as I can see, though, it's also not very useful. The results are correlated (R^2 = 0.64) with the infinitely faster weighted graph degree. (It also confirms that Francis Maude is the secret ruler of the world, though.)
The NX functions I'm really interested in, though, are the ones for clique discovery and blockmodelling. It's obvious that with getting on for 3,000 links and more to come, any visualisation is going to need a lot of reduction. Blockmodelling basically chops your network into groups of nodes you provide and aggregates the links between those groups - it's one way, for example, to get department level results.
But I'd be really interested to use empirical clique discovery to feed into blockmodelling - the API for the one generates a python list of cliques, which are themselves lists of nodes, and the other accepts a list of nodes or a list of lists (of nodes). Another interesting option might be to blockmodel by edge attribute, which would be a way of deriving results for the content of meetings via the "Purpose of meeting" field. However, that would require creating a list of unique meeting subjects and then iterating over it creating lists of nodes with at least one edge having that subject, and then shoving the resulting list-of-lists into the blockmodeller.
That's a lorra lorra iteratin' by anybody's standards, even if, this being Python, most of it will end up being rolled up in a couple of seriously convoluted list comps. Oddly enough, it would be far easier in a query language or an ORM, but I've not heard of anything that lets you do SQL queries against a NX graph.
Having got this far, I notice that I've managed to blog my enthusiasm back up.
Anyway, I think it's perhaps time for a meetup on this next week with Who's Rob-bying.
Friday, June 03, 2011
it's not Thursday...
So it must be time for a non-Thursday music link. New Order "Beach Buggy". Not sure if this counts as a remix - IIRC it actually predates Blue Monday. It's certainly a far better version of the same theme.
Also, this rocks although I found it looking for a shareable version of something else. They're supporting this lot next week but this has probably fallen prey to my disorganisation.
Also, this rocks although I found it looking for a shareable version of something else. They're supporting this lot next week but this has probably fallen prey to my disorganisation.
Sunday, May 22, 2011
your guide for this evening...
So we did the Stag & Dagger festival. This translated into the following facts on the ground, which I propose to review briefly.
Toro y Moi, at XOYO
This lot could be interesting - if they stopped, ugh, jamming. EDIT. Ended up back in the bar with the house's DJ. Venue is pretty great, too - fantastic sound, disturbingly reasonable drinks prices and surprisingly nice people. Even though I spotted someone holding a pint in their teeth to facilitate tweeting with both thumbs. Quote: "You've really done that skinhead look haven't you - is that, er, deliberate?" No, I fell under a barber's shop.
YBAs at the Old Blue Last
If you like vaguely punky, you'll like this, but there's a lot of it about. Also, could people stop pretending to be the Jesus & Mary Chain? This was the second act of the night I would have dropped in favour of the house's DJ like a shot.
Wire at Village Underground
Legends, but ruined by terrible sound in the cavernous railway arch.
James Yuill at City Arts & Music Project Basement
This is going to be harsh, but stop trying to be Jarvis Cocker, especially as you're a DJ. No-one dancing. Beer prices the highest I've seen anywhere in the world. I also refuse to believe that their basement really looks like this and suspect that decorators spent serious money making it look that cheap.
Star Slingers at Queen of Hoxton
This lot sounded interesting and they got the floor going, but for some reason we didn't like them much. Don't remember exactly why, probably because they were the last act of the night. And they kept pointing a laser at me. Prices appalling (I brought Daniel Davies here once and even he jibbed), not much point if you're not on the roof terrace. Handy for the office.
I forget who played at the Hoxton Bar & Kitchen but we couldn't stand the gaff for more than 30 seconds at a time, so the only way to take part would have been to take turns to duck in and out like Soviet submariners during a nuclear accident.
Toro y Moi, at XOYO
This lot could be interesting - if they stopped, ugh, jamming. EDIT. Ended up back in the bar with the house's DJ. Venue is pretty great, too - fantastic sound, disturbingly reasonable drinks prices and surprisingly nice people. Even though I spotted someone holding a pint in their teeth to facilitate tweeting with both thumbs. Quote: "You've really done that skinhead look haven't you - is that, er, deliberate?" No, I fell under a barber's shop.
YBAs at the Old Blue Last
If you like vaguely punky, you'll like this, but there's a lot of it about. Also, could people stop pretending to be the Jesus & Mary Chain? This was the second act of the night I would have dropped in favour of the house's DJ like a shot.
Wire at Village Underground
Legends, but ruined by terrible sound in the cavernous railway arch.
James Yuill at City Arts & Music Project Basement
This is going to be harsh, but stop trying to be Jarvis Cocker, especially as you're a DJ. No-one dancing. Beer prices the highest I've seen anywhere in the world. I also refuse to believe that their basement really looks like this and suspect that decorators spent serious money making it look that cheap.
Star Slingers at Queen of Hoxton
This lot sounded interesting and they got the floor going, but for some reason we didn't like them much. Don't remember exactly why, probably because they were the last act of the night. And they kept pointing a laser at me. Prices appalling (I brought Daniel Davies here once and even he jibbed), not much point if you're not on the roof terrace. Handy for the office.
I forget who played at the Hoxton Bar & Kitchen but we couldn't stand the gaff for more than 30 seconds at a time, so the only way to take part would have been to take turns to duck in and out like Soviet submariners during a nuclear accident.
Sunday, May 08, 2011
links, the last refuge of really bored bloggers
This came up in my twitter feed recently. Charmingly 90s-ish, but I did like the point that it's very difficult to get decent bass out of a mobile device/laptop/whatever, and this probably has consequences for the kind of music people will make with them. Come to think of it, there's an interesting economic angle. The electronics will only keep getting cheaper, and the software can be free. But some things require a large physical lump that needs transporting and storing awkwardly. It's a little like Baumol's cost disease.
Meanwhile, I read the Grauniad interview with Adam Curtis this weekend and it didn't make me want to see his next after all. This post sums up why. It's TV thinking - if the edit is right, it doesn't matter if the logic contains more handwaving than might be ideal.
What were the most successful public policies of the last 30 years? Apparently, the minimum wage, devolution, privatisation, and the Northern Ireland peace process. I suspect they may not use my definition of success, but even on their terms it's telling that three out of four of them come from the 1997-2001 Labour government.
Finally, some music.
A lot of their other stuff seems terribly dated now but that one holds up.
Meanwhile, I read the Grauniad interview with Adam Curtis this weekend and it didn't make me want to see his next after all. This post sums up why. It's TV thinking - if the edit is right, it doesn't matter if the logic contains more handwaving than might be ideal.
What were the most successful public policies of the last 30 years? Apparently, the minimum wage, devolution, privatisation, and the Northern Ireland peace process. I suspect they may not use my definition of success, but even on their terms it's telling that three out of four of them come from the 1997-2001 Labour government.
Finally, some music.
A lot of their other stuff seems terribly dated now but that one holds up.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Non-Thursday music link, on Thursday
We've not done one of these for a while, and I meant to get around to a Loleatta Holloway tribute link at some point. Here goes - an absolute killer of a remix that dropped out of the YouTube playlist by chance.
Meanwhile, depress yourself!
Ah, where did I leave that post? This stands up pretty well too.
I've been rating my way through the SXSW torrent, which is far less fun than it sounds. Sturgeon's law applies - in fact it's worse than 90% of everything being shit, it's more like 90% of everything is inoffensive and a significant chunk of the other 10% is offensive. But then it got worse, thanks to this tweet. The best is the enemy of the good, but they are natural allies against the mediocre.
Meanwhile, depress yourself!
The auction of machine tools and fittings, including a 10m antique boardroom table and 20 matching chairs is now being advertised; it takes place at the end of the month.
Ah, where did I leave that post? This stands up pretty well too.
I've been rating my way through the SXSW torrent, which is far less fun than it sounds. Sturgeon's law applies - in fact it's worse than 90% of everything being shit, it's more like 90% of everything is inoffensive and a significant chunk of the other 10% is offensive. But then it got worse, thanks to this tweet. The best is the enemy of the good, but they are natural allies against the mediocre.
Sunday, March 20, 2011
declare independence. don't let them do that to you!
Alliance Géostrategique is having a month on the theme of independence.
Some thoughts: First of all, we're constantly exhorted to act as individuals but also to be aware of interdependence. "Interdependence" seems to be the neoliberal mirror image of "solidarity" - rather than being a force that makes for positive liberty, it seems to be a negative one. You never here of anything good coming of it - rather, it's always about financial crises, viruses spreading on the airlines, cascade failures in supply chains and Internet routing, terrorists and organised criminal networks. We are asked to fork out in the name of interdependence, while individuals profit.
Of course, this is where the similarity with "solidarity" turns up. The supposed virtues of "solidarity" or "community" are often, even usually, indistinguishable from stifling conservatism, Nosey Parker, and the sort of family ethic where everyone knows the worst about everyone else but some people are never held responsible for it. To be really cynical, you know it's solidarity (or interdependence) when someone's rattling their tin under your nose.
Getting back to the point, in the world of "interdependence", why would anyone want independence? If even major powers are constrained by rules, what's the point? Between the 1980s and the great financial crisis, there was a fashion for a sort of soft nationalism, especially in Europe, in which it was argued that small states were worth having precisely because so many of the big questions of peace and war and fundamental economics had been reserved by institutions like the EU, NATO, the Bretton Woods structures, the WTO, and the less formal systems of the international community. Although there was not much point in having a Scottish Army, by the same token, it didn't matter. Therefore things like "Europe of the regions" and friends were a valid proposition.
One of the most dangerous toys left to a small state (or autonomous province) was its financial system. If you couldn't have a Ruritanian foreign policy, you could decide to be a freewheeling sin city of a financial centre, which would give your ruling elite the sort of self-importance the dance of diplomacy did in the Edwardian era. And, in the years when the financial sector itself was exploding in size, it meant real money. Importantly, the same slice in absolute terms means a lot more in relative terms to a small state. So, everyone and their dog wanted to be their regional money centre. In much the same way as the Edwardian small powers insisted on having a battleship or two of their own, they all insisted on having a bank of sorts and building up whatever local financial institutions were available into investment banks. This could be on the grand scale (RBS, WestLB) or on a much smaller one, like some of the Spanish cajas or the Hypo Alpe-Adria in Jörg Haider's fief. (As Winston Churchill said about the proliferation of battleships, it is sport to them, it is death to us.)
It's better that people should play with banks rather than battleships, of course - J.K. Galbraith said that one of the great things about a crash was that although it was a fine opportunity to observe all that was worst in human nature, nothing more important was being lost than money. (He may have been wrong - Chris Dillow observes that financial crises seem to destroy wealth more effectively and for longer than natural disasters.)
But I think the hilarious stories of Icesave, RBS, Hypo Alpe-Adria, that caja that was managed by the Church, and so on do tell us something about the value of formal independence, even limited formal independence like that of Scotland or Catalonia, in the era of "interdependence".
Essentially, I think, the one product that any degree of legal independence lets you produce is impunity. The legal status of independence is important here - without it, you're limited to hawking the bonds of the Serbian Republic of Northern Krajina to unusually dim marks, but with it, you can be of service to the world's plutocrats. Some features of independence that always sell include:
Criminal and civil jurisdiction, as impunity services go, have lost some value over the years as extradition treaties proliferate, legal norms are internationalised, and contracts come with arbitration clauses. Further, ever since the US Marshals hauled off Noriega, it's been at least conceivable that an extradition request may be delivered by 1,000lb air courier, in a vertical fashion and without warning. But facilitating tax evasion, the concealment of ownership, and the registration of ships and aircraft without taking responsibility for them are all highly valuable services.
Similarly, being able to register a horde of spammy websites is a good business to be in, especially if your own laws provide for genuinely bullet proof hosting. Unfortunately, many small island states are vulnerable to vigilante action by the Internet operations community as they only have direct access to one transit provider. Lending your direct dial prefix to anyone who wants to originate a mass of sales or propaganda phone calls is also a good business, especially if it involves callbacks and their attendant termination fees.
Finally, selling diplomatic privileges is the individualised version of the state's impunity. Holding an Angolan diplomatic passport kept Pierre Falcone out of jail for 10 years.
Arguably, turning the libertarian view of the state on its head, it is precisely the minimal state that is the closest to the status of one of John Robb's "gangs of black globalisation". Fascinatingly, some valuable criminal functions persist even in the absence of the canonical monopoly of force. It is probably no accident that the neoliberal era has coexisted with an unprecedented proliferation of ostensibly independent states.
We've not had a Thursday music link this week....
Because if anywhere made full use of the fraudulent possibilities of sovereign status, of course...
Some thoughts: First of all, we're constantly exhorted to act as individuals but also to be aware of interdependence. "Interdependence" seems to be the neoliberal mirror image of "solidarity" - rather than being a force that makes for positive liberty, it seems to be a negative one. You never here of anything good coming of it - rather, it's always about financial crises, viruses spreading on the airlines, cascade failures in supply chains and Internet routing, terrorists and organised criminal networks. We are asked to fork out in the name of interdependence, while individuals profit.
Of course, this is where the similarity with "solidarity" turns up. The supposed virtues of "solidarity" or "community" are often, even usually, indistinguishable from stifling conservatism, Nosey Parker, and the sort of family ethic where everyone knows the worst about everyone else but some people are never held responsible for it. To be really cynical, you know it's solidarity (or interdependence) when someone's rattling their tin under your nose.
Getting back to the point, in the world of "interdependence", why would anyone want independence? If even major powers are constrained by rules, what's the point? Between the 1980s and the great financial crisis, there was a fashion for a sort of soft nationalism, especially in Europe, in which it was argued that small states were worth having precisely because so many of the big questions of peace and war and fundamental economics had been reserved by institutions like the EU, NATO, the Bretton Woods structures, the WTO, and the less formal systems of the international community. Although there was not much point in having a Scottish Army, by the same token, it didn't matter. Therefore things like "Europe of the regions" and friends were a valid proposition.
One of the most dangerous toys left to a small state (or autonomous province) was its financial system. If you couldn't have a Ruritanian foreign policy, you could decide to be a freewheeling sin city of a financial centre, which would give your ruling elite the sort of self-importance the dance of diplomacy did in the Edwardian era. And, in the years when the financial sector itself was exploding in size, it meant real money. Importantly, the same slice in absolute terms means a lot more in relative terms to a small state. So, everyone and their dog wanted to be their regional money centre. In much the same way as the Edwardian small powers insisted on having a battleship or two of their own, they all insisted on having a bank of sorts and building up whatever local financial institutions were available into investment banks. This could be on the grand scale (RBS, WestLB) or on a much smaller one, like some of the Spanish cajas or the Hypo Alpe-Adria in Jörg Haider's fief. (As Winston Churchill said about the proliferation of battleships, it is sport to them, it is death to us.)
It's better that people should play with banks rather than battleships, of course - J.K. Galbraith said that one of the great things about a crash was that although it was a fine opportunity to observe all that was worst in human nature, nothing more important was being lost than money. (He may have been wrong - Chris Dillow observes that financial crises seem to destroy wealth more effectively and for longer than natural disasters.)
But I think the hilarious stories of Icesave, RBS, Hypo Alpe-Adria, that caja that was managed by the Church, and so on do tell us something about the value of formal independence, even limited formal independence like that of Scotland or Catalonia, in the era of "interdependence".
Essentially, I think, the one product that any degree of legal independence lets you produce is impunity. The legal status of independence is important here - without it, you're limited to hawking the bonds of the Serbian Republic of Northern Krajina to unusually dim marks, but with it, you can be of service to the world's plutocrats. Some features of independence that always sell include:
- Financial regulation
- Tax
- Shipping and aviation registries
- Corporate registries
- Criminal and civil jurisdiction
- An Internet top-level domain
- A direct dialling prefix
- Diplomatic privileges
- Passports
Criminal and civil jurisdiction, as impunity services go, have lost some value over the years as extradition treaties proliferate, legal norms are internationalised, and contracts come with arbitration clauses. Further, ever since the US Marshals hauled off Noriega, it's been at least conceivable that an extradition request may be delivered by 1,000lb air courier, in a vertical fashion and without warning. But facilitating tax evasion, the concealment of ownership, and the registration of ships and aircraft without taking responsibility for them are all highly valuable services.
Similarly, being able to register a horde of spammy websites is a good business to be in, especially if your own laws provide for genuinely bullet proof hosting. Unfortunately, many small island states are vulnerable to vigilante action by the Internet operations community as they only have direct access to one transit provider. Lending your direct dial prefix to anyone who wants to originate a mass of sales or propaganda phone calls is also a good business, especially if it involves callbacks and their attendant termination fees.
Finally, selling diplomatic privileges is the individualised version of the state's impunity. Holding an Angolan diplomatic passport kept Pierre Falcone out of jail for 10 years.
Arguably, turning the libertarian view of the state on its head, it is precisely the minimal state that is the closest to the status of one of John Robb's "gangs of black globalisation". Fascinatingly, some valuable criminal functions persist even in the absence of the canonical monopoly of force. It is probably no accident that the neoliberal era has coexisted with an unprecedented proliferation of ostensibly independent states.
We've not had a Thursday music link this week....
Because if anywhere made full use of the fraudulent possibilities of sovereign status, of course...
Thursday, March 10, 2011
non-Thursday music link, on Thursday due to exceptional circumstances
John Band links to very likely the worst recording in the history of music, ever. Imagine that George Michael, many years after anyone cared, decided to do an impossibly portentous version of New Order True Faith '94, through a vocoder (many years after everyone got sick of those), and worst of all, to not play it for laughs. It's incredibly hideous, and it's not even remotely funny.
For relief, here's a special non-Thursday remix link post, appearing exceptionally on a Thursday due to the unprecedented circumstances.
Here's the Grim Up North remix of the original. Here's the Futuremix Discotech remix, also from the original EP:
Here's another, possibly better than the last one although this may be controversial. Here's yet another. And here's Interface's cover version.
For relief, here's a special non-Thursday remix link post, appearing exceptionally on a Thursday due to the unprecedented circumstances.
Here's the Grim Up North remix of the original. Here's the Futuremix Discotech remix, also from the original EP:
Here's another, possibly better than the last one although this may be controversial. Here's yet another. And here's Interface's cover version.
Thursday, February 10, 2011
Sunday, January 30, 2011
in the future, trolls will be a natural resource like oil
Looking back at Tunisia, and forward at Egypt, I think there's an important point that this post almost hits but not quite.
Specifically, I'm fairly sceptical about "Twitter Revolutions" and such - if your revolution has someone else's brand name on it, how revolutionary is it? - but I don't think it's irrelevant.
I'm feeling a little sorry for Evgeny Morozov at the moment. He'd just hacked out a niche as Mr. Grumpy by royal appointment to the blogosphere, when first Wikileaks and then Tunisia and Egypt came sweeping through, and the Tunisian secret police hacked all the Facebook pages in the country, and the Egyptians turned off the Internet, just pulled all the BGP announcements... Sometimes it's not your day.
I do think, though, that there is an important way in which a whole lot of Internet tools contributed to the revolutions. I recently posted on the way in which people can at least for a while function as if they were part of an organisation just because they shared certain assumptions. It's the idea of the imagined community, which can be defined as a group of people who are behaving as if their weak social ties were strong ones. If you want a mental model of this, the revolution happens when enough people change state and start doing this, and it stops again when they revert to pursuing their interests in the normal way. Of course, what happens in between may have changed what those are and how they do it. From a different direction, look at Chris Dillow's post here - it's theoretically irrational to take part in politics, until it's not. The point when it stops being irrational, though, is the point when people stop thinking it's irrational.
In that sense, a lot of the work of starting a revolution is starting a myth. An ironic salute to this was the Egyptian government's decision to turn off the Internet, and later the GSM networks as well. If the value of the Internet really had been as a way to pass on the time and place to assemble, this would have been a serious blow to the movement. But once you're a really angry Egyptian, where else would you protest but Tahrir Square? It wasn't that they needed it for tactical communication, but rather for strategic propaganda. Also, once they took this step, they had also inadvertently demonstrated to the other world media that This Was It. The mainstream media remains very good at bringing its own connectivity, and the main barrier to them covering the news is usually that they don't think something is news. Giving Al-Jazeera and friends - who had been heavily criticised on the Web for being soft on the Egyptian government - a monopoly may have been a really bad idea as it forced them to cover the news or look indistinguishable from Nile TV.
I suspect that a lesson here is that the last thing authoritarian governments will do in future is turn the Internet off. For a start, they will increasingly need to keep it up for economic reasons - the ISP that serves the Egyptian stock exchange and central bank was left alone, and with time I would bet that it would become increasingly porous to information. But much more importantly, this is not a policy that has a great track record. Burma managed it, but started with advantages (not many users, only one network, and a strong position to start with). Iran did far better with its throttle-down-and-spy plan. Even though the Tunisians funnelled all the Facebook accounts in the country into one, controlled by the secret police, it didn't seem to help.
Jamais Casco (via here) asked if you could start a genocide on Twitter - a sensible point, as we know you can do so with the radio, the cinema, television, the newspapers, and (thanks to Serbian turbo-folk) rock'n'roll*. Terrorists tried to start a nuclear war with a spoofed caller-ID. Whether or not you could do that, you can certainly start a mob of quasi-fascist loyalist paramilitaries on QQ. Out of all authoritarian governments, China does best, with strategic trolling and semi-official moderators, which may be more important than direct censorship. Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics makes the interesting point that Russia in the early Putin years didn't so much censor the Internet, as distribute government talking-points and favours to carefully selected bastards.
Then again, was the greatest success of the wumaodang model the 2004 US presidential election? The best way to fight one myth is perhaps with another. And the best ones are distinguished by the fact they are sometimes called principles. The really depressing consequence of this is that Paul Staines probably has a job for life, although the less depressing corollary is that he gets to herd several hundred idiots yelling about ZaNuLiebour for the term of his natural.
A couple of other interesting links: Charles Bwele makes the point that in much of the world, the so-called new media are more like the first ones. Did you know about the Grozny riots of 1958?
*The world's first genocidal remix is yet to come, but I wouldn't rule it out by any means. All art aspires to the status of music, and just look what people get up to with books.
Specifically, I'm fairly sceptical about "Twitter Revolutions" and such - if your revolution has someone else's brand name on it, how revolutionary is it? - but I don't think it's irrelevant.
I'm feeling a little sorry for Evgeny Morozov at the moment. He'd just hacked out a niche as Mr. Grumpy by royal appointment to the blogosphere, when first Wikileaks and then Tunisia and Egypt came sweeping through, and the Tunisian secret police hacked all the Facebook pages in the country, and the Egyptians turned off the Internet, just pulled all the BGP announcements... Sometimes it's not your day.
I do think, though, that there is an important way in which a whole lot of Internet tools contributed to the revolutions. I recently posted on the way in which people can at least for a while function as if they were part of an organisation just because they shared certain assumptions. It's the idea of the imagined community, which can be defined as a group of people who are behaving as if their weak social ties were strong ones. If you want a mental model of this, the revolution happens when enough people change state and start doing this, and it stops again when they revert to pursuing their interests in the normal way. Of course, what happens in between may have changed what those are and how they do it. From a different direction, look at Chris Dillow's post here - it's theoretically irrational to take part in politics, until it's not. The point when it stops being irrational, though, is the point when people stop thinking it's irrational.
In that sense, a lot of the work of starting a revolution is starting a myth. An ironic salute to this was the Egyptian government's decision to turn off the Internet, and later the GSM networks as well. If the value of the Internet really had been as a way to pass on the time and place to assemble, this would have been a serious blow to the movement. But once you're a really angry Egyptian, where else would you protest but Tahrir Square? It wasn't that they needed it for tactical communication, but rather for strategic propaganda. Also, once they took this step, they had also inadvertently demonstrated to the other world media that This Was It. The mainstream media remains very good at bringing its own connectivity, and the main barrier to them covering the news is usually that they don't think something is news. Giving Al-Jazeera and friends - who had been heavily criticised on the Web for being soft on the Egyptian government - a monopoly may have been a really bad idea as it forced them to cover the news or look indistinguishable from Nile TV.
I suspect that a lesson here is that the last thing authoritarian governments will do in future is turn the Internet off. For a start, they will increasingly need to keep it up for economic reasons - the ISP that serves the Egyptian stock exchange and central bank was left alone, and with time I would bet that it would become increasingly porous to information. But much more importantly, this is not a policy that has a great track record. Burma managed it, but started with advantages (not many users, only one network, and a strong position to start with). Iran did far better with its throttle-down-and-spy plan. Even though the Tunisians funnelled all the Facebook accounts in the country into one, controlled by the secret police, it didn't seem to help.
Jamais Casco (via here) asked if you could start a genocide on Twitter - a sensible point, as we know you can do so with the radio, the cinema, television, the newspapers, and (thanks to Serbian turbo-folk) rock'n'roll*. Terrorists tried to start a nuclear war with a spoofed caller-ID. Whether or not you could do that, you can certainly start a mob of quasi-fascist loyalist paramilitaries on QQ. Out of all authoritarian governments, China does best, with strategic trolling and semi-official moderators, which may be more important than direct censorship. Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics makes the interesting point that Russia in the early Putin years didn't so much censor the Internet, as distribute government talking-points and favours to carefully selected bastards.
Then again, was the greatest success of the wumaodang model the 2004 US presidential election? The best way to fight one myth is perhaps with another. And the best ones are distinguished by the fact they are sometimes called principles. The really depressing consequence of this is that Paul Staines probably has a job for life, although the less depressing corollary is that he gets to herd several hundred idiots yelling about ZaNuLiebour for the term of his natural.
A couple of other interesting links: Charles Bwele makes the point that in much of the world, the so-called new media are more like the first ones. Did you know about the Grozny riots of 1958?
*The world's first genocidal remix is yet to come, but I wouldn't rule it out by any means. All art aspires to the status of music, and just look what people get up to with books.
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