Bat, Bean, Beam

Liveblogging the Apocalypse (8): The End of the Internet

2012-01-24T00:04:00.007+13:00

‘Imagine a world without free knowledge,’ intoned Wikipedia lugubriously last week in lieu of its usually prompt and cheerful way of answering our every query. Next to the message, a large black W cast a long shadow to reinforce the intimation that we might witness in our time the twilight of free speech, perhaps of culture itself. The internet is not entirely new to this sort of display.

Flow My Tears, the Minister Said

2012-01-16T23:59:00.003+13:00

They call it the government of the technocrats. They say that they take their orders from the market, or from the European Central Bank. Passera, Severini, Terzi, Gnudi, Giarda, Catania, Catricalà, Clini, Profumo, Ornaghi, Fornero. Who had ever heard of these people? They sound like the lineup of a third-division football team, but they are lawyers, economists and academics. They used to work

Endings

2012-01-10T00:09:00.007+13:00

Like a book, suddenly unwritten. There are blogs that cease to exist just like that, that disappear without so much as a whimper, or that linger but in mutilated form, their archives hacked into digital pieces. I’m fascinated by these endings, whether hesitant and stuttering or lucidly planned and executed. And I want to put forward two ideas: firstly, that to the extent that they even exist

Tītokowaru's Dilemma

2011-12-19T23:59:00.015+13:00

This is a question to you. To whom does England belong? To whom does this upon which you stand belong? (Riwha Tītokowaru) Socrates and Tītokowaru sit together in a forest, tending a campfire with long sticks. Behind them, the profile of Mount Taranaki. It’s an incongruous, anachronistic meeting, drawn in an incongruous, anachronistic mixture of styles. Red-figure Attic vase painting for

You and Mark Aren't Friends

2011-12-12T23:59:00.006+13:00

Timeline is the story of your life. (Mark Zuckerberg) Nine beef consommés, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup… (Georges Perec, 'Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Ninteen Hundred and Seventy-Four') As of last week, New Zealand is again the site of an experiment. I’m not sure why Facebook decided to launch

Memory Trade

2011-12-05T23:59:00.012+13:00

Translout that gaswind into turfish, Teagues, that’s a good bog and you, Thady, poliss it off, there’s a nateswipe, on to your bottom pulper. (James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, footnote 2, page 218) Histories record: Prehistories invent. (Darren Tofts, Memory Trade) Towards an archaeology of reading This is the technique that I use to recall the salient passages of a book I am reading

Land Values

2011-11-28T23:59:00.008+13:00

They resemble aerial bombardments, Rongotai or hex grids in a boardgame, Scoltand and Northern Ireland or quarantined areas in an epidemic. Auckland But they’re just different ways of representing the outcome of elections, according to polling station results or electorate winners. The last picture in particular corresponds to a mode of representation that has come to signify

Posterous

2011-11-21T23:59:00.007+13:00

Every three years the institution of the election poster gives us an object lesson in psychogeography, remaking the country into red zones, blue zones, contested zones. A sign erected on a private fence or put up at one’s window makes an uncomplicated political statement: this is a Tory household, a Labour household, a Green household; the sum of many such statements can mark an entire

The Long Goodbye

2011-11-14T23:59:00.006+13:00

I spent the night after Berlusconi won his first election working until the smallest hours to meet a deadline. I remember listening to Radio Popolare in my headphones while Justine slept, and hearing Northern League leader and ally Umberto Bossi trash Berlusconi in an interview at 3 am. Neither of these details is casual, my working through the night or Bossi’s intemperance. I have been

How to Be a Retronaut

2011-11-07T23:59:00.002+13:00

Cross-posted. When Forrest Gump was first released, what focussed the attention of the public wasn’t its appalling caricature of the counterculture of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, nor its reactionary hollowing out of history. It was the digital effects. This may seem quaint now, especially if one considers that so much ground had already been broken – and in more spectacular

The Meaning of John Key

2011-10-24T23:59:00.013+13:00

With apologies. Lancaster Park, 1981 (via) At the time of the Springbok Tour of 1981 John Key was in his last year of his Bachelor of Commerce degree at Canterbury University, yet if you ask him now whether he was pro or against the tour, he will reply that he doesn’t remember. Of course nobody believes that, reasoning that even a fence-sitter – of which there must have been some –

'Reality Is Broken': on the death of Steve Jobs

2011-10-18T01:11:00.011+13:00

The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system. (Marshall

Occupy Wellington

2011-10-10T23:59:00.011+13:00

Six months in the life of the city. From the night of January 4, 1978, when a cabbage patch appeared out of nowhere in the vacant lot at the corner of Manners and Willis, until the month of June, when the area that had become known as ‘the Roxy’ was farewelled with a week-long party, and the works for the construction of the two-storey arcade that would replace it commenced. Six months that

The Field of Miracles

2011-10-03T23:59:00.005+13:00

They had gone nearly half-way towards Pinocchio’s home, when the fox suddenly stopped and said, “Would you like to double your fortune?” “How do you mean?” “Would you like to multiply those miserable five gold pieces into a hundred, a thousand, two thousand times?” “Who wouldn’t! But how?” “That’s very easy. But instead of going home, you must come with us.” (Carlo Collodi, Pinocchio)

After Work

2011-09-26T23:59:00.008+13:00

All of the Terminator films except for the third one have their climactic scene set inside of a factory. That is the place where the killer robots (pardon: cybernetic organisms) are crushed or melted down or obliterated in a thermonuclear explosion. But factories are also where the Terminators are forged. These golems of the post-industrial age are born in factories just as humans – and

The Well-Adjusted

2011-09-19T23:59:00.004+12:00

The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. (Mark Fisher) Having adapted or conformed suitably

Animal Treatment

2011-09-12T23:59:00.011+12:00

At the moment, Happy Feet is in a cage with ice. There is a GPS tracker glued to his feathers. When he is in the sea, a satellite will follow where he is. You can follow this too on two websites: www.nzemperor.com or www.ourfarsouth.org. (Via) The body of eighty-eight year old Michael Clarke was found two weeks ago in his apartment, in the so-called ‘Zoo Block’ of Wellington’s Newtown

Three.

2011-09-06T01:23:00.009+12:00

Threatening to fall off the map is the city of Cheltenham. I think that if I could tell you what it is that intrigues me about this detail, it would go a long way towards making some of the theoretical points I am forever deferring in the writing of this blog. There is a map of England and Wales at one inch to a mile, a beautiful object in and of itself – printed on cloth in the

How to Make Love

2011-08-30T00:00:00.004+12:00

Every so often a blogger stumbles upon this book. And we laugh, oh, how we laugh. And then when we are finished laughing occasionally we draw wry conclusions on wider social trends, and how the times have changed, between the retrograde then and the relatively enlightened now. It is something of a conditioned critical stance – point, laugh, wry – and there isn’t much that

Liveblogging the Apocalypse (7): Combined and/or Uneven

2011-08-23T00:00:00.007+12:00

To begin with a point of departure, from a review by Michael Willand: More than a blueprint for liberation, Williams’s limpid and creative dissection of these cultural artefacts is an exemplary illustration of the serious scrutiny we should apply to our imaginative lives. And to show that it amounts to damning not so much with faint praise as with actual damning, and makes a non

The Looting

2011-08-15T23:59:00.009+12:00

They assembled in front of the warehouse in a late afternoon in early June: two hundred or so people who had arrived in one hundred or so vehicles, including large trucks of well-known local moving companies whose brand names had been concealed. Then they got to work. They forced their way inside the padlocked building and proceeded to strip it of everything that might have some

Our Memory Is a Never-Grey Wall

2011-08-09T01:49:00.003+12:00

La nostra memoria è un muro mai grigio, our memory is a never-grey wall. And underneath, Corsari Milano, although it’s not a signature: the two graffiti were left on different dates, likely by different hands. However to this group, linked to the ‘Milan Autonomous Zone’ and to the movement of the social centres, belong other admonishments not to forget the past that I have had the

True Names

2011-08-01T23:59:00.008+12:00

anti-aliasing n. -soc. psych. Curiosity about the real flesh-and-blood people behind internet usernames, whose vivid individuality suggests that when our parents were tracing their fingers along our nameless faces looking for some hint of who we were to become, they really should have gone with Mr. Cookieface, Unicornpuncher, Dutchess Von Whatever, or Wookiegasm. (The Dictionary of Obscure

Temple Grandin

2011-07-18T23:59:00.010+12:00

Both of these women are Temple Grandin. The younger woman is dressed as is expected of an actress at a film premiere. She looks stunning. The classic pose – one-quarter turned, leading with the right shoulder – accentuates her lovely figure. She projects total confidence as she looks into the camera with a smile that is both friendly and seductive. The older woman is dressed like a rodeo

Liveblogging the Apocalypse (6): The Triumph of Death

2011-07-12T00:00:00.010+12:00

The meatblood colors and massed bodies, this is a census-taking of awful ways to die. (Don DeLillo, Underworld) The closest source may be the fresco that once stood in the courtyard of Palazzo Sclafani in Palermo, and was crudely lifted in four parts so that now in reproduction it looks like a poster showing the creases from where it was folded. Death crashes a garden party, a