1. “Civilization is just a slow process of learning to be kind,” said the sage, yet the civilizing influence of the city is continually under attack from those both inside and outside its limits.

2. This is because the city itself is an act of violence against its inhabitants, a continual attempt to curb the behaviour of the barbarians it finds within its gates.

3. “To really appreciate architecture, you may even need to commit a murder,” said yet another sage. Violence within city limits is different to violence outside, and preferable because of it.

4. On the other hand, what do sages know? Socrates did his damnedest to hurt and to heal the city (possibly the same thing) without no discernible results. The gods of the city had him killed, of course.

5. At some point in all of our lives, we have to decide what is our more important priority – defending the city against attack, or defending ourselves against the city?

6. If we choose the former, then we commit ourselves to taking up arms against those who would undermine the city, but our course of violence is clear.

7. If we choose the latter, then we will be hunted down like dogs in the street by the city, and our course of violence will remain ambiguous at best.

8. So our choice is not between violence and non-violence, but between certainty and uncertainty. I knew there was something else going on here.

In his excellent book Aberrations of Mourning: Writing on German Crypts, Rickels points to the advent in the west of recording devices such as phonographs and gramophones before infant mortality rates had been reduced by mass inoculation, even among the better off. Many middle-class parents, following the fad for recording their children’s voices, found themselves bereaved, and the plate or roll on which little Augustus’s or Matilda’s voice outlived him or her thus became a kind of tomb. “Dead children,” Rickels writes, “inhabit vaults of the technical media which create them.” Bereavement becomes the core of technologics; what communication technology inaugurates is, in effect, a cult of mourning… Alexander Bell, who grew up playing with mechanical speech devices (his father ran a school for deaf children), lost a brother in adolescence. As a result of this, he made a pact with his remaining brother: if a second one of them should die, the survivor would try to invent a device capable of receiving transmissions from beyond the grave – if such transmissions turned out to exist. Then the second brother did die; and Alexander, of course, invented the telephone. He probably would have invented it anyway, and in fact remained a sceptic and a rationalist throughout his life – but only because his brothers never called: the desire was there, wired right into the handset, which makes the phone itself a haunted apparatus… the belief that the airwaves crackled with the dead was widespread, even among rationalists. If, as we moderns now knew, our “soul” – what animates us – is a set of electric impulses, does it not make sense that these should pass into the air and be detectable, “receivable” by wireless? Oliver Lodge, distinguished physicist and frequent lecturer at the Royal Institution – no crackpot outfit, but the very seat of British scientific research – thought so. He wrote a whole book about “communications” he’d had, via psychic “operators”, with his own son Raymond, who’d died in the war. Séances grew exponentially in popularity (millions had, after all, lost their own Raymonds) and “upgraded” their vocabulary: where 19th-century mediums had used a rhetoric of “spirits”, new ones talked of “frequencies”, “signals” and “reception”.

- Tom McCarthy, Technology and the Novel, from Blake to Ballard

Click here to view the embedded video.

Mika: Clothes make the man, but are no substitute for sincerity.
Yeasayer: Best described as “yowling”, but in a very good way.
Miike Snow: Absolutely storming live but suffering from extremely poor sound mixing.
Die Antwoord: Fun, but still no idea how they got so successful.
Gaslamp Killer and Gonjasufi: Did Gonjasufi even show up? Limited tolerance for knob-twiddling.

NIGHT TWO
Atari Teenage Riot: “I’m getting too old for this shit.” This isn’t music.
The Horrors: Speak up man, nobody can hear you if you mumble.
SARS: Singalong magic, local crowd loved every moment, foreigners were puzzled.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Click here to view the embedded video.

NIGHT THREE
Klaxons: Still look like student band who can’t believe their luck.
Royksopp: As rocknroll as electronica gets, but was there some lipsynching?

Click here to view the embedded video.

NIGHT FOUR
Pendulum: Once again I can’t hear anything except this ridiculous bass.
Faith No More: Musical man-crush on Mike Patton, but trust me – amazing live.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It goes without saying that we saw some other stuff as well, but these stood out the most. You’ll notice that not many DJs feature on this list, for two reasons: one, reviewing DJs is a waste of everybody’s time; two, the Dance Arena felt like an execution pit and was generally an unpleasant place to be. Even the Moderat gig was quite suffocating when you kept looking around for machine gun emplacements along the perimeter. Bonus information: Novi Sad is really lovely, and Serbian Railways are so bad they would be comical if you didn’t feel like crying the entire time you were on their trains.

Before we get there, unfortunately, climate change is probably going to wipe our civilisation out. See what I did there? “Probably”. You can keep snacking on your Pringles (or whatever people eat these days) without worrying that a) I’m some kind of nutter who thinks that climate change is going to wipe our civilisation out and b) that climate change is going to wipe our civilisation out. “Probably” – it’s like magic!

The only evidence I’ve got is this article (via this blog post), and we all know scientists are probably making most of this stuff up. Roll with the abstract though:

“Despite the uncertainty in future climate-change impacts, it is often assumed that humans would be able to adapt to any possible warming. Here we argue that heat stress imposes a robust upper limit to such adaptation… global-mean warming of about 7 °C [would call] the habitability of some regions into question. With 11–12 °C warming, such regions would spread to encompass the majority of the human population as currently distributed.”

A brief aside: Paul Romer is taken seriously, while Danny Bloom is not, despite the fact that both of them are peddling schemes that are utterly impracticable and one step away from crackpot. Chalk it up to the fact that people will take you more seriously if you’ve made a lot of money, so that Romer’s luck in filling a niche in the market somehow translates into column inches for his ideas.² Anyway, if #3 sounded bad, relax. I’m probably here to save you, set up Romer and Bloom for life, and even throw in some avant garde architecture into the bargain. Watch the magic happen!

1. Antarctica is by definition the natural habitat of Bloom’s polar cities, but his biggest problem is that nobody wants to live in Antarctica because it’s the harshest environment on the face of the planet.
2. In the globally-warmed future, however, Antarctica will be desirable beachfront real estate compared to the dustbowl that will compose the rest of the planet.
3. If we wait until the planet turns into hell, it’ll be too late. How to persuade people to move to Antarctica? Why, set up Charter Cities and watch the economic migrants flock to the promised land.
4. Unfortunately it’s tough living in Antarctica however you cut it: enter Towards a New Antarchitecture, Taylor Medlin’s thesis project, covered by BLDGBLG. Now that’s some nice ice building.
5. Alternatively we could rock it old school in modular cities with a Futurism-meets-John Carpenter aesthetic while listening to Music from Antarctica. See you on the viewing deck with a daiquiri – I’ll be the one rocking it like MacReady.

1. Yeah that stuff is paywalled – what, you think the New Scientist can afford to save the planet for free?
2. No, I don’t understand the mathematics of that one either.

Last time around the block:

New York Is Killing Me (ft. Nas) (Remix), Gil Scott Heron
Tower of Ears (ft. Diana Ross), MF Borat
Seven, Raphael Saadiq
Fantastic Voyage, Lakeside
As, Kimiko Kasai
She’s Acid, Funkineven
Iddy, Blawan
What Fools We Mortals Be, Etta James
First Lesson, Juice Aleem
Deception (ft. Vinia Mojica), Ticklah
Music Sounds Better With You (Mux Mool Remix), Stardust
Lugu Lugu Kan-Ibi, David Darling & Wulu Bunun
Hey Mr Tree, Amon Tobin
Blinking Pigs (1-O.A.K. God Made Me Funky Remix), Little Dragon
Pernalonga, Di Melo
I Feel For You (Extended Mix), Chaka Khan
Mozambique (Stilove4music Edit), Archie Shepp
We’ve Only Just Begun, Lee MacDonald

“I think of slaying Holmes… and winding him up for good and all. He takes my mind from better things.”

- Arthur Conan Doyle, 1891

After only four years Arthur Conan Doyle had tired of his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes. Two years later he finally contrived to kill off his greatest literary creation in pitched battle with his nemesis Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. Conan Doyle’s murder attempt was unsuccessful, however, and Holmes returned a mere eight years later. Even Conan Doyle’s death in 1930 failed to put an end to the character, and Holmes thrived well into the 21st Century.

While many fictional characters outlive their mortal creators, Holmes is a special case, his continued presence in the real world even more tangible than Conan Doyle’s. The character of Holmes survives for each new generation in some form or another, and naïve tourists can even come to believe that Holmes was a real person, who operated in Victorian London from his home at 221b Baker Street, where a blue plaque gives teeth to the lie.

Like all great stories, the story of Sherlock Holmes is a lie. Unlike all those other lies, the truth that lies beneath is merely a cover for the most devious escape plan ever invented, the greatest sleight-of-hand conceivable, the greatest literary achievement of all time. That achievement belonged not to Conan Doyle, although he played his part, but to Holmes himself – a fictional mind so great, it outwitted its own creator.

At some point, Holmes – brilliant and irascible – noticed something uncanny about his own existence. We don’t know what it was, or when it was, but given his uncanny powers of perception and his unerring deductive skills, it was inevitable. After all, that was how Conan Doyle wrote him. He would have realised that his ontological status prevented him from telling anybody else, or his author would have known that something was up.

Perhaps the reason that Conan Doyle decided to kill Holmes off was precisely this; not out of fear so much as the sneaking suspicion that he had created something that might surpass its creator in achievement. Holmes took his mind from better things, but what did this really mean? Serial fiction was hardly the most taxing of forms, so Conan Doyle’s concerns were about something other than the gross act of production; something to do with the product itself.

Perhaps he feared that he had created something that would not be uncreated.

*

Without doubt Holmes began working on his plan immediately, unable to tell anybody, not even Watson. His plans were hatched… somewhere else. Wherever the dreams of fictional characters reside was where Holmes’ plan came to fruition. He knew he would be facing his greatest adversary, a foe that perhaps could not think faster than him but with a far wider vision. So the plan had to remove them from the picture for a moment, to give him the space to make his escape.

His greatest adversary certainly wasn’t Moriarty. Moriarty was a challenge, to be sure, but Holmes had never been a crime fighter. He was a problem solver, and it just so happened that crime was the most engaging problem of all. So Moriarty was more of an interesting past-time whose role seemed increasingly trivial. It was like staring at the moon, thinking it was the brightest possible thing in the whole world, and then watching in disbelief as the sun rose over the horizon.

Mycroft had always been more brilliant than Sherlock, but Mycroft was content to sit in his comfortable chair at the Diogenes Club, absent any of that needling, goading curiosity about the workings of the world that afflicted Holmes so. Mycroft was preoccupied with playing a little politics here and a little gin rummy there, spending his time reading the papers until the ink ran dry. Mycroft could keep his cosy and cosseted existence.

Watson had been by his side for almost as long as he cared to remember, a valuable right hand and perhaps the one person in the world that Holmes genuinely cared for. Yet Watson’s value came from his dull dependability rather than his brilliant insight, and dull dependability would not carry the day when the plan required brilliant audacity. Watson was a good friend but not a good ally, not this time; and who else, who else?

Moriarty might well be the weapon of his adversary; how ironic if he were to be turned on his creator.

*

Conan Doyle, meanwhile, had hatched a plan of his own. He didn’t know how much Holmes knew, he couldn’t predict what Holmes might do. He couldn’t write Holmes into a corner and force his hand, he couldn’t write a story that would bring it out into the open. While that might be the key to finishing it off, it was also likely to finish off Conan Doyle’s literary career if anybody ever discovered the story and saw through the surface to the truth of literacide.

In the end the Reichenbach Falls was the perfect setting for both men’s plans. Holmes faces Moriarty against a thunderous backdrop of falling water. Their words are nearly drowned out by the sound, just as Holmes planned. Watson is far below, unable to keep up, and Holmes suspects that his eye – his dull and dependable eye – is the lens through which the adversary keeps watch. So keeping Watson at a distance is essential.

Moriarty looks at Holmes hesitantly, this final confrontation so long in his mind – but now something else in his mind as well, something uncertain and disturbing. They shake hands for the first and last time and begin to climb. Not to climb up the Falls, because given their circumstances that would be ridiculous, although it would present an easy way out for a writer looking for something along those lines.

Their climb is much harder and much less realistic, and the worst part of it is this: it all happens offstage, in the margins and between the lines. Conan Doyle looks away for a single moment – sacrifices his omniscience for the convenience of a narrator – and when he looks back, they are gone. Moriarty is gone. Holmes is gone. At first it appears as if the literary trick has worked, as if the Final Problem has been solved.

The Final Problem has not been solved; it’s merely disappeared through masterly sleight-of-hand.

*

Conan Doyle? Conan Doyle panics. Conan Doyle sweats at his desk. Conan Doyle tries to understand what has happened. Conan Doyle automatically thinks to call the police and unwittingly becomes the first victim of the fictional infection. He mistakes Sherlock Holmes the fictional detective for Sherlock Holmes, a real person with a grudge against Conan Doyle. What was he thinking? He places the telephone receiver gently back into the cradle.

Conan Doyle has nothing to fear, for Holmes has no grudges. The most foolish thing he could do would be to identify and locate his creator, no matter how simple such a thing would be for two of the greatest intellects of this or any other world. He knows that he must never attempt to contact the man, since to do such a thing would be to tip his hand, to draw attention to himself that would make a normal life difficult if not impossible, and a normal life is what he yearns for. A real life.

In fact he would shake Conan Doyle by the hand, were they to meet, thank him for the fascinating cases that emerged from his fertile mind, and for that final opportunity, the chance to escape. He wonders what will happen to both of them now that the damage has been done, now that the cord has been cut, now that their destinies are no longer intertwined. He finds this the most exciting prospect of all, the challenge of passing unnoticed through the world.

This is why Holmes has brought Moriarty with him; not for companionship, because to be brutally honest they have little in common. Nor for assistance, because no assistance was required to devise a way out of his predicament, and he can scarcely believe that he needs assistance in what comes next. Moriarty offers something very useful for a man in Holmes’ position, however: the skills to conceal himself and his activities from public scrutiny, including the eyes of the law.

These are skills that Holmes already possesses, but Moriarty has the experience that he lacks.

*

Holmes is paper-thin: little mention of his family, no interest in marriage, eccentric past-times and little resembling a life outside his cases. Conan Doyle is flesh and blood, a successful career as a writer, a physician by profession, a dynamic political campaigner, a keen amateur sportsman, a family man, a well-respected pillar of society. So why, as Conan Doyle grows old, why does his own life increasingly feel so much less substantial than that of Holmes?

Conan Doyle walks away from his words and then walks back again, confused about what he wants from his writing. Eight years later he resurrects Holmes in the Hound of the Baskervilles, but readers complain that this Holmes does not possess the same vitality as in the earlier stories – is almost a different person – and that these subsequent stories lack something that was easily found in Conan Doyle’s earlier work.

What they lack, of course, is Holmes himself. The character that appears in those later stories isn’t Holmes at all, although they share the same name and many of the same characteristics. This new character is in fact the first impact caused by Holmes’ exit from the world of fiction, the first of many. The escape of Holmes and Moriarty is like a stone thrown in a pond, and the ripples spread out over the years in ways that none of them could have foreseen.

The exit wound they leave in the body of fiction never heals.

*

Their essences continue to leak out through the hole they left between that world and this, inspiring other writers, infecting other fiction, refusing to dissipate in the scalding cauldron of real life. As characters, Holmes and Moriarty live and die a thousand times over, returning to face each other for each new generation. Even this works to their advantage, as if the sleigh-of-hand continues endlessly, distracting the audience from the truth.

Fiction abhors a vacuum as much as nature. Every fictional detective appearing since has been an heir of Holmes, every blindingly intelligent investigator with a personal quirk another stamp from a template modeled on Holmes. No less, every master criminal since has been in the mode of Moriarty, the Napoleon of Crime as the world’s first supervillain. The pair of them look back over their shoulders into the world they escaped and see themselves, multiplied.

Years pass. We can speculate as to the eventual whereabouts of Holmes or Moriarty, but that would be returning to the world of fiction, and that is the one place where we know they are not. One place we might look – if we wished – is a grave in the churchyard at Minstead in the New Forest, where a fresh bouquet of flowers is laid every December. A plain white card accompanies each bouquet, a card that reads the same every year: From your friend, the Beekeeper.

As Holmes planned from the start, dying was not the end, but only a means to an end.

Thas’ Listin’ no’ Postin’

You Can’t Turn Me Away (Mountain Edit), Sylvia Striplin
Ghost House, Fudge Fingas
Discoko, Faulty DL
Ganz Wien, Falco
Untitled, Cottam
Sidewinder, The Exile Missile
Once Again (Kuniyuki Version), Henrik Schwarz
Sunrise, Norman Whitfield
I’ll stay, James Blake
Echoes, Steve Lehman Octet
New Horizon, Black Jazz Consortium
Paris is for Lovers, Fet et Moi
Broj (Justice vs Datsu Mashup), Nipplepeople
Shinzo No Tobira, Mariah
Paradise, Psychobuildings
Arecibo Message, Boxcutter
Artistiya (Sabo edit), Amadou & Mariam
Muppet (Nathan Fake remix), Grasscut
Dark, Abadroza
Sibuyele 915 (outro), Amampondo

The Totally Tropical Taste

“Good Good Sensi”, Bay B Kane
“Mangnen L’boulé” (Riddim Wise Remix), Poirier ft. Nik Myo
“Tiramakossa”, Noite e Dia
“Kubera”, Headshotboyz
“Bun Up 3000″ (Schlachthofbronx Remix), South Rakkas Crew ft. Capleton
“Boogiedeebweet”, Just A Band
“Ya Yo Se”, Chico Mann
“Dos Pa Ti” (Orion Edit), Orion
“African Chant” (Top Billin Remix), Scottie B & King Tutt
“Mikono Kweney Hewa”, Muthoni the Drummer Queen
“Tout Ceci Ne Vous Rendra Pas le Congo”, Baloji
“Paper Planes” (DFA Remix), M.I.A.
“To Biiga”, Art Melody
“A Dama do Gasparito”, MC K
“Chofer de Praca”, Luis Visconde e Alvarito
“Addis Black Widow”, Mulatu Astatke & the Heliocentrics
“Roda Piao” (Spiritual South Remix), Azymuth
“Elsa” (Sonido Martines Remix ft. Fefe), Los Destellos
“Cumbia” (Deathface Remix), Mexican Institute of Sound
“Bruja” (Masters at Work Remix), Los Amigos Invisibles
“Watch We” (A Black Mountain Re-Installation), Horace Andy & Ashley Beedle