Saturday 23 November 2002

TRANSCLUSION: A thing existing in more than one place at once
SON OF/ "NAKED FAMILY 2"

back in the xmas/new year of 00/01, when i was continuously-naked in prison, my mum wrote to me, saying how proud she was of me.

its her 70th birthday next year.

Friday 22 November 2002

80% OF AMERICANS CAN'T FIND BUSH'S TARGET

From Richard Wallace, US Editor, in New York

Even more worrying - one in 10 couldn't pick out America.

When the Daily Mirror carried out a poll of 100 people on the streets of New York yesterday, we found that 80 per cent didn't have a clue where Iraq was.

GEORGE Bush is on the brink of invading Iraq - but most Americans have no idea where the country is.

A survey revealed that only one in seven aged between 18 and 24 could identify Saddam Hussein's land.

And while more than half knew that al-Qaeda and the Taliban were based in Afghanistan, only one in six could find the country on a map.
(daily mirror, thurs 21 nov 02)
on this day 1963

Kennedy shot dead in Dallas
CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER

the first nominations for eviction.

it doesn't matter that all of the six housemates know rationally that its a game and someone simply has to go. the emotional sense of group rejection must still be hard.
on this day 1990

Thatcher quits as prime minister

Margaret Thatcher is to stand down as prime minister after her Cabinet refused to back her in a second round of leadership elections.
TODAY

Serg and Fi are back from their 5 month south american adventure.

meanwhile my earlier excitement over discovering how to make a drop down menu was premature. drop down was all it did. it looks like maybe a navigational menu requires java. i'll get there eventually i guess.
QUASISPECIES: A fuzzy distributions of genotypes characterizing a population of quickly mutating organisms or molecules.

Thursday 21 November 2002

HITCHING

Freewheelers is free, it provides an online database for people offering or requiring lifts, linking drivers and passengers to share the cost of travel... Saves you money, helps other people and reduces pollution.
Concepcion Piccioto and William Thomas

while clearing out scraps of information i'd kept over the years i came across the peace activists who have been living on the pavement opposite the Whitehouse since 1981.

Wednesday 20 November 2002

BIOCHAUVINISM: The prejudice that biological systems have an intrinsic superiority that will always give them a monopoly on self-reproduction and intelligence.
[K. Eric Drexler, Engines of Creation, 1986]
"If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't."
(Lyall Watson)

Tuesday 19 November 2002

Monday 18 November 2002

MONDAY
Monan daeg, Montag, maandag, lundi, Dies Lunae, Som-var, Peer or Somwar, Tanang- la, Sin, Tsuki, Getsu Youbi.

Sunday 17 November 2002

HYWEL SIMONS

the second most popular search-hit here this week has been for the actor Hywel Simons, including at least one search for "Hywel Simons naked".

he plays a gay cop in the itv police drama "the bill", and i'd blogged about the number of complaints itv received after he kissed another male cop awhile back. (if my memory is correct he was also in a 'controversial' drama for schools about 2 gay teenagers falling in love, back in the late 80's/early 90's, that was banned from afternoon viewing and was eventually screened late at night)

the curious thing about the novelty of having stats is that with discovering so many people are visiting in search of things that aren't really here, i feel it would be a kindness to place something here to satisfy them. so perhaps later i'll find a naked Hywel pic and post it somewhere.
DREAM

the priest, played by Donald Pleasance, was enraged when i insisted that catholicism, like all religion, is entirely the same as coca-cola.
"NAKED FAMILY"

this has been my first full week of having stats on my page. the most common search hit is people looking for "naked family".

i'm just back from spending the night at my mum's. but somehow i don't think i'm ever going to be able to talk her, my step-dad, or my sister into posing for a naked group shot. sorry to dissapoint.

while on this theme, friday morning, before leaving home, i recieved a video copy of Lisa Seidenberg's naked protest documentary, "Being Human", (screening in New York at Anthology Film Archives sometime soon). Lisa came over from america last summer and along with tv crews from Spain and France, she documented the last naked protest, Green Park to Parliament Square, that Vincent and I participated in.

i took her video with me to my parents to watch, along with a copy of my own short "Naked" (screened last year at the Horse Hospital, London, and in Brazil as part of the Carlton Arts festival). but as neither film contained car chases and had far too much talking and artiness, my parents quickly lost interest.

also on friday, before getting a train to Littlehampton, i had arranged to meet with the lovely Kris Cohen, who had contacted me in relation to his academic research into the use of photographic images in blogging. his contacting me has enthused me to put more work into my image archives.

so while at my parents i went through their photos and have brought a number of treasures back with me to eventually scan and upload. gems such as my nan as a baby, end of the 19th century, aswell as pictures of my sister who is currently invisible in my image archive narrative, and me as a child in the 'purple prince' outfit my nan made for a primary school play.

many pictures are sadly lost. in the mid-eighties my parents moved to Spain and then they couldn't afford to keep up the storage payments on stuff packed up in England, which included the big bag of photos. but subsequently, since the deaths of my nan and my mothers two brothers, we have reacquired some pictures from their old albums.
AUTOMORPHISM: "Living as art", a sub-movement of transhumanist art where self-transformation and living itself is the medium.
SCRAPPLEFACE.COM

The publisher of The New York Times today announced that the paper will begin adding a "source code" to each story it publishes on paper, or on the internet. The code system will help the reader understand how the story came to be written.

"Walter Cronkite used to end his newscasts on CBS with the phrase: 'And that's the way it is,'" said Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., "But that was a lie. What shows up on TV news or in the paper is a highly-subjective list of stories spawned for a variety of reasons from political to mundane. This new coding system, is just the latest in our ongoing efforts to be transparent and vulnerable with our readers."

Here is initial list of codes which will appear just under each headline to explain how the story came to be:

* RIP= Reporter's Investigative Piece: our reporter came up with this idea, did the research and wrote the story.
* SH= Something Happened: Some event took place and we reacted by writing this story.
* TB= Trial Balloon: person quoted in story is floating an idea to see how our readers will respond.
* SRTRQ= Source Reacts to Reporters Question: source in story was forced to comment on some topic by persistent reporters' questions. Story presented as if source had brought up the subject.
* NRE= News Release Edited: story is little more than a PR news release edited to make you think we did some actual journalism.
* NRU= News Release Unedited: story is verbatim news release. We don't care what you think.
* OFI= Old Friend Idea: a former reporter, now doing PR, planted this story. Reporter 'owed him one'.
* SND=Slow News Day: speaks for itself.
* WUS= Watch Unnamed Source: Anonymous source in story is same as named source, speaking on "background" (see also TB, above)
* DBI= Drinking Buddy Idea: speaks for itself.
* TDI=Top Down Idea: someone in corporate headquarters emailed an editor and asked, "When's the last time we did a story on...?"
* SI=Stolen Idea: some other news organization just did a piece on this, and we were caught with our pants down. Now, we're trying to appear to be more 'in-depth' than them on the topic.
* AI=Astrologer Idea: the paper's 'advisor' said it would be a good day for such a story.
* TT=Thesis Theme: story is shorter version of reporter's doctoral thesis, and he can't wait to get that Ph.D. so he can get into academia and teach journalism instead of being faced with the daily grind of cranking out garbage that no one reads.

Saturday 9 November 2002

Thursday 7 November 2002

A FOX,

in broadest daylight, midday, trotting along a busy pavement in holborn, central london. it walked right past our red double decker bus.

i bought a lamp. £54 reduced from £130. i have no money, but i wrote a cheque for it and will deal with the finger-wagging from the bank when they post it.

went to see the zombie movie "28 days later". it reminded me of a feeling from long ago, when i first wandered into a cronenberg/ romero/ argento movie in the late seventies, with no previous knowledge or dreary 'cult' status attached to what i was seeing. before the mac-horror of the contemporary industry.

Wednesday 6 November 2002

AT THE SPEED OF DARK

by hook and by plenty of crook the dastardley bush regime now has control of the whitehouse, the american senate and their house of representatives.

meanwhile.... in last sunday's Observer, GORE VIDAL CLAIMS 'BUSH JUNTA' COMPLICIT IN 9/11

America's most "controversial" novelist calls for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately allowed the terrorist attacks to happen

"according to Stan Goff, a retired US Army veteran who has taught military science and doctrine at West Point, who writes, in 'The So-called Evidence is a Farce':

'I have no idea why people aren't asking some very specific questions about the actions of Bush and company on the day of the attacks'."

Tuesday 5 November 2002

on this day 1984

Sandinistas claim election victory

Nicaragua's ruling Sandinista Front (FSLN) claimed a decisive victory in the country's first elections since the revolution five years ago.

Within hours of the count beginning, the leader of the country's left-wing junta, Daniel Ortega, said he had gained nearly 70% of the vote in the presidential election.

In spite of the Sandinista victory being declared fair the United States continued to interfere.

Monday 4 November 2002

on this day 1995

Israeli PM shot dead

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was been assassinated.

The gunman, named as Yigal Amir, was believed to be one of the founders of an illegal Jewish settlement on the West Bank and a member of an extreme right-wing organisation.

Israel TV said Yigal Amir, 27, had confessed to shooting the prime minister and had told investigators that he did not regret his actions.

Sunday 3 November 2002

"GAY MEN"

i'm just back from seeing a gay-male workshop-devised afternoon performance, that Steven was participating in. and i also bumped into a few familiar faces from my act-up london AIDS activist past. (must scan and upload act-up archives)

ultimately i'm kind of the wrong gay-male audience for this sort of work. and i discovered i had a mighty low tolerance thresh-hold for hearing the words "gay man" or "as a gay man". a low tolerance that was unfortunately stretched to its limits within the first few minutes of the show.

but as someone in the bar highlighted afterwards, it is important for people to be able to process their identity narrative stuff somewheres/sometimes. and one performer's monologue, about his appreciating growing-old in the context of dead friends and lovers who never did, was especially poignant.
a posthuman manifesto

He spoke of human beings, of their freedom to grow into godhood, or to remain gloriously human, to become human for the first time.
NAKED PROTEST: REWIND

some treasures from 00/01:-

the guardian, 26 apr 01
"a replica of Michelangolo's David now wears a white loincloth after complaints by residents of Luke Alfred, Florida."

the independent, 14 jan 01
"an unhappy mistake at the Times on friday. the paper's european edition carried a caption about princess Margaret saying: "the princess, usually happy to go out, has spent most of the past 3 weeks in bed". Above it was a rear-view picture of Vincent Bethell, the nude protestor, climbing into a taxi in his birthday suit."

metro, 22 nov 00,
"one in 4 businesses allows staff to wear casual clothes at least once a week.....but a magazine survey of 1,000 workers found women in particular preferred a smarter dress code.......3 out of 5 women said they hated casual dressing in the office and many described dress-down days as 'baffling and confusing'. a third of women and 1 in 4 men said they wouldn't have a clue what to wear if a casual dress code was introduced by their employers. most women said they would have more confidence in their bank manager, lawyer, or doctor if they wore a smart suit rather than jeans and a t-shirt,"

evening standard, 22 aug 00
2 pages on from reportage of vincent's 5th naked bail/arrest of one week ("laws an ass, says naked rights man"), was news that mo mowlam's hubby likes to paint naked. he says: "i don't like clothes, anyway. i've turned down a couple of banking jobs because i can't stand the thought of putting on a suit again"

evening standard, 20 sept 00
"this season zoe williams will mostly be wearing a naked man. its the latest must-have accessory. all the fashion advertising campaigns say so."

the times, 13 jan 01
the Times' picture caption competion (prize: a fujifilm fotonex). this week readers were invited to offer a speech bubble for naked Vincent Bethell, immediately after a unanimous jury found him not-guilty of "public nuisance". there was also last weeks winning caption of Sadam Hussein shooting a rifle into the air and saying "i hereby declare this international disarmament conference open".

evening standard, 25 jul 01
"a photo of 1959 art prankster Alan Abel, with his campaign placard that reads: "clothe all animals for the sake of decency".

the guardian,12 jan 01,
"mr. Bethell's historic victory was followed by a curious exchange with the judge, George Bathurst Norman.

Bethell (naked): "being human is not a crime."
Judge (in wig): "i would not go away too much with that idea."

apart from this being gibberish, is it not a little worrying that our judges appear to believe that being human IS a crime? i rest my case."

NAKED PROTEST links and texts
"Homo sapiens? You need to upgrade."
ENTRAINMENT

"Feelingless is generally thought to be a word with negative connotations.

It is practically blasphemy to announce that one wishes to be an emotionless bastard.

More to the point, we hurt our own species out of pure hate/jealousy/*insert appropriate feeling*. We then proceed to trumpet ourselves as the most superior organisms (or nation) due to our morality and ability to experience emotions."


for me the most truly frightening aspect of sept 11th, at the time, was the almost total censorship, a smothering of any dissent from the one prescribed emotional script. it was near compulsory to be feeling the event, as if it was different to all the other deaths and tragedy on the news, everyday, that we generally don't really feel.

i worry that similar grand emotive spectacles will follow, where most of the population is, for a time, entrained to a single drum, extremly vulnerable to manipulation and is highly intolerant of any alternatives.

(the guardian newspaper Sept 17 2001): "journalists who have asked sceptical questions have been inundated with furious calls calling them a disgrace to their profession and even traitors."
OLIGARCHY

last monday's guardian, report on the Russian hostage fuck up, talked of the Russian "pro-government tv channels, which are run either by appointees or rich friends of the Kremlin".

isn't our tv and media run exactly the same?

the bread-and-circus illusion of free-speech in this country is ultimately a matter of who and what interests can speak the loudest, most often and most repetetively.

i would compare the monolithic coverage of sept 11th, with say the regular sized reporting earlier the same year of the indian earthquake on 26 January, which killed an estimated 30,000 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless in the western Gujarat state, as an example of which interests are considered to be of greatest value by those in control.
AMANDA BARRIE

there was one of those rare revitalising tv moments a few friday's ago, on the 'richard and judy' show (afternoon uk tv), when a mainstream celebrity, 67 year old ex-soap (and carry-on) star Amanda Barrie, voiced her common-sense opinion in favour of triangular/polygomous relationships.

wasn't it also in the newspapers once upon a time, that it was Amanda who made Jade's dress for her exit from the big brother 3 house?
DEATH TO REALISM
last night's thoughts-and-video wash-cycle. BLAH BLAH

i was surprised to hear recently that cities exist in our world without cctv.

if when asked to quickly write down things associated with badness, would a large majority within any group of people compile similar lists? are the lists likely to contain: fatty foods and too much tv and litter and murder and smoking and selfishness and blood-sports and list making and blah blah you can recite the drill too, right? does it stand up as evidence of an effectively embedded human coding/virus of irrelevant chicken/egg origins, but of great influence in human daily realities?

another battery-farm inspired debate is whether our new mass populations can ever be trusted with absolute freedoms

or

wether we're in constant need of shepherding (patriarchy/matriarchy, toilet seat up/down, pepsi/coke, freewill/fate, same difference).

its a debate about us as communities, as consumers, as large gatherings of human individuals, and it dominated 20th century thinking and activity, it is well researched, documented to within an inch of its life and workshopped on a global scale.

any pavlovian tinge to our human realities is amply showcased through the tv psycho-art of Derren Brown aswell as by the embodiment charms spun from Trinny and Susannah. Tv at its best, but aren't you sometimes left in the audience afterwards wondering wether some things may just aswell be chip implants, you know, right here right now, get it over with, lube the bloody screwdriver etc

"eXiztenZ is paused". (face down in the restauraunt table/bed morph)

J dropped by for a few hours. he'd been out the previous night distributing food through the anti-war gathering. i was part way through a season 3 buffy video from the library.

the question arose: might in-built capitalist restrictions such as finite budgets, person-power, worker's hours, have the potential to negate any increase in effective surveillance gathering about every inhabitant of everywhere. you know the game character script about "the bad hyper-surveillance/information-gathering society. everybody riot now."

take that old chestnut "the faster and faster intelligent machine" and roast it to its core popular assumption: that a machine at a particular thinking level will automatically be tyrannical/oppressive.

its equally as likely not to be.

a certain level of machine intelligence may make something akin to the emergence of feelings, within its decision making, inevitable.

this potential means that the mythologically omnipotent machine-intelligence, capable of hyper-collating from a host of nano-surveilance bots, forever and everywhere, amen, has an equal chance to not feel like bothering. or it may be interested in surveillancing Alphabetically and Armadillo culture is fascinating.

Ants sure were.

though our immersant culture relocated us wholesale through the looking-glass long long ago, ontologically embodied narcissism ensures that humanity is bedazzled by infinite reflections of its fragile point-of-view. we are growing unacustommed to channeling the unknown.
on this day 1957

Russians launch dog into space

The Soviet Union launched the first ever living creature into the cosmos.

The Soviet authorities said the dog, called Laika, died painlessly after a week in orbit but in 2002 new evidence revealed the dog died from over-heating and panic just a few hours after take-off.