Ha!

Today's random funny news post has nothing to do with animals or India.

A Norwegian politician advocates legalising illicit music downloads. Enslaved reply by stealing his sheep.

In trve black metal fashion they released the sheep to freedom in the mountains, where it can now forever roam twixt the blackened peaks bathed in the dark light of the frostbitten wintermoon, preserving the spirit of metal within its black unbeating heart.

Random Weekend Links

Via Making Light: Homeland Security Blanket
Via Arts and Letters Daily: More arguments against the war on drugs

Anniversary

I didn't realise until about ten o'clock, after about half an hour of reading blogs, that today was September 11th. Sure, I knew the date, but I didn't click that it was that anniversary until I suddenly noticed that every political blog in the world was talking about the same thing.

My slowness to notice was probably because every non-political blog in the world was talking about Britney's bad lip syncing and drug fucked demeanour at the MTV video awards.

Fuck APEC

I've refrained from saying much about this here because, while it's been a huge inconvenience to everyone in Sydney I don't work in the CBD so I just did my best to ignore it.

I wasn't even tempted to go along to the protests. Sure there between the world leaders gathered here last week there are innumerable numbers of actions and policies that need to be spoken out against, from the war in Iraq to China's human rights abuses to Helen Clark's Electoral Finance Bill, but I'm thoroughly dismissive of the effectiveness of your average cranky liberal protest in this day and age. For a start to effectively communicate a message you need an actual issue that everyone is gathered around. By the time the people concerned about Climate Change, those concerned about Iraq and those concerned about the erosion of civil liberties in the name of fighting terrorism get together and bolster their numbers with high school kids who want to act cool, trend followers who just want to protest 'against Bush' and general troublemakers who want a fight with the police, you're left with a directionless rabble with no common purpose and who end up looking like a bunch of smelly, brainless, mungbean munching hippies who are pretty much outraged about everything all of the time.

But while in a taxi on Saturday night I saw something quite different, the Falun Gong protesters gathered outside the university holding a candle light vigil. Their concerted message and peaceful demeanour were an affecting contrast to the usual megaphone enabled histrionics I associate with political protest. This is how it should be done people. I do wonder why they were so far from where anything to do with APEC was taking place. But I suppose that even if they were within viewing distance of the Chinese president he probably wouldn't have noticed anyway, what with the hundreds of thousands of dollars of fireworks being blown up over the city in his honour that night. Sydneysiders love their fireworks but Saturday's display was excessive even by this city's standards.

Google Reader

...is absolute gold.

The only downside is that it concatenates everything in your RSS feed onto a single page. So some troubling, serious post from No Right Turn melds straight on into whatever hardcore porn stills are on the front page of Fleshbot (NSFW).

And speaking of Fleshbot and RSS, I wonder why they split their feeds into 'gay' and 'straight' (and 'all'). It seems a little sexist. Shouldn't it be 'people who like boys', 'people who like girls' and 'people who like everyone'?

Remember When The Onion Was Always This Funny?

Bush Refuses To Set Timetable For Withdrawal Of Head From White House Banister

I know it's old and I know it's lame to post links to stuff from The Onion because everyone reads it anyway but it made me laugh so damn hard I had to anyway.

All We Ever Were. Just Zeroes And Ones.

Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero

It was a Christmas miracle. Not only did Trent Reznor release a new Nine Inch Nails album a mere two years after the last one (four years ahead of schedule), but at the same time he put out a live DVD, masterminded a brilliantly original promotion campaign for the record and started an international tour (Sydney show reviews coming soon!)

Calling the Year Zero promotion a marketing campaign is a little dismissive, it's really an extension of the album itself in which the plot and setting behind the album's concept are fleshed out and explained by a cluster of secret websites. The album on it's own probably wouldn't make much sense out of this context and reading the websites is a fun experience in itself, not to mention the liveliness of the little community that has sprung up around trying to unravel the clues to reveal the next site and piece it all together.

Before I even get to the album there are three things that need to be mentioned about how well Trent handled the release of this album. Firstly, he's been very savvy about the use of the internet in promoting his music and in his handling of piracy. While most of his peers in the music industry are still, even five years after this stuff went mainstream, viewing the internet with mistrust, as if it were some kind of fad that they just have to weather until they can deliver DRM strong and draconian enough to make your computer grow legs, jump out the window and run down to the police station to report you if you try to play anything that you haven't paid for. The Year Zero ALG (dopey terminology but it's the only name we have to describe this stuff for now) got the online fanbase onboard in promoting the album before anyone had even heard it. The deliberate leaking of a few songs well in advance turned out to be a smart move too. But the thing that impressed me most was how on the very day that a high quality leak of Year Zero appeared online, the whole album was made available for streaming off the official website. Rather than being tempted to download it I just listened to it once off the website and then waited for the proper album release. I doubt it made a lot of difference to how much the album was pirated but it's probably the smartest thing that can be done about it in this day and age.

The second thing that impressed me was the very idea of the Year Zero ALG itself. Trent has been bitching for years about how no one does proper album art any more, the days of big beautiful LP artwork are long gone and it looks like even the cramped, small confines of the CD case shall soon be a thing of the past. I've been waiting for someone to click and realise that with online distribution they now have the whole internet as a canvas on which to supplement their music. I should have guessed that NIN would be the first ones to do so.

Lastly I have also been impressed by this Open Source Resistance thing that they've started up. It's worse than a cliché when a band stands up and rants about politics and the state of the world, but rather than just bitching Trent is actually using his fame and influence to actually try and start something that could make a difference. It remains to be seen where this OSR business will end up going, but even if it does nothing more than to promote peace and art then it will be a worthwhile endeavour. At the very least it will make a refreshing antidote to Rage Against the Machine's uncomfortably violent exhortations.

It easy to dismiss artists taking pot shots at the powers that be. They don't have any power to change anything and it sometimes seems like they never make any real difference. But while listening to Year Zero I realised that the fact that I believe the things I do is at least partially attributable to the fact that while I was growing up people were willing to stand up and say “Hey this is bullshit” when they saw it, either directly or via the medium of popular culture. It might not seem like much on it's own, but little by little the influence of these things does accumulate and does make a difference in shaping the world.

The dystopian future world of Year Zero is fairly unoriginal. Climate change is starting to cause real harm, the western nations are embroiled in war in the Middle East and their governments are taking increasingly aggressive moves to curtail the freedoms of their citizens. Yes, the future is just like today, only more so. Such a generic sounding story would be a little thin for a movie or novel but it is perfectly suited to being the concept for a rock album where a more complicated narrative would drag things down.

So anyway, onto the music. If you've heard the single 'Survivalism' then you know pretty much what to expect. Trent has kept the music pretty uniform in texture for the duration of the album; crunchy, minimal, electronic and totally laptop-mungus. This is an appropriate (if not commercially savvy) decision, as it reinforces the message of the album's concept and it makes the few spots where the music departs a little from that style so much more striking.

The album opens with 'Hyperpower!', a short instrumental prologue in the vein of a military march which is the closest thing on the album soundwise to Nine Inch Nails' previous output (possibly because the screaming in the background reminds one of 'The Becoming' or perhaps something off Broken).

Most of the tracks on Year Zero are, like those on With Teeth, short, succinct and to the point. This suits Trent pretty well as he has always had a flair for putting his dirty industrial instrumentation in pop arrangements. 'The Beginning of the End' and 'Survivalism' are the best examples of this (the former track has a beat lifted straight out of 'My Sharona'), and most songs on the album exude a wealth of catchiness.

The next few tracks stretch out their running time a little more, 'The Good Soldier', a gentle song with violent lyrics, ends with a sweet guitar solo that is one of my favourite moments on the album. In contrast 'Vessel' (a dirty, sexy song about drug addiction that recalls 'Closer' and 'With Teeth') ends with a freaky electronic glitch out which is also very satisfying.

As a whole I think this album has some of the best lyrics Trent has ever written. I'm impressed with how well he has succinctly and unpretentiously presented the story behind the concept while also making each song at least somewhat relevant and interesting on it's own. Sure this is kind of easy because every element of Trent's freaky dystopian future nightmare is drawn straight from today's headlines (imminent environmental catastrophe, authoritarian governments keeping the population stupid, kids taking lots of drugs) but it's still very well done. The lyrical highlight of the first half of the album is the tremendous (and tremendously unsubtle) 'Capital G':

I pushed a button and elected him to office and ah,
He pushed a button and he dropped the bomb.
You pushed a button and could watch it all on television,
Those motherfuckers didn't last too long.

That's a pretty cool opening stanza, but it gets better. It's immensely satisfying to hear someone so sharply stick it to all the right wing media blowhards who have sold their integrity in order to brainlessly toe the party line no matter how inane, stupid or dangerous it gets.

Later on the music starts to deviate more from the style and mood established early on. 'The Greater Good' is one of the best tracks on the album, a creepy ambient piece with whispered lyrics describing brainwashing in both overt and more subtle forms. After the brilliant 'The Great Destroyer' (in which a crazy ex-soldier gone terrorist announces his intention to “murder everything”) comes 'Another Version of the Truth', a peaceful piano piece (no NIN album would be complete without one). Is it just me or is the motif of the first half straight out of Chopin's 'Mazurka'? It's not the first time I've heard a snippet of a Romantic composers work in a Nine Inch Nails song.

The last two tracks, 'In This Twilight' and 'Zero-Sum' are sad album closers in the vein of 'Hurt' or 'Right Where It Belongs'. At this point in the album's story the world is literally coming to an end, although it remains unspecified exactly why. At various times it is suggested that it is either by environmental catastrophe, the vengeance of God, the vengeance of angry aliens or perhaps the work of the psycho narrating 'The Great Destroyer'. I like the implication that from a certain perspective these are all the same thing; “...and all of this is a consequence, brought on by our own hand, if you believe in that sort of thing”. In terms of sadness the lyrics of these songs give even 'Hurt' or 'Something I Can Never Have' a run for their money. Honestly, the first time I heard 'Zero-Sum' I almost started crying. At work.

And the sky is filled with light,
Can you see it?
All the black is really white,
If you believe it...

from 'In This Twilight' is sad enough, but then you get to 'Zero-Sum':

And I guess I just wanted to tell you,
As the light starts to fade,
That you are the reason,
That I am not afraid
And I guess I just wanted to mention
As the heavens will fall
We will be together soon if we
Will be anything at all.

Sniff sniff...

A maudlin ending to a Nine Inch Nails album is no surprise but this time Trent has found a way for his miserable message to become one of hope. The internet sites associated with Year Zero reveal that they, and the album, are actually artifacts sent back in time from the date of this future armageddon in the hopes that those of us who receive the message can do something to avert humankind from the course it is on. We'll try future Trent!

Year Zero may not be quite up to the musical standard of The Downward Spiral or The Fragile but it's not far off and it's concept along with the brilliantly well done supplemental material raise it's profile to that of a pretty legendary album in my estimation. Plus it has a song about George Bush dying and finding himself in hell. Awesome.

It's Just A Question Of How Much You Want It To Hurt

24 Season 5

I'm not entirely sure why I keep watching this show. In a lot of ways it's pretty stupid. There are only so many times in twenty four episodes you can think of new and exciting scenarios in which Jack Bauer has twenty minutes to save the president's dog from terrorists. Yet somehow it manages to deliver some good action and enough interesting plot twists for the better part of every episode, so it's worth sitting through the occasional scene where Keifer Sutherland emerges from the flames of a burning building while bombastic, patriotic music swells in the background to get to the good parts.

This has been one of the better seasons, with plenty of good twists and turns in the plot and a surprising ending. Not only does it end in a cliffhanger for the first time, it also doesn't reveal the true identities of the terrorist masterminds, who remain at large for more shenanigans next year.

The frustrating thing about the series is how although it deals with real political issues, namely terrorism and how to deal with it, it never actually offers any kind of insight to or commentary on these topics. This would be fine if they were merely offering a nonpartisan presentation of the imagined possibilities, but the writers actually seem to have little more in mind than smugly attempting to push the buttons of both liberals and conservatives.

I'd imagine the conservatives would have more to be offended by in this season. While the show seems to display a strong authoritarian bias (not an episode goes by without a terrorist suspect being tortured while being gleefully informed by Bauer that his civil rights are currently meaningless), it's hard to look past this year's mid season revelation that defined the story arc; that the terrorists are being directed by no less than the president of the USA as part of a plan to secure oil supplies.

As amusing as this was, and for all the schadenfreude gained from Gregory Itzen's performance as the president (sure he looks just like Nixon, but surely any resemblance between this gormless weakling suddenly thrust out of his depth and into a position of responsibility he is in no way suited for and any current US president you may think of is purely coincidental), the writing is just a bit too snide and it grates, even when it's reinforcing your own prejudices.

The character of Jack Bauer is similarly problematic. It's hard to empathise with his plight in being forced to torture his girlfriend when his fanatical willingness to do whatever it takes for the past four years incline the viewer to believe that he's secretly rather enjoying it.

But hey, you know I'll end up watching the next season all the same.

The Pursuit of Oblivion

by Richard Davenport-Hines

I'm in love with Kinokuniya, a bookshop here in central Sydney. I've made so many impulse buys there over the last year that there's a 'to read' stack as high as my bed in my room. The very first time I walked in there this book caught my eye, and although I had to wait a few months until my finances had stabilised to go on the book buying orgy I longed for, it was the first one I picked up when I did.

The subtitle of the book is 'A social history of drugs', and the first half covers drug use in traditional societies and the advent of the first synthetic drugs (namely opium and cocaine). It's very interesting to learn about how social attitudes towards these substances evolved, but it's presented very dryly and wasn't quite as full of prurient details as I hoped. The second half, while still broadly following the same subject, takes a sudden and impassioned turn in style as the author's outrage at the incredible harm done by the western world's (and most notably the USA's) drug policies can no longer be hidden behind guardedly passive non-fiction prose.

And it's hard not to get angry yourself while reading it. It makes sense when you think about it but I was surprised to learn that making drug use a criminal act is a convention that has only been around for a little over a century. Before then opiate and cocaine addiction were primarily afflictions of the middle and upper classes (at least in Europe) and it was treated (rightly) as merely a health issue. The only reason this approach failed was because of the poorly thought out medical decisions made by the doctors of the time:

“It was his [Dr. Alexander Wood, 1817-1884] idea that taking opiates through the mouth, and the act of swallowing, created an appetite, like other forms of food and drink. He became convinced that if the drug was injected rather than swallowed, patients would not hunger for it. He was wrong.”

Other shining moments of exemplary medical science documented in the book include deciding to wean patients off opium by switching them over to cocaine.

Another interesting insight is that every traditional culture in the world has it's own method of getting fucked up, based on the available plantlife; in Europe this was alcohol, in the middle east it was marijuana, in South America it was cocoa leaves and in Asia it was opium. Guess which one is acceptable in western society and which ones are regarded as deviant and dangerous. Also consider the nature of the puritanical anti-drugs campaigns when these drugs were first introduced to America; the dirty Mexicans raping white women while high on marijuana and the shifty Chinese creating hives of sin in their opium dens. From this perspective, the motives behind drug prohibition are often quite racist.

But despite the vitriol directed towards the various figureheads of prohibition (Thatcher and Reagan get pretty bad thrashings, but not the worst) the book gives us little insight into why this culture of finger waving wowserism came about so suddenly. There have always been religious nutters and Jim Andertons around, but they never succeeded in having their way until the late 1800s. Understanding what truly drives these people would seem to me to be an important part of engaging with their ideas, but it is left unexamined here.

Nevertheless the points the book does make are good ones. Firstly, that the common media caricature of the drug user, lower class, living in a dirty hole in the wall, not caring about anything but his or her next fix, has never been accurate. The middle and upper classes have always enjoyed indulging and most (but of course not all) manage to do so without ruining their professional or domestic lives. Secondly, that any level headed look at drug use must admit that besides the obvious bad effects that it has, humanity has and always has had a natural inclination towards getting fucking out of it (the titular pursuit of oblivion) and most, if not all, attempts at prohibition do not even acknowledge this fact, betraying their lack of grounding in any kind of interest in practical realities. Lastly, history and economics both show that any attempt to prohibit an intoxicating substance desirable by a large number of people is fighting futilely against the laws of supply and demand. Any success in restricting the supply simply increases the profitability for the criminal organisations importing it, and a significant number of end users will pay any price to get it, perhaps by resorting to crime, but more probably just because those who can afford it will always put a premium on having fun.

But tell all that to the Jim Andertons of the world. They haven't listened for the past hundred years, while they've squandered billions on an unwinnable war against (some) drugs, and they're not likely to start now.

Australia Day

What a weird couple of days. Like most people I thought that the Sydney Big Day Out's threat to ban the Australian flag was a little stupid (not to mention likely to cause more harm than good), even though I was somewhat appreciative of their intentions and explanations of their actions (Yeah! Lets celebrate our country by listening to a bunch of popular bands from overseas! And Jet!). Even though I was expecting a significant reaction from the kids on the day of the Big Day Out, I still was surprised by just how strong it turned out to be, almost everyone there was either wearing a flag or a stick-on tattoo of the flag. Plus of course there were plenty of munters wearing those shirts with a picture of the Aussie flag saying “Support it or f*%k off”, which piss me off for a number of reasons. Firstly I'm aesthetically annoyed by little tough guy twats who're trying to appear intimidating but at the same time are too scared to wear a shirt with a real swear word on it. Secondly I wonder what they'd make of me. I live in Australia but I don't support their flag, would they tell me to fuck off or would they say “Oh no, we didn't mean you. You're OK, you're white”? I'm not sure which would be worse...

Anyway despite the unpleasant tone of some of the participants the day passed without incident. The next day (which was actually Australia Day) I largely avoided contact with any Aussies at all, spending most of the day in Bondi and the eastern suburbs with a big bunch of Kiwis. The one time I did venture into town I ran into a couple of drunk guys dressed in Australian flags. They came up to me and started chatting, and while they seemed friendly enough there was definitely a vibe about them that I disliked. Sure enough just then a black (i.e. Aboriginal) woman walked past and yelled out “Happy fucking Australia Day you fucking Aussie cunts” (or something along those lines) at them. At this point these guys started hurling abuse back at her. What disturbed me was the way that everyone else around was eager to join in the heckling. Now this kind of thing certainly doesn't happen everyday, at least not around where I've been living and hanging out. It's like for two days the whole country, normally so relaxed and easy going, undergoes some kind of nationalistic psychosis, and makes Waitangi Day look positively civilised. At least the two guys I was talking to were provoked by the incident into a discussion about whether it was 'fairdinkum' for the blacks to say 'fuck Australia', the final verdict of which was that they should be grateful that the poms showed up and conquered them, because otherwise the Japanese would have done so, and they'd be even worse off. Right...

Anyway I found this all somewhat frightening. Not in an 'oh my God it's just like Nazi Germany' sort of way but because it disturbs me how readily this nations youth can be persuaded to venerate an inanimate object. I seriously hate John Howard more every day. At least the actions of George Bush and his government are explicable, they may be motivated by greed, pride or some pathetic strain of religion but at least a connection between action and motivation is apparent. Not so in Australia, everything that comes out of Howard's mouth seems to be inspired by nothing but pure malice. He's like some of warlord from a b-grade eighties fantasy movie who simply wants what's worst for everyone. His recent comments about the flag seem to imply only one thing, Australia will probably want to go to war at some stage in the not too distant future, so we'd better make sure that we have plenty of young people ready to die for a flag. And the shaven headed 20 something boys of suburban Sydney are only too keen to oblige.

WTF? WTF?

Via Making Light and Wired:

World Net Daily: Homosexuality is caused by soy milk.

In case that article disturbs you as much as it did me, here's something nice to distract you from right wing cranks.

Occidentalism

An article accusing Al-Qaeda's ideological godfather Sayyid Qutb of occidentalism (via Arts and Letters Daily). Mainly I just think the term is funny, but it's a good article.