Author: old_wp_importer

The Moscow gay pride parade happened a week ago, as usual. Or rather, didn’t happen as usual. LGBT demonstrations, Described as ‘satanic’ by one former mayor, have never been allowed in Moscow.

Drugoi (Rustem Adagamov), one of Russia’s most popular bloggers, was there this time, and reports that everything followed the pattern established over the past 7 years of abortive parades. The organizers apply for a permit. They are denied, on dubious grounds (“a provocation, causing moral harm”). A few of the brave and foolhardy turn up anyway, ready to be either arrested or attacked by counter-demonstrators.

A few dozen journalists waited at the city council building and opposite the mayor’s office on Tverskaya Square, waiting for the appearance of LGBT activists…What happened today couldn’t be called a parade nor even an action — a dozen people with assorted rainbow logos, or without them, turned up to the city council. One one ground or another they were all arrested and taken away by the police.

And if you think wearing the rainbow flag is shaky grounds for arrest, you should look at St. Petersburg. There, “homosexual propaganda” has been banned since March, by a law which forbids “

propagandising sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism, and transgenderism among minors

“. There are moves in progress introduce a similar law on a national level. So all in all, gay rights in Russia are growing weaker, rather than stronger.

ETA

: after writing it I discovered that, wonder of wonders, an LGBT demonstration has been allowed in Moscow. Maybe my pessimism was unjustified — or perhaps this is a one-off, because assorted EU politicians are in town

What’s strange about guitarist Erik Mongrain isn’t his skill or the beauty of his music. It’s the novelty of his style — something I thought would be impossible by now. The guitar is the most ubiquitous of instruments — how could there exist a technique which hasn’t been explored a thousand times before?

Mongrain calls it ‘lap tapping’, reasonably enough. A few other people play percussive guitar — Dominic Frasca, Andy McKee — but with a far more traditional guitar sound. And there doesn’t seem to be any tradition of this, though presumably history has some lone virtuosos. So Mongrain is all alone in innovation.

Chinese poet Lin Zhao is gradually making a posthumous name for herself, mainly among the cliques of dissidents and intellectuals.

She was executed in 1968, after spending the last 8 years of her life in jail for publishing critical articles. Over that period she managed a stunning output, even by the standards of people committed enough to choose jail and death on the basis of principle. 200,000 words. Written in blood. On the paper provided so she could free herself by writing a confession.

I’ve not managed to track down much of her poetry — there are a couple of pieces here and here. Neither is particularly memorable in English, but then I doubt they are easy to translate.

It does, of course, fit uncomfortably well into tropes of martyrdom, religious or political. You could doubtless find a direct counterpart of Lin in the lives of the Catholic saints. And it doesn’t make complete sense: why would the jailors would provide paper but no ink?

For all that, it’s a story that brings you up short. And, apparently, it’s becoming easier to talk about Lin in China:

In 2004, the Beijing Youth Daily published a feature about Lin while Southern Weekly has also run several articles about her.

Lin’s poems are also becoming more widely circulated. People are starting to see the value in her writings as a complement to Cultural Revolution literature, which is virtually non-existent.

“So many people kept silent during those years, but she was still speaking up,” said Hu. “She represented the most beautiful quality of mankind, its conscience.”

Issandr el Amrani is pessimistic about the Egyptian presidential election, saying the process “

appears to have been rigged to put an end to a transformation of Egyptian politics that was the hope of the January 25 revolution

“. He points out that parliament passed a law which would have exluded leading candidate Ahmed Shafiq, and were then ovverruled by the Presidential Election Commission.

el Amrani also has a helpful chart to show roughly the positions of the candidates:

In Counterpunch, Esam Al-Amin argues that the US is backing Amr Moussa as a safe continuity candidate.

The beats are my not-really-guilty pleasure. However much I know I should feel bad about my enthusiasm for them, I just can’t bring myself to. Sure, they’re long-winded, self-satisfied, sexist, blind to their own privilege. Sorry, just this once, I don’t care.

Two beat sacred texts,

Howl

and

On The Road

, have recently been transposed to film. Howl, in the form of a documentary, was premiered in Berlin while I was living there. I’d just spent a manic winter treating the poem as some kind of talisman, mouthing it to myself as I dashed about through the snow.

Nonetheless, I never saw the film. I didn’t want to jinx my euphoria, and besides, I’m not good at seeing films I care about. Sitting through too-slow hours of footage is inherently painful, doubly so when I care about the subject. I’d much rather admire the ripple-effect of the film on culture, as it moves through the media propelled by PR. I’m glad it’s there, and glad to have it nudging us all in a particular direction. Still, I’ll leave it to others to actually watch the film.

Now comes the film version of

On the Road

— Kerouac’s novel of bums drifting across the US, the countercultural cliche that’s simultaneously so American it hurts. The cultural ripples are already showing their effect among my friends, winkling out people who I never would have imagined having an interestin Kerouac.

On the Road

has been showing at Cannes, with the result of this entertaining article in

Le Monde

. OK, OK, partly because of how I started cackling to myself at encountering the phrase “

l’American way of life

“.

But then we hear about the ‘monastic discipline’ of the director preparing to shoot the film. It’s on one level ludicrous — learned exegesis of a text on drifting. Cue awkward self-recognition; I’m the kind of person who would write a PhD on how to chill out, only to emerge tenser than ever. But sometimes you

need

to try to hard, especially when it’s the only tool you’ve got. And the same tension between working and experiencing was certainly present for Kerouac, Kesey, Ginsberg — eulogizing the wildness of Neal Cassady and others, while retaining enough distance from the party to write and create. So maybe the correct remembrance of them is an earnest film in praise of carelessness.

The Economist has what seems at first to be a gloomy outlook on antisocial Britons staying at home:

The decline in visiting friends and family at home is harder to explain. Inflation-busting petrol prices may have deterred people from making social trips, whereas they have to keep shopping and going to work. Because new cars are more fuel-efficient than old ones, and because their price has risen less than other items, the cost of motoring has actually fallen in real terms. But, since many people focus on the cost per litre of petrol, rather than the cost per mile, rising pump prices may have had some effect on travel patterns.

I’m insanely glad that Harvard is piling into the general rage at Elsevier &c, money-sucking parasites on the work of academics. I’m really starting to believe we’ll see open-access academic publishing become the norm, even obligatory, in the next 5-10 years. That is, exactly how it should have been all along.

This is SO MUCH more exciting than mining asteroids. The current system is ludicrous even by the usual standards of university-bureaucratic idiocy — we figure out how the world works, then lock away the results.

Commercial academic publishing made some sense in a world where articles needed to be printed and distributed, at considerable expense. Now the entire industry only makes sense as rent-seeking.

There’s a wonderful, gently cutting commentary on this by Dr. Tim Leuning. Dr. Leuning is both an economic historian, and editor of an Elsevier journal. So he knows what he’s talking about when he writes:

What I strongly dislike is the [Elsevier] Chief Executive claiming that the objections of Elsevier’s critics are based on ‘misstatements or misunderstandings of the fact’. He should be honest and state that in many cases his journals have an

element of monopoly power

which as a commercial, capitalist company he is

determined to exploit

as fully as possible. I would respect him were he to say that. For him to claim otherwise is simply false

I claim no connection between these paragraphs, except that I enjoyed them all:

Laurie Penny at her furious best:

And why is it that women are not permitted to be creative without having to speak for the entire condition of womankind? The most exhaustively discussed new cultural artefacts in recent weeks – ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ and Lena Dunham’s new HBO show ‘Girls’ – are being treated as if they were straight memoirs, rather than, in one case, a piece of redrafted fan-fiction based around a story that was originally about vampires? Is it because we don’t believe that a woman can truly create fiction or write meaningfully without drawing entirely on her own experience? Is it because mainstream culture still lacks a language to talk about women’s issues and women’s lives that is not at once confessional and riddled with lazy stereotypes? Is it because most ‘fictional’ women are still created, cast and directed by men? Is it because we don’t believe women can actually be artists?

Current standard gossip on Bo Xilai, via B&T:

Wang did ask for asylum, and was carrying the Neil Heywood file. He claimed he’d been investigating it and was shut down by Bo and now feared for his life, but they got the strong impression this was a cover, and that what had happened was that he’d been investigated for corruption, was worried Bo was deserting him, and grabbed the biggest piece of dirt he had. So Heywood wasn’t the motivator, but there was, at the least, something dirty about his death.

Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard:

Science fiction writers love to think of what they’re doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

Online retailers have deeply explored how to find similarities between their customers.

Users who bought X also bought Y

and its variants are omnipresent and widely developed.

There’s a strange absence, though, when it comes to making visible the ongoing relationship of a consumer to a product. How much brand loyalty do they display?

To take an example: I’m currently planning to buy a new laptop. I’m very interested in build quality. Testing by experts isn’t much good at exposing flaws in build: it’s near-impossible to simulate the effects of daily use over a period of years. Aggregated user reviews are more helpful: lots of complaints about cracked screens probably reflect a common problem. But they’re biased towards defects which are discrete, and big enough to inspire angry reviews.

What I want to know is: do users who buy a Vaio buy another one three years later? Or do they switch to Dell? I really want is a measure of

user loyalty

. And we have one: it’s easy to count how many users will re-order the same product, or another from the same product line. Do customers who bought X tend to re-order X? Or do they switch to X’s competitors?

This information is readily available to any online retailer, or even to an offline seller tracking loyalty cards or credit cards. But I’m not aware of anybody making it visible to users. Why not?

On Liberal Conspiracy, a member of the legal charity Reprieve flags up a quite astonishing government proposal: to deny criminal suspects the right to hear the evidence against them. Under the proposed expansion to “Closed Material Procedures” (CMPs):

once the minister has made the call that there is ‘sensitive’ material involved, the court goes into lockdown, and the citizen (along with the media) is excluded — as a result, they will simply not know what claims the Government is making about them.

Through this secret process, the only person putting forward the defense case would be a “Special Advocate” —

who would not be allowed to commuicate with their client

.

Liberty argue, reasonably enough, that:

Being able to present evidence to a judge without the other side having the chance to refute it or even know what it is obviously gives the Government a huge advantage in legal proceedings and the potential to present a very one-sided or misleading version of events.

Even the Northamptonshire police feel that the proposed legislation:

is very widely drafted and could result in its misuse. This could be used to encompass material concerning crime prevention tactics, police informants and intelligence led operations.

The impact of the overuse of CMPs would be to damage the UK reputation of a free and fair democracy.

Finally the Mail, of all places, reports the views of the existing Special Advocates, the lawyers working with the existing system of Closed Material Procedures:

They submitted a very thorough and telling response to the consultation. These are the lawyers who have the greatest experience of the system and they were unanimously opposed to the very broad extension of CMPs.