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Enjoyably happy-angry things I’ve been reading, and failing to watch.

First, on RATM vs Cowell. K-Punk, my favourite over-the-top theoryhead londoner blogger, gives it the treatment you’d expect. But I prefer cannons_at_dawn, who has this to say:

I would love to see the seething boiling whirlpool of chips on the shoulder of the British public wash Rage Against the Machine to the top spot, there to earnestly quote Franz Fanon at their enemies until they give in, sobbing, and promise to buy Fair Trade

…

The collective impetus to make one’s voice heard in this particularly pointless arena is sadly unlikely to translate into participation in, say, next year’s general election. Or at least not unless some enterprising soul decides to exhume Screaming Lord Sutch.

What it will do, however, is demonstrate that there still exists a demographic which clings limpet-like to the hull of bloody-mindedness, prepared to momentarily stir themselves in the interests of nudging the seat of mainstream popularity with a heated toasting-fork

Earlier entries are also great fun. Including my new favourite description of the way the world ends: “

a cardigan-wearing Geography teacher farting in a human face forever

“.

Meanwhile, the Independent has a surprisingly good article rant about Copenhagen, by Joss Garman. I’d not previously heard of Garman (he’s young, and I’ve been abroad), but he seems to strike just the right balance of being furious without simply condeming mainstream politicians

en masse

.

And over in the day-job, we have another film out from VODO, free to download over bittorrent:

Boy meets girl — on OkCupid. Boy introduces girl to (fictitious) social filesharing site, The Lionshare. Girl digs site, but doesn’t dig boy. Boy mopes around the city, never thinking the Lionshare would be the thing that would lead her away from him.

The Lionshare is an important kind of film for all of us, because it’s the kind of film ‘anyone’ could have made — ‘anyone’, that is, who takes it seriously, writing dialogue (and in-jokes) prised straight from their own lives, the backdrop of their own homes for scenery, friends as actors and their own experiences as scenarios. These stories are ours, and this is the start of a new kind of cinema.

I confess I’ve not yet managed to watch it (still not in the right state of mind to settle down with a film :-)). On the whole, though, people seem to like it — and not

just

because it’s free. If you do watch it, I’d be interested to hear what you think about it.

*not my pun, but how could you not repeat that?

Shocked to see some fire in the Independent:

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

By Joss Garman, who is apparently involved in Greenpeace and in Plane Stupid. I like him!

Heidegger talks about how incessant chatter of culture and other public discourse harms and makes understanding difficult, because of its inauthenticity or “groundlessness”, which he explains as talking about something “without previously making the thing one’s own”. [source]

The word you’re looking for, Martin, is grok

Der Spiegel, like everybody else, pulls apart Ban Ki-Moon

Jacob Heilbrunn, a commentator for the respected American journal Foreign Policy, called Ban “the world’s most dangerous Korean.” The moniker is a terrible insult, since by rights it belongs to Kim Jong Il, North Korea’s erratic dictator. But it’s also a gauge of the disappointment currently reigning in the United States. Heilbrunn fears the UN is rapidly becoming irrelevant under Ban’s stewardship. Ban’s sole achievement is having attained his post, Heilbrunn claims, calling the secretary-general a “nowhere man.”

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Cutting the “too big to fail” knot: order that “no high-rolling investment bank can exceed 2% of GDP; no boring commercial bank can be bigger than 4% of GDP”

Student protests: have there been an unusual number of them going on this year? I’ve seen next to nothing about them in the media, although from word-of-mouth they seem pretty damn huge:

In France, strikes effectively shut down the entire university system from February to May. That’s the longest student strike ever in France — longer than ’68, for instance.

And now, Austria and Germany are on the go. It started with with the occupation of the University of Vienna in late October. That sparked a large movement across Austria and Germany, which is claiming occupations of 80-odd univeristies. Today they’ve also been protesting at a meeting of state education ministers in Bonn — apparently with some success.

Obviously there’s always a low-level simmering of student protest, and it tends to be a dog-bites-man story that doesn’t much inconvenience anybody. The protesters are also monumentally incompetent at simplifying their message (which, very roughly, is about education becoming more driven by exams and money, to the detriment of actually learning anything). And I’m not convinced by attempts (common around here) to connect it to the protests in Greece and Iran; those aren’t really ‘student’ protests, no matter how prominent students are in them.

[this was going to be a post about going to the occupied Freie Universität yesterday, but I got sidetracked. Briefly, there was excellent music, and I got to re-meet my ex-housemate Lara — who, apart from being generally fantastic, has drawn the most wonderful picture of me. I will post photos, just as soon as I find somebody to take them for me :)]