This room is good for pacing. I have an oddly-comfortable mattress, good for sitting as well as sleeping. I have a decent expanse of wooden floor. I have a balcony, with a view. To the right, a cemetary. To the left, the sad remnant of a doomed icon of Weimar modernism: a department store, built in 1929 as one of the world’s largest, destroyed in 1945, since rebuilt more shabbily and to prosaically human dimensions.

Excellent weekend so far. Last night, went to a gallery opening, which turned out to be comfortingly familiar, full of gothic fairytale fantasies. And enlightening in that familiarity: I’d not realised how well the various tropes of that world hold together, as a language as internally consistent, and as flexible, as surrealism or futurism or any other art movement.

No politics there. No sex (many naked women, widespread kinky undertones, but all in an austere, inhuman style). Little trace of the 20th century, barring the occasional landscape of post-industrial decay. Religion only as a source of pre-packaged pathos. What’s present is connected to, and for all I know inspired by, Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer, Lewis Carroll and Tim Burton. Fairytale metamorphoses; proud grotesques. Clothes from Versailles; metalwork from Robber Baron America. All together, it feels like an exceptionally well-curated Deviantart sampler — and makes you realise that this is actually quite some achievement.

Then a poetry reading, which compensated for so-so texts by requiring each poet to mix a thematically-appropriate cocktail and pass it out to the audience in shot-glasses. Still a bit of a come-down, but followed by an early exit to a self-consciously shabby pub with two new acquaintances.

Tonight it’s time for the goths; I’ve not been out just to dance (i.e. alone) for several months, and instead spent too many evenings at anodyne gigs played by friends of friends. I need my fix of anonymous, black and cynical, and I suspect in the process I’ll satisfy whatever urges made me so love yesterday’s exhibition.

Until then I’m sat cross-legged on that mattress, listening to last.fm psytrance, splurging out words in all directions possible. You’ll eventually get bored of me saying this, but I won’t: Life is good.

From Bruce Sterling’s compellingly-annotated Flickr set studies in atemporality, presumably a companion to his Transmediale speech:

What I love about this is that it’s obviously part of that Strychnin aesthetic of steampunk victoriana and Gaimanesque fairy-tales, but has managed to bridge the gap between there and the real world. Oh what a world, where introducing punk into steampunk can be a revelatory gesture.

Infected Mushroom, with some of those lyrics that, when heard as lyrics, sound like some kind of missing key. When written down, the magic fades into the air — so imagine this to the background of some unusually determined and driving trance:

We gonna run run run
To the cities of the future
Take what we can and bring back home

I’ve never seen the film Waking Life, but this quote makes me want to:

Quiet Woman at Restaurant: When it was over, all I could think about was how this entire notion of oneself, what we are, is just this logical structure, a place to momentarily house all the abstractions. It was a time to become conscious, to give form and coherence to the mystery, and I had been a part of that. It was a gift. Life was raging all around me and every moment was magical. I loved all the people, dealing with all the contradictory impulses – that’s what I loved the most, connecting with the people. Looking back, that’s all that really mattered.

Valérie Pécresse achieves total obliviousness as regards racism:

A un homme d’origine africaine qui lui demande l’application de la loi sur les CV anonymes, la ministre répond en le renvoyant sur les bancs de l’école. Selon cette native de Neuilly-sur-Seine, “une lettre de motivation avec une faute d’orthographe a plus d’impact” sur un recrutement qu’une photo…

In other words, two wrongs make a reason to ignore the public.

[via AG, of course]

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Spanking cliches: a transatlantic comparison:

The Cowboy spanking story is as American as apple pie, while the Schoolmaster caning story reaches its perfection on the other side of the Atlantic.

Interesting for the comments, almost as much as the post itself. It’s somewhat odd how clearly I can see that neither of these appeal to me.

Activists and insurrectionists: an article that gives the most damning definition of activism I could imagine:

. Activism can be defined as any activity which petitions the support of leaders and policy-makers (for the liberal activist) or which petitions the support of “the people” (in the case of “anarchist” activists).

To pull a realaudio stream and convert it to mp3:

mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile out.rm -dumpstream rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/b56realaudiog2.rm

ffmpeg -i out.rm out.mp3

[this uses mplayer to pull the stream, and ffmpeg to convert it to mp3.

Or, here’s how to do it in one command-line:



mplayer -noframedrop -dumpfile /dev/fd/3 -dumpstream rtsp://media.real.com/showcase/service/samples/b56realaudiog2.rm 3>&1 1>&2 | ffmpeg -i – /tmp/output.mp3

Why do this? Mainly because I can then use vlc to play the audio speeded up, which is great for slow-moving radio shows.

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