Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Drone wars:
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/2011/08/10/obama-2011-strikes/

(Thanks to @gregoryfoster for tweeting that link.)

This is something you didn't see on television ("you can't handle the
truth!"). Covert and subtle war drones on; note the collateral damage.
  

    
That Gibson interview in Paris Review is about as good as Gibson
interviews get.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6089/the-art-of-fiction-no-211-willia
m-gibson
  

    

"So then we look at a picture of the globe at night. What's out there
in the dark spaces where the enlightenment has not yet reached?"

I'm inclined to think that the "dark spaces" are the ones where the
enlightenment is in full retreat.  Chernobyl and Fukushima, for two.
  

    
Venessa Miemis writes very good "back to square one, let's rethink the
world" posts. Latest is here:
http://emergentbydesign.com/2012/01/10/core-principles-for-the-new-economy-hum
an-agency-enlightened-self-interest/

"I believe in a social and economic future that is convivial, vibrant,
thriving, and life-enhancing for all. We live with passion, manifest
our dreams, and don’t cause suffering to others in the process. We
engage in a process of continuous learning and mutual improvement. We
have fun playing infinite games while still getting shit done. We are
alive."

That quote makes me think of Jean Russell's work around
"thrivability": http://thrivable.net/ Jean is @nurturegirl - and she
really is a nurturing presence.

It's hard to think about thriving when you're hanging on by the skin
of your teeth, though. The average global citizen doesn't thrive,
doesn't feel safe, doesn't have a lot of enthusiasm about the present
or future. It's a depression, after all. You have to admire somebody
who has starch for a stiff upper lip in wicked times.
  

    
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/01/11/phobos_grunt_the_u_s_didn_t
_shoot_down_russia_s_mars_probe_but_it_could_have_.html

*So, the "Phobos-Grunt" Russian Mars probe came to a bad end, and here
Vladimir Popovkin, the head of Russia's space agency, hints that it
was done in through spacewar foul play.

*I'm guessing this is "Predator Shuttle" paranoia.  When you've got a
"hidden" gun bulging in your sleeve, and you're icing people right and
left while pretending nothing happened, people get itchy.

*I guess Popovkin's glad they didn't drag the probe out of orbit and
stash it ten years in Guantanamo.
  

    
Speaking of which, I sure wish I could interview the Mossad guy who
designs and builds magnetic limpet mines for Iranian nuclear
scientists.  What a career this dude must have.

When the results of his labors hit Google News -- "men on motorcycles
blow nuclear scientist and unnamed companion to bits" -- what's his
personal reaction, I wonder?  I'm guessing it's something like, "hey
sucker, my personal assassination bomb trumps your city-wrecking bomb!"
Yet he must be aware that this vastly expands the legitimacy of
terrorist bombs as state-sponsored weapons.  

IEDs have been popular for ten years now.  Drones are IEDs with
cellphones and wings. These magnet bombs are IEDS with magnets and
motorcycles.  If they're good enough for the holy men of Al Qaeda,
they're good enough for Big Satan and Little Satan.

Maybe our bomb designer is an open-source guy who's way into
"bottom-up innovation."  They probably call him in to defuse bombs on
the days he's not building 'em.
  

    
I see your motorcycle magnet bomb, and raise you this headline:
"Google predicts flu, fountain spews germs, boy blows up silo..." 
http://yourlife.usatoday.com/health/healthyperspective/post/2012-01-11/google-
flu-stress-norms-elder-abuse-waterfall-legionnaires-disease-cancer-boy-blows-u
p-building-/600908/1

Actually a set of unrelated stories, though they all have a connection
to health. You have to appreciate a kid whose one wish is to blow up a
grain silo. ""I watch MythBusters and they inspired me to blow a
building up." Indeed.
  

    
I did read that Charlie Stross piece today, though not all the
hundreds of comments that followed, despite the fact that so many of
them looked interesting at a glance. There's always too much good stuff
to read and digest; if we have attention deficits, it's because there
are so many roadside attractions, all seductive.

Stross was talking about the state of the future; I think in this
conversation we've been staying closer to the present, which is weird
enough to keep us busy. The present is where we are, after all; the
future is completely unreal. We want to imagine a future that's
different, and of course it will be to one or another extent, but
seldom in ways we can predict. We keep predicting because we're bored
with the present, we want the future to hurry up, dammit, and bring us
something new.

I have an abiding interest in the UFO mythos, that sense of longing
people have as they watch the skies and hope to see something truly
different and startling. We never imagine that aliens will be boring. I
say never, but George Alec Effinger once wrote a short story wherein
aliens land on earth and prove to be boors with bad taste, a fondness
for leisure suits and terrible art. 
  

    
Whole 'nother meaning to "Smart Mob", Mafia now Italy's #1 bank:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/10/us-italy-mafia-idUSTRE8091YX20120110

  

    <scribbled by jonl Wed 11 Jan 12 20:12>
  

    
Via email from George Mokray:

The Occupy sites could become models for resilient refugee camps,
self-sufficient for energy and efficient in waste recycling for use. 
After all, they were/are/will be  "voluntary" economic refugee camps. 
Could they become models for the emergency and disaster facilities we
regularly need (and a new line of camping equipment for those that can
afford it)?

I can see a lot of things that they could do with simple solar. 
Occupy Wall Street with a Solar Civil Defense?  But then I've believed
for a long time that Solar IS Civil Defense and a logical first step to
the renewable transition.  An added advantage to such small scale
solar is that the flashlight, radio, cell phone, and extra set of
batteries we are all supposed to have on hand in case of emergency is
the entry level for the billion + people in the world who do not now
have access to electricity.

When I visited NYC on October 21, 2011, the kitchen had a gray water
treatment system.  Soon after, there were pedal power generators and
solar panels there and at other Occupations.   The Wall Street compost
was biked to local community gardens, too, before the police evicted
them.  In Boston, a local portable house builder, MIT, and other
college and university students, and the local Maker community were
involved in planning winterization for Dewey Square.  Occupy Boston
began on the same weekend that a national housing rights conference,
Right to the City, came in town.  The Occupiers later took part in
local housing action in Malden and other cities and neighborhoods. 
Many other Occupations did and are doing the same, preventing eviction
and foreclosure for individual families.  Occupy Detroit is occupying
an abandoned neighborhood.  Combine that with solar and weatherization
barnraisings and you might have a grassroots local movement towards
energy efficiency.  (Does Van Jones know about this?)

In Boston, the General Assembly is still meeting.  National GAs have
happened as well.  Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Spain, Greece,
the UK, and other countries are very much still unsettled.  It isn't
over.  This Spring is going to be a Global Spring.  Some of it may be
highly imaginative guerrilla gardening.  Some of it will be bullets and
prison.

Occupy and other such mass movements are not only political.  They are
social and civic as well, direct action rather than representative
action, as in voting.  So far, they have also been outside of party
structures as well, at least in the USA.  For me, it seemed as if there
were no means of public expression so people went into the street to
make something happen.  In Wall Street, it took some time before the
regular lines of mass communication could no longer ignore them. 
Occupy is people doing it for themselves, talking with each other.  It
is not about governing or even choosing the next Governor.

Occupy could be about broad policy, if people really wanted to pay
attention.  Occupy DC released an economic reform paper a couple of
months ago, Glass Steagle and all.  How many people have looked at it? 
Which other local Occupy's have done similar work on other topics?

Occupy is public and civic conversations, talking loud at the bus
stops, which is how Lech Walesa said Solidarity started.  They are more
than political and are not focused on electoral politics and
candidates, something which may be a loose commonality with all the
global protests.

At least, not yet.
  

    
Via email from "goatknockin":

re: #91

" People are always gonna say, "surely this is Weimar Germany again,
all hope is lost" but here's somebody else saying, "this is 1977 again,
there is NO FUTURE. Again."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/jan/07/punk-fashion-sex-pistols

*Except it's a "no future" for posh rich people this time.  Posh
punk."

From 'The Psychic Soviet' (a collection of quasi-Marxist satirical
essays about rock music):

"While the punk phenomena echoed developments in bourgeois
marketeering through grass roots distribution campaigns such as Amway,
it was never paradigmatic in the way that its progenitors hoped.
Instead, its aesthetic triumph was felt in the liberalization of
violent and sexual content and the institutionalized disregard for the
integrity of the artist/worker.

... Punk, which explicated an apocalyptic nihilism ("No Future"), was
the corporate response to newly poignant environmental concerns spurred
by Three Mile Island, Love Canal, and so on. It was capitalism without
the pretense of social conscience -- the ruling class's proxy
mouthpiece for voicing a virulent hatred of its subjects ... in fact
the mirror of the bourgeois' uncensored bitching in the boardrooms and
private yachts about their upstart Seventies peons (environmental and
consumer groups)."

I sense a, uh, synchronicity...

-- G.K.
  

    
Stewart Brand once wrote in _Coevolution Quarterly_ that punks,
however fierce they might appear, were in practice gentler and more
nuanced than hippies. I suppose apocalyptic nihilism is more sensible
and real than flower power. 
  

    
*Globalized peacekeepers unwittingly convey Nepalese-Haitian cholera.

http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/scientists-soldiers-brought-deadly-superbug-amer
icas/
  

    
Kenny Mann, via e-mail:


Jon and Bruce,

How 'bout some creatively atemporal perspective on the stakes in that
headline poker game?

How we've seen such things settle down (or not) when seen before?
Expect to see hence?

...since we're clearly still around to talk about it.
  

    
People don't go into Occupy camps so as to live in tents; they go
there to annoy and harass one-percenters.  Pursuing a tent-based
lifestyle is not some brand-new design problem.

It's pretty common for people who run refugee camps to find the
inhabitants getting radically politicized.  Not because camps are bad,
but because they're better than what they had.

Commonly, refugees are poor people already on the precarious margins
of society, and as soon as they're in a place, however humble, that's
built for themselves rather than the profit of slumlords, they suddenly
realize that they're poor because they're immiserated by the system. 
It's not because they lack solar panels.

Nobody builds favelas because they don't know how to build any better.
 They do know better, and they can even afford better, but not under
the legal and financial structures that breed favelas.  

The same goes for Occupy camps; nobody's gonna occupy abandoned towns
in North Dakota, because there's no way to get on TV there.  Camps and
slums are epiphenomena.  They're not utopian startups in the dewy
freshness of a New World.

This dead Texan guy here, Fred Cuny, was like "Mr Designed Refugee
Camp."  Great material for a novel.  It's never just about hammering up
shelters Jimmy Carter style and walking away.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cuny/bio/hero.html
  

    

There's something intriguing about living in a society where rich guys
are Posh Punks who really do feel that they have No Future.   
Especially when they behave that loudly obnoxious punk way: spitting on
the middle-class, stage-diving into SuperPACs...  Making life up as
they go along, with crazy, "go rogue," do it yourself, tea-party
politics, where there used to be George Bush "prudence."

The idea of Gingrich running a useless attack campaign sponsored by a
wacky zillionaire, just so he can put the boot into the Mormon
business-vulture, out of sheer spite...  That has a rather Sid Vicious,
careening, out-of-control feel about it.  Personally, I don't think
Gingrich has the guts, but he's done weirder, nastier stuff in the
past.

Normally, rich guys are very Great-and-the-Good in their attitudes,
even in private.  If you go to Davos, you find that they're
well-briefed,  extravagantly polite to everyone, and extensively
concerned with do-gooder issues like river blindness and child
vaccination.  That's because they're mostly Type-A executive dudes who
figure that they can create rational plans and have them successfully
carried out.  So they behave in a way that accommodates those ambitions
and legitimizes their long-term aims.

In the Crisis, though, the rich tend to drift toward a bling-bling
Russian Mogul version of wealth, which is all about flinging your
elbows into the faces of the help.  Also, attacking one another in a
frenzy of open looting, often lethally.  

Here's an old WIRED article I wrote about the Russian "War of
Compromats," back in  the day.  Once you sell off the mass media to the
moguls, this SuperPac character-assassination stuff becomes
exceedingly likely. Moguls aren't responsible conservatives, they don't
circle the gilded wagons and tell the masses that it's about liberty
and justice for all. Instead, they know that their precarious lives
hang by a thread, so they're very "Like No Tomorrow."

 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/sterling_pr.html

The Russian semibankyrschina age ended in a strange kind of Spy
Bonapartism,which we still have with us today.  I'm guessing a regime
of Punk No-Future Rich would be vulnerable to the same modern driving
forces.   When you've got a free-market state so hollowed out that
there's nothing left but spies, prisons and the military, you're gonna
end up ruled by some tough-guy spy prison-camp general.  And he might
even get the votes, because the 99% like and admire him a lot more than
they like you.
  

    

It's always a revealing question, how any society thinks its
ultra-rich people are "supposed to behave."  What behavior by an
ultra-rich person  can successfully avoid envy, hatred and a scolding
from the general populace?  Statistically speaking, there are always
gonna be at least a few ultra-rich people around.  They're a social
reality, they're a demographic.  They don't often dominate as harshly
as they do now, but they're always around.

What are they supposed to do with themselves?  There are lots of
guidebooks about how to get rich, but very few about how to be rich. 
If we didn't have today's "Posh Punk" rich guys, what kind of rich guys
would we really want to have around? 

I was never much thrilled by even the older, 1990s, Davos
charity-entrepreneur style of rich guy.  They weren't cruel or crazy,
but they gave me the feeling that they had something  wrong with them.
Sone neurosis, really.  Like, if they were ever alone on a desert
island, with no one watching their stock prices, then they'd scratch
their own skins till they bled.
  

    
Walt Dangerfield via e-mail:

"Like, if they were ever alone on a desert island, with no one
watching their stock prices, then they'd scratch their own skins till
they bled."

This is pretty much the view of economics duo Bichler & Nitzan who
argue that all capital today is financial in nature, and that all
finance is measured through differential rates of accumulation. The
only profit that matters is beating the average profits of everyone
else.

<http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/12/differential-accumulation/>
  

    
And again:

This dead media is starting to turn ripe:

<http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/12/should-the-times-be-a-truth-v
igilante/>

I noticed locally that the roadkill on the highway isn't getting
picked up either.
  

    
E-mail from Julian Bond:


I'm curious if Bruce has seen anything particularly interesting in the
arts and music this time around. Last year we had Anthropophagic
Syncretism which turned out to be a Hipster Chanteuse transplanted
from Sao Paulo to Hoxditch[1]. Anything comparable floating around in
2012?

How about Lana Del Rey, apparently famous for being manufactured
rather than famous despite of it. "Think about this for a second, how
can someone's public image be that their public image is fake. Such an
idea is so post-modern, so a product of internet culture, that it needs
severe unpacking."
<http://mthrfnkr.com/post/15135866637/i-be-that-pretty-motherfucker-harlems-wha
t-im>

Two things that have amazed me in late 2011. First AKB48. This seemed
like something straight out of Zeitgeist with Yasushi Akimoto taking
the role of Leggy Starlitz but done in a typically Japanese fashion. A
completely manufactured group consisting of 3 teams of 16 with an
apprentice team of 10 or so. And all performing Japanese pop bubble
gum nightly and competitively around Tokyo. As if that wasn't enough
there are variations on the same idea from the same source SKE48, SDN48
and NMB48 It's #23 who is replaceable, not "The American One".

The second was comparatively staid people in the business world of
computing admitting to being fans of Trance and Dubstep. Mostly that's
just another few generations growing up but still having a strong
taste for the music they listened to when they were 21. But look closer
and you find that they are actually listening to a commercialised,
decadent form of that music. So when they say Dubstep, they mean the
stadium super-club version from Skrillex, not the grimy, south london
club night version from Kode9 or Loefah. What's amazing is how fast
this happens and how fast a new music can go from being impossibly hip
to mainstream to decadence. You could argue that House took 15 years,
Drum and Bass 10 years, Dubstep 5 years and now it looks like
Post-Dubstep (James Blake, XX, etc) managed this in under 12 months.

[1]Hoxditch. Hoxton and Shoreditch are the deeply ironic and self
deprecating hipster centres of London.
  

    
Are the artists themselves responsible for the faster move to the
decadent form?  Perhaps there is less viable social pressure against
selling out by allowing bad versions of your own work to go forth? 
Interesting observation.
  

    
Well, the Anthropophage of Hoxditch is still in the music biz and
Tweeting her tousled head off.


cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

>< <> ^ <3 instagr.am/p/ga3Pm/
15 hours ago -




AnonyOps Anonymous

I'd love to see a blackout of all social media sites, search engines,
tech news, etc... on #J18 (January 18th).
18 hours ago -
Retweeted by cibellecibelle



bigred1369 Sunshine megatron

I will not tweet update facebook or @foursquare on january 18 #J18
from 8a-8p #sopa @YourAnonNews #FBGB
15 hours ago -
Retweeted by cibellecibelle



YourAnonNews Anonymous

You can show your protest of #SOPA by changing your avatar:
blackoutsopa.org | #SOPAblackout #J18
15 hours ago -
Retweeted by cibellecibelle



cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

@Pegasus_Warning HoT HoT HoT avatar!
10 Jan -




adferrera Ad Ferrera

"O prefeito da maior cidade brasileira está com os bens bloqueados na
Justiça por suspeita de fraude de milhões no programa 'Controlar'..."
10 Jan -
Retweeted by cibellecibelle



cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!
@
@Cesar_myOpinion fecha o olho , abre a orelha e vai!!!
9 Jan -




Cesar_myOpinion Caio César Mancin

Na lista das 50+ do iPhone, recordista d posições é a lindona
@cibellecibelle, ocupando 6 posições com as músicas da Sonja
Khalecallon!!!
9 Jan -
Retweeted by cibellecibelle



EikeBatistta Eike Batista

To pensando em comprar os direitos autorais da gravadora do Michel
Teló e acabar com essa porcariada.
8 Jan -
Retweeted by cibellecibelle



cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!
@
@GabyAmarantos @iararenno que tudoooooooo!!!!!!!!!! Até quando cê
fica??
9 Jan -




cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

Loka instagr.am/p/fYaxX/
8 Jan -




cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

A.B.R.A. Pré-Ca CHEGOU e é HOJE! APENAS O COMEÇO! traz serpentina!
confetti! fantasia! fb.me/L1Kra78z
7 Jan -




cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

No baile do A.B.R.A. Pré-Cá amanha quero ver todo mudo de confetti e
serpentina na mão pulando a fantasia!!
6 Jan -




cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

Tia! #nofilter #nolayer instagr.am/p/eaQ_K/
4 Jan -




cibellecibelle Cibelle, La Sonja K!

real brazilian music , 100 % sao paulo produce fb.me/1etVUovR7
4 Jan ...
  

    
http://blissout.blogspot.com/2011/12/11-for-11-metronomy-english-riviera.html

*That's music critic Simon Reynolds doting over the with-it
obscurities that a guru of his ilk would be into these days.

*I'd have to admit that "the most interesting thing in music" that I
saw last year was Simon Reynold's book "Retromania," which explains in 
detail why music isn't as interesting as it used to be; or rather,
that it's interesting in different ways.
  

    
I experience music every day, but I don't listen to it the way I did
in, say, 1970. I don't have that focus, it's background music, like I'm
in my own movie. The music I hear in passing is diverse and pretty
inconsistent. Fragmented. Top 40's all hip-hop (some of it very good),
the local public radio station has drifted into pop and "adult AOR" for
much of its airtime, with forays into Brazilian music, more general
world music, and odd eclectics. There's oldies radio, alternate rock
radio, the local cooperative radio station, probably a country station
here in Austin, though I wouldn't know where to find it.  I'm fond of
Soma FM, especially Suburbs of Goa, but I'm never sure what I'm
listening to there.  I run Spotify from time to time, and I"ve picked
up on oddly diverse playlists set up by friends here and there. 
Haven't listened to the blues much lately.  I've acquired music by fab
guitar virtuoso Gary Lucas, the Gourds, Blitzen Trapper, TV on the
Radio, the ever imaginative Wilco, Tinariwen, The Black Keys, Bon Iver,
PJ Harvey, M83, Wild Flag, Lady Gaga, Fleet Foxes, etc. - point being
that I'm all over the map.  I also listen to jazz, especially Miles
Davis, Freddie Hubbard, and the Dirty Dozen Brass Band. Like Bruce, I'm
a Cibelle fan. I hear all this through a haze of tinnitus that was
probably caused by years of too-loud concerts, especially The
Pretenders on their first tour: the late James Honeyman-Scott ripped my
eardrums to shreds.  I'm convinced that music shapes emotions,
thoughts, experiences.  I wanted to be a rock critic; the first review
I sent to Rolling Stone was rejected (by <captward>, in fact), and for
some reason I didn't follow up. I don't write about music much these
days, or film… I write about digital media somewhat, but more about
culture and politics, which are probably less interesting than the
latest Skrillex dubstep.