Wednesday, 20th of December, 2000

Well in case you haven’t heard yet, in very sad news today, Kirsty MacColl has died. Run over by a speedboat that was in the wrong area, how horrible. Let’s all sing her song with the Pogues, Fairytale of New York, in her honour. My favourite Christmas song (I fuckin hate Christmas *grin*)…

Monday, 18th of December, 2000

Well, I’ve found something worth linking to! I’ve recently been discovering some excellent contemporary (hard) science-fiction authors to compete with my Greg Egan obsession. Wonderful people like Paul J McAuley (who writes frequent reviews for Interzone, UK’s superlative science-fiction magazine, and mind-expanding science-fiction), Kathleen Ann Goonan, Simon Ings and others come to mind…

I’ve known for a while that I must check out Brian Stableford. I read an interview with him in a recent Interzone, in which he expressed a philosophy very similar to mine - not just atheist, but no supernatural stuff at all; and this is reflected in his writing (as it is in Greg Egan’s and Paul McAuley’s and Kathleen Ann Goonan’s, at the very least)… Stableford has written an enormous amount, amongst which he’s quite well known for some revisionist vampire and werewolf novels, in which all the traditionally supernatural stuff is explained in terms of the biological sciences (and the social implications are explored of the potential that biotech gives for everyone to have access to the “supernatural” powers).
His most recent (ongoing) novels form part of the Emortality sequence, set centuries in the future, with the stress on biotech/nanotech/cyberpunk - “emortality” is his substitute for immortality, where emortals have potentially unlimited life-spans (but are not un-killable).

Most interesting, but until now I hadn’t read anything by him. I’ll get those recent novels soon. In the meantime though, I just found a short story of his, In the Flesh at the ever-reliable Infinity Plus. Everyone must go and read immediately. A wonderfully touching story about a child with motor-neuron disease in a medium-near-future setting (”lightly cyberpunk” one might say). Now I know I’ve gotta check this guy out.

Ho-hum, another almost-week goes by between posts. Sorry, been a little busy at this end. Been harrassed by hayfever too *achzsnoooooo* GRAAAARGH.

So anyway… had some gig action last week, with our double-bill-over-two-days with our mates the wonderful Karma County, plus on Friday a (relatively impromptu, considering how late it was booked) lunchtime gig in Martin Place, where we sold some 43 CDs over two half-hour sets. Not quite up to Dublin’s standards, where we managed something like 154 CDs in one outside gig, but not bad either! Oh well, if someone has to benefit from this horrible time of year (extreme heat, coprorate Christmas bullshit everywhere, etc *grin*) it might as well be us!

Hey! Who said “horrible time of year”? It’s my birthday in two weeks and one day! (I think… 2nd of January). Ah well ;) Still, I really hate this heat. Drowning, draining, dr…something else. I can’t even be poetic, it’s too hot.

Can’t think of any links right now. Maybe later. Updating the listening/reading now.

Tuesday, 5th of December, 2000

One of the most interesting sites I’ve come across recently has been around for quite a while. It’s called The Edge and it’s basically a community of thinkers, that happens to involve a lot of really fantastic people including Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins…
It embodies the “Third Culture”, a reference to C.P. Snow’s The Two Cultures - scientists in one camp and the literary intellectuals in the other (and never the twain shall meet, so it was felt). The Third Culture would bridge this imagined gap, understanding science but also communicating eloquently with the public, grappling with issues of ethics, culture, aesthetics, politics and so on…

As well as being a venue for some fascinating articles by scientists, philosophers and others, The Edge - being a community a little like the Well - has some real gems in the discussion-board style responses to some of the articles. Grassroots interaction between some very sharp (and often well-known) thinkers - a rare pleasure and privelege to read (and I imagine potentially even take part in).

Of course there’s plenty to disagree with amongst the myriad opinions on the site, and that’s the beauty of it. Take for example with Jaron Lanier’s One Half of a Manifesto, in which he rails somewhat incoherently (but no doubt convincingly to many) at a group of thinkers he calls the “cybernetic totalists” - Dennett of course would be one, and I guess Greg Egan would be the arch-example, as would I. Lanier attacks the position (basically one in which we are all machines inasmuch as everything is purely physical, and we are evolved from non-conscious matter) with the vigour and blindness of a creationist spewing forth about evolution.

The responses are fascinating. Of course there is something to what Lanier is saying (best to go read the article for yourself), but there are plenty of problems too. The best responses in my opinion are those (links go to their posts) from Rodney Brooks (who Lanier amusingly dismisses out of hand) and the ever-reliable Dan Dennett. Also contributing are Freeman Dyson, Bruce Sterling and Lee Smolin, among others…

Stimulating reading! Go to it.

Friday, 1st of December, 2000

Hmm. Just found a fascinating article on Richard Rorty, an American philosopher who, on most points, falls squarely in the “not-me” camp. Here’s a choice quote, referring to his book Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

“One of the central morals of the book,” says Paul Boghossian, who studied with Rorty at Princeton, “is that whatever there is that’s still worth doing in philosophy is best done by literary critics rather than philosophers”…

Those who know me a little will know that I consider this to be complete rubbish. Literary critics should go on doing literary criticism, but neither philosophy nor science have anything to do with lit crit. It’s exactly the invasion of philosophy by literary critics and their methodologies that’s what’s wrong with much philosophy today. Damn that linguistic turn!
I should comment though that much of Rorty’s thinking on philosophy of mind is spot on, and possibly a good part of his politics (very much leftist, but not (although I’m not sure here) in fact infected too much by the Foucauldian (etc) malaise that so much leftist thinking suffers from these days… If I’m wrong, well hey…)

There are some great comments by one of my favourite philosophers (and a friend of Rorty’s), Dan Dennett. Dennett comments:

“Dick Rorty has failed to discourage a lot of nonsense that I wish he had discouraged. It’s an obligation of us in the field to grit our teeth and discourage the people who do the things that give philosophy a bad name. I don’t think he does that enough.”

Unfortunately, Rorty likes Derrida and Foucault and suchlike thinkers. Such a shame… *sigh*

Some Dennett papers on that many-stranded slippery scourge of contemporary thinking, postmodernism (or Critical Theory, Cultural Theory, “Theory”, yeah whatever…) can be found here:
Faith in the Truth (Oxford University Amnesty Lecture), and
Postmodernism and Truth.
Both are excellent.

Just yesterday I finally picked up OK Computer by Radiohead. Love the band, just hadn’t gotten all their stuff till recently. I got Kid A (which I do think is rather yum) and then found The Bends more recently (probably their best effort still), and thought I needed this. Will get Pablo Honey eventually - I still remember the first time I heard Creep - Richard Kingsmill playing it late at night on Triple J (back when they weren’t complete shit), first time on Aussie radio as far as I’m aware. Those crunchy guitars when they came in and the whole “so fuckin’ special” stuff just blew me away. Of course now we love them for far more than just that.

Anyway, the point of this post is to draw attention to a fact about OK Computer I haven’t heard mentioned by anyone before, and it completely floors me. In the second-last song (Lucky), a couple of minutes in (and then rather markedly through the rest of the song) is a big quote from the theme music from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy! (Both the original BBC radio show and the TV series had the same theme music - a completely classic piece of music).
Given that there’s a song called Paranoid Android, it’s not too surprising I guess - the influence of the series (or at least poor old Marvin) is pretty strong anyway. But the song itself has nothing to do with Hitchhiker’s as far as I can see. It’s bizarre hearing the music for such a madcap insanely funny work in amongst the relative despair of this album, but then there is admittedly a lot of darkness and cynicism in Douglas Adams‘ work I guess.

Great stuff! Anyone who wants to comment, Please do.

And it’s been a while since updation once again. I only do it so I can use my invented word “updation” you realise. Otherwise, I’d be blogging every single day, without fail.

Well I just got back from Melbourne on Wednesday night anyway. Since it’s now Friday, that’s not too long really! Melbourne was a ball of course. Went to all my fave record stores (see raves in entries below) and bought lots of wonderful goodies there, and then found some fabulous bookshops I hadn’t found before, as well as ones I knew about, and of course there’s two excellent comics shops as well…

Melbourne has some great zines as well, such as Sadness is in the Sky, focusing on all that post-rock stuff you know I love (Godspeed You Black Emperor! for instance). The latest issue, Numero 14, has attached their third CD compilation, We Are Now Flying At 33,000 Feet, with samples of all sorts of exciting bands including The For Carnation (sort-of murmury indie vocals with guitar/bass/drums and weird electronic noises, hard-disk processing and stuff - very interesting!)

The most overwhelmingly amazing thing about Melbourne (and I luuuuurve the place enough already y’unnerstan’?) is THE RADIO!. Here in Sydney we have 2SER and yeah they play some excellent underground electronica and a very leeeeetle bit of good indie stuff, and some good talks, but they’re not something you can listen to 24-hrs a day, and frankly they’re not very challenging much of the time. When/if we get FBi all will be fine.
In the meantime Melbourne has TWO community radio stations, both of which are miles better than 2SER. First is the deservedly famous 3RRR. I was listening to Triple R at about midday on Wednesday as I trammed into town, and they were playing this wonderful atmospheric experimental post-rock type stuff, instrumental indie rock, looong tracks, beautiful, right in the middle of the day. If they weren’t enough, there’s also 3PBS, arguably even better. What with both stations playing music almost 24-hrs (and the talks programs are pretty good too) there’s no need ever to listen to that government-run commercial station Triple J at all. It’s wonderful.