Saturday, 22nd of September, 2001

I’ve been reading a heap of hard science-fiction lately (as I always do, yes yes I know), and one author who’s come up a few times with brilliant stories is Charles Stross. He’s worked with another of my favourite authors, Simon Ings, on some short stories some time ago, and is now writing mid-near-future satire (I suppose) about the information age (with fabulously inventive technological and social extrapolations), and alternate worlds stuff (satire also).

I mention him right now because his website has a an essay about the WTC thingummy. Entitled Needed: a new age of enlightenment, it gives a pretty good history of why we’re in the mess we’re in… Go read.

Just logging in briefly to blogger to link to a couple of places… Not much time, down in Wollongong with Ange.

I posted a link to Robert Fisk’s very penetrating article on the WTC Disaster a few entries ago. Today in the Sydney Morning Herald (and no doubt various other papers around the world) is a new article - in the SMH it’s titled Bush is marching straight into bin Laden’s trap. Once again very much worth a read. It says at the bottom it comes from The Independent, without a doubt the UK’s best newspaper. Congratulations to the SMH for publishing the article - anything critical of the whole fucking US thing at the moment in the mainstream media is to be very much welcomed.

Tuesday, 18th of September, 2001

Whilst The Onion has, sadly, flaked out (bad pun there) on the WTC Crisis, Australia’s own The Chaser released an absolute classic this week. Of course many people will be deeply offended by it, but SUCKED IN!
“RIGHTEOUSNESS UNDER ATTACK” is the headline… Some utter classics there…

CANBERRA, Thursday: Australian Prime Minister John Howard has said his US trip was a complete success, if slightly upstaged towards the middle. Mr Howard said his visit had been the subject of intense media interest, until a “small incident in New York” distracted the local press.

The Prime Minister understood the incident involved planeloads of foreigners attempting to gain illegal entry into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He supported US President George Bush’s determination to retaliate against these “queue jumpers” with the full force of the country’s military.

And this story contains some very clever commentary on the Tampa crisis.
Good on ‘em! Go subscribe today.

More from Grant:

Did we bomb Boston to stop the Boston Strangler? Did we level New York City to get at Son of Sam? No we did not. So why the fuck should we flatten Afghanistan just to get at a bunch of murderous bastards who have the country’s people in a repressive death grip?

You know, it seems to me, someone who thinks conspiracy theories are as much toss as religions are (you’re lookin’ at a well dedicated atheist here), that it’s almost believeable that this whole thing was if not engineered then at least taken advantage of cynically by the highly conservative US government. I mean, they’ve wanted a war for ages… since Big Daddy Bush bombed the fuck out of innocent civilians last time in the Gulf. This is the perfect excuse now - they’ve got some obscenely high proportion of Americans (not to mention the rest of the world!) fully behind them as regards carpet bombing the whole region - and this is without proof that whoever was responsible even came from there!
Sick sick sick sick sick.

As I read further into Grant’s column, I can only reiterate… he’s totally on the ball that guy, about a lot of things… Bombing the fuck out of Afghanistan, as many have been pointing out, would be a terrible terrible tragedy. Those people have been oppressed by successive regimes for a long time now, the Taliban just being the latest. The civilians are by no means responsible for anything that’s happened in the US (and do you think maybe the Tampa refugees are terrorists too? For fuck’s sake…), and a war will really not affect those responsible…

The more I read into this all, the more I feel like everything’s buggered. But we have to keep a perspective - everything’s been buggered for, well, decades, and we keep going on don’t we? Yeah. For sure.

More interesting people commenting on that American situation… One of UK’s greats of the comics world, Grant Morrison, writes about it in his current column.
You can safely skip over the first bit, the “Magical Perspective” (or read it for amusement value)… there’s a heap of extremely astute political commentary there.

Monday, 17th of September, 2001

Moore presents a TV show called The Awful Truth, a very provocative, very anti-establishment program. He takes on causes like gay rights and anti-capitalism in very interesting ways - for instance he led a chorus of smokers who had lost their larynxes in christmas carols through their voice machines in the lobby of Philip Morris on one of his shows… His letter here serves as a passionate and articulate counterpart to Robert Fisk’s article, which I posted a link to earlier.
In Moore’s latest letter on his website, he has this to say at the end:

PS. Three days ago, I learned from someone at ABC News that ABC had videotape — an angle of the second plane crashing into the tower — that showed an F-16 fighter jet trailing the plane at a distance.

I have not shared this with you as I had not personally witnessed that tape myself and did not want to contribute to all the unsubstantiated rumors. It just came across on the TV that the government admitted they did dispatch fighter jets when they knew the planes were off course.

From this point, I will pass on any censored information to those of you in the mainstream media who are being blocked from reporting.

Is it becoming more clear now that the plane that went down in Pennsylvania was shot down to prevent it from attacking its destination?

The truth is harrowing, unbearable — but it must be told to us. A free people cannot make an informed decision if they are kept in the dark. Let’s hear ALL the truth NOW.

If this is true, it really is chilling - what does it imply about the reported phone calls from various heroic plane passengers? What does it say about what the US government could have done?
The pompous crap about this being an attack on Freedom itself is quite nauseating really. “We’re the center of the free world, and to prove it, we’ll now limit civil liberties even more!” “Oh and while we’re at it, we’ll keep hiding information about our foreign policy and its repercussions on the world…”

By the way, Chomsky’s short letter On the Bombings is worth a read too. He quotes that Robert Fisk article.

I’ve put up links to some very intelligent commentary on the World Trade Center terrorist attack lately. Various people are interested in the Michael Moore letter - the first can be found here, at his own website. I have to follow acb in quoting this, because it’s so utterly correct:

Will we ever get to the point that we realize we will be more secure when the rest of the world isn’t living in poverty so we can have nice running shoes?

Here’s an amazing cartoon by Rex Babin - if you don’t get it, I don’t know what to say… A riff on an old Life magazine Vietnam photo and the recent WTC attack…

From Adbusters (awesome culture jammers, always worth checking out):

“Like it ever went away” reads the caption.

Sunday, 16th of September, 2001

In Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Zvi Bar’el writes a considered, if slightly patronising article debunking the idea of a “war of civilisations” (Islam vs America). He argues strongly that the West should not lump all Arab nations and peoples together, that the Arabs have in fact similar lifestyles and problems to the West, and they should be enlisted in helping to fight terrorism.
Of course, the first step that’s needed to help that along is a major change in US foreign policy…

Despite being a Jewish Israeli paper, printed in Hebrew with an English edition, Ha’aretz is not that right-wing, and contains reports that are critical of the Israeli government and supportive of Palestine. Here’s one from today, detailing how the IDF (”Israel Defence Force”) have been entering Gaza. Here’s an example of Israeli vs Palestinian interpretations:

“Earlier, the Palestinians reported that a 17-year-old boy who was throwing stones at IDF troops, was shot dead. The IDF said the teenager had aimed a Kalachnikov assault rifle at the soldiers.”

So what’s really going on? It’s just too complicated.
In case you think that compared to Sharon, Barak was some sort of visionary peace crusader, here’s a realistic look at “Barak’s Generous Offers” from Gush Shalom, which describes itself as “the hard core of the Israeli peace movement. This document responds directly to the “widespread propaganda assertion that ‘We gave them everything and they gave us war’”.

Meanwhile in Israel there are Israelis who oppose their government’s oppressive actions. (And of course there are!)

From Indymedia Israel, here’s an article on reservist Idan Landau, who had this to say at his trial (and is now in military gaol for 14 days):

“In progress in the occupied territories is a war of repression entirely subservient to the ideology of the settlement drive. The Palestinian population is being subjected to starvation, denial of medical treatment, demolition of homes and economic strangulation. I will take no part in these war crimes, nor will I serve as a fig leaf for them.”

A brave man indeed, and not the only one. Conscientious objection in Israel is on the rise - for those who don’t know, Army service is compulsory in Israel, and everyone (I think) is on the reserve list. This indymedia article begins with some chilling lines from Rehav’am Ze’evi, Israeli Minister of Tourism, arguing that “Israel should ’seize the opportunity, now that the world understands us’ and ‘exterminate the Palestinian entity’”.

Following on from last night (this morning…), here’s a couple more links that I found, but because blogger was playing up, I couldn’t post…

Ohhhhhhhh I’ve got to quote Momus, right from that page I linked above. He’s totally on the ball, this guy:

Too many reactions to this crisis have been religious. One commentator on PBS’ Charlie Rose show put this very well when he said ‘This is not about the civilised versus the uncivilised. It’s about the values of the 12th Century versus the values of the
18th. It’s the Middle Ages versus the Enlightenment.’ That line does not run neatly down the map dividing the Middle East from the West. Some US and UK reactions to Bin Laden’s medieval crusade have been, themselves, medieval.
…
Ascetic religious rock star Moby venting his spleen on his website about this ‘attack on civilisation’ is broadcasting live from the Middle Ages. Committed Christian Tony Blair seems to aim Britain straight for the Crusades with his vehement speech telling the UK parliament that Britons, too, must show they are willing to die for their beliefs. Nobody seems to have learned the essential lesson: that this crisis came about because of a lack of intelligence (in all senses of the word), not a lack of fervour.

Go read the rest, now.

Fuck. Now looking at the Independent’s site (best newspaper in the
UK, although the Guardian’s pretty fine too), I see:
a) The fucker Ariel Sharon has called off peace talks between Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat, and
b) Dubyah is promising a “long and unrelenting war”. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. The assholes are out in force. Take me home mummy.

So I’ve been scouring the net in the wee hours as I listen to Peter Gabriel (finished now), reading accounts of the Manhattan tragedy… It’s getting too much, I don’t think I want to read much more. I just read two very depressing stories of people who lost friends and loved ones, and it’s gripping reading, and tears you apart. Enough.

Here’s a photo of one missing person sign - one of many thousands around Manhattan at the moment. It comes from EastWest, which has some first hand stories and lots of photos. An even more gripping photo account is at MarkAllenCam… Beware, both take a long time to load…
Enough with the “God bless America” though. Fuck’sakes… Here’s a very brave woman. The text says it all: “Question U.S. Foriegn Policy”.

I love New York, and looking at all these photos of the place is evoking strong feelings of nostaglia mixed up it all.

OK and finally before I go to bed, the extraordinary avant-garde pop muso Momus’s “Thought For The Day” on the whole thing…
OoooooK… and via Momus, we have the great Richard Dawkins showing us that religion is the cause of this whole mess, and who am I to argue?

I PROMISE I shall update the other bits of this blog soon, and change the look and all. It’ll be a good exercise for me ;) I’d like to take all the review bits I can find from the left-hand column and stick ‘em in an archive that can be continually updated too. Nice idea hey!

More from the archives. Amongst all the new stuff I’m listening to (and that’ll go up in the Recent Listening lists SOON I promise), I’ve been pulling out old stuff for some reason. Oh yes, sampling drum breaks ;)

Anyway, what’ve we got here? Two early Peter Gabriel albums, from 1980 and 1982 respectively. Since they’re both self-titled, they’re generally known as PG3 and PG4… or somesuch.
He was a real weirdo back then, and all the better for it! Extraordinary inspections deep into the psyche of very disturbed individuals, and music that suits the times perfectly - post-punk guitars and wailing, dark & twisted, with African percussion, early digital sampling and processing…
PGCD3 has Games Without Frontiers (with Kate Bush on backing vocals singing “Jeux Sans Frontiers”), the classic anti-apartheid song Biko, as well as Intruder, No Self Control, I Don’t Remember… Every song is brilliant (with some caveats), except the horrible saxy Start. And the pat ending in Family Snapshot, where the assassin turns out to have been traumatised by his parents breaking up, is a bit much. Oh well, can’t have everything!
Features both Robert Fripp and Dave Gregory on guest guitar (the latter from XTC, another extraordinary English act from that far back, still making wonderful music).
Oooh! And Through the Wire just came on. One of those songs that evokes the barren industrial England of Thatcherism for me in a strangely nostalgic way (since I wasn’t there to experience it). Edgy post-punk stuff with time-signature changes, plenty of melody, jangly distorted guitars and alienated lyrics.

PGCD4 is not quite as caustic and out-there, but still brilliant. Shock the Monkey is famous, but The Rhythm of the Heat still rocks, and there’s plenty of passionate lyrics about tortured political prisoners, social outcasts and so on…

Peter Gabriel went on, of course, to setup Real World, which he sank millions into, and which has probably done more to promote “world music” than any other group. WOMAD is directly related…
His more recent albums are ok, but not as cutting-edge as he used to be. He still keeps up with the times though, but a bit overblown I s’pose. I haven’t got the last couple…

Here’s another rather amazing account from someone who was there - a Pakistani Muslim, whose life was saved by a Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn…

It’s a shame that those of us in blog-land have nothing else to talk about at the moment. OK so Ansett’s closed itself down as well - what a schlemozel that is too!

Friday, 14th of September, 2001

Finally Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat are set to meet and discuss peace. It’s hard not to be cynical, but one can only hope, even with such an asshole as Ariel Sharon being Prime Minister of Israel…

What’s a left-wing Jew like me to think about the whole Israel-Palestine thing? I don’t know, I really don’t know.

In better news… Well I pulled out the Art of Noise’s surprise re-appearance from 1999, the seduction of claude debussy just ’cause I felt like it. What a brilliant album! A concept that should be the cheesiest of cheesy, and yet they pull off one of the most beautiful and funky albums imaginable. Drum’n'bass beats, large extracts of Debussy delightfully re-orchestrated as usual by Ann Dudley. Woohoo!
“Debussy didn’t believe in god. He didn’t believe in the Establishment. He didn’t believe in bourgeois convention. He didn’t believe in Beethoven or Wagner. He believed in… Debussy!”
What can I say? Hear hear, on all counts!

That’s all for now. Big-re-jig comin’ up, when I have time in the next oh… few days? Hopefully.

At Metafilter (a big multi-person blog), there is a fascinating thread of posts from during the attack. It’s shocking reading - some of the posts were made by someone on a handheld device (I can only presume) whilst on the subways almost directly under the WTC.
[An aside: My oldest friend Jacob Horowitz is living in New York and when I finally heard from him he told me he’d been on his way to work (in downtown Manhattan) and was on the train at the World Trade Center station (under the towers) when the first plane hit! He was herded out and back home by firefighters (I think) and tells his Mum now he’s coming home - enough of living in America! Fair enough.]

I found out about the events in Manhattan and Washington of September the 11th at the end of a marvellous gig by my old friends Monsieur Camembert, launching their new album supported by Double T (gypsy jazz on guitar and cello).
I couldn’t even bring my mind to understand it until I got back to Ange’s place at about 1:30am and saw the images on TV of two aeroplanes smashing into the World Trade Center. It’s utterly horrifying and evil, words cannot describe. Not a pleasant way to end an otherwise excellent evening.

For an alternative view, Indymedia always have something to offer, and on this tragedy Robert Fisk (Middle East correspondent for the progressive US publication The Nation), writes this highly moving and thought-provoking article.

Nothing can possibly justify this act, and terrorism and war it certainly is. This article shows, though, some of the reasons why such an act could occur. When the mainstream media does its best to blinker us from the manipulative acts of the US and UK (who are still routinely bombing Iraq, and whose sanctions against that country have killed probably millions of innocent Iraqis), we should look for some slightly more free information. The polemics about America as land of freedom and justice are more sinister than laughable when put in context. There are a lot of people and indeed peoples in the world with a justifiable hatred for America and its hypocrisy.

And boy-oh-fucking-boy I hope we don’t have a big ol’ World War Three soon. Israel seems pretty bent on it at the moment too. Nice world we live in.

Yes, so I’m blogging again. I hope I have enough time and dedication to overhaul this entire page soon, updating all the Recent Listening and Reading (of which there’s fuckloads, to coin a phrase) and re-jig the look an’ all. Here’s hopin’! Drop me a line if you think that’d be a good idea.