“In one of their more delicate rulings of recent years, British television watchdogs ruled today that a pig sexually pleasured on television by a minor celebrity did not feel degraded by the experience.”
Popularity: 7% [?]
Archive for November, 2004
A challenge to amateur codebreakers and budding cryptographers
(conspiracy theorists need not apply): professionals from Bletchley Park and GCHQ have been asked to take a crack at breaking the (presumably) coded inscription known as the “Shugborough code”, a sequence of letters inscribed on the Shepherd’s Monument at Shugborough, Staffordshire. The letters “D OUOSVAVV M” are found beneath a carving of Nicolas Poussin’s Les Bergers d’Arcadie, Et in Arcadia Ego.
The painting has previously been linked to the Knights Templar, often
through convoluted logic and misinformed history. Pretty much a whorish
publicity stunt for all involved (probably inspired by the success of
Dan Browns appalingly conspiratorial Da Vinci Code), the flurry of press coverage might however rekindle interest in a true cryptographic riddle.
Popularity: 8% [?]
Belgian cinema giants Kinepolis and UGC have announced that their theaters in Brussels will not be screening Banlieue 13, a film co-written by Luc Besson. “From experience, we can confirm that there’s a direct link between security problems and what we show and the public that the films target,” said a spokeswoman for Kinepolis. “Since the start of the year, we have been going for family films aimed at a wide audience rather than action films which could generate aggressive behaviour.” The film will, however, be screened in Liege and Braine-l’Alleud, apparently home to more mature audiences able to distinguish between reality and film fiction.
Popularity: 13% [?]
After a short stint with the U.S. Army in Bosnia, Skippy started
compiling a list of what is not allowed. For example, it is not allowed
to threaten anyone with black magic. Neither is it allowed to challenge
anyone’s disbelief of black magic by asking for hair. Harsh but fair.
Popularity: 7% [?]
When a candidate for public office faces the voters he does not face men of sense; he faces a mob of men whose chief distinguishing mark is that they are quite incapable of weighing ideas, or even of comprehending any save the most elemental—men whose whole thinking is done in terms of emotion, and whose dominant emotion is dread of what they cannot understand. So confronted, the candidate must either bark with the pack, or count himself lost. His one aim is to disarm suspicion, to arouse confidence in his orthodoxy, to avoid challenge. If he is a man of convictions, of enthusiasm, or self-respect, it is cruelly hard…
The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even a mob with him by the force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second or third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically the most devious and mediocre—the man who can most adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.
The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their hearts desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun,
July 26, 1920
Popularity: 6% [?]
There’s a good case to be made for dumbing down technology, easing access for people who might not otherwise grasp the complexities of the technologies that drive our society. But then there’s a case to be made for the barrier to entry that complex technologies create. Two Belgian politicians, Philippe Monfils (Mouvement Reformateur) and Valerie Deom (socialist) have come to the mind-bending conclusion that the solution to the illegal copying of digital works (audio or video, for the most part) is to introduce a computer licensing scheme. Every computer owner would need to buy a license, presumably with penalties involved for those who fail to comply. Hopefully the government economic affairs committee who discussed this proposal also came up with a good way of defining a computer. Anything bigger than a shoebox, attached to a monitor? A PDA running WinCE? A cockroach-mounted EPROM chip running Linux, scurrying back and forth with illegal copies of The Grouch’s F*ck the Dumb album? The mind boggles.
Popularity: 13% [?]
Nicholas Gurewitch’s Perry Bible Fellowship reveals a fiendishly warped sense of humour and incredible graphic dexterity. Eclectic cartoons for your delectation.
Popularity: 8% [?]
This short essay on the possible origins of US Republican fervour goes a long way towards establishing a credible explanation for the excruciatingly disappointing 2004 election results. Failing to admit that short, fat trailer park-dwelling America won out over intelligent, questioning, living-the-dream America, I too prefer to believe that the car parks did it. Short of mentioning that this was posted on the nettime mailing list by Geoff Manaugh (possibly the author, and who also possibly used to tour Europe with Allen Ginsberg), I cannot offer any further attribution. For lack of trying.
A theory that has not found itself in wide circulation on nettime, and for an understandable reason, is the one about too many car parks: that is, the United States is full of parking lots – huge, paved, empty spaces built on a scale that’s literally inhuman – and so the only possible response a person can have to them is to go to church and vote Republican…
Which is to say that the landscape, the built American landscape, is so bleak, so out-of-scale when it comes to the human body, so incomprehensibly empty, that the existential void it induces forces you to look for a holy spot, a place with meaning, a place that makes sense. A psychogeographic centre of some sort.
Someone like Jean Baudrillard comes to the United States and he sees Las Vegas and he sees the desert and he sees massive roadside shopping warehouses, and he interprets it all in terms of European secular Marxism, and so it’s all a kind of giddy, Heideggerian earth-lessness – but an American doesn’t do that. An American says, “Holy Christ, this place sucks – I better go to church on Sunday, I’m lonely as hell. I’m lonely as fuck-all. I need to find God.”
The sheer quantity of parking lots – and highway flyovers and cloverleafs and feeder roads and subsidiary rural routes to nowhere and redundant overpasses circling dead cities – is a major factor in the creation of the quote-unquote American personality. What it means to “be American”.
In other words, you grow up in a paved void built on the scale of Hummers and SUVs and you start to think, “Man, the world is total shite, the world needs more purpose, the world needs more spiritual depth” – and you slowly morph into a fundamentalist Christian.
It’s a landscape problem. The American landscape creates a certain personality structure.
It’s intellectually exhilirating if you’re prepared for it, if you’ve read Baudrillard or Ballard or Iain Sinclair or Mark Taylor or avant-garde architectural theory, but if you’re illiterate and poor – ie., an American – you turn to God.
And so of course Americans are right-wing Christian fundamentalists who vote for George W. Bush. What else are you going to do when you’re surrounded by parking lots all day?
And that’s the car park theory of American takeover.
Car parks – parking lots – are in the Republicans’ direct interest. Build more of the fucking things and you’ll stay in power for the rest of – for the life-span of concrete. And that’s pretty fucking long, I think. I think it is. Build a landscape that has absolutely no meaning at all, a vast, abstract void of grey surfaces completely resistant to all but the most persistant of poetic or interpretive projects (ie., Baudrillard), and you’re more or less generating religious fundamentalism.
You haven’t heard this theory for two reasons: 1) it’s ridiculous, and 2) the Ouroborus effect, ie., there are so many fucking parking lots here you don’t even notice them! And so you don’t realize the effect they have on your cognitive relation to “the world”. You have to go out into the commuter belts of Surrey to find this in England, and not even there; JG Ballard doesn’t know the half of it. Brasilia? Fuck off.
The Taj Mahal of the future will not be the Guggenheim Bilbao but the parking lot of a Home Depot in rural Alabama.
Parking lots are the Chartres’s of tomorrow.
And they’re responsible for re-electing Bush. It’s not Karl Rove – it’s vast expanses of concrete.
There are, of course, optimistic ways of recuperating this landscape into some kind of poetic project, ie., a Wordsworth – who was a dick, by the way – of the car parks instead of the hills, a Wordsworth of the overpass (but Ballard already fills that role), a John Muir of the Ikea multi-storey parking deck, but first of all rural Americans are too full of industrial pollutants, and therefore chromosomally mutating, to care, and they don’t know who Wordsworth is!
So they turn to God.
They are mutating, and they turn to God.
They walk to school – through a parking lot. If they walk to school.
They go across town – driving past incredibly huge parking lots. If there is a town to cross.
They look out their windows – at shimmering fields of poured concrete.
And so they think secular modernism equals boring bullshit. They think secular modernism equals existential meaninglessness. But it’s really just too many parking lots.
As long as there are this many parking lots religious fundamentalists will always rule America.
And you heard it here first. It’s the car park theory of American takeover.
Popularity: 8% [?]
