Australian scientists have created a T-shirt that allows air guitarists to play real music – without resorting to a real guitar.
Filed by billy at 1:22 pm under culture,technology
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Not only has the first attempt to do him for war crimes already surfaced, but his wife seems to be getting into a real state. 
At least he’ll always have his poems.
Filed by billy at 2:44 pm under politics
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Forty one hours without sleep.
Went to the 24hr movie marathon then a party at my house. The marathon was quite mild somehow, 12 movies and random stuff but didn’t really hurt the way other years have. The highlight was one of only two extant prints of Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. It was totally amazing to see one of my favourite films on the big screen, giving Jodorowsky’s unrelenting visual and creative genius the scope it deserves.
Incredible.
Decided not to sleep since the DJ’s were going to be testing the sound system anyway, and instead finished making the dreamachine. It is a prototype in lieu of making a nicer one, but it seems to work and was a fun addition to the party, though probably not the ideal circumstances for its use.
Surprised how well I held it together through the sleep dep arc. Of course, other people may have a different impression of events (especially as it got later…) 
Party was kind of surreal. Danced like a crazy, which was nice.
Filed by billy at 2:13 pm under the moose
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Hey. We need to get a new internet plan at my flat. What are the good ones/what are people using now the Telecom monopoly is broken?
I think we are just after cheap, decently fast web with reasonable (or no!) download caps, though I don’t download a lot.
Oh, and this could disrupt bloggage a touch.
Filed by billy at 2:03 pm under meta,new zealand,technology,the moose
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Gobsmackingly brilliant. That’s the short version.
The book is a dialogue, carried out in conversation and letters, between James Hillman, a “renegade Jungian therapist”, and Michael Ventura, who regular readers of this blog will have realised by now is a very on to it writer. It concerns itself with the nature of culture, therapy and the interaction between the citizen and their society, recasting therapy as a “cell of revolution”. Actually, it goes all over the place, is tonnes of fun. Incredibly stimulating, often very sharp and erudite. Dating from 1991, they anticipate with startling lucidity and a fresh angle the current crisis of the Western world. It is an analysis of the condition of the modern world soul by two outsiders, getting at the underlying motivations of our metaphors. Man, I want to hang out with these guys. (As some form of caveat, I only read the dialogues, not the letters, as the library wants it back today.)
Some quotes:
Ventura: Because the idea “all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights” is larger than America and larger than Western Civilisation. The statement that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth” transcends America.
Hillman: Regardless of how hard some Americans are trying to make it disappear from the earth.
Ventura: The idea is larger than America. It’s an idea America gave the world, but our republic being finished doesn’t mean the idea is finished.
And another:
Hillman: The principal content of American psychology is developmental psychology: what happened to you earlier is the cause of what happened to you later. That’s the basic theory: our history is our causality. We don’t even separate history as a story from history as a cause. So you have to go back to childhood to get at why you are the way you are. And so when people are out of their minds or disturbed or fucked up or whatever, in our culture, in our psychotherapeutic world, we go back to our mothers and our fathers and our childhoods.
No other culture would do that. If you’re out of your mind in another culture or quite disturbed or impotent or anorexic, you look at what you’ve been eating, who’s been casting spells on you, what taboo you’ve crossed, what you haven’t done right, when you last missed reverence to the Gods or didn’t take part in the dance, broke some tribal custom, whatver. It could be thousands of other things – the plants, the water, the curses, the demons, the Gods, being out of touch with the Great Spirit. It would never, never be what happened to you with your mother and father forty years ago. Only our culture uses that model, that myth.
Actually, note that the above came in the context of widening the narrow scope of therapy to include the client’s whole world… and there is too much to quote here, in general. Awesome stuff. Check it out.
(Oh yeah, to save an email, Brad, you in particular would enjoy this, moosethinks.)
Filed by billy at 12:51 pm under consciousness,culture,reading
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I guess the news from America is reassuring. Bush is a lame duck with Democrats taking the House and Senate, and Rumsfeld has been scapegoated for the election failure (not his incompetence on Iraq, per se, remember). A different kind of interesting times in Empire.
It depends on just how paranoid one is about the general corruption of American democracy as to how much this changes. Both parties, after all, are owned by the same corporate interests. The ideological difference is crucial, however, but the questions remain: Will the Democrats move to undo the Tsarist excesses of laws passed under the Bush regime, or will the power already granted be too tempting to disburse? Does anyone, anywhere, actually have a solution to the mess in Iraq? Other than let them all kill each other and negotiate with the winner? (By the way, I saw Iraq For Sale: The War Profiteers the other day, Robert Greenwald’s latest, which was pretty demented. Apparently if you are Halliburton and have no oversight you can order any expensive equipment you don’t need, throw it in a pit and set fire to it, and bill the government for it. Literally.) And how many extraordinary powers ascribed directly to the President will find use in the final throes of Bush’s Ludwig II esque reign?
Filed by billy at 10:44 pm under politics,the world
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You can download the soundtrack to Alejandro Jodorowsky’s psychedelic western masterpiece El Topo here.
It be cool.
Also, spies report that Holy Mountain may be showing at the 24 hour movie marathon, which would be freaking awesome, as this moose would love to see that on the big screen.
(via Growabrain)
Filed by billy at 1:12 pm under culture
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Today I wandered into Ferret and found The Place of Dead Roads by William Burroughs and Mr Rinyo-Clacton’s Offer by Russell Hoban. The Place of Dead Roads is the only one of Burrough’s last trilogy I haven’t read, and something I have been looking for idly for a few years, but Burroughs is like hen’s teeth, one of the class of writers whose books are always either “missing” from the library or kept at the desk. Hoban is my favourite living writer. The only other copy of Rinyo-Clacton, which got one hardback run in England, that I have ever seen, was in an overpriced US omnibus edition of Hoban’s work in which I already owned everything else.
I grabbed them both without thinking upon subconsciously reading the spines. And I had credit at the store with which to buy them.
You have no idea how exciting and rare a day like this is. This is the loneliness of the second hand book store trawler. Oh, the many fruitless days spent trawling the dusty shelves. Oh, the books. Oh, the books.
Filed by billy at 3:05 pm under the moose
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Saddam Hussein has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging.
The former Iraqi leader was convicted over the killing of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail following an assassination attempt on him in 1982.
As, the good old days of 1982. When the US was selling him guns, chemical and biological agents, and tacitly endorsing and supporting his actions.
I wonder if he feels like a toy that has been thrown away by a petulant child.
Hmm.
Given that the war was allegedly about him being a tyrant and “immediate threat”, it is weird they had to go back over 20 years to find something to pin on him in a particularly farcical trial.
I mean, no disputing he was a nasty son of a bitch. But murder by the state still seems like murder to me.
‘Thou shalt not kill.’
Filed by billy at 11:42 am under culture,the world
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Damn.
one of my favourite actresses. found dead. either by her husband or agent. either suicide or foul play. (one of the strangest things is the randomness of conflicting news articles, but there is no indication she was suicidal etc and some irregularities at the scene.)
if you haven’t seen The Unbelievable Truth, or Trust, then you damn well should. they are brilliant films and she was awesome in them. she was really dedicated to the indy movie scene. later she went on to write and direct films.
she ruled.
the 14 year old me that was in love with her is rather unhappy at this.
Filed by billy at 12:49 pm under culture,the moose
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