A little walk I took a couple of years ago…

Night time

I went out walking and the cats watched me
All through the back of Newtown along the trainline
On top of terrace walls and under cars
Their heads turned silently or not at all
And I strolled, marvelling at the orange light
And purple dimples of the clouds.
(more…)

so, like, i’m new to video games, but this one is beautiful! and i have to share it straightaway! you start out like a little strip of salmon bone hieroglyph, and you float around and get quite lost. you also eat things, which changes your shape and how you view the world, and, well, it’s about flow…via detritus

…who is sick and lying in bed… courtesy of the chocolate lady

xxoxx

it’s a little blog, just new, but there are lots of beautiful things on it, lovely ideas that make me hold my breath and can’t wait to do things and make things, let’s do this and that, let’s run headlong down the side of a hill, let’s read things and swap them word for word, tell eachother ideas, how do i find that out, let me see, show me whatcha got, leap this way, follow me i have an idea, lick my brains, are we there yet?

“It refers to a practice in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s when dissidents who wanted to bring banned Western music into Russia would go to hospital trash cans, secure already exposed X-ray film and then press a master disk onto the X-rays to make floppy records,” Cadava said. “They were called ‘music on bones’ because the grooves were on images of chest cavities and spinal columns.”

Music on bones, some audio to listen to, somehow related to Eduado Cadava’s “small book on the relation between music and techniques of reproduction, memorization, and writing.”

THE HARD ONS are being joined by THE ASSASSINATION
COLLECTIVE from Melbourne, THE THAW and CALL THE
MEDIC, CALL THE NURSE in a benefit gig to raise money
for people arrested after the G20 protests.

G20 arrestee benefit gig with:

The Hard Ons
The Assassination Collective (melb)
The Thaw
Call the medic, call the nurse

Date: Thursday 7th February
Cost: $10
Venue: Annandale Hotel
Cnr. Parramatta Rd & Nelson St, Annandale

first band on by 8:30

All proceeds to the G20 arrestee fund.

In November 2006, people took to the streets of
Melbourne to confront the G20, a meeting of the
world’s most powerful finance ministers whose policies
perpetrate suffering and violence in countless
communities around the world every day. Since that
protest, Victorian and Federal police have carried out
a vast operation of surveillance and arrests, raiding
houses at dawn and slapping protestors with ludicrous
charges and repressive bail conditions. This is a
campaign of intimidation and part of an attempt to
criminalise protest; it is an attack on everyone’s
ability to resist war, poverty and oppression.

To defend political protest, people are organising in
solidarity with those arrested and supporting them by
raising money to help with legal costs and other
expenses. For more information see www.afterg20.org

The assassination collective is number one on my punk band list. They are really freakin excellent.

What I have come to like about exciting contemporary published academics is their ability to elucidate fine upstanding paragraphs from other authors and/or each other. And with the immediacy of blogging, and a reluctance to enter into the archiving ahead of me this afternoon at work, I am going to share with you a couple of paragraph quoted by Jean Bobby Noble in Sons of the Movement: FtMs risking incoherence on a post-queer cultural landscape, women’s press, toronto, 2006.

Peggy Phelan on nostalgia, or “the wound of wishing to return”:

…even at the seemingly simple level of the linguistic sign it is impossible for writers to convey the complete context in which a[n]… act occurs. To report it back, to record and repeat it, is at once to transform it and to fuel the desire for its mimetic return … Much of the writing [about performatives] is a record of a living relation between the writer and the artists she sees. This seeing is, necessarily, a distortion, a dream, a hallucination; writing rights it back towards reason by creating enabling fictions … The effort to “cite” the performance that interests us even as it disappears is much like the effort to find the word to say what we mean. It cannot be done. (Phelan 1993a:19-22) (ie from Noble 2006:59)

And Bahktin on words:

“When one finds a word, one finds it already inhabited … there is no access to one’s own personal ultimate word … every thought, feeling, experience must be refracted through the medium of someone else’s discourse, someone else’s style, someone elses’s manner … almost no word is without its intense sideward glance at someone else’s.” (Bahktin 1981:91) (ie from Noble 2006:71)

And finally a stellar bit from Noble himself:

“…Whiteness is marked and articulated - that is, made to work by revealing itself. If you think about the verb to articulate, it means to devide into words, to pronounce or utter. But it also means to connect or mark with joints - thatis, to be connected with sections. Thus, to articulate is to express fluently and to manipulate a site where component parts join (as in a knee or hip), to bring segmented parts together to enable functionality. These kings dissemble White masculinity, break it into parts, and then reassemble those parts to make them work differently, to render them dysfunctional. If White supremacy works best when it’s hypervisible and invisible, it cannot work in quite the same way when it is denaturalised, rearticulated, and most importantly, de-cloaked.” (Noble 2006:65)

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower in Jell-O:

Hayden said the CIA is working closely with the National Endowment for the Arts to cut off all grants that may serve as funding for the group. In addition, the Department of Homeland Security has begun monitoring any large purchases of gravy, tinfoil, pig’s blood, and barbed wire in hopes of preventing another aesthetic tragedy.

from the onion; care of laughing quietly to myself

i have a thing about ties. matching shirts and ties especially. this is one of my favourite combinations. i mean, the R.A.F. shirt was plainly calling out for something…anything with a diagonal stripe in pleasing pastel shades.

pretzel
1856, from Ger. Prezel, also Brezel, from O.H.G. brezitella, from M.L. *brachitellum, presumably a kind of biscuit baked in the shape of folded arms (cf. It. bracciatella, O.Prov. brassadel), dim. of L. bracchiatus “with branches, with arms,” from L. bracchium “arm” (see brace).

brace (n.)
1313, “armor for the arms,” from O.Fr. brace “arms,” also “length measured by two arms,” from L. bracchia pl. of brachium “an arm,” from Gk. brakhion “arm, upper arm,” from brakhys “short,” in contrast to the longer forearm. Applied to various devices for fastening, tightening, on notion of clasping arms. The verb “to render firm or steady by tensing” is c.1440, with figurative extension to tonics, etc. that “brace” the nerves (cf. bracer “stiff drink,” 1740).

heart
O.E. heorte, from P.Gmc. *khertan- (cf. O.S. herta, O.N. hjarta, Du. hart, O.H.G. herza, Ger. Herz, Goth. hairto), from PIE *kerd- “heart” (cf. Gk. kardia, L. cor, O.Ir. cride, Welsh craidd, Hittite kir, Lith. širdis, Rus. serdce “heart,” Breton kreiz “middle,” O.C.S. sreda “middle”). Spelling with -ea- is c.1500, by analogy of pronunciation with stream, heat, etc., but remained when pronunciation shifted. Most of the figurative senses were present in O.E., including “intellect, memory,” now only in by heart. Hearty is c.1380; heart-rending is from 1687. Heartache was in O.E. in the sense of a physical pain, 1602 in sense of “anguish of mind;” heartburn is c.1250. Broken-hearted is attested from 1526. Heart-strings (1483) was originally literal, in old anatomy theory “the tendons and nerves that brace the heart.” Heartless (c.1330) originally was used with a meaning “dejected;” sense of “callous, cruel” is not certainly attested before Shelley used it so in 1816. Heartland first recorded 1904 in geo-political writings of H.J. MacKinder.

Online etymology dictionary, you are my friend.