Monthly Archives: August 2011
Mum, am I a Puritan?
Does it ever worry you that your gratification is the dominant narrative of a disproportionately powerful entertainment-advertising-retail complex? Or that pleasure might be the bait and the snare a unitary like/dislike response? Or that an animal thus broken in might totter towards its dotage … Continue reading
Filed under Media
From the London-Edge Psalter
“And oh but just to look fine once in a while. And that there be something on when the day ends and I sit down. But oh only let us have our pleasures and all will be well and we … Continue reading
Filed under writing
Definition corner: Regeneration
Enterprise zones announced to help boost growth File on 4: Kick-starting recovery? Regeneration, n: A rhetorical sleight-of-hand by which ‘the area’ is treated as the prime unit of social good, such that when said area’s inhabitants – in this manoeuvre … Continue reading
Filed under Musings
The honest answer
One of Facebook’s strategies is to make money from your social interactions. One of the ways it can do that is by building a social graph drawn (cuddly version) from your personal relationships, but also (mammon version) from scraps of data you … Continue reading
Filed under Musings
Interlude: Hockey Nights in Canada – Downliners Sekt
Very nice. Parent EP Meet The Decline is available free at www.downliners-sekt.com. Via the Mudd Up podcast, which recently ran an lengthy interview with the pair – can’t find it on the blog though.
Filed under music
Interlude: Drága megbocsásson nékem – Sebő Miklós
Apparently this is from the film Skandal in Budapest (1933). Found it and liked it while looking for the version of the German song Einmal ist Keinmal used in the Pina Bausch piece Kontakthof. The titular phrase in Einmal translates as ‘Once is … Continue reading
Filed under music
Oh good, the Gaucho’s doing well
Thinks: The City boy’s ‘playing hard’ is code for a furious gilding of the prescribed and comfortable, a cultural sickness that is prevalent in the Square Mile but of which Las Vegas is the most aggressive outbreak, the more malign because … Continue reading
What’s the matter? Are you the chicken?
“The man who has fed the chicken every day throughout its life at last wrings its neck instead, showing that more refined views as to the uniformity of human nature would have been useful to the chicken” Bertrand Russell, The … Continue reading
Filed under Uncategorized
