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August 2000

2000-08-31 / Track-of-the-Week. Having crossed the halfway mark in our serialization of the Matter video, we split from the spoken word vérité of the previous segment to another ploppy, delightfully beat-heavy piece. Artifice is the title and what does it mean? We see a suited man on a dreamlike set telling us things we can’t hear and then pointing at a lot of question words. At this point, the reader might well ask themself how we might make our description of this segment even more unappealing. But I think we’ve already got you, haven’t we?

2000-08-26 / Now, an interlude before the music starts to simmer again. We give you Good button as a follow-up to last week’s Sudden impulse, immediately below.

2000-08-19 / The real crux of the matter of Matter begins to be seen in this scene where we mete out the real red meat, as the replutocrats would say. Angst, fear and apparently, bitterness help to fuel its raw nervy energy. The track is called Sudden impulse, and its workings are something like that of a series of delicately trained lightning bolts. Is it a bad dream, or a moment of epiphany that makes the one man attack the other? And what fuels our own urges, etc., as if you know where I’m going with this?

2000-08-22 / Today’s reading: Against Intellectual Property, Chapter Three of Information Liberation by Brian Martin.

Music of the Boxes

2000-08-15 / As ‘plagiarists’(®) we find ‘music’ ‘everywhere.’ That is what is so beautiful about our situation: The World is New. I have been listening to broadcasts of two of the year’s major spectacles, the (recent and ongoing) national conventions of the replutocrats and the demographers. I have both my television and my radio on, because it sounds so beautiful.

The two signals transmitted live from the convention floor reach my living room by separate routes, and so there is a slight delay between the time the radio sound comes in and the time the television sound comes in. It is a duet! Or a chorus, if you introduce other sources of the same signal having different delays. Add a cablecast, or a webcast. It gets even better. The mix gets more interesting when the commentators for each broadcast break in at different times, using different words, at intervals during the broadcasts. This creates counterpoint!

It’s the best music I’ve heard in years, although the lyrics leave something to be desired. Try it yourself tonight. You don’t have to call it a ‘Tape-beatle piece’ or a ‘Public Works composition’ if you don’t want to.

2000-08-11 / Track-of-the-Week. The title for our video of the week is Furious sleep. Taken from the Chomsky example ‘Colorless green ideas sleep furiously’ of a perfectly grammatical sentence that has no logical semantic meaning, Public works’ back-formed allegory defies such easy syntactic analysis. Here is a periphrastic limbo quote: ‘How deep can you go?’ and in this track we offer some trenchant opinions in NTSC format.

The Plagiarist’s Ideas Are on Everyone’s Mind.

2000-08-06 /Steev Hise of Detritus.net fame sends this tasty news item:

‘LOS ANGELES (Reuters) — A stitch in time used to save nine. But bands of underground grannies have started stealing stitches online, rocking the genteel world of needlepoint and threatening to tie the industry in knots.

’Their numbers are probably in the hundreds rather than the millions that make up the Napster song-sharing community on the Web. Yet the pattern publishing and needlepoint industry is so alarmed at the mostly elderly cross-stitch pirates who swap copyright patterns for free via the Internet that they are threatening to take legal action. "This strikes at the heart of the needlepoint industry. The people who are doing this seem to have a hacker’s mentality," said Jo Weiss, executive secretary of the International Needleart Retailers Guild. … ’

And the link is here.

2000-08-05 / Track-of-the-Week. ‘I see inside this rock a prisoner,’ begins this punchy, morose little track. We have to wonder, whom is Mr. Narrator describing, anyway: Himself? The track’s authors? The listener? An unnamed fourth character? The beauty is, that we just keep rattling off these questions as if there are clear answers to be found. Consistent but contained to its fragment; or beautifully entire yet perplexingly contrary to itself: Philosophers have built their fame on as little as this.

2000-08-03 / Site Note. We’ve been working on getting some old CD reviews up for your interest and edification; in addition the navigation has been re-organized and much improved in our opinion. If you haven’t looked over our review section recently, a prompt visit will reap rewards: we have added a whole bunch of reviews there that weren’t there before.

Remember, it’s new to you!

Post-Napster resources

2000-08-01 / ‘Never mind Napster, just another .com failure. The phenomenon it helped to create, though, is likely to last. Here’s why:.’..begins this post from the Nettime list. Hell, it’s true. Napster, built around swapping sound files provided by anyone who wants to through a centralized server, is so completely superceded by other hunks of code that make possible the completely non-centralized swapping of any kind of file. We have posted links to these useful resources on our site.

Download, share, and live life to its fullest.