thecages

This blog has moved to
goodnite sweet blogspot.

After an extended search I finally found a .com domain name that I both wanted and wouldn't have to pay an overinflated price for from some dodgy `search service`.



I've always been sure that nothing less than a .com would do.
I'm not a .org kind of person(far too warm and fuzzy) and I still think that using .net for general purpose sites is misuse. And let's not even mention .ws or *shudder* .tv

It has taken some time to get the CSS just right[1] and I suppose I should cite all the sites that I harvested images and styles from...
Know that if you use IE you might get one of those stupid 'active content' warnings.
This is not due to spyware/malware/ActiveX - that'll come later.
It's because the transparency on the red div below the header image is done as follows:

filter: alpha(opacity=50);
opacity: 0.5;
-moz-opacity: 0.5;

Basically IE lets you specify filters to apply to nodes, but spits out an ugly warning (depending on your security settings) before it does anything with it - yuck.

I'm in the process of moving this blog there and will be moving the blogspot archives along with it.

[1] liteweight but comprehensive

One of the things that struck me about central London was the lack of tagging and graffiti - though I have to qualify this by saying that I never went beyond Zone 2 and suspect that less über-whatever neighbourhoods probably have plenty.

Nevertheless I've come to expect some level of illegal tagging to be present in all urban areas. The only such evidence I found was some half hearted keying on the tube, a torn poster for Buy Nothing Day[1] and a bescrawled phonebooth on Portobello road.




But the UK's greatest proponent of rad urban art, Banksy, does have a new book out[2] - Wall and Piece.
It's a retrospective of his work but also includes some insight into his motivations.


Banksy (possibly aka Robert Banks) has been around since the 90s and manages to keep on shocking London on a regular basis. I won't go into the blah of his biography etc. - wikiwiki







What I find particularly rad is his work in galleries; covertly hanging modified renaisance paintings alongside the originals in major British museums.






His work often does not survive for more than a few days[3] as the London city council has become particularly adept at reacting to news of a new stencil and dispatching teams forthwith to remove such offending items.

All of this is great - a serious artist with maximum credibility and integrity[4].




But even more - a serious activist who bites back at the homogenised, serialised, advertised reality of urban London.
The tube is saturated with adverts, the Oxford street christmas lights feature animated characters from this holiday's animated blockbuster, cabbies promote faraway destinations they're unlikely to ever visit themselves.


Some excerpts from Wall and Piece:

Copyright is for losers©™
Against his better judgement Banksy has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patterns Act, 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

By way of an introduction...

I'm going to speak my mind, so this won't take very long.

Graffiti is not the lowest form of art. Despite having to creep about at night and lie to your mum it's actually the most honest artform available.
There is no elistism or hype, it exhibits on some of the best walls a town has to offer, and nobody is put off by the price of admission.

...

The people who truly deface neighbourhoods are the companies that scrawl their giant slogans across buildings and busses trying to make us buy their stuff.
They expect to be able to shout their message in your face from every available surface but you're never allowed to answer back.
Well, they started this fight and the wall is the weapon of choice to hit them back.

And on the backcover the following blurb...

"There's no way you're going to get a quote from us to use on your book cover" - Metropolitan Police spokesperson

And here's the section entitled: Manifesto

Extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willet Gonin DSO who was amongst the first British soldiers to arrive at the Nazi death camp Bergen-Belsen. It was liberated in April 1945 close to the end of the second World War.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen.

It took a little time to get used to seeing men and women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistence. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundered a day were dying and that five hundered a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference.

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentry which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing start naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.

It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundereds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick.
I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of a genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance.
I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick.
At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on their arm.
At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

It's this last excerpt that really blew my mind.

I typically react well to art/activism/music/politics that is evidence of a strong integrity and sense of individuality. But, in truth, I am not often surprised or challenged[5] by most personal views/philosophies. Everybody knows the dice are loaded, no-one seriously believes what they read in the news anymore. The most radical zine or blog or church or political party hardly dislodges my world view.

But this really got to me.
How could he take such a gruesome, degraded vision as his manifesto?
Should he not be writing about freedom and defiance and liberation of the individual? About flag waving street raves and a little house in the country?
I wanted my feel-good revolutionary lullaby.

I was really shocked.
But upon re-reading it the vital truth in such absurd horror peeked through.

The Plague does the same thing; the horrific merry-go-round, the death rollercoaster, and the hoarse laughter of the dying as they realise that they're still alive.

Great manifesto - just what our conformist urban sprawl needs.


[1] 25th of November - I was there and I bought stuff. shit.
[2] which we bought at the Tate - how posh!
[3] or in the case of works placed in museums and galleries, a few hours
[4] bear in mind that he literally has no personal fame - unlike Damien Hirst et al he is personally unknown.
[5] and very seldomly seriously offended

Back from London after several traumatic return flights - distance kills.

This was my first time to London(!) and bizarrely I am glad to finally have gone.

London seems to be the default destination for South African youth-types and every dumb nut who has been on a gap year has been.
So invariably the response that you get from anyone when you say that you've not been is: 'Really? So have you been outside South Africa at all?'
Yes - asshole. There is a world beyond Wimbledon and Earl's Court, y'know.

Regardless; I did enjoy London and am glad to have been there in the late autumn/winter.
This season seems to me somehow very true to what it means to live in London; cold, wet and dark, but somehow comforting and very `present` - the city has a real sense of place.

Invariably we did do many of the sites[1] - but only on stroll pasts.
I was relieved to see that even world cities like London have crappy curio shops.

Of course there are many things that live up to every expectation.

The Tate Modern rocked, featuring a couple of cool exhibitions including the very cool Carsten Höller slides[2].



Naturally I also dug on the urban culture bits - the music shops are great and I got some really nasty UK Dubstep in the guise of Skream! amongst other things.
I also dug on the slightly packaged sleaze of Soho.


A particularly delicious outing involved dinner at the St. John Bread and Wine bistro in Spitalfields.



On day trips (while Anita attended her conference) I headed out to Portobello Road[3], WhiteChapel[4] and the ultra-skanky Camden Town[5].



The tube freaked me out, as did Oxford street. The National Gallery rocked, as did Hyde Park.


I really liked London, but there's something missing.
London has a real energy and massive variety, but here's the problem; London didn't surprise me in the way that Washington or Barcelona or Tel Aviv(!) or Rio de Janeiro did.
Those cities blew my mind. Somehow London didn't.
I really like the city, but wouldn't want to live there.


[1] Wesminster Puke, Big Bore, Tower Snooze
[2] The queue for tickets was massively long but I do wish that I had time to go sliding
[3] Very cool and not nearly as packaged as what I had imagined
[4] In search of LARC and Freedom Press - both of which turned out to be closed; damn hippies
[5] Which was dissapointing beyond description with its fake ruffness and nudge-nudging salvia hawkers.

Bem vendo em Londres!
Estamos aqcui na cidade dos Brits para relaxo.

The weather is frickin cold and wet etc. etc.
etc. etc.

music: AC/DC(obviously), Roots Manuva, Placebo - how very Londonese!

Its been a while since I posted music compilations.
I've put together a few for various reasons but none of them have really rocked.

Here's Opening Doors.

  Opening Doors

  1.  Prince  Raspberry Beret
     (In through the Out door)
  2.  Crowded House Pineapple Head
  3.  Jenny Lewis with Handle With Care
      The Watson Twins
  4.  Supergrass  Late in the Day
  5.  Ryan Adams  This House is not For Sale
  6.  The Mutton Birds Come Around
  7.  Marc Broussard Home
  8.  Gnarles Barkley St. Elsewhere
  9.  Finley Quaye Your Love Gets Sweeter
  10. Antony &   Fistful of Love
      The Johnsons
  11. Sophie Solomon Lazarus
  12. Neil Diamond What's It Gonna Be?
  13. Stephen Duffy The Deal
  14. Eagle Eye Cherry Desireless

I made it for a friend's housewarming which never happened[1].
That's OK since the compilation never really took off.
The idea that I started off with was to use only tracks that were originally released as the opening tracks to the albums they were on.
See? Opening Doors -> new house -> first tracks.
Yup, the idea is kind of lame.

In the end the only track that conforms to this kind of thing is, ironically, the last track (Eagle Eye Cherry) which, even more ironically, is the _last_ track on it's album[2].

Of the line-up the only songs that I really, really think are great(from a compilation point of view) is Jenny Lewis[3] and the terminally underrated The Mutton Birds.
The rest are all good songs, but somehow they don't really contribute much to a compilation desperately in need of contributions.
Correction; there is one other absolutely killer song on it - Neil Diamond, if only for the lyrics:

Move a little closer
Try a little harder
Dancing with a partner
Helps you find the beat

fuck yeah.
Here's Anita's HH Mix - much cooler than Opening Doors.

 Anita's HH Mix 

 01 Max Normal   Stay At Home
 02 A Tribe Called Quest Can I Kick It
 03 Busta Rhymes  Turn it Up
 04 House of Pain  Jump Around
 05 Cypress Hill  I aint goin out like that
 06 KRS One   Sound of Da Police
 07 Kanye West   Diamonds From Sierra Leone
 08 Jurassic 5   Freedom
 09 Blackalicious  A-G
 10 Eminem   My Name is
 11 Beastie Boys  The Negotiation Limerick File
 12 Cashless Society  Hottentothop Bantu 1-2
 13 Roots Manuva  Ticka Tock
 14 The Herbaliser The Blend
      feat. WhatWhat

The story behind it is that Anita's new office[4] is staffed by a bunch of young comic book artists.
Naturally they have _great_ taste in music and Anita felt that she had to do something to retain her street cred in such a competitive environment.
It's a straight forward hip hop collection but it works well.
Apparently the office was suitably impressed and now suspect her of being a bit of a gangsta.

I didn't know what the name of the Roots Manuva track was, so just named it Ticka Tock - the name is actually Clockwork.

[1] the housewarming - not the compilation
[2] also entitled Desireless
[3] a cover of the Roy Orbison classic
[4] the Beat Comics studio is in flight and Mshanna is in production

I, like everyone else, now get a lot of my news from Digg.
It's a good news service, blah blah blah blah.

They now also have a Labs project which is not nearly as fancy as Google's or Yahoo's but still has two cool toys.

Digg Swarm and Stack are two flash-based apps that visualise Digg activity in near real time.

Digg Swarm draws a circle for stories as they're dugg. Diggers swarm around stories, and make them grow. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

Digg Stack shows diggs occuring in real time on up to 100 stories at once. Diggers fall from above and stack up on popular stories. Brightly colored stories have more diggs.

Not really revolutionary, but cool.

What I find interesting about Internet Visualisation tools like these is how intuitively *right* what they display feels.
The visualisations appear totally random.

That's the point - they present the ongoing random reality of the internet.
Somewhere there is a pattern in there - a very complex organisation.
Information tends to organise itself.