Both the DNC (or the RNC, I guess) and the NFL Draft share one major characteristic - that one must really stretch the imagination to consider either to be entertaining, yet both are watched by millions anyway.

The NFL Draft I always thought was the worst form of entertainment - it's just waiting for someone to walk to a podium and read a name, repeated every ten minutes for two days.    That the NFL has managed to convert the draft into a major televised event says a lot about the success they've had marketing their own product.  The draft comes two months after the Super Bowl has ended, when NFL fans are in a huge drought of football-related entertainment.  They could probably televise kids playing Madden and get good ratings at that point. 

The conventions aren't as successful on this front as they occur in the middle of a ridiculously long election season, when many people are starting to get sick of it all.  Thankfully, the convention, which is largely four days of people making speeches, only occurs every four years - well, I guess there is a party convention every year but we only see 24/7 media coverage during presidential election years.  

At least the NFL Draft can be surprising, though only the first round is really interesting and not even consistently. I can't imagine being surprised by anything during this convention.  Unless Joe Biden drops the F-bomb or something, I'm sure any "excitement"  will be excrutiatingly minor.  As acclaimed as HRC's speech was last night, it was just her doing what she had to do.  This is where the phrase 'towing the party line' comes from, I guess.  Even Chris Matthews, who loves the charades of electoral politics more than anyone else on TV, just said that the roll call hasn't been meaningful since Adlai Stevenson chose his VP through it. The MSNBC guys are bored and keep talking over top of the silly state history speeches, just like Mel Kiper Jr. discussing why one draft pick's stock has gone up or down since the combine.

I vowed never to watch the NFL Draft again about 2 years ago, and I don't think I'll ever turn back.  Yet I'm glued to this meaningless roll call vote even though it's 1:27 AM and I have to work tomorrow.  Seeing some clips of college football players might be more interesting than this but I wouldn't get to see a bunch of Democrats in a calm mosh pit.

I moved to Helsinki five days ago.  For the first time in my life, I live in a non-English speaking country (though you could certainly make a case for Scots).  Furthermore, I stepped off the plane committed to staying at least two years here, despite having never even visited Finland before.

Next week we move into our own flat,  provided by the student housing service at a very low price (but in a very poor location).  This week we're living in a large basement warehouse space rented by some of my partner's friends.  There are five thirty-something Finnish gamers who live in this space; they while away the days playing first-person shooters and talking to girls on Facebook chat.  The facilities are, to put it politely, raw; the only source of water is a bathroom sink, and the lack of walls makes privacy impossible.  There are some weird live wires hanging down in one corner which we were warned not to touch. 

Still, I feel strangely comfortable here, though I will probably be ready to move on come the weekend. This week, my partner has started her New Media MA program and I've gone back to work,  telecommuting from this strange 'home office'.   A lack of money (as I'm between paychecks and just spent a fortune shipping all of our worldly possessions here) has kept our leisure activities to walking and cycling around our new city, exploring the geography and sights.  More to report on this later.

Of course, this week coincides with the Democratic National Convention, so my head has been a weird mix of cable news punditry, endless blog dissections of speeches/rhetoric, and obsessive polling websites.  All of this on top of the stimuli of a new surrounding - a new, strange and difficult language; the adventures of surviving in a hyperactive economy on very little money; the thrills of Western consumerism in a new environment explored through repeated visits to supermarkets; etc.  I haven't had a drop of alcohol and don't miss it.  It's a very different first five days to when I moved to Glasgow; I haven't sensed the pulse of Helsinki yet, as I'm too distracted by MSNBC streams and figuring out if the sandwich spread I just bought is vegetarian.  Next week will be occupied by the new flat - settling in, and of course the Republican National Convention.  The following week I'm going back to the US for a few weeks, which means I don't properly start "living" here until October.  At which point I can begin my grand plans of playing music, making art, experimenting with the Uberman's Sleep Schedule, and other things ....

Today BoingBoing ran a nice post about Joybubbles, and the history of phone phreaking. Rather than reBlog it, I though I'd save my old interview from Internet oblivion.

When I was 18, I worked for the University of Pittsburgh Information Science library, mostly shelving books and doing general student summer job tasks. That summer, Joybubbles was visiting the library to listen to every episode of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood (which were archived there), and my duties included changing videocassettes for him. Chris Strunk and I talked him into doing an interview one night, and it was published in a little zine that Dan Goldberg and I did called Used To (named after the Wire song, but also a strange and awkward little phrase we liked).

Somehow the zine made its way to an enthusiastic librarian somewhere who nominated it for Jen Angel's Zine Yearbook. It was selected and published in an abridged form in volume 3 of the Yearbook, which I see is now selling for $97 on Amazon. Later on, Harper's magazine asked for a copy but nothing ever came of it, so my dream of appearing in a magazine my father subscribed to never came to fruition.

I kept the unabridged version in static HTML on my Pitt account for years; I was surprised to see it still alive and linked to from Wikipedia when Joybubbles passed away last August. However, my Pitt account has since been deactivated and the interview is only found now in archive.org's Wayback machine.

Anyway, I have reposted the article here in all of its HTML glory. Ten years on I am still wondering if I will ever meet anyone as fascinating and accessible.

On the Terminal Boredom messageboard, someone started a brilliant thread, asking about 'The first time you ever heard Minor Threat'.  The brilliant thing about it is everyone's heard Minor Threat - at least everyone who would be reading Terminal Boredom - and apart from a few naysayers, everyone remembers this moment and the impact it had on them.  Except me.

It's really easy for me to fall into nostalgic reveries about my adolescence, when I discovering things that seemed secret and life-changing all the time.  I'll try to avoid that here, but I did post about the first time I heard of Minor Threat, which actually predated my actual hearing them by a few years.  To quote myself:

7th grade, a friend of my family's has died and I'm at the funeral home in St. Clairsville, OH.  I'm downstairs in the lounge of the funeral home where people are smoking, and there's this incredibly obese metal guy in a suit, but I can still tell he's metal.  He's there for another funeral home viewing (as there were 2 or 3 in the place), and we're talking and I tell him I'm into metal (which at the time for me is MTV stuff like black album-era Metallica, etc.)  He says Metallica is his favorite metal band but his second favorite is Minor Threat, but I think he's saying Minor Fret which makes me think they're a total shredding Yngvie Malmstein-kinda thing.  So I thought they were tech metal called Minor Fret up until I actually heard them, which was probably 2 years later on a mix tape or something.

This I remember more than when I actually did hear their music.  Lately I've been talking with friends about the change brought by the Internet regarding how accessible things are - today, any kid could download "In My Eyes" in less time than the song itself lasts and make their own assessment - but it wasn't that easy then, of course.  No shit, Fail - but --

I realise now that back in these times -- when I would read descriptions of music in lieu of actually hearing it -- these textual descriptions influenced my tastes and artistic direction, often moreso than the music itself.

In this era of accessibility - an era that I still occasionally fear may end due to a Net Neutrality meltdown, a Draconian copyright enforcement or maybe just an environmental dark age - the treasure at the end of the map is nothing special anymore.  Because language generally fails to describe music, it creates a layer of abstraction that opens more possibilities in the imagination.  I still enjoy reading descriptions of music and find the music often disappointing, or different, compared to the luxurious gateways painted by the prose.  

Here's an example: 

a percise collage of beautiful sound made with more instruments then a parrot could handle, such as Plastic guitar, bass, clarinet, banjo, optigon/organ,egg slicer, ratchets, broken toys, fan motors, whirliegigs, glasses, tape loops..etc. poor rabbits quickly hide when they see the red head with the twitching eye play his tunes with more then 34 hands at the same time, this could be the soundtrack for some seriously fucked up road circus, dead rabbits crawl out of a lazy elephants hat while a sad tapeloop of a rotting harmonium plays your uncle vomits fave cough sirup tap dance blur, oozing for some romantic noise crackles, the nostalgia of the banana fish days putss him down in his cough again wheeping like a black cat on an attic in new jersey!

This is Dennis Tyfus, describing the new Angst Hase Pfeffer Nase LP on his label Ultra Eczema.   I haven't heard the album yet, though I want to.  The description makes me want to stop writing here and get back to my own recording projects.  Dennis (who is a great writer though will probably never appear in a Norton anthology) has made me imagine something grotesque, beautiful and carnivalesque, soaked in the whimsy of experimentation through a damaged vision.  It's this idea of 'play' that still excites and keeps me engaged with experimental/surreal/weird/whatever music. 

I was going to go on about Minor Threat actually but I've let myself get sidetracked, and I'll end this here. There's plenty of time for that in the future.

Sorry for the low volume of posts lately; the pressures of moving, etc. are starting to take over.

Though it doesn't say so on the flyer, Neil and I will be accompanied by Laura Molloy.  Hope to see you there!

Today Slate's got an excellent Venn diagram of Bush Administration scandals so you can see who exactly might be prosecuted for what. Of course it doesn't cover all of the scandals (I'm not sure that would be possible to represent in 2-dimensional space) but it's a nice start. Though I'm sure these fuckers will escape any sort of punishment for their crimes, it's at least nice to dream of justice.

kottke.org linked to this list of popular Boat names today:

Most popular sailboat names

1. Orion
2. Zephyr
3. Stargazer
4. Free Spirit
5. TBD
6. Cheers
7. Mariah
8. Solitude
9. Sandpiper
10. Calypso
11. Banana Wind
12. MoonDance
13. PATRIOT
14. Mental Floss
15. valhalla

We here at icewhistle.com take boat names very seriously, and felt the need to not just reBlog this but to specifically post it here, to call attention to the 10,000 Boat Names website. Strangely I couldn't find Sumpin Else, Hl'Fella, Hulovit or Bottom Sup. At least Sayanara is in the database. I will search for the rest of the Bleu Shut boats when I don't have a day job to do.

Today's Electoral-vote.com (one of the best sites covering the election) talks about the major influx of newly registered Democratic voters, showing how in every state except New Mexico the Dems have registered far more new voters than Republicans. Some of this is attributed to the primary dragging on til the very last state:

All those (Obama) Democrats who were moaning that Clinton's refusal to give in was going to hurt the party need to eat a second helping of crow tonight. Her persistence led to huge registration gains which may serve the party well in November.

True enough, I'll eat some crow. For years I wondered why the Democrats didn't focus more of their energy on registering voters in poor, economically struggling areas. Then Howard Dean took over as DNC chair and now they do. Of course, it's possible a lot of new voters registered Democrat just to vote in the primary, when they might actually be Republicans (like Limbaugh's Operation Chaos or whatever it's called) or independents. But still, these figures are yet another lucky alignment of the stars for this November.

As the final minutes of yesterday's Glasgow-only bank holiday ticked away, I realised that this is the last long weekend I'll have in Glasgow. This is significant only because I've had quite a few of them, and through every one I am plagued with the feeling I've wasted it. This time, like most of the others, I whiled away the time by recording, reading, watching some films, cooking, and cycling a bit. I can't think of what I could have done to be more productive, yet without an actual 'product' at the end of the three days it feels disappointing.

I watched a few films this weekend, including War, Inc. Though I didn't realise this til I saw the credits, the script was co-written by Mark Leyner of Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog fame. I loved Leyner when i was in high school. His absurd, hilarious mish-mash of pop culture and gonzo narratives spoke directly to my soul. It's not that I've moved on to more "highbrow" fiction; I just kinda forgot about him, due to his reduced literary output.

War, Inc. is enjoyable, despite the critical lashing it received. It's a Philip K Dick-inspired futuristic satire on the Iraq War that updates Gross Pointe Blank with a pisstake attitude and narrative excess that approaches (though comes nowhere near) Southland Tales territory. It's got John Cusack stumbling through it, totally upstaged by Joan Cusack's minor role; it's Syriana meets James Bond divided by heavy layers of irony.

The biting commentary on Halliburtonesque war profiteering isn't subtle, nor is it particularly convincing. Because of the over-the-top nature of the film the politics just become a sideshow to the main focus, which is actually a pretty conventional adventure film. When it ended I felt disappointed, thinking about what this could have been - an indictment of the Bush administration and the 'militarisation of pop culture' while still being absurd and funny. But I dug it anyway; the action/fight sequences were surprisingly good. Three Kings it is not, but it made an otherwise slow Sunday afternoon quickly pass.

Last night I attempted to watch William Klein’s A Model Couple but I accidentally put on A Perfect Couple, directed by Robert Altman in 1979. OK, I love Altman and here’s one that I haven’t watched yet, still from his 70’s period but the tail-end, that post-Nashville, starting-to-lose it phase that produced films like A Wedding and Quintet, culminating in (the brilliant) Popeye and pretty much ending his career for a decade. Right. Sounds good, so I stick with it.

I actually have a soft spot for the so-called “bad” Altmans. OC and Stiggs is great; I even enjoyed Beyond Therapy, of which the critical consensus is that it’s Altman’s utter nadir. Actually I would rather watch either of those films again than sit through Nashville a second time, even though Nashville is completely brilliant and his masterpiece etc etc - because they don’t have 2 hours of bad country music in them. Plus there’s my whole love of non-B-movie trainwreck films, and love of all American films from the 1970s. A Perfect Couple sounded promising anyway - it’s from the 70’s and it stars Paul Dooley - how bad could it be?

It’s actually not horrible, just bad; but it starts with a classically brilliant Altman soundmix where Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin are caught in a rainstorm. Everything is layered and distorted and it’s impossible to tell what’s going on and it’s just perfect, with that technique he never abandoned. This scene, though the high point of the film, managed to keep my interest for the next hour or so via the hope that there would be something equally dense. Sadly, there wasn’t. This is a musical, based around an awful production called “Keeping ‘Em Off the Streets,” a plotless theatre performance put together by a bunch of out of work rockers, led by the guy who played J.C. in Jesus Christ Superstar (the movie version, not the superior stage version with the dude from Deep Purple).

So I’m tolerant of this, at least for the first 75%, cause I’m thrilled to see Paul Dooley play a romantic lead, and this Heflin woman who kinda looks like Skeletor is OK too. And Henry Gibson! (more on him below). There’s the typical Altman perversity - the man’s subverted every other genre of film so why not attack the romantic comedy too? His method of doing this is simply to cast Paul Dooley as a romantic lead; it’s the mark of Altman Perversion that I see in even his most dire films. This is slightly younger Paul Dooley of course, meaning mid-40’s Dooley, where he isn’t that jowly yet, but still clearly not supposed to be a romantic lead. This is the days before Judd Apatow, of course.

The DVD featurette is a 20 minute documentary about this film, which is about 15 minutes longer than it needed to be since Altman offered his brief comments at the beginning and the rest is about how great the musical is. See, Altman says that Alan Nichols had written this shitty musical and he wanted to make a film out of it, and Altman wanted to make a romantic comedy where the lead is someone unattractive like Paul Dooley, so he thought “why not?” Except of course Altman doesn’t say the musical is shitty, though it is. And also, he says that he thinks A Perfect Couple stands up against any of the other films he ever made, which it doesn’t.

The thing that I realised the next morning is that Altman probably didn’t write any more of a script than that, and probably didn’t care either. Though this is probably the most commercial film of his I’ve seen - perhaps the most desperately commercial - yet it still has essentially no writing to it. There’s the basic plot, which is two dumpy people meet on a computer dating service, and the Guy lives in a really repressive traditionally Greek household and the Girl is involved in this rock band she doesn’t like, and that’s it. There is no more to it. Nothing interesting even happens, really.

And enter Henry Gibson. He plays some sort of family friend, and he has about four minutes of screen time in the whole film, and he completely fucking nails it in that magical Henry Gibson way that I can’t quite explain but you just have to see it. Honestly, watch this film just for Henry Gibson’s lines, and fast-forward the rest - definitely fast-foward the songs.

The songs are really, really lousy. In the self-fellating documentary one of the producers even admits that they suffer from the ‘trappings of 70’s rock’ (I think that’s how he puts it - it was late, and I’m not going to search for the exact quote just to put in a blog post). But I like 70’s rock - all sorts of it - and this is just terrible. If they sounded like Led Zeppelin or Aerosmith or Fleetwood Mac I could have handled it; instead it’s some sort of watered down soul/rock/pop big band that just SUCKS. And as the film progresses, there’s gradually more and more songs. It reminds me of how I used to watch the James Bond marathons on TBS when I was in high school, and I realised rather quickly what Ted Turner’s commercial programming schedule was - the first commercial break was a full 30 minutes into the film, then the second one came 20 minutes later, then 15 minutes, then down to the regular 8 minutes for the duration of the film. In other words, it draws you in and then exacerbates the torture near the end, when it hurts more. That’s kinda what lying through all those Keeping ‘Em Off the Streets songs felt like.

At one point when it looks like things aren’t gonna work for Paul Dooley and Marta Heflin, he goes on a date with another girl from the computer dating service. And this girl is supposed to be vapid and slutty, and she’s there to teach Paul Dooley that he actually really does care about Marta Heflin, a plot device that’s found in probably every other RomCom ever made. (Furthermore, and this would be a footnote if there was an easy way to do footnotes on blog posts, it’s completely unclear why they fell in love in the first place. They go on one date, and they stand each other up for the second, and then after hitting him with a metal rod and sending him to the hospital she announces her love for him. This absolutely disinterest in the plot is what I was talking about above.) Anyway, the other girl, played by Ann Ryerson also of Caddyshack, looks a bit like Dominique Labourier from Celine and Julie Go Boating. She’s fun and way hotter and of course, there’s that scene where Paul Dooley is gonna bang her but he decides not to - because he makes the Right Choice, and RomComs are all about Love triumphing over Bitterness or whatever. The thing is, this film would have been way better if Dooley actually DOES bang her and then goes home and feels incredibly shitty about it. Maybe so shity that he can't get out of the funk, and isn't able to rekindle things with Marta Heflin, and the film ends on a miserable bleak note. Because that’s what you didn’t see in films then, and maybe you’d see it now in an Apatow film or something edgy and postmodern, but you didn’t see it in 1979 and that’s why it woulda been great. Because guys like Paul Dooley don’t often get to sleep with girls like Caddyshack.

Also - I forgot to mention that there is very little actual “comedy” in this RomCom, but enough that you can tell it’s supposed to be funny - there’s this ongoing thing where they can’t actually have sex with each other (Dooley and Heflin, I’m talking about) because they keep getting interrupted, no privacy, etc. It’s absolutely Buñuelian - yet dull.

However it’s inspired me to finally watch the rest of Altman’s 70s work. I’ve still never made it all the way through Quintet, and that’s a film I’ve been meaning to watch for at least five years (it ain’t easy). I’m really looking for H.E.A.L.T.H., which is a 1980 film that I can’t find anywhere, though allmovie.com hints that it has shown on American TV recently which means someone’s gotta have a tape of it. It was actually co-written by Paul Dooley, who is a brilliant character actor that manages to do the best he can in this. It may not rival his performance as Wimpy in Popeye - I mean, let’s face it, that’s just fucking tight - or the dad from Breaking Away - but he is capable, which is all that matters. If this were made today I’d imagine some nightmare casting like Lewis Black or maybe an African-American targeted remake with the kid who played Urkel or something.

But thankfully this film has been forgotten, except that some company felt it was worthy to release on DVD (to which I am grateful, but suspicious). Was there actually a huge demand for A Perfect Couple to be issued on DVD? I know that even for an indie label you have to press a minimum like, like, 1,000 DVDs; I'm sure these big companies have even larger basic pressings, say, 10,000 copies. Do they actually think there are 10,000 people out there who want to own this on DVD? Or even 1,000? Maybe my sense of demographics is totally screwed up - certainly thousands of people saw it in its original theatrical run, and a few of them maybe loved it in 1979 and will now want to own it in letterboxed digital glory. But how many, really? Is there a way that the manufacturer can actually break even on a film like this? Is it some sort of tax writeoff for them?

There's a good interview with Matt Bai in the new issue of the Believer, which you can read online. I particularly like his analysis of the legacy of Dean's 2004 campaign, which I supported:

Dean himself will tell you that the failure of his campaign was the failure to make a transition to a broader, credible candidacy, to articulate a more constructive agenda for the country in a way that seemed reassuring to people. He was channeling so much fury that he was never really able to transcend it. And I think he regrets that. I know he regrets that. Nonetheless, the party that emerged from the 2004 campaign did not belong to John Kerry (though he thought it did). It did not belong to John Edwards or the Clintons. The party that emerged from 2004 belonged to Howard Dean.

During the brutal Clinton/Obama primary, I felt that the real debate was over the future of the party. The Clintonite strategy is the one of the past; of focusing on the swing states, doing the big-money donor thing, and trying ruthlessly to win. Obama, regardless of who or what he actually stands for, symbolised the Dean democrats - the angry lefties at the pub, the Matt Yglesiases of America, and the desperate workers who were dealt a raw deal by 8 years of Bill Clinton. Maybe I was overdramatising it, but I really saw the primary as far more important than the reductive personality game the media was playing.

Now the primary already feels like it happened sixty years ago. The general election campaign is looming and it's already starting to feel like the Clinton v Obama battle was irrelevant. (Or as I saw it, the McAuliffe v Dean battle, a battle not so much about platform ideology but about organisational ideology - how to raise money, how to connect with the oft-overused phrase 'grassroots', and how to built the party in 50 states). A shift of attention away from the party faithful to the general "independent" voter is expected - it's necessary, sure. But all of the talk about the 'base' of a party (such as how McCain is struggling to connect with his Ginrichite base) greatly simplifies the dynamic of an electorate, even within a party. There's a Democratic base, but that base differs wildly. The progressive left is already screaming about Obama's FISA vote, and his faith-based initiative talk scares all non-believers. Obama's gonna find himself in the difficult position of trying to appease not his base but his bases. The Obama campaign staff has been brilliant at recognising the "Dean base" within the party and doing exactly the right things to strengthen their support. But now that he's gotten over the primary hurdle, he'll have the same challenge of reassurance that Dean admitted to failing at.

I am really bummed to hear that Bruce Conner has died. I first read about Conner when he was interviewed in the RE/Search Pranks book, a book that has vastly influenced me... and I first saw A Movie in my Experimental Cinema class - the same class where I saw pretty much everything else that I love and revere (see this site's iconography, purloined from Robert Nelson).

The found footage technique of A Movie is nothing special today, where recombinant art is everywhere and YouTube is full of weird amateur slideshows. But there's something very pure about it; it's still wonderfully irreverant and absurd. I smile every time I see it, and I've watched it a lot.

But Conner was more versatile, artistically - his Report is an experimental film approach to dealing with the Kennedy assassination, made up of Zapruder residue and the Dallas police scanner from that day. It uses a very minimal visual style at the critical moments of the audio track, mostly black and white solid screens in a flickering pattern. I haven't seen it for years but I remember being blown away by how powerful it is, and how completely different in tone it is compared to everything else I have seen by Conner.

Cosmic Ray and the Devo fils are also great.... he will be missed.

This morning I found myself thinking about advertising in general - and just how completely normal it seems to me, a 28-year old who has grown up in the United States. Logos, slogans, and other residue of the coprorate advertising language are so ingrained into my life that I rarely take the time anymore to even think about what they mean. I imagine a teenager, growing up today, would be even less likely to question it. The corporate logo, when at it's most successful, is sigil magick in operation. Attempts to counter this (such as graffiti, or organised anti-consumerist projects a la Adbusters magazine) invariably end up using the same language of the advertisers, and therefore end up just being another commodity. I know this isn't a brilliant insight; yet I felt a strange awe at how the conglomeration of Nike swooshes and Apple logos is wrapped around my brain and I don't even think anything of it.

"Our job is to manipulate the consumer by arousing his desires," says one of the executives in Putney Swope. "Then we satisfy those desires at a fixed price." This manipulation is completely taken for granted now; it has been granted access to every facet of our existence. I still remember going to the cinema in the days when you didn't see a bunch of 35mm commercials before the trailers (back when I was of the age that saw things like Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! in the theatre [yes, someone actually saw it {Stallone, I'll take my refund now, just email me!}]). These days I go to the cinema so rarely that I'm not used to it; I still feel a small bit of outrage each time I sit through an Orange mobile phone advert after I've paid £8 for a film. The rest of the theatre, often largely made up of of high school students, thinks nothing of it. A lot of people enjoy the ads and prefer them to a commercial-free zone.

I watched an excellent 3-part documentary on Coca-cola last week, The Cola Conquest. It devoted an episode to the advertising battle between Coke and Pepsi, and specifically how they target developing nations. I've always been critical of cola companies for the way they push their products into cultures that lack proper nutrition and dental care, so this was a bit of 'preaching to the converted'. But in the past week I've started to notice the the red-and-white Coke logo everywhere, like it's a living creature - an organic form that replicates like rabbits or bacteria. It probably didn't help that I also just read Philip K Dick's The Simulacra, where commercials are living creatures that cling to people and shout their message until they are killed.

I went to see a talk by Chris Cutler when I was an undergraduate, and he said something about how the continual bombardment of advertising affects him every day - I think he was trying to make some point about fair use and sampling - anyway, that really stuck with me. But I normally don't think about this saturation; it's easier to let it all wash over me and get on with whatever pursuits I'm normally engaged in. Every once in awhile I'll feel advertising's glossy ambience to be overwhelming, and then I have one of those 'breakthrough' moments. It's kinda like in They Live, where Roddy Piper puts on the sunglasses and sees signs everywhere that say 'Obey'. Of course that's another tired sci-fi metaphor. Yet it's definitely harder to notice things that are all around you.

The merging of advertising and entertainment has been happening since long before I was born, but now I see it sliding into the realm of art (which is much more frightening). Lately I've been noticing a lot of 'viral videos' and guerilla marketing practices popping up on the various art/activism blogs I read. The faceless people at Wimbeldon is a good example; if it was the work of some subversive art organisation, it would have been amazing. Instead, it's just a marketing campaign for Lotus Cars. If logo satire/defacing and groups like the Yes Men are artists/activists who are co-opting the rules of corporations and advertising, then this Wimbledon thing is the inversion of that - predatory advertisers using the language of subversion to peddle their products.

This, to me, is very dangerous. Maybe it's because I'm too concerned with intention; I have to know the motive behind an idea. Maybe I should learn to enjoy an art or action for it's aesthetic/cultural/comedic/thought-stimulating value, regardless of whether it was created by some impoverished Berlin artist or Nike. But I don't think I'm capable of that; I have to make the distinction. Would I be better to evolve past us vs. them mentality, and just get a kick out of something?

I'm afraid that viral marketing is more of a virus than its name suggests. Yes, it will replicate, relying on people like you and me to spread itself, which is why it's called viral marketing. But it will also eat away at any efforts to oppose its goals. It uses surrealism, surprise, and shock to sell products, thus bleaching out the effects of these devices to critique and suggest alternatives to consumerism. Before I knew it was Lotus Cars, I viewed the faceless people stunt suspiciously, having just read Web Urbanists's excellent History of Guerilla Marketing primer. Viral marketing has already started to ruin my appreciation of actions like this; I want that 'innocence' back.

Now that I have this blog, I can post about my perverse food experiments here instead of dumping things to the blindness tumblelog.

I've only had Surinamese food once or twice, on visits to the Netherlands, but it has the potential to be my favorite cuisine. I fear that more frequent access may knock it down a few rungs in my ethnic pantheon; e.g: I used to be obsessed with Ethiopian food, but this was due to its scarceness where I lived. After repeated exposure, I still love Ethiopian food, but it's no longer my favorite food. (Though a few years in Glasgow has put it on the endangered species list, as the only Ethiopian restauraunts in the UK are in London).

Anyway, the last time I was in Den Haag I found an Asian grocery and stocked up on jars of Surinamese pastes (and some Indonesian stuff too). Most of these are extremely spicy - so much that I think you might be supposed to use them as a concentrate, diluted ... I don't know. My favorite (that I've tried so far) is Moksi Patoe Tempeh Sambal, which has little chunks of tempeh in an insanely hot (yet sweet) gravy.

I often make pizzas with this as the sauce, which can be quite scorching. Tonight I decided to alter an earlier experiment where I added a small amount of this paste to Indian samosas.

First I made some dough - I actually did this on Sunday - and following the doughmaster's advice, I let it age a few days. Actually, I was just too lazy to use it on Sunday after it had risen, and yesterday my partner made dinner ... so it sat in the bowl, slightly fermenting and developing a nice odor.

I rolled out the dough and stuck a dollop of tempeh sambal in the middle, as seen on the right. Then I folded them over and made little pierogie-samosa-empanada structures, moistening the dough a bit at the seam. The little black spots you see aren't mouse droppings but rather roasted barley seeds, as the dough mixture was about 65% white, 25% barleyflour, and a bit of wholemeal (to use up a bag). I put a small amount of shredded red Leicester cheese in each one, but not enough to make them too cheesy.

I expected these to be pretty disgusting. My initial plan was to bake 'em, maybe brushed with a coating of soymilk, but then I thought "Fuck it, this is Scotland" and threw them in the deep fryer (well, a saucepan with some oil in it).

I hate deep frying at home; I swear that everything in my flat is coated with an invisible layer of grease now; I need to take a shower.

But ... these are awesome.

I will feel disgusting for the next two days, and I have probably taken some years off my life. But these taste fantastic, like Hot Pockets of Surinamese gruel.