Indubitably good news from the ICTR, even if it has taken them a ridiculously long time to get there. Every conviction at ICTR places another brick in the wall of our defenses against future genocide, even if we’re still not dealing very successfully with large-scale rights abuses in the present day…
December, 2008
17
Dec 08
A strange unit
Philip K Dick was born this week in 1928 – December 16th, to be precise – and died in 1982. I’m fairly comfortable proposing that in fact he did not die, but was memetically reverse-engineered into a viral fiction calling itself “The Empire Never Ended”, then re-inserted into his own lightcone around 1940. If you think that sounds strange, then you’ve obviously never read any of his books, and I suggest that you remedy this as quickly as possible. His official website offers little in the way of enlightenment, but I recommend Robert Crumb’s cartoon of one of the key episodes in his history.
People often ask me why I never took drugs when I was younger. The short answer: reading Philip K Dick is like taking drugs, except the effects never wear off.
14
Dec 08
Hacking the city (Tirana extended mix)
Tirana massively improved since I was last here seven years ago; the standard narrative places responsibility for this firmly at the feet of progressive mayor Edi Rama. There’s no doubt that Rama has had an enormous and generally positive impact on the city, but that narrative fails to take into account the role that the citizens of a city play in making and remaking that city. For a few days, that included me.1
The city is an act of consensus. It’s a negotiation from which it is difficult to remove yourself, except by physically leaving. Those who remain are the raw material from which the city is built; the construction of the city reflects those people and shouldn’t be mistaken for the city itself. TIrana feels like it’s on the move, and that’s not the result of painting a few buildings in bright colours.
So the new TIrana reflects a new generation of Albanians, that much is clear.2 Nowhere clearer than in Blloku (the Block), an area populated almost entirely by young people, especially at night. Decent bars with free wi-fi, upmarket shops with well-dressed assistants, pavements that aren’t punctuated by neck-breaking holes. From the Sky Club Cafe you can watch it all passing as the tower rotates – but then you can’t help but notice the rest of the city.
Tirana rolls three ways. The old communist-era apartments are still standing, the worse for wear and perpetually in need of repair. The new capitalist-era construction is going up, glossy and magazine-friendly, but limited to a few key areas. Meanwhile the future of the city is being written on the periphery – urban sprawl, particularly in the direction of the airport, is where most newcomers to the city end up. Illegal and improvised housing is the future of urban development – hacking the city.
You’ll find people who argue that setting up community wi-fi, mixing virtual and physical spaces, and even graffitti are all examples of hacking the city. They’re not. Hacking means getting into the guts of a thing and gripping it, shaping it to suit your purpose, not skateboarding in a car park. The people who hack the city are the ones building extra floors on their apartment building, extending blocks into grey areas, stealing electricity from the grid, throwing up kiosks on street corners.
The cities of the Balkans occupy an odd space between the first and third world,3 and their future is probably the best we can hope for in our future. First world cities won’t be able to sustain their infrastructure, tending towards decay; third world cities won’t manage to construct the infrastructure that defines the industrial west, and so they won’t feel that decay, but they will suffer the indignity of being perpetually hacked by their inhabitants.
It’s a mistake to look at cities as machines that can be fixed – they’re an act of consensus, remember? The only way the city will survive is if the planners and the hackers keep negotiations open and open-ended, continually plastering and patching and reinventing. Hacking the city is the only real option we have and, to that end it’s those communist-era apartments that show the way, not the shiny new luxury apartments,
- I’m hoping to get to SAM in Basel for the Balkanology exhibition, and to get hold of a copy of Prishtina is Everywhere soon. [↩]
- Albania of course being know for its relatively young demographic within Europe. [↩]
- Deliberate use of archaic terms signifying familiarity with their usage! [↩]
14
Dec 08
Top 10 Albums of 2008 That I Didn’t Listen To
There was so much music that I didn’t listen to this year, this list was very difficult to put together. This is in no particular order, although the one that I was most excited about not listening to was the Max Tundra effort. Maybe in 2009 somebody will send me a promo copy.
- Parallax Error Will Behead You – Max Tundra
- The Seldom Seen Kid – Elbow
- Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill – Grouper
- Hercules and Love Affair – Hercules and Love Affair
- London Zoo – The Bug
- Stainless Style – Neon Neon
- Koffi – Koffi Olomide
- Leucocyte – e.s.t.
- Black Sea – Fennesz
- Uproot – DJ/rupture
- Tchamantche - Rokia Traore
- The Beauty and the Sea – Mor Karbasi
- Notes from Elsewhere – Peter Mulvey
- Carry on Breathing – Cassetteboy
- River Mouth Echoes – Maja S K Ratkje
- Make the Road by Walking – Menahan Street Band
- Reality Checkpoint – Logistics
- See Clear Now – Wiley
13
Dec 08
The uneven distribution of human rights
On 9 December 1948 the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide was adopted by the UN General Assembly; on 10 December 1948, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was likewise adopted. (The General Assembly was busy that week, hey?) Despite continued breaches of both of these documents – which if we’re brutally honest, was fairly predictable – they have shaped global political discourse ever since – not just in the field of human rights, but much more widely.
I want to write more about human rights, but I fear that anything I write will be reduced in the writing of it. These two documents – but especially the Genocide Convention – are cornerstones of the reason I do the work that I do, building blocks of the person that I am. I fear pressing against them too hard – not because they might collapse, but because I might collapse. So instead I will post this story about Raphael Lemkin, architect of the Genocide Convention and one of my heroes, who, by the time the Convention was adopted, had lost his entire family except his brother.
He walked the halls every day from the spring of 1946 until Dec. 9, 1948, when the General Assembly, in Paris, adopted a resolution approving his convention. That day reporters went looking for him to rejoice in his triumph. But we could not find him until, hours later, we thought to look into the darkened Assembly hall. He sat there weeping as if his heart would break. He asked please to be left in solitude. Then this Lemkin came back to the corridors for years, pleading with delegation after delegation to follow through on the U.N. resolution by getting their countries to sign the treaty… But he died alone on Aug. 28, 1959, without medals or prizes, in a hotel in New York. There were seven people at the graveside when Raphael Lemkin was buried.
Lemkin’s fate – persecuted, ridiculed and ignored – tragically mirrors the experience of many, many human rights activists over these years. Progress is not guaranteed, and never secure, and so we keep working in the hope that one day human rights are distributed more evenly, from America to Zimbabwe.
13
Dec 08
The comicbook in the marketplace
What are they reading in Prospect magazine? Why, comics:
Two recent American novels have spirited the topic of superheroes out of its usual quarters in comic books. In Superpowers by David J Schwartz, five college students attend a party and gain amazing abilities overnight, for reasons left wisely unexplained… More successfully, Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman alternates between two narrators, the evil genius Doctor Impossible and the aspiring superheroine cyborg Fatale… both a send-up of the superhero genre and a loving homage to it.
Instead of reading poorly-written1 novels about superheroes, why isn’t this person reading superheroes in their natural habitat – the comic book?2 One of the reasons – I would argue often the main reason – why the sort of person that reads Prospect magazine doesn’t read comics is simply the design of most comic books. For every comic that has a reasonably well-designed cover, you’ll find at least one that’s average and at least five that are downright embarrassing. Here’s a nice picture to break up the text, from the cover of All Star Superman 10:
To most people, books are a persona signal, an outward sign of the sort of person that they want to go Kevin has the answer:
This, of course, got me to thinking about how comics, particularly the ones coming from DC and Marvel, compare in design to what’s on the book market lately and what I would do to sell graphic novels and trade paperback collections alongside Twilight and whatever adventure Tom Clancy’s Op Center has found themselves on this time… I think a lot of the comic book design mentality revolves around a culture that already exists, particularly in the case of Marvel and DC’s superhero lines.
He then goes on to deliver some nifty designs that show that you can communicate what a comic is about using cover design. His tastes are the opposite of most comics – minimal and representative – but the point is that good design helps to sell books. For example, this cover for Daredevil is fantastic, the design matching the themes of the book perfectly.
I grew up reading the classic newsstand comic – cheap four-colour action wrapped in a garish cover – and never had a problem with it then, so why is it a problem now? It’s a problem because comics are trying to compete in a crowded marketplace, and they’re a visual form – so why on earth wouldn’t you market them visually? In a culture where superheroes are now a mainstay of the film industry, you don’t have to be embarrassed by the content any more – but you can still be embarrassed by the packaging.
Nuff said.
- The original quote says the first suffers from “poorly differentiated characters and an excess of narrative viewpoints”, while the second proves that the “inclusion of every comic-book trope in his world can be distracting and the plot twists are underwhelming” [↩]
- Of course superheroes are now migrating from to a new natural habitat, the cinema, but that’s literally another story. [↩]
6
Dec 08
Pirates in the Balkans!
Now at last I can hold my head up high on International Talk Like A PIrate Day, because it’s now official. Pirates from Serbia attack Bulgarian ships on the Danube:
About 40 unstaffed ship convoys were attacked and robbed in the past two years at the Serbian port of Smederevo, located to the east of Belgrade… Although the Serbian pirates’ attacks are not as spectacular as those taking place in Somalian or Indonesian waters, as the former usually don’t have any casualties, they nevertheless attack ships with armed men and steal cables and various goods, such as metals, coke, wheat, and sugar.
There’s a lot less glamour involved, obviously, but also less chance of having your vessel sunk by the Danish navy.
In other news, Prva Banka Crne Gore asked the Montenegrin government for a €40 million bail-out to get it through the financial crisis that the government insists isn’t a problem. Prva Banka is of course 30% owned by Aco Đukanović, who happens to be the older brother of Milo Đukanović, Prime Minister of the government that Prva Banka is asking for money from. Oh, and did I mention that Capital Invest – owned by Milo – has a 7% stake in Prva Banka as well? Hopefully the bail-out package will be approved and the Đukanović family’s long nightmare of financial insecurity will be over.
If all this news of pirates and financial crisis is getting you down, you could do a lot worse than buy a copy of Scurvy Dogs, a comic book about pirates in a financial crisis. Here the team face off against a posse of monkeys, “the pigeons of the seas”.
“Pain Tyme” indeed.
5
Dec 08
The soundtrack to the war on terror
While reading this post you should be listening to
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. by Muslimgauze
DJ/rupture writes on Muslimgauze in Bidoun:
He had no interest in making Middle Eastern-sounding music. Jones was after Middle Eastern-sounding sound… In a 1994 interview, Jones said, “I wouldn’t talk to any [Israelis]; the whole people are disgusting, so no, I wouldn’t.”… I’m not the only one struggling to come to grips with the music’s context. One commentator on the music networking site Last.fm advises newcomers to “get past the ridiculously fundamentalist/trollish titles of his tracks and albums as they bear no relation to the music at all.”
But of course not all of the track titles have anything to do with the Israel-Palestine conflict – my favourite track is called “Turkish Manipulator of Limbs”, for which I struggle to find a particularly anti-Israeli meaning.
I first discovered Muslimgauze in Buybook in Sarajevo – a whole row of CDs that looked as if they’d been slipped in while nobody was looking. Without any context for the sounds I was hearing, I assumed it was some mixed-culture kid from somewhere in the fertile crescent who’d discovered how to splice his own tapes. When I found out that Muslimgauze was a Mancunian bedsit musician who never went anywhere near the middle East, it didn’t have any impact at all on what I heard – just the same as when I learnt Bruce Chatwin’s life story, it barely impacted on the impact of what he’d written.
In some ways, as the mythology that somebody constructs around themselves becomes more complete it also becomes more compelling. DJ/rupture is right that Jones was interested in “Middle Eastern-sounding sound” – and achieved it magnificently – but that interest quickly infected his entire artistic persona. The persona was like a scaffolding on which the music was erected, but at the end, even when the music was complete, the scaffolding couldn’t be brought down.
I don’t agree with Jones’ politics – who in their right mind would? – but that doesn’t make the music any less powerful. That was the power that he was aiming for, I think – the power of the dispossessed, the defiance of the raised fist, the shock of the child soldier, the threat of twisted metal – and although I hate to say it, his vision has been the soundtrack to the first decade of the 21st century.
(Bonus beats: DJ/rupture’s now-classic Gold Tooth Thief mix, for free.)
4
Dec 08
Your DNA should thank the ECHR
People should be dancing in the streets at the news that the European Court of Human Rights has ruled unanimously that an individual’s DNA should not be kept on record if they have not been convicted of any offence. However it’s likely that – like most of the news relating to the government’s attempts to gather more and more data on citizens – it won’t register on most people’s radar.
Predictably Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, said that she was “disappointed”, and went on to claim that
DNA and fingerprinting is vital to the fight against crime, providing the police with more than 3,500 matches a month. The government mounted a robust defence before the Court and I strongly believe DNA and fingerprints play an invaluable role in fighting crime and bringing people to justice.
This is the usual line from the government – the law and order cover story always plays well to the tabloid gallery. Unfortunately her belief that a comprehensive DNA database will help to solve more crimes has – as far as I’m aware, and I welcome any correction – never been supported by any evidence, while the Nuffield Council on Bioethics consultation suggested that
Britain has the biggest DNA Database in the world, but making it bigger is not helping to solve more crimes. Collecting more DNA from crime scenes has made a big difference to the number of crimes solved, but keeping DNA from more and more people who have been arrested – many of whom are innocent – has not. Since April 2003, about 1.5 million extra people have been added to the Database, but the chances of detecting a crime using DNA has remained constant, at about 0.36%. (via Genewatch)
If you want to do something about this yourself, I strongly recommend joining NO2ID, who pursue this issue tirelessly, although not in a creepy stalker-ish way, and watch out for people who claim that they’re going to keep you safe by treating you like a criminal.
2
Dec 08
Unacceptable conclusions about Batman R.I.P.
Batman R.I.P. has been making headlines, as DC Comics no doubt prayed it would. Mainstream comic sales dwindle yearly, and the only light at the end of the tunnel is the fact that film-making technology has now caught up with comic-making technology. No news is bad news as far as the big comics companies are concerned – Batman R.I.P. gets a few column inches (the BBC runs it, for god’s sake), DC shift a few more units and everybody gets to pretend that superheros are the thing.
It had its moments, but I’m not going to spread fairy dust on this mess that is Batman R.I.P. – Tucker Stone nails it completely when he says
… if the goal–and yes, this was the fucking goal make no mistake–was to do a Batman story that could stand alongside the hoary old classics, a story that could make good on the promise Grant showed for the character back when he said he wanted to bring back “the old Neal Adams hairy chested sex god Batman”… then hey, yes, no math required: Batman RIP is a miserable failure, and it’s a miserable failure that actually sold out in stores in Wilmington fucking Delaware, because idiots read newspapers, and they thought this was going to be a big deal… Take a bow, squandered talent. Make sure that you and your friend, lofty ambition, sign some autographs on the way out the door. There’s a fucking line.
The problem is that the whole exercise is so transparent. Check out Mr Butter-wouldn’t-melt-in-his-mouth himself, writer Grant Morrison, quoted in the Times:
“It took me by surprise,” says Morrison, who writes the current series Batman RIP for American giant, DC Comics. “I thought a few people would sit up and take notice but 72 newspapers around the world picked up the story and suddenly there was all this excitement and nervousness.
That’s right, Grant. You didn’t have a clue that a plotline that claims to kill off Batman wouldn’t make headlines. Unlike the deaths of Superman and Captain America, both of which generated fairly hefty media interest, but neither of which helped to reverse the death spiral of the comics industry. Every single problem I have with the marketing of comics is summed up in the closing lines of that BBC article:
The storyline included clues which dated back to Batman comics from 40 years ago, [Morrison] added. Wayne may be dead, but publisher DC Comics shows no sign of bringing to an end the Batman franchise… It is not the first time a superhero has met an unfortunate end in the comic world. Last year, Captain America was killed after being shot by a sniper in New York.
Breaking it down:
- Literally nobody cares about clues dating back 40 years except comics bloggers, and even they’re not sure if they should care about them that much. Morrison’s writing is dense because it packs in so many allusions, but allusions only work if the readers can actually make the necessary connection. If they can’t, then they go away disappointed – and you’ve lost yet another reader to the Xbox.
- Everybody knows that the franchise isn’t going to end, and that means that everybody knows that the “death” of Batman is just sleight of hand, a cheap magic trick. The publisher is that man behind the curtain that you’re not supposed to pay attention to, because it’ll spoil the magic. But if the man behind the curtain is issuing press releases about the Death of Batman, then he’s not really behind the curtain any more – and any magic is pretty much screwed.
- Superheroes die all the time. Everybody knows this, at least since the Death of Superman storyline. However superheros never stay dead for very long, which everybody also knows – again, thanks to the Death of Superman (and wasn’t there a Superman film out last year?). So how are you every going to deliver on that promise you made to the public when you went to the newspapers – because, you know, there’s going to be another Batman film out in two years’ time?
If you treat the public with contempt – by promising them something that you won’t deliver, in a book that requires a fairly deep background knowledge to really appreciate, and in a really obvious way – they’re not going to thank you for it. They’re just going to ignore you even more than they were before, because they’ve got other things to do. In the long run, the comics industry doesn’t benefit from this kind of exercise – but if there’s one thing the comics industry appears to be good at, it’s repeating its mistakes over and over and over.
Quelle surprise.