You Spin Me Right Round

Rear cover art (G, Garbage, 1995)

The final track of the album fades out. The laser assembly returns to its starting position with a whir and the disc slows to a halt. All that remains is the faint hum of the speakers. The disc ejects and you place it back in the case, glancing at the artwork before slotting it back into the rack.

The older generations oft pine for the crackle of vinyl and the large elaborate cover art, and I sympathise as someone who has undergone the rite of digging through parents' vinyl collection. Our attitudes to distribution media are more tied up with memory and nostalgia than any qualitative superiority as some audio enthusiasts are always attempting to prove. Whilst technological progress enables me to carry one and a half thousand songs on my old 8GB iPod Nano, which is a hell of a lot more than the 8 track decks my Dad remembers, my own musical experiences in the 90s bind me to the compact disc.

A Design For Life / The Messerschmitt Twins

Electron micrograph of Bacteriophages, Public Domain

Today is exactly a decade since I finished my first play of Metal Gear Solid 2. Or it would have been if I had finished this for the 17th of March.

To begin with, we're not quite what you'd call human.

Back in the 90s I had a lot of shareware and (unbeknownst to me) pirated games. When the PS/1 was replaced with an Aptiva in 1998, I set about porting my stuff via floppy disk. The instant A Drive engaged the screen cut to a blue and red DOS prompt warning me that a virus had been detected. To put it mildly, this was not the most encouraging thing to happen with the brand new computer, as I had a legacy of breaking the old one. This was my first experience with an anti-virus programme and I had never even considered that all those dodgy floppies might be riddled with anything other than the files I put on it. The particular viruses that were detected by Norton (of cross-armed fame) are long forgotten, but in the following years I was captivated by the idea that there's something almost alive in the digital world - unseen technological analogues to our organic processes.

And The Money Kept Rolling In (And Out)

PART TWO OF A SERIES.

Corporate (red)washing, jonathan mcintosh, 2007

Some have never had it so good. You might be mistaken for thinking there was an economic crash not four years ago and that we are living in a recession, but that's because you aren't the 1%. As we saw abroad and now domestically, a leaderless movement has now come to prominence. If successful in nothing else, Occupy has brought home the message of wealth inequality through the 'We are the 99%' slogan. The extreme inversion of the scales in the economic clout of the top 1% versus the remaining 99% betrays an uncomfortable truth about our egalitarian and meritocratic societies - that we are actually living in plutocracies. The egalitarian and meritocratic principles of western society are what comprise The American Dream, and yet like a dream we think we're awake. Eisenhower may have warned us about relations between the state and private contractors during the heights of the New Deal society, but Franklin D Roosevelt spoke in 1938 of a more elementary danger that "among us today a concentration of private power without equal in history is growing". If some members of society have greater private power than others then it logically follows that others have less power. This is the very basic fact that underpins the subversion of liberal democracy.

The Street Parade (Rock The Casbah)

PART ONE OF A SERIES.

President John F. Kennedy, The COM Library, 2009

Kings were put to death long before 21 January 1793, but regicides of earlier times and their followers were interested in attacking the person, not the principle of the king. They wanted another king, and that was all. It never occurred to them that the throne could remain empty for ever.
- Albert Camus, The Rebel, 1951

2011 was by all accounts the most unpredictable year since 1989. A revolutionary wave began sweeping away the Western puppets, just as the Eastern Europeans sent the Soviet puppets to the ash-heap of history. Stability for stability's sake was once the mantra that subjugated the Middle East until the suicide of one man seemingly instigated what neither international free trade nor exiles or internal opposition could persuade. I originally intended to examine the preconditions of these revolutions, but that continues to be a work in progress if not a mystery for future historians. What I have noted, however, is that this wave that has rippled through the Middle East, and other regions to varying degrees, has for the most part been leaderless. When I last wrote a political post in November 2010, the eve of events in Tunisia, I specifically rejected cadres as essential or desirable to revolution. The absence of commanding individuals in Tahrir Square or elsewhere appears to have shown spontaneous and leaderless movements are possible - though the effectiveness of these versus the militarised rebellion in Libya or Syria is yet to be settled.

Don't Believe a Word

mirrors_2, ze1, 2003

I've always taken exception to the idea that you should do something you enjoy professionally. If I was to work as a freelance writer, for instance, I would have starved to death long ago even if I set my own deadlines. I could invoke that old Douglas Adams' quote again, but I wouldn't want to look like I'm trying to boost the word count - even though I just have without quoting it. I specifically put a 'Scheduled Posts' gadget on the blog to try and hold myself to my own weak promises and perhaps, I hoped, the Russian web crawlers that read this blog so often might demand that the Buffy The Vampire Slayer post I've been putting off and on for four years now actually turn up in January 2012 like I said on the 31st of last month. Surely that's why they keep viewing that post fifteen times a day, to communicate in the only way they can? I can't imagine it's because they like what I wrote - it's a bloody list of songs I liked last year.

Music For Your Tape Recorder

This year started with a rich mixture of contemporary releases and older hidden gems thanks to "legal downloads", until May or halfway through the list when I was recommended Trademark Ribbons of Gold. I almost didn't listen to anything else for four months until the pace picked up again when I finally purchased GTAIV and Rockstar did once again provide some well playlisted radio stations. Come the end of November I remembered to check for new releases which led to a cascade of new material for consumption. The below playlist is no longer by month as it would be pointless listing one track for each between May and September.

Running Blind Through Killing Fields, Bred To Kill Them All

First Person Shooter, rimblas, 2009

As revealed at the end of my long-simmering rant against Sony, I unexpectedly recently received a PlayStation 3 as a birthday present. The bundled game was Resistance 3. I'm not one for First Person Shooters. I never experienced the revelation of Wolfenstein 3D because it would never work on my old computer; and I never actually bothered to play the second coming of the FPS, Half Life, despite having purchased it. The last shooter to grace my shelf was Rising Sun eight years ago - the poor quality of which (save for a few interesting moments) pretty much killed any enthusiasm I had off the back of the success of Frontline. Only a particular subgenre of the FPS has ever really appealed to me - the tactical shooter.