Please be informed that I don't update this blog anymore. My new blog is over here.

I'd often checked out this amazing resource of Jorge Luis Borges information, but it was only today that I realised The Modern World, the umbrella site, is a vast resource centre for not only Borges, but also Samuel Beckett, Umberto Eco, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, James Joyce and Thomas Pynchon, plus their 'what's new' section lists new pages about Philip Glass, Neal Stephenson, and Morton Feldman. How do they say... "indespensible".

Adrian Miles, lecturer in New Media at RMIT, has devised this video blog, or 'vog'.

An interesting festival coming up in October, if you're in the Brisbane area, oganised by Multimedia Art Asia Pacific. An international multimedia exploration of the theme of 'excess' ("waste, byproduct, recycling media, minimalism and maximalism").

An interesting new project, ::fibreculture:: aims to examine the theory, policy, education and arts of Australia's growing media / IT nexus. The archive of their mailing list is here.

Going straight from 'One Hundred Years of Solitude' to Borges' 'The Aleph' (of which the entire text is online here), was one of those unplanned actions which turn out to reveal some synergetic concepts. In 'One Hundred Years of Solitude', time slowly grinds away in circles, events repeat themselves, and those who notice this (Jose Arcadio Buendia and his wife Ursula) spiral into madness with the weight of the realisation. In 'The Aleph', all time and space exists in one point, simultaneously. This seems to tie in with Borges' fascination with infinite sources in information (most famously, his infinite library of interlocking rooms). What a pity he died in 1986, as I often wonder what he'd think of the Web.

Usually, when I'm at the Blogger homepage, about to log-in to work on Silent Type, I'll check a few of the recently updated blogs, in the chance that I'll stumble upon a gem. It's rare though, that I'll actually find one. Today however, I found Thinking With My Fingers, Torill Mortensen's blog about MUDs, media studies, and online communications, put together with an analytical edge. Definately worth a look... and yet another Norwegian academic blog I inadvertantly discovered today via the same method, jill/txt is the work of Jill Walker, a researcher in humanistic informatics at the University of Bergen (where I spent a lonely 3 days a few years back).

Currently playing... Vespertine, at last... and well worth the wait. While the CD's playing, an grey haired, grey suited auditor comes through my workshop, inspecting anything of over $1000 value (my workshop resembles an audio-visual graveyard more than anything). First he compliments me on my Sigg water bottle, then asks if it's Bjork that I'm listening to. "She's very distinctive, isn't she" he comments, "she's like Sam Newman... you either love her or hate her". He then lucidly adds "she's been around for ages hasn't she... she's very hard to age".

'One Hundred Years of Solitude' brought me some unexpected interactions on public transport. Travelling home from work one night, on an Epping bound train, an old Italian man tells me that he read the Italian version of the book, many years ago. The plot lost him, but the imagery immersed him. A few days later, rushing between platforms at Flinders Street Station, I spy a man a few years younger than I, clutching a copy of the book. I stop to tell him that I'm reading the same book. He'd only just begun, whilst I was about three quarters through. I told him to stick with it through the slow parts, because there's some mind splitting passages buried in there. Like any epic book or film you become immersed in, it's a strange feeling when it's all over.

Simblog pits social theory against The Sims. Can a struggling artist, living in a squat, survive by selling her oil paintings? click in to find out.

I visited the Melbourne Museum on Saturday, to view the fantasic Reggae Explosion exhibition. Whilst it takes a small corner of the Bunjilaka Gallery, it was nonetheless an intensive overview of the rise of reggae. From the birth of ska, through bluebeat, soundsystems, rocksteady, reggae, dub, dancehall and ragga. Listening posts were available, playing selections from labels such as Island, Blood & Fire, and On-U Sound. Definately worth a visit. While you're there, it should be mentioned that the Melbourne Museum is the current home of CSIRAC, and if you love Jamaican roots music, you should be listening to Chant Down Babylon on 3PBS.

Identical twins Dave and Ryan are exploring the notion of their shared genes with some amazing body modification work. Ryan has had Dave's entire right arm grafted to his torso. Dave had a joint removed from one of his fingers, which was then added to one of Ryan's fingers, giving them an eerie appearance of slightly adjusted reality. (via Glider)

I saw 'Lips of Blood' last night, Jean Rollin's 1973 erotic vampire horror. Whilst not as hallucinogenicaly wonderous as the surrealist queer-horror masterpiece 'Vampyros Lesbos', it still contained a sufficient supply of creepy Euro-horror music, scantily clad female vampires, and that oh-so-French seduction style.

It's life-affirming to listen to Triple J and hear The Birthday Party's 'Release the Bats'.

A few suggestion on what to do if you're in Melbourne this weekend... Lazy go head to head with Philip Samartzis at Pony (68 Little Collins Street), also appearing are the Bearded Ladies and Tim Catlin... Saturday night, at the same venue, Letraset, Hagus, Qua, AI Yamamoto, and DJ Beatrix... next Wednesday at The Empress (714 Nicholson Street) features Dworzec, Qua, Pause, AI Yamamoto and DJ Quockenzokker

Bjork's new single, 'Hidden Place', crawls up the back of your shirt, maybe even beneath your skin, and rolls around the perimeter of your skull. Working with cut-n-paste surgeons Matmos, and domestica house agent Herbert (BTW, read Herbert's fantastic manifesto / personal contract) has further fractured then liquified her 'Homogenic' sound, allowing it to seep in where you least expect it.Wonderful stuff, can't wait for 'Vespertine'.

So here's list of films I saw at MIFF, with very brief description... Pentridge : Some Ghosts and Memories from the Big House(documentary on Melbourne's infamous Pentridge Prison with obligatory Mark 'Chopper' Read interview). Tokyo Bound : Bondage Mistresses of Japan (behind the scenes look at Tokyo's seething S&M underbelly). Brotherhood of the Wolf (French period-conspiracy-supernatural-horror, with some great Woo-style fight scenes). The Irrefutable Truth About Demons (podgy New Zealand demonology horror... all bark, no bite). Little Otik (Czech "militant surrealist" animator Jan Svankmeyer's gruesome re-telling of an old Czech fairytale). Possible Worlds (Robert Lepage's metaphysical quantum-theory science-fiction romance thriller, beautifully shot, hypnotically paced). Berlin Babylon (amazing Baraka-esque documentary of the rebuilding of my favourite city, Berlin). The video Diary of Ricardo Lopez (disturbing video diary of man who sent letter bomb to Bjork, this one had me in an ethical headspin). Gimme Shelter (The Rolling Stones try jumping aboard the free festival bandwagon, only to walk into a logistical nightmare). Beautiful Cyborg (compilation of Anime footage with crisp live electronic soundtrack performed by Philip Brophy, Darren Verhagen and Frank Tetaz). American Nightmare (documentary on the sociological impacts on 60's/70's American horror films). Atanarjuat the Fast Runner (totally amazing Inuit film, based on old Inuit legend... a truly amazing 3 hour experience). I think that's all.

I can't beleive I got through a Melbourne International Film Festival minipass (10 films), whilst working full-time, and studying full-time. Phew, I'm exhausted now, but am left seatching for a way to fill in that spare 2 hours I now have every day.

Google have done it again, there's not only their addictive image search engine, but they've now produced a web-based usenet reader. This may be old news to you, but it's (good) new news to me.

Poul Anderson RIP.

Michael Swanwick is working his way through the periodic table, writing short works of science fiction for each element.

Silent Type keeps disappearing. "The page cannot be found". Hmmm.

Could Peter Singer be the anti-christ?

Whilst the Australian Family Association tries to stuff more cotton wool in the ears of The Kids by attempting to ban Eminem from touring Australia, we're sneaking around their bedrooms, looking for traces of drugs instead of treating them like adults, and engaging in rational, open dialogue. Is it any wonder The Kids distrust The Man? Makes it all the more easier to pedal them mass-market consumer-grade angst and aggression. Build up the barriers, then sell them the outlet.

It's just a pity that The Kids see homophobia and misogyny as a viable expression of rebellion. Still, it's safer than getting involved in anti-globalisation protests.

Blip. Where did it go? Blogspot can't find Silent Type!!!

Human's make Fraser Island a holiday destination. They go there to be tourists, to experience life in unfamiliar surroundings. They go there for the beaches, the bush, and the wildlife. They often foget, though, that the wildlife is actually wildlife. Not the kind of wildlife you see at the Zoo or on TV. This is the real thing. So when a wild native animal does what wild animals do, and attacks something they perceive as either a threat or as prey, in this case a young boy, people become shocked and outraged. If someone was attacked by a tiger in India, or a leopard in Africa, or a boa contrictor in Brazil, we'd just accept that those can be dangerous places, and that shit happens. When it happens at a place people treat as a tourist resort, we call for a cull of the 'predators'.

Just caught a glipse of Eye Witness News, with a concerned-looking John Howard claiming he doesn't believe in the exploitation of children. Could he mean it's time for our Government to take action on multinational corporations using child slavery? Alas, no, he's refering to the school children who, like poeple from all ages groups, took to the streets today. It appears that if you're thinking for yourself at such an early age, then our education system has failed.

...seems it's okay to use children to sell greasy junkfood, but not to highlight the effects that those junkfood producers have on the world.

Attended the M1 actions today, part of the global movement of people, concerned about globalisation. This movement's ditractors claim that protesters are blocking a system which can solve world-wide poverty, sickness and starvation. What's actually causing poverty, sickness and starvation, is the greed and selfishness of the fewer and fewer people who are holding more and more power.

Well, it's been raining for three days straight here in Melbourne, and I'm facing an ethical dilema. Is it okay to build my ark from Bunnings timber? When the great flood comes, all the old growth forests will be drowned anyway. And as for all the protected and endangered species, well, I'll have two samples of them all, onboard.

Ooops... A huge, gaping sore in the fabric of Silent Type. Have been tied up at work for the last few months, with little time for bloggin'.

More action forthcoming in the next few days.

Things have been pretty quiet around Silent Type lately. Too much time spent working, and not enough time gathering useless info.

Still, this Rob character has written a poem about Silent Type. [via Virulent Memes]

I'm honestly fearful for the people of Israel, both Jews and Palestinians. All hell is about to break loose.

Jonah Peretti tried to do the right thing. He tried to use the Nike iD service, where Nike can custom build your shoes, including personalised messages, to remind him of the poor children who slaved over his footwear. He wanted to get the word "sweatshop" inscribed in his trainers. Unfortunately, Nike considers the word "sweatshop" to be slang, and therefore could not process his order. Here's the e-mail correspondence that took place between Peretti and Nike.

The perhect antidote to the word processing blues.

Poor Pluto, a lonely block of ice almost 6000 million (which is not quite 6 billion) kilometres from the Sun. Now, the Rose Centre for Earth & Space wants to strip it of it's planetary status.

Donations are being accepted by Community Aid Abroad, the Australian Red Cross, and Care Australia to assist with earthquake in India. A visit to these sites will also reveal the other work being done in El Salvador, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and other locations far away from our comfortable computer seats. I've always had a strange distrust of the word 'sobering', but it's the best word to describe the way certain world events can snap you into reality. ...and to think, I was stressing over which couch to use in loungeroom.

As the Ganges washes away the sins of 70 million Hindus, and their Karmic scales tilt towards Nirvana, a satellite drifts by, capturing these amazing images of the largest ever human gathering.

Lars Kindermann has worked out a mathematical formula which converts IP addresses into music.

Watching a television programme on Pulitzer Prize winning photo-journalists, I felt deep disgust at the voyeurism we all partake in, when feeding our heads with other people's emotions. A girl clings to a tree as a flooded river gushes around her. Resquers unable to retrieve her, she loses strength and hope. Facing death square between the eyes, a situation very few of us could ever understand, she screams at the photographer to stop taking photos. With total disrespect for the dignity of a fellow human, the photographer tells us that she _has_ to keep shooting. Why? The public don't need to see the face of a woman about to face her ultimate end. We don't need to see this to help us understand that there was a flood and people were in danger. The photographer _has_ to take photos so that her ego is stroked when when she wins awards.

I haven't seen 'Cunnamulla' yet, so I'm not sure what perspective it takes when documenting a small Queensland town and it's inhabitants. Could it be another case of trendy inner-city folk having a good ol' laugh at those daggy country folk? A recent Sunday Age feature gave us all a little chuckle as the journalists drag out 3 brothers from the country, who've never seen a city, over to Melbourne. Oh, ha ha, they've never tried a cappucinno!!! It's the same borderline ethics that let 'The Castle' sit on the fence, a guilty laugh at a daggy Western suburbs family.

Anyway... the point I'm trying to get at here, is the ethics of journalism, the ethics of film / documentary making, and respect for the subjects. It all ties into the fact that two Cunnamulla families, upon seeing the film, have requested a 30 second section be removed.

Now for some reason, Blogger isn't recognising my HTML here, and there should be a link to http://www.abc.net.au/news/arts/arts-30jan2001-2.htm

A little poison every day. While right-wing religious groups call for the banning of 'Corpus Christi', a play concerning alternative views on the life on Yeshua of Nazareth, Robert Mapplethorpe books are taken off the shelfs of Australian bookshops. Artists who explore the outer boundries of ethics and taste are often put under the interrogation spotlight.

In the US, Slayer are under fire again for allegedly inciting a psuedo-Satanic ritual, in which two young men stabbed a girl to death. Meanwhile, in the UK, Eminem is accused of inspiring the suicide of young student.

Harry Potter as avatar of a Chaos Magick reality twist, subverting young minds into believing in the supernatural otherworld. Following overseas conservative Christian trends, the Suncoast Christian Outreach College has banned Harry Potter because it poses danger to young minds who cannot tell the difference between fiction and reality. Following this idea, banning _all_ fiction is the next logic step.

Every now and then, the intrepid web traveller will stumble upon something truly remarkable. A pure gem in the deep dark mines of fringe interests. Something like the Wedgie galleries for instance.

A few news items which caught my attention over the weekend... London Police are to get increased powers to retain DNA samples collected from criminal suspects (we're all on our way to becoming Winston Smith).... The Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh, is to have a televised execution to satisfy the families of victims (nothing like watching a fellow human die to make one feel better)... Huge protests expected in Davos, Switzerland, Washington DC, U&SA, and worldwide... a cross of light has appeared in the small Victorian town of Baringhup, adding to the worldwide list of this phenomenon. Ofcourse, those spiritual party-poopers, the Skeptics have an answer for everything... Domonic Choy and Eddie Lim have applied for a patent for their internet robot sex interface, allowing users to sexually intereact with each other over the net, with the help of an erogenously equipped rubber doll...

Gregory Corso, one of the original Beat Generation, has passed away.

Fianlly got around to dropping into the new Synaesthesia shop at level one / 28 Block Place / Melbourne. A clean, sparse, white space, much in keeping with the interior design of Mark's previous outlet in Prahran.

Speaking of such things, the What is Music? Festival is on again this year, featuring such stars of the 'whatdafuck' audio world as Pimmon, Oren Ambarchi, Farmers Manual (including a FM vs Hard-Ons performance in Sydney!), Pan Sonic, Menstruation Sisters, cd_slopper, Hecker, Curse Ov Dialect, Minit, Dworzec, and many many more. Always a synapse melting experience.

The top 100 moments in sex for the year 2000.

Hatewatch.org has closed down operations after 6 years of fighting online hate groups. They feel that their work is done, and that there is much more public awareness of and resistance to hate groups. Hatewatch's head honcho David Goldman has started his new project, Paragraph 175, turning words into action.

"Christianity started out in Palestine as a fellowship; it moved to Greece and became a philosophy; it moved to Italy and became an institution; it moved to Europe and became a culture; it came to America and became an enterprise." Sam Pascoe, American scholar.

Why wear out your Sunday best... you can now worship from home at Fellowship Church, which offers "innertainment for the heart". See baptisms in streaming Real Video, check your free e-mail account, and buy some books. And remember to thankful to God for inventing the internet in the first place.

Be sure to sign into the new Guestbook

Poetic justice. The world's largest spamming operation collapses after they're bombarded with too much of their own medicine.

The computer training industry is constantly telling us of the high demand and low supply levels of IT profesionals, and we're constantly told about the 'brain-drain' of talented IT-ites leaving our shores to pursue higher wages overseas. With a Federal election looming this year, both the major parties are clammering over each other to prove how much they can improve Australia's prospects. Microsoft have been snooping around, toying with the paranoia that australia will be left behind in the information technology race, hoping to get tax breaks and Govt funding for Research & Development.

Late last year, the Victorian Government struck a deal with General Motors Holden, whereby a new manufacturing plant was to be build in Melbourne, outbidding Adelaide. A sign of events happening worldwide. Corporations playing Governments like a pack of cards. It's no secret who has the upper hand, as politicians try to outbid each other to win over the interests of the multi-nationals and their investments.

...and people still don't understand what S11 was all about.

Science Fiction writer Jeff Noon's new book Cobralingus takes off where William S Burroughs dropped the metaphorical needle. Where Burrough's literary cut-n-paste tactics were reflected in the early industrial music of Throbbing Gristle, Caberet Voltaire, SPK etc, Noon's new book attempts to take off where industrial music's decendents have landed. He attempts to send language and fiction through filters and effects, disecting it and inserting samples spliced from other works of fiction. The idea that most intrigues me is his appreciation of dub music's skeletal surgery, of stripping music to it's rhythmic core and then sewing the flesh back together in an anatural way.

Pulp and Ian Brown have refused to play at a UK music festival, because one of it's major sponsors are third-world baddies Nesle. Nesle have been in the activist spotlight for years and years, encouraging Third World mothers to give up breast feeding, and use their powdered milk (which not only costs them most of the families income, but usually gets mixed with polluted local water).

In recent years I've heard that key activist and human rights organisations have lifted their boycott on Nesle, and that Nesle now claim to comply with the World Health Organisation's International Code. Indeed, this news opened up the world of Monaco Bars and Peppermint Crisps to me. Have I fallen for corporate whitewash? Or haven't Pulp and Ian Brown caught up with the latest ticks of approval?

Just as in nature, everything in Legoland fits together as if some higher being or deity had some immaculate design. Now we can witness the hidden world of the Legoland porn industry

An interesting site about the history of Australia's suburbs. I'm currently living here but will soon be moving to here. I grew up here and here and here.

Have you heard about IT? Seems to be the question on the internet's lips lately. A revolutionary invention; those who have seen it are sworn to secrecy, and those who haven't are speculating heavily. The most common guess so far, seems to be some kind of personal transportation device based on the Stirling Engine. Myself? I say it's more than likely a Boba Fett style rocket pack.

I was first introduced to ELIZA about 9 years ago, when a friend of mine had it on her Mac. It's an experimental AI program that analyses grammer and sentence structure, and uses this to create further sentences. The user types in a comment and ELIZA responds. Like having a telephone conversation with someone when you know they're actaully watching TV. These days, there's no need to chat mindlessly with a computer, instead, we can chat mindlessly in chat-rooms (I'm still waiting for the day when someone stops me in the street and says "age / sex / location"). But what happens when ELIZA is unleashed into a chat-room?

A few interesting events at the upcoming Melbourne Jazz Festival including mesmerising trio The Necks (who did the chilling soundtrack to Rowan Woods''The Boys') playing at The Athenaeum on Saturday 20th Jan. Also, local free-spazz terrorists, the Bucketrider Big Band, perform John Coltrane's 'Meditation' at The 9th Ward on Tuesday 23 Jan, and New Zealand's c.l.bob will apparently take listeners on a "rollercoaster ride that takes you from Hendrix to Sun Ra to dixieland in a minute".

As well as featuring a performance by the cacophonic multi-octave gurgle and shreik wonder Diamanda Galas, this years Midsumma Festival also features Terrence McNally's controversial play 'Corpus Christi', which depicts the life of Jesus as a homosexual. Ofcourse this has stirred up trouble amongst Melbourne's Islamic and Christian communities. Interestingly, this falls after a recent controversy over the Victoria Government's proposed Racial & Religious Vilification laws.