OVO

The years between the death of Nietzche (& Queen Victoria) & 1914 constitute a dawn of Modernism that never happened into day. Instead it was smashed to nihil by the one long war (1914 – 1989) of the ghastly XXth Century. The liberté libre of trends like Symbolism, Expressionism, anarchism / socialism, lebensreform, Cosmicism etc. turned into the cynicism of dada, the fascism of Futurism & so on. Hope seemed dead.

L. Broadmoor III (who circa 1975 first turned me on to the idea of “living in 1911″) wanted to be an ordinary person in rural America (but with decayed millionaires as neighbors, hence his choice of Dutchess Co.) – he read only books published in or before 1911 that were truly popular at the time, such as novels with happy endings by long-forgotten lady novelists. In the 1970s you could buy old books like that for 25¢ a pound, yellowing & crumbling. Many by now must’ve disappeared completely.

I understand this “taste” or rather discipline as that of the spiritual dandy: an impenetrable cool of exotic ordinariness & secret impeccability. In effect one’s life becomes one’s art – completely. I could never aspire to such bodhisattvahood: fundamentally I’m simply not that serious. In fact neither was Broadmoor: he gave up 1911 & went into Reichean therapy. But still I take 1911 as a kind of metaphor or ideal double for my art, & to a certain extent my life as well. I’ve lived for 20 years now with no TV or other people’s cars – I pay people to use the internet for me (to buy books!) – & so on. I just don’t want to own the fucking things. I admire the Anabaptists for refusing electricity & infernal combustion in their homes. But you need communitas to live in that manner. You need place.

Even reading & writing is contaminated with Civilization’s technopathologies. Oral / aural culture would constitute the Luddite ideal. But as an isolated individual & lifelong print addict I can’t give up books – that necessary poison – like certain drugs… “Life in 1911″ requires books just as it might ideally include cheap & legal laudanum or tincture of Indian hemp.

Charles Fourier praised the Pigeon Post. It seemed quite modern in 1830, “utterly modern” as Rimbaud would say. In 1911 we’re allowed telegraph & even telephone, but our hearts still go into writing & receiving letters – handwritten, private, mysteriously brought to yr very door by unseen hand for only pennies per message, the money having been transformed into beautiful stamps. None of these pleasures are afforded by electromagnetic CommTech, which eliminates everything (including privacy) except text & image.

Imagine perfumed letters sealed with red wax & heraldic imagery, letters like Prince Genji used to write, or Proust, who could send little blue notes by pneumatic post anywhere in Paris. Think of mail-order degrees in Rosicrucianism. Yes, the POST – under the sign of Hermes – is sheer magic.

If only I could find a working mimeograph machine (or even better a roneograph, the kind that printed only in purple) (they had one in my high school in the 1950s) I’d certainly publish these manifestos on it. At least I can still use a manual typewriter, another surrealist-looking machine we enjoy here in “1911.”

June 14 2011

Via youtube.

In our End Of Year Show Mat [Fraser] and Liz [Carr] are joined by Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and BBC Disability Affairs correspondent Peter White to say goodbye to 2010 and hello to 2011.

[...]

TANNI    I’ve heard a lot of people, which I haven’t heard for a long time, talking again about how they can protest. And it’s more than just writing letters to your MP, how can they come together and find the right way to protest. And the trouble with that, someone was telling me about ‘let’s organise a flash mob.’ But when you can only get two wheelchair users on a train coming down from the north east and get left on at Kings Cross, it’s a bit harder to make that happen. 

LIZ    They’ll just end up on a mobile phone ad anyway won’t we?

PETER    I also think something else has happened really since… sorry, this is being my serious BBC Disability Affairs Correspondent head on,,, the organisation, the disability organisations, aren’t as strong as they used to be. In the ’90s, in the ’80s, when you’re talking about when people chained themselves to buses and so forth, disability organisation was strong. And Labour did something very clever and I reported on this quite a lot and nobody took any notice of me, which often happens. What they did was they incorporated all the leaders of the disability movement into their various quangos and organizations and disability rights commissions and you got Baroness Campbell, friend of Baroness Grey-Thompson’s here, they put them in the Lords they cut the head off the tiger, that’s what they did. 

[...]

PETER    I don’t think, you know, Disability Discrimination Act and any of the legislation, I don’t think had anything to do with celebs, What it had all to do with solidarity and marching and people tying themselves to things. That worried people and it really got to people. That is what made the difference between sixteen attempts to get a disability discrimination bill into Parliament and actually getting it there, because it was when that really built up. So I’m sorry that is what people say, ‘oh why do people demonstrate?’ They demonstrate because it works. 

MAT    So are you saying that that’s what young disabled people should be thinking about now in view of the cuts?

PETER    Well I’m not going in incite them on your programme, Mat. I’m just saying that is what works and if it gets bad enough that is what will happen. Nothing gets given to you by sitting around and it doesn’t get given to you because a celeb says it ought to happen.

Highest recommendations for the twice-monthly Ouch Talk Show from the BBC.

Quiet, Please aired from June 8th of 1947 through June 20th of 1949.

Quiet, Please

Motorhead – Orgasmatron 2000

Why Bother? was a Talkback production for BBC Radio 3

Why Bother? | MetaFilter

a number of other recordings have been found, pushing back the oldest recording to 1857.

Oldest recorded voice | MetaFilter

Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. [TR IS FIGHT!]

Theodore Roosevelt – I have just been shot

This recording was made a few months before Mencken’s stroke in 1948 that ended his public life.

Mencken Speaks | MetaFilter

iphone audio blogging ap

AudioBoo

use your iPhone or iPod Touch to listen to any audio from your computer via Wi-Fi.

AirPhones

Here’s choice samples of O’Reilly’s prose, read by he who trespasses against the English language himself.

New York – “Off With Those Pants”: Bill O’Reilly Seduces You in Clips From His Dirty Audiobook – Runnin’ Scared – Village Voice

Magister Diabolus Rex Church was interviewed on The Freezone, a show on the Oracle Broadcasting Network, back in November 2008.

Diabologue » Magister Church Interviewed on The Freezone

About a week ago I decided to spend less time reading online. I didn’t have any particular goal in mind but I guessed that if I spent less time reading online then I would spend more time doing something else, and it was possible that something else would be at least as worth doing as spending time reading online. This has been the case.

The first day was unpleasant. Reading the news is something I enjoy, and having such a simple pleasure a just few keystrokes away was quite a temptation. Nothing as good as reading the news presented itself on that first day. On the second day I found myself spontaneously… doing ‘nothing.’ Being in my apartment, in the quiet, puttering about. Doing things I needed to do (clean house, balance checkbook, etc.) and things I enjoyed doing (come on over and I’ll show you some new art). Not taking in information and then blogging about it, which had filled several hours a day only two days earlier. On the third day I drew a hot bath and read a book – that was nice, and something that wouldn’t have happened if I’d been sitting at the computer. A week into my media fast I felt info-cleansed and am glad for the experiment. When I’m at my computer I hope to be doing more original work and I expect that to occur less frequently. We’ll see. OVO blog may have fewer posts but I hope they will be more worth reading. Other online projects may also benefit from this recalibration.

A central theme of this blog for some time has been a criticism of religion and an attack on theocracy. If you’ve been reading OVO blog to get this sort of information, here are the sources I was getting much of my information from. I won’t say any of them represent all of my views, or that all of their views are my own, or that the views of any one of these is compatible with any other one of these.

Dhimmi Watch (seeks to bring attention to the plight of the dhimmis)
Religion News Blog (articles about religious cults, sects, world religions, and related issues)
The Jawa Report (Islamic theocracy through Star Wars metaphors)
Jihad Watch (bringing attention to the role that jihad theology plays in the modern world)
Religion Clause (Commentary on the first amendment by law professor Howard M. Friedman)
VDARE (devoted to the National Question)
Western Resistance (Our objective is to help expose Islam)

Western Resistance is the only blog on this list I’m going to keep reading at present. They post less often but in greater detail with more original content. Otherwise I’m recalibrating my online reading to focus on individual authors (such as Klint Finley) or blogs that I enjoy enough that I don’t have to justify to anyone (such as metafilter). I’m also going to keep viewing the visual-oriented blogs I enjoy (such as everlasting blort). These are the current settings of my recalibration but they will change over time.

I spend a good deal of time on public transportation and walking, and I enjoy listening to podcasts during that time. Here is a list of what I’m listening to these days. Similar disclaimers apply: I like them, they may not like me or each other.

The Bugle (weekly audio news for a visual world)
Guardian Daily (daily news)
Le Show (weekly news and commentary by Harry Shearer)
Ouch! (monthly BBC disability program, highest recommendations)
Point of Inquiry (weekly interviews from the Center for Inquiry)
Puzzling Evidence (weekly audio collage)
The SubGenius Hour of Slack (weekly SubGenius ministry)

OVO blog has existed for a year and a half. I’ve been online since around 1991. I’ve been publishing OVO since 1982. My first zine was made in 1979. I’ve made stuff since childhood. Some things change, some things remain the same. Taking stock once in a while as to where my time goes seems to always be beneficial. I recommend it.

A weekly podcast tracing the history of the Roman Empire, beginning with Aeneas’s arrival in Italy and ending (someday) with the exile of Romulus Augustulus, last Emperor of the Western Roman Empire.

The History of Rome

from the LP

YouTube – Mishima Yukio – eirei no koe (voices of the heroic dead)

the first-ever documentation of a primate mimicking a sound from another species without being specifically trained to do so.

Orangutan’s Spontaneous Whistling Opens New Chapter In Study Of Evolution Of Speech

Welcome to Public Radio Podcasts, the site that makes it absurbdly easy to get the precise NPR content that you want in a podcast format.

Public Radio Podcasts

they pioneered absurdist, satirical, dry, improvisational sketch comedy, influencing a legion of future comics (and others).

Matinee with Bob and Ray | MetaFilter