Month: July 2023

Disability Pride Month

It’s been Disability Pride Month all month, and I’ve said nothing about it cos, frankly, I don’t know what to say about it. But I think this video nails at least some of my issues about it (you should also watch it because Jo uses a microphone attached to her prosthetic foot in this video which I think is fucking MARVELLOUS), particularly the use of the word “pride” in a context like this. Cos I know it’s not about literal pride in being disabled as such, it’s like not being ashamed of being disabled. I’ve just always found the use of the word “pride” in this sort of way to be… I don’t know what, exactly, but off-putting. It’s using a word to indicate you are not the opposite of that word rather than that you are that word, they’re not the same thing. “I’m not this thing!” That’s nice, good for me… what am I supposed to be in a positive way, then?

Anyway, Jo also brings up the idea of being “differently abled” and yeah, FUCK THAT TO HELL. I am able to feel pain (physical and mental) I might not otherwise experience if I weren’t disabled, that’s as far as THAT goes. I am able to stumble in a way that I couldn’t before. I am able to only walk rather than run as well. Bah. This is why I’ve always been enamoured of the cripple punk movement since I first discovered it (yes, something good and useful did come from Tumblr! Unimaginable), there’s none of that bullshit and it’s actively opposed to that “inspiration” Jo also talks about, i.e. the pressure she feels as someone who’s a public figure in the disabled community to put a brave face on things all the time. And I’m not a public figure of any sort, but even I feel that sometimes. I kind of like having cripple punk there as a corrective to that. More useful for me than disability pride.

“Too many strings on this fucking thing”

This is a weirdly sad picture, but also weirdly funny in a way: the Sex Pistols are sitting around watching Sid try to play guitar presumably before their show at the Longhorn Ballroom, part of the infamous January 1978 tour that ended them a few days later. The Longhorn was better known for country music (and for having been run at one point by Jack Ruby), but Malcolm McLaren had made a point of booking “redneck” venues like that to create a stink, which he undeniably got whether or not the band wanted it… I said “presumably” before the show because Sid’s nose was broken in the course of it and he was covered in blood by the end of it, which he is not here. I particularly love Lydon in this shot for some reason, glumly regarding the spectacle before him, unable to decide if Sid learning guitar is the worst thing to ever happen to the band or mild in comparison with the other shit the band had suffered by this time. Couldn’t be much worse than his bass playing, surely.

VenusGate?

Via.

In fairness to Guillermo Sohnlein, he hasn’t actually been part of OceanGate for ten years, so he had no direct part in the recent debacle… but he also saw nothing wrong with what Stockton Rush did in said debacle, and has said he would’ve gone on the Titan sub himself if he’d had the chance. This frankly makes me fear for anyone he might convince to try out this Venus thing…

Venus is the warmest planet in the solar system. Its atmosphere is chock-full of carbon dioxide, its surface temperature could melt lead, and sulfuric acid rains down from its clouds. Its atmospheric pressure is crushing — more than 90 times that of Earth, according to NASA.
In spite of this, Söhnlein doesn’t see why humanity shouldn’t attempt to live on the planet. He points to research that suggests there is a sliver of the Venusian atmosphere about 30 miles from the surface where humans could theoretically survive because temperatures are lower and pressure is less intense.
If a space station could be designed to withstand the sulfuric acid in the clouds, Söhnlein says, hundreds to thousands of people could someday live in the Venusian atmosphere.
He says a floating colony could hold 1,000 people in the Venusian atmosphere by 2050, although exactly how this will happen is less clear.

…And why do I feel like it’ll involve similar cost-cutting and refusal to acknowledge criticism from industry professionals to OceanGate? I will admit to finding his vision fascinating, but I’d want evidence that this “sliver” of the atmosphere actually is useable before getting excited about it… and I’d be interested to see if Guillermo’s willing to follow in his old mate’s footsteps (whatever Rush’s failures, at least he wasn’t afraid of getting on the Titan himself even if he should’ve been) and take the risk of going to Venus himself.

Remake rites

Here’s a somewhat perplexing double bill, with the brothers Cavalera having decided to go back to their, er, roots and re-record the first two Sepultura releases, the Bestial Devastation EP from 1985 and the Morbid Visions album from 1985, each with a “new” track made from unused material from that time. The most perplexing thing about it, perhaps, is that it actually works; the only thing they’ve really updated (apart from the artwork) is the sound, which was of course a lot rougher on the 80s originals, particularly on Morbid Visions… I mean, that sound has its charms for the sort of 80s teenage Satan metal it is, but the new versions do benefit from the improved sound. Otherwise, both records are exactly what you might expect, i.e. 80s teenage Satan metal being revisited in later life by two of the people responsible for it and associates, and fuck me if they don’t just smash both of them out with great vigour.

I just wonder why. Apart from remodelling the Cavalera Conspiracy logo to resemble the old Sepultura one, I don’t think it’s meant as a dig at their old bandmates, and it doesn’t seem to be a Taylor Swift-type situation where’s she’s trying to reclaim her music from Scooter Braun, or a Guns ‘n’ Roses siuation where Axl Rose talked about re-recording Appetite for Destruction to screw the other band members out of royalties. Maybe Max and Iggor did indeed just want to see if they could make the old stuff sound better. Whatever, I like it.

Terrace of… MiniDisc?

So I just got an email from the Projekt Records mailing advising they have a Kickstarter for a rerelease of one of Sam’s 90s albums with Dirk Serries in three physical formats. LP, CD, and MiniDisc.

MiniDisc?

I’m not kidding, I looked at this message and just said “…MiniDisc?” because my brain couldn’t conceive of anything else in that moment. MiniDisc. The Kickstarter page advises they’re doing an edition of 500 copies each for the CD and vinyl and only 30 of the MiniDisc (MINIDISC!), so obviously Sam knows there’s not exactly going to be many people able to play that one… but why is he doing a MiniDisc release at all?

MiniDisc.

Honestly. Like the cassette revival wasn’t enough. What’s next, eight-track cartridges?

RIP Mother Bernadette Mary

Ah Sinead, you complicated woman. I can’t honestly say I was ever a fan as such, and, frankly, I’ve probably been as judgy towards her over the years as anyone. I like to think I’ve become a bit more understanding as I’ve got older, and I think as she got older we all realised Sinead’s complications weren’t entirely under control or her fault. She was a difficult woman in a time when that was even harder to get away with than it is now, and she kept going through all the bullshit that came her way.

And we should’ve known right from the start that she would be difficult. I watched the video for “Troy” after I read the news this afternoon, not the first time I’ve done that but I can only remember seeing it once on TV many many years ago… what a fucking berserk choice of a song to release not only as a single at all, but the first single from your debut album. Holy shit.

I don’t think I ever heard this at the time, my own first memory of Sinead was “Mandinka” which followed this, and that seemed singular enough back in 1987. Looking at this all these years later… Christ. She was nothing if not unto herself and true to herself. And she definitely wasn’t wrong about the Catholic Church. 56 is no age to be leaving us.

Heads with hair

This is a pretty well-known photograph (taken by Dutch photographer Theo van Houts in 1968), but I think this is the first time I’ve seen it in colour. And actual colour too, I don’t think it’s been colourised. Looks like natural 1968 colour. I’ve seen this a bunch of times on Tumblr and elsewhere, and no wonder; the sheer gigantism of that hair is truly epic. Apparently the girls were Thai, which makes me wonder how that hair would’ve been received in Thailand in 1968; I gather that country did undergo quite some modernisation during the 60s because of America’s presence in Vietnam (cos that little affair was still ongoing), but I imagine it would’ve been a little too avant-garde even so…

Playing nice with nitrate

Found this interesting piece from the BFI about the use and management of nitrate film. Nitrate film, I already knew, is an infamously flammable substance whose potential lethality first revealed itself in Paris in 1897 when a fire killed 126 people… I mean, nitrate also shrinks and decomposes, which is bad enough from a preservation angle, but this rotting can also increase the likelihood of the film going up in smoke, and once it does that it’s practically unstoppable, so it has to be very carefully handled… which not everyone does, including some people who really should have known better, but there’s generally some fairly strict rules about what to do with it and indeed who can do those things.

I won’t say, however, that I wasn’t at least slightly concerned by this statement:

When built in 1957, the projection booth in NFT1 was entirely encased in encapsulated asbestos. It still is, making it very safe from the effects of fire but difficult to update. This design helped protect the building during a nitrate fire in 1968, which was caused by an undetected nitrate print being run without safety features in place.

I mean… I’m glad the building was saved back in 1968, but I’m also concerned that the projection booth is still full of asbestos (which, I’ve just discovered, actually translates from Greek as “unquenchable”, ironically enough in this context). And that theatre is still in use, so… the asbestos-encased projection booth is still in use? Conceding that people didn’t know quite how bad asbestos was in the 50s, they did know by the 80s when the stuff was actually banned in the UK; and I know it might be “difficult to update”, but the BFI’s own page about NFT1 suggests they have in fact done that at some point since the 1950s, at which time digital projection wasn’t a thing. I’d be… slightly worried about being a projectionist in that booth; I know asbestos is much more dangerous when it’s actually floating free, which I don’t suppose it actually is here, but still.

25 years

Today marks 25 years since I first got the Internet at home. Do not ask how I remember this date, just accept that I do. My brain actually does remember things sometimes, including frankly pointless things like this. I had been on the wonderful world of the WWW before this (at the computer lab at UNSW) though I don’t recall exactly when, but it was sometime in 1994. IMDB was still the Cardiff Internet Movie Database at that time.

Anyway, the Internet came home on Saturday evening July 25th 1998. Old school friend Adrian set it up for me with a modem he’d, er, borrowed from work and life changed forever, sometimes for the better too. At that time I was still running my Windows 95 machine which had come with MSN pre-installed, as Windows 95 did, so I had an ISP built in all along. Easiest to just use what was already available. Also, preposterously expensive, cos, well, MSN’s dial-up chose to route its call through some long-distance regional line rather than one in Sydney, and we didn’t realise this until a phone bill for seven hundred dollars came in a fortnight or so later. That was nearly the end of the Internet in this house…

So a complaint was duly filed with MSN though we stuck with them and just made sure the number it called was local. However, after they kept trying to switch back to the long-distance number, we dropped them and went with an actual ISP based in here in Sydney. As a sign of just how different things were back then, my initial plan with them was, if I recall rightly, thirty dollars a month for 100Mb of downloads (the aforementioned “borrowed” modem was a 14.4kbps model too). Yes, one hundred MEGAbytes. More than that cost extra though I forget how much the rate was. And I rarely exceeded that, weirdly enough; these days I can go through 100Mb in minutes with what the Internet is like now, but back then about 3Mb a day was more than enough most days. And I wasn’t online the entire day like I am now. That 100Mb soon went up to 500Mb and then unlimited for the same cost (and the modem upgraded to 56kbps!) as things rapidly improved.

It was a different world back then, getting harder to remember what it was like as the years go by… Google only came into being a couple of months after I first went online at home, there was a whole panoply of search engines, hardly anyone knew who Elon Musk was, Usenet was still a thing and Facebook wasn’t, instant messengers were what passed for social media, even the ads weren’t quite as egregious as they would soon become… I kind of regret that world’s passing in some respects, for all its many undeniable issues I don’t think it was as psychotic as it often is these days.

I don’t think I have anything else to say cos most of us know the way things have gone since then, I don’t know if I even needed to say this. But 25 years is still quite a milestone so I thought it should be marked somehow. Like I said, though, just don’t ask me how I remember the date 25 years later when I barely remember things that happened a few days ago…