On a blustery February morning in 2009 I found myself stranded in Heathrow Airport’s Terminal 5. My flight was delayed indefinitely due to the UK’s biggest snowstorm in 18 years, leaving me to wander aimlessly against a backdrop of scrolling cancellations and panicky commuters. Outside the billowing airport architecture London was deadlocked, its citizens sabotaged by an absentee polar jet stream.

As I wandered through the terminal I watched groups of temporary refugees from across the world form micro-communes, emptying their luggage onto the floor and building little nests out of coats and sweaters. It was a surreal image: The typically bustling and optimistic concourse was transformed into something that looked more like a deportation centre.

Having been mugged at knifepoint in a dodgy Parisian stairwell earlier that week, I was without cash or plastic. No big deal at first, but after ten hours of hunger pangs, desperation set in. After a few embarrassing and unsuccessful attempts to flog the contents of my carry-on (two books and a used disposable camera), I set up camp near an abandoned Krispy Kreme and tried to distract my brain from my stomach with J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come:

Mmm … consumerism. I couldn’t help but imagine dipping a giant-sized iced donut in a pot of boiling coffee and have it gently melt away in my mouth, warm sugar dripping from my lips and running down my chin, bear claws and fritters, jellies and …

Then someone tapped me on the shoulder and I was shaken from the comforts of my fantasy.

“Is that seat free?”

“Ah yes, it’s all yours”

He was a pensive Danish gentleman, anxious to get to Brazil where his pregnant wife was set to deliver within the next 24 hours. He turned out to be Bjørnstjerne Christiansen, from the art collective Superflex, and was generous enough to lend me some euros for food and drink. After filling my stomach we discussed the focus of his work: copyright issues and intellectual property law. We talked about how elite fashion brands like Louis Vuitton had become ubiquitous through counterfeiting and about the copyleft revolution, peer-generated content and the emergence of free culture as a real movement.

Across a snowy London cityscape the Tate Modern was preparing for the opening of its 2009 triennial: Altermodern. As defined by the triennial’s curator, French cultural theorist Nicolas Bourriaud, Altermodernism is what comes after postmodernism. It’s an “attempt to reexamine our present, by replacing one periodizing tool with another.”

When I first learned of the exhibit it struck me as a campaign to re-brand a failed business model. Throughout the zeros up until the ’08 market crash, contemporary art had become little more than an investment scheme for the funny money of the hyper-rich: the overpriced wallpaper of late capitalism. On reading Bourriaud’s Altermodern Manifesto, I was reminded of the great Pepsi re-branding debacle of 2008, when PepsiCo paid an embarrassing amount of money to one Peter Arnell, renowned corporate image guru, to take their brand into the 21st century.

In a 30-page user manual, Arnell detailed how his new logo was based on “the magnetic contours of Earth,” and how it would create a “breathtaking trajectory of innovation.” Alongside mock diagrams he detailed how the “establishment of a gravitational pull” would allow Pepsi to “shift from a transactional experience to an invitational expression.” Same Pepsi taste, but a slightly different logo that was supposed to revolutionize how consumers relate to cola. But once his fee was in the bank, Arnell came out and openly mocked PepsiCo, boasting that it was “all bullshit.”

Unlike Arnell, Bourriaud appears to be sincere in his effort to re-brand the blahblahblah-modern notion. His manifesto posits that art will cease to be a tool of deconstruction and will instead become an “editing table” for reality, enabling alt-artists to transform art galleries into globalized research labs for a more plastic tomorrow.

This is modern art’s theoretical bailout: a rhetorical restructuring that shouts “New! Better!” but preserves the original formula. It’s a more egalitarian xxxx-modernism that will complement a leaner, meaner, greener global capitalist machine – a machine running on fumes that’s about to grind to a halt, burst into flames and then just sit there and burn while we all eat popcorn and watch. But although altermodernism amounts to little more than shift in a prefix, Bourriaud is correct when he says that “postmodernism is dead,” because it is. Finally.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly where and when it died, but I’d venture a guess that it choked on its own vomit somewhere between Kanye West’s gradual descent and Lady Gaga’s meteoric rise. Mr. West and his Murakami-grubbing, Jetson-worshipping, DaftPunking, Auto-Tuning barf parade brought postmodernism to its absurd conclusion, and now Gaga is nailing the coffin shut with her hypnotic transmedia brand of nihilistic marketing gimmicks.

Gaga refers to her music as “soulless electronic pop” and says things like “we’ve already killed everything” and “the apocalypse has already happened.” Her sensational aesthetic has a divisive effect and tends to generate one of two reactions: She is either the most awful, most infuriating cretin ever to crawl out of corporate entertainment, or she’s an ingenious Warholian synthesis of David Bowie and Madonna with admirable Jay-Z-style business savvy.

Both positions overlook why the Gaga “fame monster” is a significant development in pop culture: Her persona is so infectious because it is the most accurate reflection we have of capitalism’s mutagenic effects on the human form and psyche. Her music is just a pretense, a rationale for her celebrity. She is the bizarro Paris Hilton. The manipulation of capital is her true art, and the “Haus of Gaga” is not a fashion/performance collective but a new breed of PR firm.

Even more crucial is the cultlike passion that she inspires in her followers. It demonstrates how, even long after its death, postmodernism’s specter will continue to beckon us toward the apocalyptic future that the “fame monster” so wantonly desires.

Thus we should consider postmodernism today as analogous to the counter science of the renaissance-era Catholic church. That is to say, anyone caught wearing shutter shades in 2010 shouldn’t be considered just a hipster douche bag but an obsolete zealot. The reemergence of the grand narrative in the form of global ecological disaster has rendered all forms of postmodern thought dangerous anachronisms. Regardless of how climate change does come to affect our lives, the postmodernists will carry on as if nothing is happening, because capitalism has come to depend on postmodern abstraction.

Obama, whose logo-driven election utilized Soviet iconography to win over the Gen Y vote, is America’s first postmodern president. The war in Afghanistan, Iraq’s prequel-sequel, is not a war to be won but an account to be exhausted: a war of attrition on the attention spans and pocket books of the NATO citizenry. “Talqaeda” is not an enemy that can be defeated but a nebulous global brand that increases its market share every time a missile loses it way.

The whole sordid affair would be comical if the six o’clock news used a laugh track, but it doesn’t so it’s just awkward and unnerving. How could our governments not recognize that the Afghan war is a rerun of Vietnam? Perhaps the boomers in charge of NATO watched too many episodes of M*A*S*H* and have come to believe that shitty wars should drag on until all possible plot devices have been thoroughly exhausted.

The Copenhagen Climate Conference was another boring rerun, a tiresome reenactment of the Hague Climate Conference that took place nine years earlier. Both conferences failed to produce any real results, and until carbon-reduction markets develop to a point where they can rival the carbon producers, a climate deal will remain out of reach.

This situation is a byproduct of what British scholar Mark Fisher, aka k-punk, refers to as “capitalist realism”: the process through which the ideology of capital has monopolized all areas of contemporary experience. As a result resistance becomes unimaginable, dissent becomes commodified and buying a $5 latte becomes a deed of selfless charity.

It is also in this sense that the twin climate conference failures run parallel to the failure of the Iraq War protest movement. Rather than threaten those in power, the protests of the zeros validated their doctrine. Protesters were greeted not by a sneering Nixon but by a smiling Bush, who looked down upon the dissidents and congratulated them on expressing their freedom of assembly – a freedom Iraq would also enjoy once it became a capitalist democracy too.

A protest is no longer an act of defiance but a confirmation that one’s democracy is functional. Everyone’s political appetite is satisfied – hawks fight a futile war overseas while liberals fight a futile war against that war from the comfort of their laptops. When revolt is not a possibility, the results of political events are predetermined by focus groups and socio-mapped by think-tank polling data.

This is why no one was surprised when Obama name-dropped Martin Luther King and Gandhi in his defense of the “war on evil” before picking up his Nobel Peace Prize. We understand that politicians are required to pander to public opinion, even if it means betraying one’s ideals with populist newspeak. Democracy under postmodern capitalism has become little more than a pageant of personas tuning their brand to the pet fancies of consumer percentiles. And for the last 20 years, that consumer has been the boomer – the age demographic that assumed absolute primacy over the political marketplace through its sheer numbers.

In their wild youth the boomers were supposedly radical agents of change – at least that’s what all their shitty sentimental pop-propaganda has led us to believe. But as the boomers aged their concerns evolved, and not without a few ironic twists. They went from being Maoist acidheads who could taste the hefty licks of a Hendrix 8-track to Tupperware partiers who sprayed I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter on their children’s Eggos. The “I’m gonna live forever!” generation, grown fat and paranoid off cheap Chinese goods and cable news, consented to a politics of fear and an economics of absurdity while an adolescent Gen Y and a marginalized Gen X looked on in vain.

Now that so many Western economies are trapped in a deepening recession with no end in sight, Gen Y faces the possibility of becoming a lost generation, plagued by un- and underemployment for the whole of their adult life. We were born into Spielbergian dreams and all-you-can-eat promises of prosperity, but now we’ll be lucky if we can scrape together a scrap of the half-eaten capital pop tart.

But gradually we’re waking up to realize that our place in history is uncertain, that our destiny is no longer predetermined by perpetual growth. The greatest generation, which weathered the depression and defeated fascism, is considered exceptional because it was willing to sacrifice itself for the benefit of future generations. By this standard, the boomers are the worst generation because they have sacrificed the economies and environs of the future for their own comfort and security. But what of Gen Y?

Unlike Gen Xers, many of whom found ways to express anticapitalist sentiment through subculture, Gen Y has nowhere to run or hide. All forms of cultural rebellion have long since been appropriated and integrated into the ideology of capital. Marketing firms and advertising agencies now enjoy an unprecedented relationship with the avant-garde, so much so that they’ve become one and the same.

Gen Y only has one choice if it wants to avoid becoming a lost generation: push the boomer way of life onto an ice floe and let it die. Rather than Bourriaud’s altermodernism, we should pursue an alter-realism: dispense with the art gallery altogether and make reality our experimentation lab.

There is a revolutionary current running through the subconscious of this generation that has yet to be realized or defined. We champion piracy, instinctively believing that information should be free and open, that intellectual property law is contra-progress and that capital is not a necessary intermediary for social organization. Postcapital collaboration is our daily bread, and we hold a distinctly global worldview, void of class, race or nation. But we grew up too comfortable, played too much Nintendo, watched too much Saved by the Bell, read too much Chuck Klosterman and not enough Frantz Fanon. We naïvely drank the consumerist-credit card Kool-Aid, and now that the Final Fantasy is upon us, we’re in danger of sliding into a delusional techno-utopianism.

This is our decisive moment. Either we wallow in debt as passive observers of history and pray that technology will eventually solve all our problems or we actively seize power and deal with the consequences. While Gen Y outnumbers the boomers, we won’t hold the balance of power for another ten years, at which point the climate may be all but lost. So democracy is not an option.

We should take our cue from the likes of the Brazilian Pixadores, a disenfranchised group of graffiti artists from the favelas of Rio who storm and vandalize art galleries and universities to proclaim their existence against the society that excludes them. But rather than storm art galleries we should pursue a policy of strife: storm and occupy whatever political and economic space we can.

In the next ten years Gen Y will inherit the ownership of something commonly referred to as “the West,” but what will that even be worth? The West has become its own worst enemy, creating global conflict in order to promote a failed socioeconomic doctrine – a corrupt corporatism that bails out its banks and then gives its thieving rich million-dollar bonuses for bankrupting the working class. How could such a dysfunctional system possibly compete with China’s monolithic authoritarian model?

The only hope for the West is if we tear our current system apart piece by piece from the inside out, replacing what we destroy with viable alternatives. Starting with the renunciation of the label “Gen Y” – a hollow marketing term thought up by a balding boomer advertising executive. Instead we should refer to ourselves as the “Barbarian Generation,” because that’s what we are: the greatest threat yet to capitalist civilization.

(originally published in Adbusters #88)

Here’s a quick n’ dirty video I did for the recently self-leaked and apparently unfinished track “automating”, in anticipation of Darkstar’s upcoming album on Hyperdub.

Bonus:

Darkstar: Aidy’s Girl’s A Computer

01%20Aidy%27s%20Girl%27s%20A%20Computer.mp3

Darkstar: Squeeze My Lime

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Darkstar: Need You

01%20Need%20You.mp3

Darkstar: Break

02%20Break.mp3

THE LONG GOODBYE MIX

goodbyemix.mp3

“I Just Don’t Understand…”

Vandal Cock: Imp Girl

Chronicle Grime: Carrer Cats Get Tiger Suits

Googie Rene: Firebird

Can: Oh Yeah

OJ Simpson: American Dream & Future

Gonjasufi: Sheep

Souls of Mischief: What a Way to Go Out (inst)

Madlib: Telegram

Waajeed: Anything

The Rappers: Krunchberry Beast

Jono Pelicio: A Zebu Nuclear Junco

2 new videos from my good friends at SALAZAR.

SCTV (1983) :

This was a running skit of a game show where the contestants are unable to answer any questions correctly. Eugene Levy, plays Alex Trebel, based on game show host Alex Trebec (Jeopardy). Alex starts by chatting with the contestants. The first category is articles of clothing found in a bedroom. The second is European cuisine. Alex decides to have the contestants pick a number from 1 to 10. Prize: seat covers from Vinyl World.

Strange Brew (1983) :

BEER is to the Canadian hopheads Bob and Doug (”Eh?”) McKenzie as marijuana is to Cheech and Chong, though Bob and Doug are by far the more infantile duo. (One of them, whenever he’s in trouble, actually sucks his thumb.) The McKenzies are the creation of two Second City TV veterans, Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, who wrote, directed and star in ”Strange Brew,” a movie that’s barely there. The McKenzies are genial enough, and once in a while they’re vaguely funny. But their film is so ephemeral that you may hardly be aware of watching it, even while it’s going on. (NY TIMES)

Kids in the Hall (1992)

The most unusual episode in the set is Chalet 2000 in which Scott Thompson plays his two most famous roles, that of Buddy Cole and Queen Elizabeth II. In the skit, which lasts the entire episode, the Queen gets tired of photographers following her around and so she heads to Northern Canada to relax with her friend and confidant Buddy for a while. While she’s there she has a torrid affair with Buddy’s adopted son, a beaver played by Bruce McCulloch, and avoids a tabloid photographer named Lanky Dean (McKinney) who is still on the chase in hopes of capturing her in some rather unorthodox situations. This is a stellar episode full of all sorts of great little jokes but there’s one big problem with it – if you’re not Canadian, this isn’t very funny. (DVD TALK)

Tom Green on The Mike Bullard Show (1998)

“I threw up for 10 minutes. They had to stop tape for the first time ever,” Bullard said yesterday of Green pulling the rotting carcasses of a raccoon and a squirrel out of a sack on Wednesday night’s show. “Oh my God, there were maggots coming out of its nose. I was fine until the squirrel went flying by my head and I looked behind me and saw the intestines hanging out of it,” Bullard said. (JAM!)

Machotaildrop (2009)

Machotaildrop is ostensibly a skateboarding movie, but only in the same way that our parents’ home movies are about band/soccer/spelling bees and not embarrassment and failure. Or maybe its directors, Corey Adams and Alex Craig (winners of Fuel TV’s million dollar short film contest) realized that we’re all jaded by the conventional skate part-tour van-party-puke-skate part plot of most videos and that what we really need is an intertwined narrative that is equally Terry Gilliam and Paul Thomas Anderson and Rick McCrank’s facial hair. Accident or cinematic revolution, we’re excited about this development and look forward to seeing each of the bizarre scenes in this trailer played out in full glory. (FADER)

DH: I’m working on an article on Canadian Surrealism – so any suggested viewings/readings or timbits of enlightenment are MORE than welcome. I haven’t seen Machotaildrop yet, but it looks like it might fit well into the canon.

The music is “Sovereignty” by Japandroids, off their totally excellent album “Post-Nothing”.

In Cho Chabudai Gaeshi, a new arcade game from Taito, the player has one very simple task: to flip over a chabudai, a short-legged round table. In Japan, the act of table flipping, or “chabudai gaeshi” is a common expression of anger among old-fashioned, middle-aged men. Cho Chabudai Gaeshi is specifically aimed at balding fathers who are perpetually infuriated with their disobedient and noisy families, but too timid to actually upend their real-world chabudais. What’s so interesting about Cho Chabudai Gaeshi is how mundane the gameplay is: The father sits at the table, pounding on it with his hands as his obnoxious children ignore him until finally, he flips it over and sends everything flying into the air, collecting points for every item destroyed in the wake of his moderately-violent outburst.

While it seems like a novelty, the workaday content of the game is a profound innovation that alters the very nature of gaming. Of course it’s fun and entertaining, but it could also be used as a form of domestic catharsis, a way to express one’s anger in an isolated virtual world before returning home from a tough day at work. I think we’re going to be seeing this sort of game pop up more often in the near future – games that allow the player to act out in situations very similar to their daily lives. Right now there’s a surplus of games where you can run around brutally murdering people, but 99% of these are completely fantastic and in no way pertain to the player’s actual experience. I can see a whole new genre blossoming out of Cho Chabudai Gaeshi – games where you get to destroy your office printer, push people in a crowded subway, throw things at your boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse and so on. An alternate digital dimension allowing for constant emotional micro-management.

What I would most like to see is a game where you are playing a videogame, similar to first person Tetris, and get to break the controller and smash the system after failing repeatedly. That would have been really handy when I was 14.

BONUS!

Mix of the Month: Gilles Peterson and Thom Yorke back to back spinning Floating Points, Darkstar, Mingus, Sun-Ra, Doom, Madlib, Dam Funk and the rest of the gang.

Gilles_Peterson-live_on_radio_1-01-20-2010.mp3

BONUS!

The world of words is currently undergoing a revolution of such magnitude not seen since one Johannes Gutenburg made type movable. The ebook device, whether in the form of a Kindle, Mac Tablet or any number of brands and styles, will eventually take over as the medium through which we read books. All books deemed digit-worthy will be digit-ized. But many books, truckloads actually, hundreds of thousands, will slip through the cracks and eventually get sucked through the vacuum of time, never to be read again. Most of these soon-to-be forgotten texts could surely be deemed as “shit”, so good riddance. But some of them, due to being out-of-print and too obscure to capture the attention of the digitizing agency, will be lost classics – chunks of thought and experience that will go the way of the Apalachee and the Kakadu.

One such book,  recently given to me as a gift by the lovely Jules Moore (of Hobo fame, et al), is Bottoms Up: The How-to Guide to Booze, Babes & Bar Tricks. Since cracking the pages of this old tome to modern manhood, a bible of booze and babery, it has become somewhat of a sacred object, something I might carry in a leather satchel if I owned one. But I don’t so it sits on my desk, next to a bottle of navy rum, a pack of smokes and fresh deck of jimmies. As it stands, there are surely many copies out there in the world, but they will dwindle down to a few. Knowing that this book will  likely be wiped from human consciousness sometime in the nearish future imbues it with a certain mystical quality.  And so, in this age of instant access information overload, there’s something wondrous about owning a piece of language, neigh, wisdom, that is local to one’s self. It’s like my own tiny, private piece of an abandoned universe.

Here’s an excerpt for your reading pleasure:

THE PROSTITUTE:

You don’t run into as many hookers these days as you think you might. First of all, most of them have gotten off the streets and are using telephone answering services – cuts down on the wear and tear and eliminates both competition and two many dry runs before they find themselves a john for the night. Besides, it’s dangerous for both the girl and the bar owner. He loses more business than he gains when his place gets a reputation for being a hangout for hookers and she’s always in danger of being picked up for soliciting a vice cop by mistake. So if you’re looking for a hooker, bars are usually the wrong place  – you won’t find that many operating around pubs anymore. But just in case, how do you tell a prostitute? Simple – She’ll tell you.

Depending on how eager or desperate she is for the trick will usually determine how rapidly she makes her pitch. She’ll size you up first – don’t let your ego get out of control; by sizing up, I mean she’s figuring out how much money she can get out of you, not your personal charm. Then she’ll make her pitch – well it’s not really a pitch, it’s a blatant out-and-out proposition. And if you’re hot to trot, then you’re on your way…

BONUS:

Cities are at their best when they are unknowable organic superstructures:  fathomless depths of dive bars, crooked little cafés and dimly lit side-streets built on waves of wet pavement and light. The true megalopolis provides supreme anonymity to its dwellers. affording them the  freedom to create their own psychic maps – personalized routes through a mutating labyrinth. Objective cartography, subway maps etc,  are secondary to one’s own individual narrative. You choose your haunts, your pathways and your comrades, living a private life amidst 10 million unknowable others. But if a city imposes structure on the individual, rather than the individual on it – it becomes oppressive, a bore, predictable, a tedious slog through the hell of other people. This is the difference between Tokyo and Pyeongchang, between strip malls and street markets. Which is why I’m undecided about the benefits of geotagging and augmented reality.  There are doubtless numerous ways in which emerging mobile technology can improve city life, but most are intended to demystify the city in order to impose order and surveillance on consumer behavior.

In the above video, a trailer for Nike’s True City campaign, the cityscape is transformed into a hybrid social-media-videogame, where the user navigates their way vis a vis Nike’s own privately curated cultural/commercial map. On a superficial level, True City is benign – it’s essentially a more advanced version of a promotional mailing list and  a convenient way for Nike fanboys to interact and learn about new product. But if we look a bit closer it becomes problematic for two reasons:

A: It will destroy culture: True City presupposes that its users will be socially inept – who else would require such an application? There are magazines, newspapers and blogs (and friends) dedicated to keeping people informed on what’s hip, making True City a needless middleman for the those who are too lazy to exert any effort and require their experiences to be filtered through an iPhone application. But let’s suspend our disbelief for a moment and consider how the “hidden” becomes “visible”.  The user gets dialed into True City, which has employed tastemakers to tell them to tell you which hip spots to check out. Or something. I don’t really understand what “inspired by insiders” actually means. But according to the video, if you follow the True City instructions, you will eventually wind up at an art gallery that has a disco bear and is filled with shirtless men. Yaaaay. You finally made it, you are now on the inside and all that was once hidden from your view is now visible. This is where True City runs into a very big problem: Once the “inside” is available to outsiders, it is no longer special or interesting, but just another homogeneous space, like a mall. True City Insiders function as informants – they discover something new and interesting, then distribute that information to the mouthbreathers who need to be informed and at the point of contact – when the True City user arrives at the previously unknowable disco polar bear art show,  it ceases to be special. In this sense, True City disrupts the organic process that produces “hidden” events/space by exposing them to outsiders in real time.

An example: When I was in Paris earlier this year I spotted a very attractive girl smoking a cigarette on the street. I approached her and asked if I could have one, and we ended up going for a coffee. She then invited me to meet her at a bar later that night, which she described as “very special”. I agreed and went to the address she gave me, which was in a very unhip, out of the way part of town. The bar was very special, in fact it was the strangest bar I had ever been to, I would describe it but I was sworn to secrecy. The bar owner did not want any mention of her establishment on the Internet, and was not interested in publicity or an increase in business. She was content with the clientele she had, which was an eccentric bunch, many of whom were on a first name basis with each other. It was an intimate place – a key component to its “insideness”. I was lucky to have been brought into the fold by  the girl, an individual True City would surely consider an “insider”. If I had been a shameless fuckhead and told the whole world about the bar, and as a consequence it gained a large amount of exposure, one of two things would have happened: the owner would have shut it down, sold it, or changed it to accommodate the increase in business and dilution of clientele. Either way, the original bar  would have ceased to exist. This very common process that we’ve all encountered, illustrates why the premise of True City is flawed: once you expose the hidden, it is no longer hidden, which robs it of its value.

B: It will create corporate enclaves: Obviously the sole purpose of True City is to position Nike products at the centre of city life. In Nike’s best case scenario True City will usurp older mediums (newspapers, blogs) as a cultural navigation tool, allowing Nike to transform the purchasing of their products from being a mundane consumer act into a new form of social video game, which is hinted at in the trailer. From this perspective, True City is brilliant, because it will allow Nike to have a far more direct relationship with their market and by becoming a cultural mediator, Nike no longer needs magazines or blogs to communicate with consumers. But their market for such an endeavor is very slim, and I doubt it will attract anyone outside of the core fanboy demographic. But there is something much more interesting about the possibilities of  geotagging/social-media/mobile device integration and that is the development of corporate, or private social enclaves. Theoretically, Nike could create a service where only subscribers have access to certain urban space – like private events that require secret QR codes, which can only be attained by True City subscribers. Something like this seems to be more in line with the absurd and often obsessive culture Nike has built around their limited-run shoes. It would also attract those that would be otherwise disinterested. For example – Nike pays Band X to play a tiny gig at a back-alley venue, and only those with a certain  QR code may enter. This could be the future of elite consumerism and brand culture, wherein an entirely invisible network of urban space is made available only to those with the proper QR code.

Regardless, as the ideas and technology behind True City become more common, a new type of city will emerge – one that may or may not conform to the totalizing ideology of social technology. Or maybe that already exists and I’m just not reading the right blogs or buying the right shoes.

BBC 2/All Black: The Jungle Underworld

BBC 4: Synth Britannia

“n the late 1970s, small pockets of electronic artists including the Human League, Daniel Miller and Cabaret Volatire were inspired by Kraftwerk and JG Ballard and dreamt of the sound of the future against the backdrop of bleak, high-rise Britain.”

BBC 3: Tower Block Dreams (Pirate Radio/Grime)

BBC 4: Krautrock – The Rebirth of Germany

“Between 1968 and 1977 bands like Neu!, Can, Faust and Kraftwerk would look beyond western rock and roll to create some of the most original and uncompromising music ever heard. They shared one common goal – a forward-looking desire to transcend Germany’s gruesome past – but that didn’t stop the music press in war-obsessed Britain from calling them Krautrock.”

Ben UFO: Why Not Mix

ben-ufo-why-not-mix.mp3

Unreleased and forthcoming from the likes of Roska, Kode 9, Ikonika & Joy Orbison.

DJ Oneman: Winter 2009 Mix

“The Winter mix is a real mix of styles, incorporating old favourites like Shackleton and Burial as well as some new peeps to check out like Joy Orbison and Bisweed. It also draws in elements of downtempo d&b and some light techno for good measure and makes for a mix that reminds you of frosty winter nights.”

Martin Kemp: XLR8R Mix

“Loaded with high-quality tunes—many of which are forthcoming or entirely unreleased—the mix occupies that unique space where garage, 2-step, funky, and house bubble together in a uniquely potent brew.”

Dorian Concept: Mi NYE Mix (LuckyMe)

57.mp3

“Oh hell no – no tracklisting this time”

The Gaslamp Killer: A Decade of Flying Lotus

Decademix.mp3

“Can’t believe i’ve been making tracks for over 10 years now..That said, there’s so much to learn still. I hope you all enjoy this mix. Thanks to the Gaslamp Killer for doing an incredible job on this. Can’t wait for you all to hear my album ‘Cosmogramma’ coming out April 20th 2010 on Warp Records.”

Darkstar: 20JazzFunkGreats mix

“Darkstar and their post garage phantom pop are probably the [Hyperdub] members we’re most excited about as we enter into a new decade, which is why we’re more than a little happy the wire whisperers took the time out from communing with their computers to make XXJFG an exclusive mix, which expertly blends Timbaland exoskeleton rhythms, trippy echo-soul and micro bass beats to perfection.”

[near the bottom of the page...look for the stars]

DJ Food: Blech 20.1

“Part 1 of a new Blech collection – classic tracks from Warp’s 20 year history, mixed together by Strictly kev aka DJ Food with a nod to the Blech mixes he did with PC in the 90’s. Certain sections mirror the set played at Warp’s 20th anniversary gig in London, 2009.”

and also…

L Vis 1990: Classic House Mix

[vis a vis RJ5000]

BONUS!

Belog, which seems like some sort of subsidiary product of the excellent Bidoun Magazine, is a hot blog for all things Iranian.

Okinawa_Soba is the nom de plume of an American fellow living in Okinawa who presides over a stockpile of 60,000 antique Japanese photographs. To the benefit of photography enthusiasts and nipponophiles everywhere, he has decided to scan and upload a choice selection of the photos to his flickr photostream. How did one individual happen to come into the ownership of such a magnificient photographic treasury? According to Soba, it was rather simple:

“95 % of the stream came from photography dealers and collectors in several countries — the majority of images found during business travels to NORTH AMERICA. The part that was not found in North America was tediously acquired from several other countries of the world via “snail mail” correspondence, phone calls, and looking at Xerox copies of single images (and whole collections) that were available. Over 30 years of business travel in and out of Japan allowed me to frequent Antique photography and Ephemera Shows, as well as other venues that centered around the buying and selling of vintage photography. As a member of the National Stereoscopic Association, attendance at our Conventions and Trade Shows naturally resulted in the accumulation of old 3-D images of Japan and elsewhere.”

Note: I predict that hand-colouring will emerge as an avant-garde photo trend in 2010. Soon after it will be available as an iPhone app. Or maybe that’s already happened and I missed it.