Listening to ‘Dazed & Confused’, the first track on Marxman‘s second album ‘Time Capsule’, delivered into my hands by the illustrious Malcolm Craig mere weeks after I mentioned I was searching for it. I had been on the hunt for seven years and it took him two weeks. Blimey.
Damn it’s a good track. Oisin made it available on the internet a few years ago so I’ve got the mp3s, but it was taken down sometime in the last nine months – there might still be copies floating around the P2Psphere if anyone’s into it.
Malcolm tells me Marxman – a militant Irish Marxist hip-hop group – once played on Top of the Pops, to the confusion of the audience. Heh.
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Will there ever be, in the modern era, a leader with as complicated and compromised a position as Yasser Arafat? For every honour he rightly bears, there’s a crime; for every achievement there’s a failure.
Maybe not – but every political leader is compromised. That’s the conundrum of political leadership. Arafat is exceptional only in the extremity of his achievements and his crimes, not in the fact of their dual existence.
Of course, opinions differ as to whether his achievements outweigh his crimes, or vice versa. This is as it should be for so complicated a figure.
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Finally took Brad’s box of books to the post office to ship to NZ.
*looks at overland shipping bill*
*looks at growing pile of morgue books to one day be shipped to NZ*
*feels nervous*
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Anyone interested in the interface of tech and media, and the possibilities of new forms currently unfolding, will probably already be reading Warren Ellis’ writing on the subject.
If you’re not already, and you want a glimpse of the future, go read. The man is essential. He’s currently writing a fascinating series on ‘mind gangsterism’ that is bringing together a dozen strands of technological innovation and sewing them together. I’ve linked to his livejournal, which he’s winding up soon, but that’s where the action is right now.