The following paragraph should be topped off by the sound of the world ending:

Pony is an orangutan from a prostitute village in Borneo. We found her chained to a wall, lying on a mattress. She had been shaved all over her body. If a man walked near her, she would turn herself around, present herself, and start gyrating and going through the motions. She was being used as a sex slave. She was probably about six or seven years old when we rescued her, but she had been held captive by a madam for a long time. The madam refused to give up the animal because everyone loved Pony and she was a big part of their income.

And some people have slung about four pages’ worth of samples of her various works on YouTube:

As prompted by RU Sirius in a large discussion about writing and the net:

It helps to know how to write across all media platforms. Not only that, but to become various role-playing personas whose writerly performance plays out in various multi-media languages across these same platforms. The most successful writer-personas now and into the future ? at least those interested in “making a living” as you put it ? will be those who can take on varying flux personas via the act of writing. (And who isn’t into making a living… What’s the opposite? Conducting a death ritual for the consumer zombies lost in the greenwash imaginary?)

The idea started out as a kind of MetaPortal, but Ariana came up with the MetaBar. It’s the sidebar “below the fold.” It grabs the top of new posts by my fellow-travellers in realtime. So while you’re here, you’re also there. I’ll be adding a few more in next week, if I get time.

(One day, of course, I’ll find a shop that has volumes 2 and 3 in stock)

Today, the website has its winter coat; thanks, Ariana.

1. what should we write?, 2. Untitled, 3. Untitled, 4. pom, 5. Fuck the LRDP, 6. NBC picket 11.12.2007

I keep losing this, so I’m putting it up here. Kode9:

Yeah, I suppose it?s what happened when Acid House in the UK collided with Afro-Carribean music culture in London in particular. So it is Dub, Reggae and Dancehall. And when these collided in the early ?90s you got when Hardcore and then most importantly for me Jungle, ?93, ?94, Drum’n Bass, UK Garage, currently Grime and Dubstep. So the Hardcore Continuum is a way of understanding that evolution of music, because there are all kinds of similar in way. All different speeds, but at the same time coming from a similar place and always using pirate radio as a media platform, because these musics haven?t at least initially a lot of media coverage. So what?s interesting about them in a way is, that they are musical genres, but at the same time they come with their own media. And with Grime just now they come with their own DVD and mixtape culture as well.

About ten minutes after I posted her link last night, she put ten more prints on her Etsy store:

GHOST HARDWARE EP was as Ballardian a record as I’ve ever heard: the sound of a drowned London. “Ghost Hardware” is on UNTRUE, but UNTRUE is an attempt to turn away from the watery cemetery of the EP, to make a “glowing, buzzing” record. I’m not so sure that he achieved that. Like his eponymous debut, like GHOST HARDWARE EP too, it’s head music, it’s contemplative. The textures of the thing are incredible. The beats come from under the road, the breaks come from three rooms away, and some of the vocals come from over your shoulder and thirty years ago. People sing with the crackle of dusty old vinyl. The ghosts of old musics.

I’m on the twelfth listen, and I still don’t feel like I’ve nailed what this album is. Because I don’t think Burial set out to make a funeral for soul music. But none of these lush R&B voices are alive. They’re all haunting broken speakers. They’re all coming from abandoned houses, the middle of empty streets, the floor under your flat where sometimes you hear someone tapping at the walls but that can’t be right because no-one’s lived down there in years. Vocals loop like the old stories of ghosts returning to perform the same motions night after night. The non-singing voices, the captures of people talking in the street, or even whispering, are way further up in the mix. I’m reminded of the old-style ghost hunters, training their mics on haunted rooms, and playing back the recordings to hear, under the bustle of ordinary life, the sound of dead people trying to make themselves heard to the world of the breathing.

It’s not as immediately doomed a record as GHOST HARDWARE EP. But it’s not as benign a record as it wants to be, or as it wants you to think it is. Even the final track, “Raver,” sounds like the 21st Century sadly closing the casebook marked “1992″ and locking it in the filing cabinet of failing memory. Throwing it back to the ghosts.

“Polaroid Of A Geisha” at Etsy:

“Have you ever wondered what Coldplay’s Chris Martin thinks of ‘Autobahn’?”

Ice Bird Spiral

If you can stop watching it after 80 minutes or so, you can walk away knowing you watched something that ranged from pretty good to very beautiful. Watch it to the end and you’ll spend the rest of the night looking for someone to kick the shit out of. Ideally the writer and/or director. The film’s descent into utter bubbling gibberish is quite astonishing. The original manga was never exactly shining literature or anything, but it never stopped partway through and said, “Ah, fuck it, this is how it ends, bang bang, happy ending, I’m going home, bollocks to all of you.”

Facebook apps allow you to hit at least twenty people at a time with their bullshit. Julia Roy sends five messages in a row and gets called a spammer.

For November 2007, five hundred microgrammes of pure language:

…Poochlatz’s Dalek-voiced singer Rani Zager drags this bizarre vocalist/bassist/drummer three-headed secular beast by the nose, the ensemble coming on like some LSD-fuelled Orange Day parade-of-berserkers through the heart of Catholic Belfast. I s’pose some fucker’s got to do it, especially if… the results occasionally sounds like all four of the Doors on largactyl playing “Wild Child” through a factory-sized Vent-Axia. Israeli Post-Industrial Ritual Forced-March Post-Blues, anyone?