Mrazek – framing exotica – are you sitting comfortably?

Gotta take risks to get the image you need: There’s a revealing warning reported in what is a really excellent book by Rudolph Mrazek (from 2002, called Engineers of Happy Land: Technology and Nationalism in a Colony (Princeton, Princeton University Press, on P. 108) where the author relates the story of a colonial era photographer [...]

Zen choice

Hey hey hey – take me back to the dyakshya yoga youth refuge I first ran to after Grandpa Tate thought I shouldn’t keep camping out in his backyard shed… I was 14 – Crikey, there is a long story I have to tell one day… but already I can see this is going to [...]

WPRM

Subscribe to WPRM_BRITAINPowered by groups.yahoo.comThe people of the whole world are confronted with a global challenge by imperialism aiming to solidify and expand a world-wide empire. They have declared their right to use military force to intervene anywhere and everywhere, to destroy peoples and their lands, to slander the people’s struggles as “terrorist” in order [...]

Trinketization: ‘Third World Tourism’ and the manufacture ofthe Exotic

I am sort of stuck in my room. Somewhat foolishly perhaps, I agreed to write an entry on Exotica and Tourism for Jonathan Gray’s encyclopedia (getting so there are too many such things about) and I agreed to a deadline of Jan 1st, possibly forgetting that I should be indulging in some tourism myself at [...]

Trinket Crimbo

XMAS TEACHES KIDS TO LOVE CAPITALISM This old graffito favourite (I will post pics sometime) returned to mind this morning when I was rudely awakened by some god-bothering Bishop (Nazir Ali) on Radio Four’s Today Programme complaining in ever so slow plummy tones that something about diversity legislation – vaguely referenced as ‘political correctness’ – [...]

Bougainville

Occasionally I update on Bougainville stuff (here and here and here) but the latest I have is this (and someone certainly should dissertate on the topic…): This interview first ran around 0549 GMT By James Attwood Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES SYDNEY (Dow Jones)–Papua New Guinea’s government expects to agree terms with Bougainville authorities next year [...]

Indian curry powder – theory of translation

I am first of all against translation as it is mad, its impossible, it cannot ever be true to origins, its a kind of violence, it is always political, it transforms, it is creative, it is heroic to try, it is the essence of communicability, it is exchange, it disrupts parochialism, it is the foundation [...]

Kennington and Oval

Today, avoiding real work that is piled up on my desk, and waiting on the gas inspector to check my pipes and tell me what I already know – ie that my listed Edwarding building is not allowed to have a gas boiler outlet sticking out where it does – for shame… well, I thought [...]

Thead our hero//Space as Final Frontier//The tendency for the rate of profit to flail about madly like a neon beam emanating from your skull.

Sci Fi literature over and over enacts the subsumption of everyday life before my very eyes, and more and more of my day is teleported into commodification. From the mundane tech of gadgets, phones and comm-sets, to regimes of control, underlying code and even the modalities of aspiration; myriad forms of life are morphed in [...]