Reading List: August.

Fiction: 


John Ajvide Lindqvist: Handling the Undead.
William Gibson: Pattern Recognition.
William Gibson: Spook Country.
William Gibson: Zero History.
Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett: Good Omens.

Films: 

Super 8 (2011, J.J. Abrams) ***/****.
Sister My Sister (1994, Nancy Meckler) ****.
Les blessures assassines (2000, Jean-Pierre Denis) ***.
Portrait of a Marriage (1990, Stephen Whittaker) ****.
Sense and Sensibility (1995, Ang Lee) ***.
3 (2010, Tom Tykwer) ****/*****.
Stake Land (2010, Jim Mickle) ***.
The Conspirator (2010, Robert Redford) ***.
Submarine (2011, Richard Ayoade) ****.
Beautiful Thing (1996, Hettie Macdonald) ****.
Shelter (2007, Jonah Markowitz) ***.
Win Win (2011, Thomas McCarthy) ****.
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011, Joe Johnston) ****.


Shows: 

Game of Thrones, Season One.
Parks and Recreation, Season Two.
Party Down, Season One and Two.
Life, Season One.

random mixtape - there is so much suffering, i can't do a thing

the rosebuds | second bird of paradise. dawn landes | picture show. dr manhattan | baton rouge (daytrotter). blood red shoes | take the weight. snake rattle rattle snake | kafka and the milk (daytrotter). the mynabirds | let the record go. a weather | third of life. radical face | welcome home. lissie | wedding bells.

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Pollyn - Mysterons (Portishead Cover)




Inside you're pretending
Crimes have been swept aside
Somewhere where they can forget
Divine upper reaches
Still holding on
This ocean will not be grasped
All for nothing

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

• Female 18th century cross-dressing pirates; or the stuff my childhood was made of.
• You might complain about a slight increase in price; elsewhere, the geopolitics of food are a question of survival. 
• One of the most insightful pieces I've read about the London riots so far.
• The new condition of the working class - Chavs by Owen Jones and The Precariat by Guy Standing.
• An ingenious way of tricking German Neo-Nazis, based on the assumption that they occasionally wash their shirts. 

When the layout makes all the difference

If so, Londoners of all stripes will have to learn again to live together in a way Parisians and their banlieusards haven't even attempted to for generations. The divide is that complete, due mostly to the reinforced-ghetto nature of many French projects. Indeed, one of the biggest complaints that France's banlieue residents continue airing is how their geographical remoteness from the centers of France's main cities only the most evident form of their exclusion from and rejection by wider, productive, profitable French society. Transportation to and from projects into city centers is limited at best, and it takes significant effort for residents to jump what's become known as the “invisible wall” separating them from the turf of wider French society. This, indeed, was a major reason why when rioting broke out in 2005, the burning cars and pitched battles with police were limited to the suburbs: that's where the anger was created, grew, festered and exploded; seeking to export that into the areas that white, comfortable France calls home would have left rioters dissipated, disorganized, and exposed so far from their bases.

Conversely, in London—and the other English cities in which unrest is now flaring up—the people doing the most damage are believed to live among relatively well-off working families. 

TIME: The Riots of Paris and London: A Tale of Two Cities, August 9, 2011

Statistical Numbing

Statistical numbing plays a huge role in what the news media covers, and what it doesn’t, since the media are in the business of bringing us information we are likely to pay attention to, and our attention is less drawn to numbers than stories about individual people (which explains the success of the narrative device of weaving stories about big issues around a personal example). Less coverage means less concern, because we certainly can’t be moved by these tragedies if we don’t know much about them. And public concern drives government policy, so statistical numbing helps explain why nations so often fail to expend their resources to save people elsewhere who are starving, or dying of disease, or being raped and murdered, in the tens and hundreds of thousands. 

Big Think: Statistical Numbing: Why Millions Can Die, and We Don't Care, August 9, 2011

Linkliste unbehandelter Themen

First and foremost, the humanitarian catastrophe in Somalia isn't over simply because it has disappeared from the front pages of the newspapers. The Guardian reports that more than 12 million people need immediate help, while efforts to distribute food are hindered by rebel and Somali government troops (and logistics are also a problem). Please consider donating to a relief organisation, Doctors Without Borders and UNICEF provide the option of donating via text message (at least in Austria). 

As the Syrian government continues to assault protesters, international pressure to cease the attacks increases. Turkey, which shares a border of 800 kilometres with Syria and is seeing an increase in refugees, sent its foreign minister to deliver a "grave message" to Syrian leader Assad. 

After the last-minute agreement on raising the debt ceiling, Standard & Poor's, one of the three major rating agencies, downgraded the US to AA+, which was promptly followed by a massive slump (a "free fall" of the stock market), also caused by lack of faith in the European Central Bank's ability to support troubled European country (also dubbed "the ever-growing list of doom") and headlines indicating the possibility of "A Second Recession".

On August 4th, police shot Tottenham resident Mark Duggan. Two nights later, following peaceful protests, riots broke out and quickly spread to other London areas, and, as of last night, Birmingham, Liverpool, Nottingham and Bristol. 

Wikipedia

Before/After pictures from Tottenham

Some attempts to explain the context of the riots
NY Times: Egyptian Bloggers Parse London Riots in Real Time, August 8, 2011

A Hackney resident shouting at looters: "Get real. Do it for a cause. If you're fighting for a cause then fight for a fucking cause."

Diane Abbott, MP from Hackney, on how the protests differ from the ones 26 years ago: 

The other thing that may be different is the underlying relationship between the police and the community. My friend David Lammy, who has been the Member of Parliament for Tottenham since 2000, was correct to point out that, while the original Broadwater Farm riots were a straight fight between the police and the youth, the latest disturbances were an attack on Tottenham itself. It was not just cars and buildings that went up in smoke on Saturday night. It was 25 years of investment, of painstaking attempts to transform Tottenham's reputation and (above all) of trying to build better police-community relations. 

Independent: Diane Abbott: A tinder box waiting to explode, August 8, 2011

Das Lied zum Sonntag

Best Coast - Our Deal

Get More: MTV Supervideo, Music, Best Coast

I wish you would tell me 
how you really feel
but you''ll never tell me
'coz that's not our deal