Parolin Products

Parolin Products: Maria Anna Parolin, Lecture Review.
by 0018922

Maria Anna Parolin is an artist working with multiples in various contexts who delivered a lecture on her artwork and practice. She is a printmaker, and I know her from the plate lithography course that she taught here at Emily Carr two years ago. Her presentation was less a conceptual argument than an artist's talk. She presented her work to let it speak to us, rather than her for it. Her practice being generally print and paper making, with also a strong conceptual element. She focused on the idea of the multiple, the idea of detail in a vast world of multiples, and various aspects of our multiple society such as business, depression and invasive species.

Since her presentation was so purely descriptive, we need to look to the two background readings she presented to see the ideological underpinnings. The Baudrillard writing, Simulacra and Simulations, is a confusing one. It starts off with a statement from Ecclesiastes, "[simulacrum] is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." This paradoxical statement is not more easily understood by looking up the word, simulacrum: it means an "image or representation," or "a faint trace or semblance; as, a simulacrum of hope" [wiktionary]. Basically, the word is very similar to simulation, but with more emphasis on the image. As the two words are hard to distinguish from one another, so is the language of Baudrillard intentionally confusing, the idea of truth is challenged.

Throughout his essay, Baudrillard is constantly building up elaborate pyramid schemes of a conspiratorial nature, then quickly dismissing them as merely one perspective that is no less true or false than the alternate mundane explanation. He talks about Disneyland a "hyperreal" unreality, of Main Street America, yet this colourful faux street is an illusion for children. The cartoon childishness conceals the intention of being a place where adults get to act like children, but also to hide how it is normal for them to act like children, as if this were the only place. Then when one leaves the Disneyland Park grounds with it's charismatic manufactured busyness we are confronted by the stark inhumane parking lot with isolated complex automotive machines. And the delusion goes even further, when we see how all of America is alike with its malls and parking lots. So, Disneyland is just the same and no more an illusion than anywhere else.
Similarly, Baudrillard attacks the truth of radical political realities. He looks at a communist political revolutionary group that is dealing with the ideology of power. Yet, this group may have a co-opted discourse if they are part of the system and their rebellion only symbolic. He examines multiple perspectives on the truth of the conspiracy to overthrow power or maintain it and finds that all perspectives are equally true and equally false. The end of his essay is a cynical footnote about buying the vote in what he sarcastically describes as 'more advanced' Athens.

Baudrillard's message is one of confusion, of total imaginary and imagery saturation. Borges is less desolate, by talking about the desert he humorously illuminates the paradoxes of a map so big that it covers the entire surface of the empire, one and the same, the artefact of empire being real or reproduction? After reading these two absurd writers, I feel lost, without direction. Is the map real? Baudrillard seems to be referencing Borges map but is a lot less humorous. I think Borges is a bit more sophisticated still because laughter is more complex than tragedy.

Parolin does not have a clear direction in her art that I can see, except her method. She is printmaking and doing it all by hand, highly detailed. What she produces she brands as her 'Products,' an embrace of mass production. Yet there is irony in all her work, her labour intensive printing process is not cheap production at all. In the material she chooses we see truth and paradox: paper and anti-depressant. Knowing lithography, I know the detail and inhuman dedication to that truth of the finite, yet the impossibility of perfection. The lithographer learns a physical appreciation of the role of the machine. It reproduces more exactly than the human can yet never with the same care and reality of detail; a human can fix or finesse to correct for error, while the machine has specifiable parameters and does not see the flaws except as another number.

In our alienating mass society depression is common, as are anti-depressants. However I don't think that is the sole focus of her paper and pills. The pills are revered; we awe at their power yet printing into paper is an arbitrary circumstance. That randomness is the post-modern bit. The control of all variables can't hide the lack of control. Her invading species is similarly about a certain lack of control, the beauty of chaos.

Her conceptual focus is that control of complexity issue, and the impossibility of control. It's how the individual is lost in mass production, even as she is the master of it able to finely hand craft that which seems inhuman.

After all that work, she invites rich CEOs with a coupon for her Product. Busyness and lack of control of our time - the most valuable of resources - is apparent. In this, Borges' tricky humour is at play. The powerful CEO who has the power over a mass of people, a mass of production, is given a coupon to her fine art. In an artist run gallery her commercial exploitation of the hand craft is underlined by controlling those CEOs who are such expert commercial exploiters.

Her work is probably better presented not by herself, because she is too sincere and honest about her confusion in our era. People need to be explained the concept. Confusion may be apparent by immersion, but not artistically appreciated. I recall her description of working with a master lithographer in Italy and all the variables such as humidity and sunlight that come into rolling that slab. Others without that story I don't think will feel the terrible irony of hand lithographing cheap packaging in multiple colours. And that may be the point. Control or out-of-control, we can never appreciate all that goes into the materials we consume in our interconnected society. If we try we're confused, we're consumed ourselves. Despite our grand post-modern narratives and technologies, we are all still at the whim of nature which can reproduce better; it reproduces us.

• Baudrillard, Jean. "Simulacra and Simulations." Stanford History and Philosophy of Science and Technology website. From Jean Baudrillard, "Selected Writings." ed. Mark Poster, Stanford; Stanford University Press, 1988, 166-184. (15 February 06) http://www.stanford.edu/.../Baudrillard_Simulacra.html
• Borges, Jose Luis. "On Exactitude in Science." Washington University in St. Louis website. From Jorge Luis Borges, "Collected Fictions." Translated by Andrew Hurley, Penguin, 1999. (15 February 06) http://www.artsci.wustl.edu/.../stories.html
• Parolin, Maria Anna. "Parolin Products." Art History 333. Interdisciplinary Forums: Studies in Contemporary Praxis. Emily Carr Institute, 9 Feb. 2006.
• Wiktionary. "Simulacrum." A Wikimedia Project. (16 February 06) http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/simulacrum

Clones in Our Lifetime

Copies: Review of Catherine Anderson "Clones in Our Lifetime" Lecture.
By 0018922

From movies, we gain a shallow understanding. The Island, a recent film, portrays a micro colony of post-apocalyptic survivors. It is a near utopia, but the governance and purpose of the group is mysterious. Eventually we learn that the protagonist and his whole world are clones. They are kept in this distopia which effectively functions as a warehouse of human "product," clones reserved for the very rich should they one day require a new organ or whatnot. The story becomes a story of Exodus and the clones/subhumans/slaves are eventually led to full humanity through emancipation. The moral predicament is surprising not for it's unique modernity but as it is an ancient story of exodus underneath, the morality is no different with clones than it is with slaves or any other class of the oppressed.

Catherine Anderson came to speak to us on behalf of the provincial genetics science education mandate. Cloning is such an overhyped issue, overused in Hollywood. It is a fashionable topic. We see that in the stories of people jumping the bandwagon on false human cloning news reports.

In reality, the technology of cloning is unlikely to be so simple. Our sexual biological paradigm is inherently against cloning. Sex is understood through evolutionary biology to be important primarily as it ensures diversity. Genetic diversity is necessary for large populations that won't constantly be brought down by plague. Cloning is a strategy used in biology rarely and in moderate amounts. It is simply too unnatural, too unsafe, for there to be large human populations of clones. It would not be sustainable. So the moral and ethical issues are partly pre-determined by nature. No is the answer. Realistically there are a plethora of ideas surrounding genetic engineering that are a lot more interesting to me and a lot more likely to challenge us. Yet somehow, we parcel up these ideas, and those ideas, into dramatically isolated topics. Perhaps this is due to the dramatic necessities of the motion picture arts; a more broad perspective is likely to yield understanding.

Obviously individuals should be treated as persons. But what about pigs grown with human organs? In many instances it is a simple case of technology being used for good or evil. Depending on circumstance, it's easy to imagine both good or evil consequences. Likewise, with a 'technology' such as a chair or a gun: I can use either for socially constructive or destructive aims. The morality is not in the object, but in the act or the politics. Obviously, a gun is easier to use for evil, and so deciding what technologies are widely available is a priority.

Politics is very central, therefore, as that is what this all boils down to. Social justice allows for just solutions to new problems, or rather often the same old problems in new forms. Our world is full of new types of problems. While there may be religious or traditionalist types who would like to turn back the clock and close the pandora's box of knowledge that technologies like genetic manipulation bring to us, it is impossible. It's a pandora's box after all. Politics is always central and the questions of playing God with our genes are more scary because we as a species have a terrible record of cooperating. Our Political History is a long endless list of wars about simple old problems. How can one expect more in facing complex new misunderstood problems?

Yet even Catherine, in her presentation, didn't know about the patenting of genes of Aboriginals or many such questions which are already in the public imagination. The goal of education, claimed by the body she represents under the BC government, is noble. Yet, how can they claim to be educating people when they are blind to the most dramatic signposts in the political debate? Hello colonialism! By feigning the impossible objectivity she is taking a stance; apolitical is a political stance.

The ethics oversight board is the only concept of dealing with these issues her group suggests. Their naive corporate approach that denies the possibility of unofficial technology is worrisome. This situation reminds me of early internet utopians, who could not imagine the commercial onslaught that the 'information superhighway' would face. How can they expect justice when the oversight board is in a position to be just as much a group of PR accenters to mollify the public as it is a group to oversee and protect the public from industry. The language of ethics board oversight is the language of corporate spin, it seems from the presentation and the seminar group's reaction.

However, I don't think that this group is malicious in intent, simply naive. BC is in violation of patents for breast cancer research, this is a case of the political realities right here and now; enough with the abstract future! I wish that Catherine had focused more on this. Intellecutal Private Property is one of the key issues defining our new era as much or more than the physically dramatic technology of gene manipulation.

Who wants to live forever anyway? Eternal youth is a metaphor for present day life, not practical reality. Look at Micheal Jackson to see how far away from common desire for eternal youth he is. I don't find these extreme moral challenges to be terribly useful, we are not likely to have to decide about living forever but more the grey areas. We face the same problems with these complex 'new' topics as we do with older more supposedly understood realities. The dangers of marketing and manufactured desires are still overwhelming. Common sense moral issues of murder, and individuality, are in fact what all this cloning stuff is about. The new age approach is unhelpful, it may even be said to be a type of marketing invading the public discourse.

I am not terribly worried about clones in our lifetime. I am worried about drones right now who accept and propagate propaganda. I am worried about simplifying and dumbing down the public discourse, which is inevitable with rapid fire mass media. I am worried about science becoming privatised wholesale so that all of our debate is moot.

Anderson, Catherine. "Clones in Our Lifetime." Lecture. Art History 333. Interdisciplinary Forums: Studies in Contemporary Praxis . Emily Carr Institute, Vancouver. 26 Jan. 2006.

Simulacra and Simulations

Jean Baudrillard writing, Simulacra and Simulations
by 0018922

The Baudrillard writing, Simulacra and Simulations, is a confusing one. It starts off with a statement from Ecclesiastes, "[simulacrum] is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true." This paradoxical statement is not more easily understood by looking up the word, simulacrum: it means an "image or representation," or "a faint trace or semblance; as, a simulacrum of hope" [wiktionary]. Basically, the word is very similar to simulation, but with more emphasis on the image. As the two words are hard to distinguish from one another, so is the language of Baudrillard intentionally confusing, the idea of truth is challenged.

Throughout his essay, Baudrillard is constantly building up elaborate pyramid schemes of a conspiratorial nature, then quickly dismissing them as merely one perspective that is no less true or false than the alternate mundane explanation. He talks about Disneyland a "hyperreal" unreality, of Main Street America, yet this colourful faux street is an illusion for children. The cartoon childishness conceals the intention of being a place where adults get to act like children, but also to hide how it is normal for them to act like children, as if this were the only place. Then when one leaves the Disneyland Park grounds with it's charismatic manufactured busyness we are confronted by the stark inhumane parking lot with isolated complex automotive machines. And the delusion goes even further, when we see how all of America is alike with its malls and parking lots. So, Disneyland is just the same and no more an illusion than anywhere else.

I saw an extended version of this essay online. He writes a lot more beyond Disneyland but doesn't say a lot more. He takes a similar approach to attack the truth of radical political realities. He looks at a communist political revolutionary group that is dealing with the ideology of power. Yet, this group may have a co-opted discourse if they are part of the system and their rebellion only symbolic. He examines multiple perspectives on the truth of the conspiracy to overthrow power or maintain it and finds that all perspectives are equally true and equally false. The end of his essay is a cynical footnote about buying the vote in what he sarcastically describes as 'more advanced' Athens.

Baudriallard's message is one of confusion, of total imaginary and imagery saturation. I suppose this is the 'post-modern condition' then? I thought it was more about globalisation and hybrid culture, about going past the simulated grand narratives of the West to see local reality. This essay reads like a grand narrative, totally melodrama.

Is all of Post-Modernism supposed to be depressing?

25th of every month

this is the best idea ever!
{notice the darwin fish with legs on the bunny's helmet}

MY ALGERIANCE by Hélène Cixous

MY ALGERIANCE by Hélène Cixous- Review, Reaction
by 0018922

This is basically a story more than an essay, Hélène Cixous' childhood. Her childhood is evidently full of hardship and an atmosphere of oppression. Yet, she does such a wonderful job of describing the gritty sincere people, dramatic landscapes and settings pregnant with meaning, that one cannot help but feel nostalgic with the protagonist. Impressions, imprints, mirrors of her life, it is a wonderfully romantic war story. One wonders at the irony of such beautiful humanity amidst such conflict and oppression.

The colonial and European wars are "violent plays" which give a lot of political significance to her Algeria. Her family has its own piece of the action when bullets lodge in their door from the American liberation forces.

The Algeriance title is a clever wordplay on Allegiance and Algeria. Poignant with the colonial themes of the essay. Apparently the noun 'Algerian' is new, it was only an adjective before. I don't really understand what that signifies.

Hélène was a "clandestine" little girl. This is how she describes her out of place existence. Yet evidently she was formed by Algeria and the harsh contrasts there. She recalls longing to live elsewhere but also hospitality and gratitude. "Nowhere is home."

She is in a torn land, symbolised by the two cemeteries Catholic and Jewish. I'm not sure why there aren't more cemeteries of the other groups, but I suppose it just wasn't part of her childhood. She relates a terribly poetic situation of having to sell the roses her dead father had wished they maintain, both soiling and growing from his memory.

She sees herself as an outsider. "My house is encircled." There are various colonial ethnic divisions: There are the Arabs versus the French occupiers. She is neither because she is colonial but not accepted as Catholic because she is Jewish. It is around WW2, and there is extreme persecution of Jews. So, she uses the letter 'J' to describe herself, instead of Jew, it becomes her favourite letter. Also, her leftist family describes the groups as Israelites, Muslims and Indigènes - the latter, I guess are the indigenous 'black' people in Africa? Jewish and Arab groups are divided, as well, by a "poisoned gift" of citizenship - extended only to the Jewish group. Divide and Conquer is the classic and is demonstrated. There certainly is a mix of groups but all of them are not united against the occupying French.

She has mixed feelings about having a French passport. It opens doors for her. For her family it was a "lucky landing" in the chaos of war. Yet it makes her part of the oppressive colonial group, that those around her hate. Despite her opinions of sympathy with the oppressed, Hélène feels she is part of the colonial class also because her family has a maid by the name of Aïcha, though that was not her real name. Evil impoverishment surrounds her but as a child she does not share. This the author expresses with some obvious regret. Her own name of Cixous is curiously of Arab Berber name origin even though she is Jewish. She still feels totally foreign with that name and almost disavows it.

Her family was expelled from circles of military before and after war, intersecting contradictory social circles. They lived in the "uninhabitable" Clos Salembier, under siege as enemy due to strange misplaced anti-colonial sentiment and racism. She says she feels like Cinna the poet, murdered for presumed allegiance to Caesar. Yet she loved the Algerians who spurned her, she identifies with the oppressed. Her only friend 'Kabyle boy' also with a lost name. Wanted to love but too early too late.

She can forgive the hate of the oppressed not the hate of the colonialists. She remembers the colour navy blue as the fascist youth.

She feels sexual repression and identity as a girl. She is a girl afraid of cunning, and is picked on and spat upon by the tricky boys. Cunning is an interesting choice of word, coming from Cixous the feminist; it is related to the much maligned word 'cunt,' and has been recently re-associated with female knowledge and traditional wisdom. However, as a girl she feels lucky to be able to hide her Jewishness more easily than her brother. Her brother is circumcised and the tricky boys are more rough with her brother.

She comes to live, in 1941, on the a hill and no longer feels like the guilty oppressor. She has the "Peace of the poor" in Oran with the sailors who were really French. Water carriers are still there, the oppressed. Yet, the climax of the writing is an incident with a shoeshine boy. Her new white shoes get bloodied. Why still the hate? I think she is meaning to show how overwhelming it all is. She went home without retaliating and tried to be dignified.

The end of the story feels a bit unfinished. She tacks onto the end a part with a positive spin, about Madame Bals the Spanish Grocer who said, there's "no point using kid glove[s]" and taught the children four letter words. Somehow she united the children but it doesn't say how. She makes a point about the year and living in the past that I don't understand: 1940 or 2000?
Legitimacy is one of the key issues of her essay and she shows how illegitimacy and the law serve to divide the various ethnic groups against each other for the French to rule. The division of friend and enemy is very muddled.

Question: What is Oran? What year is she talking about written in the stairwell, surely not the year 2000?

Sleepers Awake

"Don't you fret, pet. I'll tell them to stamp PERISHABLE all over it."
Damn! you miss one and you step in two!

"But it's not perishable, Mr. Best."

"I know, I know, but just remember that somewhere we may have an everlasting use too."

The old man walked down the path and told me to come out of hiding. You are a nobody, a freak, a pathetic little weepingstock, lost, already forgotten, as it has spent all meaning, as the words and the quick flesh draw farther apart--

"I'm afraid I don't follow."
--plunge through the net, break into the light--stop writing books

"But I've never even read one." This, of course, happened some time ago; when you might almost say, I still had my innocense, and a little, yes, perhaps a little faith in something...
--try to feel your own heart beating in your chest, your own life in the living wonder of all creation--You are a liar, a thief, a winded ghost making empty sounds in a madhouse--

"I don't know why you talk to me if you think I'm as worthless as all that, sir." And I was down on my knees crying and all the light and stalking had their teeth in my life and I didn't know how I was going to get out I didn't know how I was going to control what was eating the sick oyster that squirmed in my head
--it is time that books began to whirl and dance--

"I thought you just said writing books was bad."
--I've changed my mind. It is time that books be allowed to OPEN INTO THE UNKNOWN--

"What, sir, does that mean?"

--books must be allowed to get out of hand, to wander off on their own account--

"Help me not to be a cheat. I'd like to take all the poor devils in the world in my arms and be able to give them something, some real food, some stuff that has the stink and the painful wonder of being alive in it--Even the crude drawing of a cow--"
--man must be made to understand that all the gates are still open, that all the Wild and Beautiful are beckoning him NOW... a flower, a girl, a star... be hushed in that wonder--

"My trouble in the world is inside, not out at all. Something inside myself has damaged me."
--kneel to the Blakes & the Shakespeares
--There is one king on this earth, and that king is the poet--

"Pray for me, Father... for I am without an animal to live in."
--be as children again.

"I laugh, I weep, Father."
--BE AS CHILDREN AGAIN!

"The world is dying around us."
--then leave the world which has--O my children have been made to murder one another; they have been driven mad--

"A flower, God--a girl, a star."
--and I am crying too.

---------------------------------

Well, that's enough for now. I got to go take mea a look around. Who knows, I may be missing a few tricks--Besides, my fanny's had enough work-out for one day.

! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * !
Put this book aside a couple hours and
go out and do something nice for somebody.
! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * ! * !

[Kenneth Patchen. 'Sleepers Awake.' New Directions Publishing. New York,
1946. pp.85-87]

free software recommended by rusl

OK,

I'm going to write something useful here because I'm tired of nonsense at the moment. It may be because my school is all nonsense at the moment. Speaking of which, probably I should post my school assignments here. Why the hell not!?

OKay,

software that I recommend...

...Please note, software changes fast and I may change my view in the future. Make up your own damn mind:

P2P file sharing. I recommend using Bittorrent [BT] technology to get big files such as movies or discographies [all the music published by a certain artist in one bundle]

I use to use ABC because it is open source and written in Python which is a way better language than java. Azureus is written in java, it is the most popular P2P for BT out there but java crashes my computer. I think java is more stable on Mac or Linux so use it there] But then I learned about µtorrent. It is a very small program. You don't need to install it, you just run the .exe. Very decent for windows and crashes a lot less. So I definately recommend µtorrent [aka utorrent because people don't know that if you hold down 'Alt' then numbers 0 1 8 1 you get 'µ'] Even though it is closed source, which sucks, it is currently free.

The only downside of utorrent is that is makes the filesize for incompletely downloaded files to report as the final file size. This means that I run out of space artificially sometimes and is annoying. ABC was better in that it didn't do that. However, utorrent is superior not just because it is a smaller .exe, but also because it has features like DHT which mean you can keep sharing torrents without a working tracker, meaning torrents which are dead on ABC may be alive and well on utorrent.

For BT of any sort, you need to download the .torrent files themselves. I find mine using isohunt.com. It is a big commercial site with sketchy pop-up ads that would be dangerous to click on, however isohun has the best selection because it searches all the other search engines too. I have never been able to find more results with another search engine. utorrent comes with a list of other search engines. The only one I really know about is mininova.org. Other than that there are various topic specific websites which are better if you know what you are looking for such as Southpark, the Simpsons, Electropunk music or indymedia torrents. There are many others. Sometimes you have to sign up with a 'tracker' in order to be able to download a torrent they are hosting.

Besides BT there are lots of ways to file share. Napster was the first most famous. Popularity is signifigant with these things because it determines selection. Then there was KaZaa and WinMX. These programs have their own internal search function. A lot of those old ones are dead because the RIAA killed them because they want to make sharing illegal, because sharing is dangerous to a system of greed. Currently the program I use that is still working great is called Soulseek. It is an established system of the KaZaa/WinMX era. It was not, however, shut down because it mainly is for trading independantly produced more local community type music. One of the best features is the 'rooms' where you trade with users of similar interests. So I definately recommend Soulseek.

There are lots of great music download websites out there, or just sites which give you the titles of good music that then you can then plug into a torrent or P2P search. Some of the music sites I like, and of course it all depends on your taste, are CiTR radio show pages for These are the Breaks and Radio Zero, Nardwuar's site, Electropunk hitlist, Evolution Control Commitee, Negativland, Chumbawamba, Shirley and Spinoza Internet Radio, People Like Us, wobbly, cutcopy, chicks on speed, peaches... I could go on an on.

Speaking of Internet Radio. I'd recommend you use realalternative or winamp for that. Winamp has an OK list of stations. I'm not really into Podcasts at the moment.

---

OK OK, I'm getting tired of writing this. Now I will just list software with minimal discription.

ubuntu
is the new slick way to run linux. It's an African word meaning "I am what I am because of who we all are." They are super awesome. I have yet to install it but all I've heard is gread things. It's debian, meaning, pure free software, no tricks. There is also edubuntu, which we totally need because big dumb institutions are most of what props us Micro$oft. Another good way to us a Linux OS is with knoppix, which has a liveCD. I have used it and it works awesome. You boot the computer off of a CD and it is so smart it automatically sets up everything you need. The only thing i couldn't figure out was the wireless card, but that's because I don't use that and it was my sister's computer and probably if I understood wireless it would have been easy.

winavi is a thing I use for converting avi files to DVD format so I can burn them. It is a commercial trial. I've never sucessfully burned yet. However I beleive it is a decent program. Since it is a trial it has this annoying message on the converted video right in the centre of the screen, so it's a useless demo. However, I managed to find a password for it on this winavi crack website. Now for the past few years cracks have all been on sketchy malicious websites, but this site seems to be pretty decent so far for me. It just has a java popup that tells me a code and I click if it works or not. And lo and behold it did work!

Burning in Linux is going to work better than windows winavi whatever. I hope. Well it can, the question is will I be able to figure it out.

Gspot
despite the sexy name, this is a program for .avi video files. You run it to find out what codecs you need, or if you already have them

VLC
this is the most robust video player. it is open source. it has powerful features but I don't know how to use them all that well. it is good for weird formats like .mkv and bin/cue played right on your computer. Many video formats you would have to get a codec for in winamp are native to this program. Everybody should have this at least as a backup if you do video.

free-codecs.com
this is a good site which tells you all about video and codecs and all that. And you can download many of the programs for free from this website. I was suspicious of this site because of the expensive sounding URL. However I have yet to see any problems on this site. I think there are ads but's not popups and crap. I'm not sure if it's nonprofit or what but it seems a lot of people use it, it's linked on wikipedia, so that's what I trust.

Spacemonger
this is a visual way to look up how space is used on your hard disk. You can more easily see which files you ought to delete. Rather than going through tiny files one at a time. Quite useful if you, like me, want to feel in control of what is going on inside the box.

Undelete
Undelete was a standard feature in DOS but since the 'recycle bin' you need to specifically get a seperate program to do this. It's necessary when you mistakenly delete things. Recycle bin sometimes helps but really isn't a replacement since I empty the recycle bin quite often to free up space.

In case you didn't know. In a windows filesystem, you information is never actually deleted. What the computer does when you say 'delete' [or empty the recycle bin if you insist on that language] is windows removes the first letter of the filename, effectively making the file invisible to normal DOS or windows. Eventually the file will be overwritten as you use the disk. However, if you want to restore a 'deleted' file, all you need is an 'undelete' program that can see the files with the ?character as the first letter. Often you can fully recover deleted files this way. Unless the part of the disk where the file is has been overwritten, it's still there. There are various programs to 'truly' delete the file for the paranoid by this reality. However, it's not really a big deal, just seems like it when you read the PR from companies trying to get you to pay big $$$ for very basic stuff - good ol' reliance on ignorance to sell things.

Scandisk ME
This is just a windoze micro$oft program. But the newer ME version is a serious improvement if you are running win98, like me. You simply replace the .exe in the relevant directory and then it defragments a lot faster. However, when it starts it doesn't look like anything is happening for a while, but don't worry, when it does finally get going it will be way faster than the defragment98 version. Some seriously reworked mathmatics or something.

mozilla obviously
I kind of like the WYSIWYG html editer in the mozilla suite [the non-firefox mozilla] but I use the firefox thing for browsing. Jane uses the Thunderbird email client in mozilla, but I still prefer my old eudora. Mozilla not firefox link.


what about mosaic!
just for historians
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_web_browser
I just like to reminisce about when my friend bryan was skipping out of his 'virtual high'school and he told me about using mosaic.

amipro 3.0
www.zisman.ca/Articles/1991-92/OCP_AmiPro.html
this is the writing program I use instead of M$word or openoffice [bleh... java]
apparently others like it too. I'll send the .exe to you if you want it. Unfortunately
it is becoming dated. The file selection thing is annoying and it still forces you to use
8.3 filenames. but otherwise, it's still quicker and better thought out than anything else
I've tried. I'm use to it, but I wouldn't really recommend the 1993 version unless you
are use to it.

not recommending openoffice
because of the java in it and once it didn't save my homework when it had said it did which made me skip school I was so upset. I'm hoping there is a fork in the program and a non-java version comes out from the debian purists. This is the flagship of opensource after all [after linux servers] and it shouldn't suck so bad.

perfect keylogger lite
I use this not to be a spy, but to backup what I write in web browsers text boxes [like in your webmail] because often browsers will crash or just reset the text box if disconnected or something. It records every keystroke and mostly is a pretty reliable fallback plan [unless your computer is super fucked, which does happen]. Just be careful, it records every password which is good but I don't like it keeping my bank password!

search and replace html 98
I use this on webpages and in many other things it is useful.
All it does is 'search and replace' text which is exactly what you want. It can do a single file or all the files in a directory which is perfect for websites. Not fancy, not bloated.

AceFTP
This is the most straighforward FTP I like to use. I like how it highlights the difference between your disk directory and the server directory. Free with ads and pretty reliable I've found.

Turbo FTP
This is a 30 day trial program which I don't consider free, but you can set your clock back to feb 2003 and keep using it forever. It's great if you have a big website and are changing lots of files. It is designed exactly for that. I needed it when I made by bikesexual pictures thing because it's about 3000 files that need moving and sometimes, with a computer, you need to AUTOMATE!

Procomm Plus
This is the program I use to use to use the dail up modem to renew my library books. Also my friend had an ascii art BBS that was pretty cool though I never fully understood that stuff [back in grade 10/11]

Hackman Hex Editor
I used this to hack my way past level 50 in kobodeluxe, which is a seriously hard level. It was actually quite simple, but you need to edit the file that is not text, but hex or binary or something. This program can deal with that and it's pretty intelligently designed.

Lavasoft Ad-aware
This is very popular and is supposed to remove spyware. Commercial company, but smart, like the computer companies that will survive, it advertises with the good quality free product. Listen up 30 day trial nickle and dimers, nobody likes you.

Eudora 4.2
I have a CD of this that my dad bought! Why did I put this in the free section? I like it. I can hack the text back end of the program very easily. It's all these .ini files. Eudoralight I used for many years.

Smartwrap
This installs into eudora as a plugin but also is a standalone program. It erases the >>> and reformats garbled email so it's readible and doesn't have idiotic line breaks. Quite handy.

EzWare EzDesk
This thing keeps the icons on your desktop in the place you put them. Windows fucks it up regularly and resets the icons otherwise. Kind of a gimmick, but handy if you run a stupid windoze computer.

Photoshop, Flash MX, Dreamweaver
These I got to use because of my school. In order to move the program onto your 'home study' system, simply copy the directory containing the program from the 'program files' directory onto your equivalent, copy all of it. Then, go into regedit, and copy the section with the 'adobe' directory or the 'macromedia' one, and then copy that and then put it on your 'home study' unit. Learned this from a Lindows tutorial. Why the fuck are people so unwilling to fess up and be proud of sharing? Does everybody beleive just because the M$ stock price is down that their competition is, due to their own label, 'piracy'???
By the way, it even works from XP to win98. However you have to reformat the .reg file that you copied into the other format. It's like email formatting thought, just plain text. Just export a sample of the win98 .reg and compare to that.
Does that make sense? If not I can explain it better. I guess it's kindof a hack.
Premiere Pro 1.5
I tried the above trick with this program and it didn't work. Apparantly photoshop 8 is the same. Does anyone know the mechanism to get this to work?

Corel Print House Magic
This I got free on a CD that came with my scanner. If is very good for text layout and then printing. It is especially good for circular text, like the writing on a bicycle wheel for instance, which happens to be something I tend to draw. The interface is really annoying, but it does function.

Thumbsplus 3.0
This I have used for years and it was an awesome program. Starting to be obsolete with winXP being able to view files a bit better in the explorer. On the otherhand, it keeps the thumbs.db in one single place instead of all over the damn place [that is why you always end up downloading god damn useless .ini files with a directory of mp3s when you fileshare] Also it has seriously decent batch conversion features that I still use. I tried the google/flickr 'hello' or whatever stupid thing they made to do the same as what thumbsplus started 10 years ago and I still find thumbsplus works better.

Kobo Deluxe
This is a cool game in python that I'm slightly addicted too. Except I got over it because after level 50 it just repeats and is kind of dull. Opensource. It may improve in the future!

Eliza
This is something I remember trying first on the 286 and it was kind of stupid then and it is still now. But it's kind of interesting if you try and thing of alternative ways to use it.

Sayzme
This I love. sourceforge project. Made for blind people basically, it reads out the text to you. I want to figure out how to hoow it up to an automated webcrawler so it just reads the internet out loud until infinity. That would be a conceptual art project. I'd weld the computer into a steel box with a solar panel or something and have it access the net by wifi or something. Then you could never make it shut up.

Impulse Tracker music tracker
This I use to play with and even made a few songs. I'll post them here one day I guess. I transcribed scott joplin's entertainer. The .it files play in winamp nowadays!!! My friend rowen, or maybe jason the BBS guy, showed me it.

Klik & Play
This I ordered the floppy disk off the net in 1998 or something. It's a program for making your own video games. It is very limited but you can still make something fun. It's one of those annoying programs you use because the capabilities are worth the fucking butt ugly hard to function interface.

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK?

CAN THE SUBALTERN SPEAK? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
0018922 - Feb.2006

The conclusion seems to be, no they cannot [subaltern speak], though it would be better if they did.

I am beginning to sympathise with these incomprehensible writers. There is so much background required to understand what they are talking about, it is difficult writing. Certainly my own writing here would be equally indecipherable to the outside reader since I will not bother to elaborate all of the context for the essay I'm responding to. Still, I don't understand what's with all the "..."s? Spivak also uses big compounded words like postrepresentationalist, historiography and subproletariat among others. Was he German? Because, in German, you can just put any words together to make bigger words. Fun!

I'll try and start with definitions of parts of the essay I didn't understand so as to be as enlightening as possible. These are passages that I've gathered from the essay and then tried to define the words in boldface using Google, Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Altavist.babelfish and other internet sources:

cathect, as in "the subject could cathect, could occupy [invest] its itinerary"
to inject or focus libidinal, mental, and emotional energy, to perk up. Similar to cathexis from Freudian psychology and originating from the idea of occupation, in a non-military non-job sense.

"under erasure"
erasure is total blankness, "like a cow watching a train go by," not a positive term.

"transcendental signified"
this is Derrida's term related to phallocentricism, and logocentricism that privileges the signified over the signifier. I think it is quite bizarre that we have to tie it somehow to the penis, even though we are rejecting that Freudian outlook and so much else.

"epistemic violence"
related to epistemology, theory of knowledge. I guess this means the violence inherent in the system.

"palimpsestic narrative of imperialism"
a document that has been rewritten. Derived from the history of European manuscripts written on animal skins paper which were quite valuable. Thus, some paper was reused/rewritten after the old writing was scraped clean. Sometimes, the reasons for doing this were political rather than material; Christian text was written over Pagan, to erase the history.

"the required level of cognition or scientificity"
Foucault uses this term to be critical of science. It reminds me of a word I sort of invented a meaning for myself, Scientifical, which means kind of falsely attributing credibility to something by associating it with Science.

"urban subproletariat"
I'm guessing this is the people who don't have jobs - living under the proletariat - and in cities.

"can the subaltern speak?"
subordinate, lower rank, class or position. Kind of a one up term that is even more hardcore than oppressed or proletariat.

"Indian colonial historiography"
the epistemology of written history. A good concept to recognise. People write history for the present that they live in and will therefore always have bias in reading the past.

"practical historiographic exigencies"
demand, necessity, urgency is basically what exigency means, but to combine that with practical and historiographic?!

"antre" Derrida's term
cave, in French? A place of in-betweenness

"situational indeterminacy"
I couldn't find anything except to presume that when you live in a cave you situation is indeterminate.

"postrepresentationalist"
Well, that's an obvious one isn't it: That mute man over there without a camera is a dogmatic postrepresentationalist.

"Name-of-the-Father imagery in The Eighteenth Brumaire"
refers to a writing by Marx about Napoleon I and later and his Grandson Napoleon III coming to power as dictators. It's often cited in understanding Fascism. Brumaire is the name of a month from the 10 month French republican calendar

"patronymic"
name of the father

"'rendering visible the medical and juridical mechanisms that surround the story [of Pierre Riviere].'"
juridical is relating to the law and its administration. In something Foucault wrote about crime, he used the name Pierre Riviere as his protagonist murderer example. I have yet to read the story however.

"concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern"
following as a consequence

"semioses of the social text"
a misspelling of semiosis perhaps? Meaning, production of meaning. [tee, hee]

"minimal predication as indeterminate"
dependency

"race and class differences are subsumed under that charge"
take under the above idea

"general violence that is the possibility of an episteme"
sort of like a paradigm, what we see as truth collectively

Who is Deleuze?
he was a philosopher who said desire is productive, and was connected to Guha and Spivak intellectually.

So apparently Guha wrote about peasant uprisings. I find that topic a lot more exciting than Spivak.

Spivak seems to be saying that by writing a history of peasants we are stealing their voice to articulate their own needs. We have a kind of fetish interest in the peasant uprising but that is not enough, the subaltern has an "irretrievable consciousness" which we can't connect to because we use the "elaborations of insurgency" in place of their genuine "utterance." The elaborations are merely historians products, historiography - not what the peasants truly intended to express by revolting. We should know the limits of what we can say for a group we are not a part of.

Spivak notes how there is a kind of buffer group in between the elite class and the subaltern, called group number 3. These people live in antre, a French cave of in-betweenness. By focusing on group 3 instead of the subaltern we are proving that continuing the perspective of elites who do help the subaltern speak for themselves, but focus on the middle class group 3 that are similar to the academic elites - except they're in India, and we're in France. Group 3 is "irretrievably heterogeneous," and this is important to Spivak. I think this is because he implies that the subaltern is also heterogeneous.

Finally Spivak connects this all rather vaguely to identity. Heterogeneous is a way of saying the group is made up of different minority identity groups. He says that women subaltern are even more oppressed than men subaltern, and subsumes the other racial and other kinds of minority groups in that statement. Much earlier in the article he says that the margins are the silent centre "easily." I agree that diversity is what makes up groups such as the subaltern and number 3. I agree that we should support people in these groups to speak for themselves. However, I don't think diversity by itself is a totally functional idea without unity balancing with it. Spivak kind of implies a unity by calling all the heterogeneous groups as subaltern and implying a kind of Marxist liberation purpose. However, I think that unity stuff is more important and should be emphasised or articulated more than it is in his writing.

When I think about these issues I think it would be more useful to have dialogue not among young impressionably university students only, but also with people like my Grandma who have the perspective of living out these ideas over the course of time. My Grandma was married into the British army and was a bit of a colonialist herself. It would be a deeper conversation if we talked about putting these ideas of justice versus exploitation into practice. My Grandma believes in justice and not exploiting people, yet, she still was a part of perpetrating a lot of things that have left a terrible scar. I don't think she thinks of it that way, even if my schoolbooks do.

What is this Radical Criticism coming out of the West Today? Is that in 1988? and where?
What is the difference between the oppressed, the subaltern and the notion of feminine?