The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine is a three story building on the corner of Keppel and Gower Streets. Along the 2nd floor window balconies are 15" gold painted medallions depicting various disease-carrying insects, reptiles, & mammals. There are rats, mosquitoes, flies, snakes, spiders, beetles, ticks, and other parasites. As I approach the building the medallions reflect the low sun and are dazzling in the afternoon light. I make a mental note of a new concept: disease carriers as facade ornament.

Inside the Keppel Street entrance to the school is a low table displaying a free catalogue for the artist Susan Brind's work "bad air [mal'aria]". The school has the distinction of having a Contemporary Art Fund that is used to commission artist to produce art works for the building. Bad air [mal'aria] is a complex work that takes time to read and think about. Running along the marble halls of the foyer just at eye level is a fragmented text that the artist has hand-rendered in gold leaf. The text assembles quotes primarily from accounts by Richard Burton (the explorer not the actor) of his malarial fevers (contracted while he was searching for the source of the Nile). The text begins on the light coloured marble in the foyer and progresses further into the darker corridors of the school. The language becomes more deranged as it follows Burtons decent into madness produced by the disease, until on the stairwell that leads to the basement, we read of Burton's encounters with "hag-like women and men with heads protruding from their breasts".

At this point the whole experience becomes uncomfortable. I am the only person who is following the text thru the hallways. Faculty and students go briskly about their business as if untouched by the halting fragmented text and it's hallucinatory images. All I can think about are the colonies of mosquitoes and other disease carriers that have been carefully bread in this building and kept alive for research for over 70 years. The hallways are uncomfortably hot and airless; I decide to grope my way down the stairway to the student cafeteria where I have been told other artists have placed their work.

The cafeteria, like the rest of the building, appears to have seen no renovations since the school opened. Students are sitting in a fairly dark room at low tables and when I look up I see ghostly glass forms about a foot in length and width sitting on the wires that hold the lighting for the room. These sculptural pieces are forms of the parasites that use man as their host. The pieces are pearlescent in colour and are made from blown glass by the artist Rebecca Evanson for her series titled "Host Infestation". The pieces are beautiful and totally strange. Evanson has placed her sculptural representations of parasites in the specific areas of the school that equate with the anatomical site that the parasite occupies in the host. Parasites that live in the gut are placed in the cafeteria. Parasites which cross-fertilize in the lungs are placed in the entrance hall etc. The artist's statement reads: "The experience of the parasite, invading the host and finding the most suitable place to inhabit is compared to the experience of the artist entering the alien environment of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and locating themselves within that space".

I have definitely not found a place to locate myself within the space of this building and the cafeteria isn't an attractive room to sit down in to enjoy a side of fries. The site specific work of the Brind and Evanson is fabulous and disturbing. Their pieces relate brilliantly to the space and the research that goes on there. The school is to be commended for commissioning artists and giving them the freedom to develop their work. But all I can think about is running outside to locate myself in what's left of the bright afternoon and find a place to have coffee where I won't be thinking about parasites (or feel like one).

2. STRANGER THAN ANY PYNCHON CONSPIRACY
ubiquitous computing in .walk
by Barnaby Snap, Helsinki

Sitting in the park one rare sunny afternoon, I noticed something peculiar about certain members of the crowd passing-by. Some of them were carrying a green A4 which they were passionately studying at every turn in order to find out where they had to go. It was definitely not a map, maybe an itinerary of some kind. But even though they had instructions they didn't really seem to have a destination either. Normally only people who are looking for something, or who are lost, take the same streets over & over again like these paper carrying pedestrians did. But they seemed to know where they were going to.

After a while, trying to work it all out, the purpose of this strange behaviour dawned on me. I thought. Oh no! I thought also, it's another one of those zany generative psychogeography experiments which seem to be going on everywhere at the moment. I mean, you can go to any random blog & within 3 double clicks you find yet another report of a psychogeographic walk talking about 'aimlessly wandering in memory of the flaneur' & 'the sublime spell of the algorithm' always supplemented by shady pictures of even shadier back-alleys or modernist high-rises towering into the sky. Well you know, it was fun in the beginning but now it's just everywhere, psychogeography has become as fashionable as Prada. What do I say, it's even worse: psychogeography has turned into the Dolce & Gabana of the pedestrian underground.

I stopped a boy & a girl walking hand in hand, who were of the age that you really should be thinking about other things, like if I may suggest drinking beer & smoking marijuana (just like the real flaneur did), instead of participating in a pointless [second left, first right, second left, repeat] walk. So I stopped them, wanting to point out to him that geezers need excitement & that she was young, much to young, doing psychogeography with a kid she could be having fun with. But (2[step/tone] puns aside) while talking to them I found out that my suspicion was only partly right. I also found out that what was going on around me was stranger than any Pynchonite conspiracy: I had not solemnly been watching the meandering of psychogeographers walking on an algorithm but the peripatetic processing of data within an ubiquitous computer in the truest sense of the word .

The couple was doing a .walk; a dotwalk. Apparently it has all got to do with added functionality. Like an umbrella that doubles as a chair, the dot in the walk turns psychogeography into the Swiss army knife of non-electronic computation; think Turing, think Apollinaire applied by Torvalds. The way they explained it, it all sounds as far out as Kool Keith doing his Dr. Octagon shizzle, but let the truth be told, the concept was not utterly devoid of logic, albeit in it's own schizophrenic mode. Because, so the reasoning goes, people were already executing algorithms by walking them for psychogeographical causes like 'unpredictability of the route' & 'the non-subjectivity of the directions' , it's a small step to use them at the same time to do what algorithms do: perform calculations. If this is possible & there are no reason's why it isn't, it is possible to construct a 'Universal Psychogeographical Computer' a strange construction in which people doing walks generate a computer.

So... there is code, with an extension called .walk (the couple was indeed carrying something resembling computer code which they were running... walking) & all these people participating together produce it's walktime.

you will think & you go ahead thinking for a while, if you are as intelligent as I am & I'm sure you are, you will decide for yourself that it all makes sense.

.Walk has the catchphrase 'Walking Apart Together' & the key moment in the functioning of this pedestrian computer is the random encounter: when 2 different psychogeographers cross paths, they immediately start writing down all sorts of stuff from the other's piece of paper. During these exchanges the data that is generated during walking slowly builds up within the system. But information only becomes intelligence when it can reach the individuals in the network that need it. Information want to be valuable, so the saying goes, it's the same here & therefore data must flow through the system rapidly. People are already talking to do .walks by bike to enhance the processing speed, thus creating a 'cyclotron'. But let's stick to the point, shall we? When an agent receives new data it doesn't need to be valuable at that time for that particular agent. But because it gets stored anyway, the information has copied (double, than trebled, in exponential speed) & is increasingly more likely to find an agent elsewhere who can use that data. To get this .walk system to work you only need the numbers to beat statistics; remember how ants tackle the same problem.

I didn't get the chance to talk to the people of socialfiction.org who are behind all this, but I did found out that the project has just started & that for now their main concern is to let people get used to the idea, many people who are unprepared to the concepts seem to be overcome by codefobia when confronted with a huge slab of .walk code to be walked. Perhaps not that strange when you look at previous experiments on their site. I only wonder if it's possible to program artificial intelligence in .walk.

Liberals are spreading over a hundred accusations that our Vice President of the United States of America knew about and allowed the 9/11 attacks.

Fellow Republicans, we recommend not directly addressing all the details spouted by liberals and their bleeding heart press. During a recent prayer meeting here at Patriotic Citizens for the Defense of American Values, deep inspiration and humility moved us to develop a special answer to the mounting liberal propaganda. We call our answer the "Daisy Cutter Moab Rebuttal."

Here it is: "Even if Vice President Cheney allowed the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, he did so for the good of the nation. Franklin Roosevelt did this when he allowed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor so the United States could join the war against the axis of evil of that era." (Use in #13 below.)

Because liberals love Franklin Roosevelt so much, this answer shuts them up quickly.

Only a true leader can make the toughest decisions in order to lead his nation to its destined greatness. Even if our President allowed the attacks of 9/11, this proves Bush is an even bigger hero for allowing Vice President Cheney to make such a tough, necessary decision. We elect our leaders to lead, not flirt and carry on with interns. It was President Bush's amazing post-9/11 leadership that unleashed the American people to free others around the world, including oppressed women in Afghanistan and Iraqi victims of Saddam Hussein.

You can help. Our views will win over liberal propaganda regardless of their so-called evidence.

Please donate to the Republican party to protect the truth from the snooping eyes of the unrighteous (liberals).

Thank you, Patriotic Citizens for the Defense of American Values

LIBERAL LIES and FACTS

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Liberal Lie #1: In October 24-26, 2000, detailed drills were held in the Pentagon practicing response in case an airliner crashed into the Pentagon building.

FACT: If God inspired the planners at the Pentagon to prepare for an attack on their building nearly one year before the September 11, 2001 attacks, they should be commended, not cast into suspicion.

********

Liberal Lie #2: Field FBI agents in Arizona notified their superiors of information about hijackers using planes as suicide bombs, but the superiors didn't act on this information.

FACT: The FBI management can not act on every wild claim made by field agents.

********

Liberal Lie #3: In 1995 the FBI under Clinton's administration raided flight schools looking for potential hijackers. The FBI and other gov't agencies already knew of this specific real danger.

FACT: In government, six years is a long time and with all the FBI personnel changes, the agency was unaware of its past diligence. It is impossible a few high-ranking members of Herbert Hoover's esteemed FBI along with other high-ranking officers from other U.S. intelligencies would betray their own country by blindly following heinous orders to allow a mass attack on their own country's civilians. Some agents would be truly patriotic enough to risk even their own lives to uncover such a high-level crime against the people of the United States of America.

********

Liberal Lie #4: A United States Air Force Intelligence Colonel at the Monterey Language Institute U.S. Intelligence School told his class, "Bush is a joke. He knew about 911 and let it happen." He was forced to resign.

FACT: Though this did happen, similar outbursts by military personnel about gays in the military occurred under President Clinton. Those critical officers also resigned.

********

Liberal Lie #5: Before 9-11 a con-man working for Navy Intelligence fled to Canada with a sealed document showing the impending attacks by suicide hijackers.

FACT: This person is clearly a con-man, and though he worked for the U.S. Navy, he is unreliable and has a long criminal history during his entire service in the United States Navy. This exposes him: http://www.scoop.co.nz/mason/stories/HL0210/S00005.htm
********

Liberal Lie #6: Russian and other foreign intelligence agencies warned the Bush administration in the summer prior to the 9-11 attacks that hijackers intended to use planes as suicide bombs and were soon going to attack.

FACT: Foreign intelligence sources frequently notify the United States about many so-called impending attacks, most of which never happen.
********

Liberal Lie #7: Ashcroft and some other government officials did not fly commercial flights in the weeks leading up to 9-11 for fear of being on a hijacked plane.

FACT: Ashcroft and others as citizens of the United States of America are free to choose any method of transportation within their means and legal rights. They stopped flying commercial for scheduling reasons and their heavy workload.

********

Liberal Lie #8: Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco was warned a few days before 9-11 not to fly to New York on a commercial aircraft as he had planned.

FACT: It is illogical a so-called Republican conspirator would call a liberal Democrat Mayor to help him.

********

Liberal Lie #9: Vice President Cheney wanted to take over parts of the Middle East and boost the his administration's sagging popularity. An attack would fulfill both.

FACT: This accusation of treason against the Vice President should not even be dignified with a answer.

********

Liberal Lie #10: U.S. armed forces were massing in the Middle East in the weeks and months before the 9-11 attacks.

FACT: Though true, the forces were involved in a large military exercise. Such U.S. military exercises occur regularly throughout the world. This was only a routine military exercise.

********

Liberal Lie #11: The head of Pakistan's Intelligence agency (the ISI) was in the United States meeting with Condaleeza Rice and others in the Bush administration in the week before the 9-11 attacks. During that week this Pakistani General wired $100,000 to hijacker Atta.

FACT: Pakistan is our ally, not our enemy. Iraq was our enemy, but we liberated them and rid them of weapons of mass destruction and thwarted evil in God's name.

********

Liberal Lie #12: A few years prior to September 11, 2001, Philippine police discovered a document outlining suicide attacks with hijacked planes in the United States. The Philippine police officer who found the document gave it to police commanders who passed it to U.S. intelligence.

FACT: It is completely understandable and expected that such a document would get lost on its way from a Philippine police officer through the Philippine government then to the United States then through the US Intelligence community. This happens all the time.

********

Liberal Lie #13: Families of 9-11 victims threatened the Bush administration with going public with their questions about 9-11 after the Bush administration stonewalled an independent 9-11 inquiry. The Administration responded by backing an investigation led by Henry Kissinger and by stalling the whole process. President Bush is terrified of an independent inquiry into 9-11.

FACT: Use the "Daisy Cutter Moab rebuttal," which we feel is more effective than diving into liberal-minded detail: "Even if Vice President Cheney allowed the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon, he did so for the good of the nation. Franklin Roosevelt did this when he allowed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor so the United States could join the war against the axis of evil of that era."

********

Liberal Lie #14: Attorney General Ashcroft is secretly using the powers of the Patriot Act to investigate Vice President Cheney and others in the Bush Administration for treasonous actions against the citizens of the United States of America regarding the 9/11 attacks. Some members of Congress and the Senate are also being secretly probed under the Patriot Act.

FACT: Completely false. Attorney General Ashcroft is an honest Christian and loyal Republican committed to the cause of anti-abortion. To suggest the Attorney General of United States would secretly investigate treasonous crimes perpetrated by his Republican superiors is ridiculous regardless of so-called liberal evidence. True Christians follow orders and are always loyal to their bosses. The rumors regarding this are just that: rumors. This is completely false.

********

To waken you and your friends to action, please rebut the liberal propaganda. To view the details of their plot, study the following, but only if you're over 30 years old (the age of Jesus when he started his mission) and a committed Republican. Do not view otherwise!

http://www.communitycurrency.org/MainIndexMX.html
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/02_11_02_lucy.html
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MOO208B.html
http://www.guerrillanews.com/after_math/

***********************

WE SALUTE the brave men and women behind the scenes in the ONI, FBI, NSC, NSA, CIA, MCIA, AIA, OIG, DIA, USAIC, USSS, OFAC so willing to risk their lives for their country and every bit as brave as single and married combat soldiers on the front lines. Their courage to serve the U.S. Constitution and U.S. citizens even when their superiors command otherwise protects our democracy. This commitment prevents our agents from serving evil by covering up internal high-level crimes against their country and fellow citizens. Only athiests and the guilty fear the truth. God is Truth. Life is short, and our agents are committed to doing the right thing. They are part of the solution, not the problem. To paraphrase Jesus Christ in modern language, "Real psychopathy is not the snapping, it's the ability to maintain a calm presence and give plausible explanations to implausible events." Matthew 23:27-28

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* Warning: Do not be fooled by liberal hoaxes trying to stop this message by claiming it is a virus.
* Neither this email nor the Patriotic Citizens for the Defense of American Values are authorized by or affiliated with the Republican Party, but the Republican party needs your financial help and prayers more than ever.
* "Daisy Cutter Moab Rebuttal" is not a trademark of Patriotic Citizens for the Defense of American Values, but can be used by Republicans only.

Hi, I used to have the domain name www.instantcoffee.co.uk which has now moved to www.pixeljourney.com/stuart_eaton Any chance of getting a link on your site, i still get a lot of people secrhing for instantcoffee.co.uk

I am a broadcast / interactive designer, I have been working at the BBC in the UK for the last 5 years> i leave the BBC this week and i am moving to Barcelona in a couple of weeks with my girlfriend.

Anyway, like your site, would be great if i could get a link. i will put a link to your site from mine

cheers
stuart

2. http://clockdin.com

your site is a true blast of fresh air in a sometimes stale toronto.

I would really be grateful if you would consider listing clock din in your saturday edition or elsewhere:

It's a site where users can make their own remix using sounds from our artists.

thanks!

gord high
clock din

Marriage as a long conversation. When entering a marriage, one should ask the question: do you think you will be able to have good conversations with this woman right into old age? Everything else in marriage transitory, but most of the time in interaction is spent in conversation. (Fredrich Nietzsche, Human, All too Human # 406)

I was reminded of the above quote by Hillary Clinton last spring, who was on TV doing promo for her memoir, reading an excerpt from the back of the book. In her bedtime story voice, she tells us that she began a conversation with Bill Clinton in the spring of 1971 and they're still talking. Could not one consider text a conversation, held between the writer and the reader? If so, then last spring, I began a conversation with AS Byatt, through her text Possession, and the film adapted from it.

--The Book--
Having gotten over the repulsion I'd felt for years at seeing it's pre-Raphaelite cover in the bookstore and thinking it was something entirely feminine and not at all of interest to a boy steeped in science fiction and the cynicism of contemporary art, I picked up this thick paperback at the local library, my interest piqued by last year's film. Based on the trailer, I thought the story was one of reincarnation - two lovers in the 19th century rediscover each other through academic research and fall in love all over again. The story is more banal and far more intriguing.

Published in 1990, and set in 1986, this story takes place in the dying days of typewriters; computers do make their appearance here and there, but all in all, this is a tale for the last generation of academics who fell in love with words and the tales of deconstructed meta-narratives before the computer and internet came along to put it all together again. It is essentially two love stories, the first of which begins with a conversation which has not had a chance to complete itself. The 20th Century character Roland finds drafts of a letter which begins a search for an undisclosed portion of a 19th Century poet's life - that of Mr Ash. Mr Ash is a complete fiction, but in this alternative reality he is perhaps akin to William Morris, a poet obscure, but not too obscure.

I think I have to stop pretending to claim any profound understanding of postmodernist issues, because every time I feel I have a grip on the theories I read something which throws me off balance - and I write this because Possession seems to have been written as a critique of postmodernist theory. AS Byatt had definitely mastered her craft, and the excessiveness of her skill is overbearing. Her recreation of 19th Century writing would be impossible for me, because the tone and formality of the language I find so inhumane as to be repellent, and I had to skip these portions of the text to simply to be able to breath. Byatt's appropriation of academic jargon, and the 1986 setting, seem to posit that love is beyond discourse and that at the end of the day, all of our theories are nothing more than a pastime for the bored and over educated. That deconstructed meta-narratives and post-something-or-other critique are there only to fill our lives in the absence of that which all mammals such as us seek - food, shelter, love or a bathroom.

Whole chapters of text written in a 19th Century style are not necessary to convey the one idea which anchors the plot line for that section - something which the film makers picked up on. This novel was really written for a generation who like Byatt were raised in a pre-televisual time, where a big fat book was all the more required to stave off the boredom of an evening next to a fireplace, a generation raised with Latin and Greek meta-narratives.

--The movie--
Neil LaBute drinks mocca choca supercalifragiclicoala espresso while the sun rises above the Los Angeles horizon. Because he's a famous Hollywood 2-bit schlep, he lives in one of those beach homes, where he sits and ponders the scripts of his magnum opiate. Should he be faithful to the text of this highbrow English hottie-tottie snob? Or should he find a way to blow something up near the end of the film, delivering a signature line which has been in his head since he overheard it at the restaurant - "That'll be all."

No, he has to focus; he has to get this project done, since it's already been in limbo for years. He's the director triumphant, he got the script, and he's got his friend already lined up to play the lead. That fact that he's American, and the character he's supposed to play is British is irrelevant - this will be changed, so that the female character will have a reason to be snarky to him. Such a long book - and he has to get it down to a couple of hours! He thinks, "Oh this is just a chick flick, no need to satisfy the male urge to classify, and strategise by giving us a plot that makes sense".

The movie becomes an exercise in summary. Talk about cutting to the chase, this film cuts out the chase, and replaces it with scenes that seem incongruous. This movie becomes the definition of a film swissed-cheesed with plot holes. In the novel, one sees how the characters arrive at their positions and decisions - in the film, its as if everything pops out of thin air, as if being directed from above ... which it is ... as if to say that internal narrative consistency and apparent irrationality of the characters do not matter since we all know this make believe anyway, and that you're only here because you had nothing else to do - an attitude that is so disrespectful of the audience's intelligence that director Neil LaBute should go into something else.

Why the hell do they dig up a grave at the end? This does not make sense! It's the Chewbacca defense applied to a plotline.

The film adaptation is makes up the unconscious identity of any text; for any song their exists the possibility of the remix, for the text, the possibility of a film. And while there are 'definitive' versions which try to create a faithful reproduction of events, there is the possibility for any number of modifications - this movie version chose to dumb down, to simplify, to become an exercise is brevity. Telling only what needed to be told, it is almost unfair to watch this film after reading the text. It is full of plot holes which are there only because they chose to exclude so much. A novel like Possession should be a 3 hour movie - that is not unreasonable, especially when one compares the two English Patients where the text is smaller but the film is large; instead here you have the reverse, a large text and a small film. It is only an hour and half long! Its so light and breezy it could blow away on late night television, you'd end up watching infomercials or the girls on the beach having forgotten the story over on channel 6. The film has disposed of much of the nuance and its sense of reality is compromised because it has paired down a complex story into something too simple to be believable.