June2005 :: wintermute

wintermute :: bits

June2005

You are currently viewing bits entries by month. You can browse through months by time, or click on a directLink or category to switch to individual entries.

« May2005 :: July2005 »

Me and 20,000 other hippies

30June2005 [directLink] [france]

Spent the night before the Summer Solstice (June 20-21) at Stonehenge. The only time in the year that you can actually touch the stones; and they had the largest crowd ever. I’d spent the day at Avebury, a small village built inside an old (massive) stone circle; the place was full of hippies. I decided then that I should go to Stonehenge. Still plenty of hippies, though being as it is there were quite a few (normal) young people too. We got up there soon after sunset, wandered up into the stone circle (in which there was a party happening) and eventually found a place to sit. Didn’t move much from about 1am, it was too freezing to do so — the wind on Salisbury Plains being a killer on the best days. Half-past-three the sky started lightening; soon after four all the warmth was sucked out of the air; quarter-to-five and we finally saw the rays of the Sun. Everybody cheered before marching home.

Though it sounds rather uneventful, it was an _amazing_ experience. Actually walking under some of the stones, watching people celebrate inside the circle, seeing immense crowds drawn towards the center, the shadows of the past came to life and I could feel even more the power of the place. The strangest thing about Stonehenge is the way it’s been re-discovered and used in completely different ways by completely different cultures…

bourgeois myth

25June2005 [directLink] [myth]

“the big wedding of the bourgeoisie, which originates in a class ritual (the display and consumption of wealth), can bear no relation to the economic status of the lower-middle class: but through the press, the news, and literature, it slowly becomes the very norm as dreamed, though not actually lived, of the petit-bourgeois couple. The bourgeoisie is constantly absorbing into its ideology a whole section of humanity which does not have its basic status and cannot live up to it except in imagination, that is, at the cost of an immobilization and an impoverishment of consciousness.”

Roland Barthes, Mythologies, London: Paladin, 1973, p141

Updates

21June2005 [directLink] [personal]

I’m sitting in an empty bus somewhere in South-West England as I write this; I will type it up later. I’ll have more on the holiday later, but for now, an updates post.

Going back a little, got a mention on Violet Kiteway’s blog. She’s from Perplex City; she’d requested our help with a riddle she needed to crack to steal some files from a Reconstructionist compound; I sent in what seemed a satisfactory answer… From the limited (and one-sided) information we have, it seems that the Recons are fundamentalist Cubists… When I sent in the answer, I also asked Violet some questions about their relationship to Cubism, and she was nice enough to address them in her following post.

Back in France, Earth, have finished exams with a very satisfactory result (even though I missed one worth 10%). Have also passed my medical check, hopefully allowing me to stay in the country a little longer. A chest XRay showed no signs of TB, but the French shot me up with the stuff anyway; was able to fight it off (though one of the girls had a localised allergic reaction - so it’s not a nice thing to do to someone).

Am now in England, where I will meet family from Aus in a week. After some touristing here will spend a couple nights in Paris - assuming the French let me back into the country - where I will play the part of ‘local’, having finally visited myself just last Wednesday.

press-ganging alive and well

10June2005 [directLink] [myth]

Interesting (read “scary”) article from a Seattle paper — about a kid that Marine recruiters went after. Their tactics are frightening, even their base psychological methods — this kid’s dad had been a Vietnam vet and had died years ago; the recruiters start spinning “be a man … make your dad proud” lines. They ended up taking him away (press-ganged) and lying, getting him to sign forms while hungry and tired… Said nonsense like “He could serve anywhere he chose and leave any time he wanted on an “apathy discharge” if he didn’t like it. And he wouldn’t have to go to Iraq if he didn’t want to.”

Source: Seattle PI

Also reminds me — I’ve heard stories (via “friend of a friend”) of how difficult it actually is for people to get out of the US armed forces once they’re in — I want to find more information on this, but it sounds pretty serious (spookily cult-like really)

A place amongst the living

07June2005 [directLink] [movies]

Je viens de regarder Une place parmi les vivants. C’était… intéressant, un peu bizarre. Un peu de ‘film-noir’, un peu de jazz, et beaucoup de cinématographie très stylisée