Mark E. Smith, on form, on TV, a year ago (or two, or three, I dunno, dates conflict). This is The Fall:

Wagner James Au was right, when he wrote at New World Notes, that this offering by Winston Ackland is infuriatingly catchy. Pretty funky to look at too.

Courtesy of my better half and Afghan Headpsin comes this offering from London jungle legend Andy C and MC GQ, in soundclash with the Holy Ghost. Top editing, and a slab of rolling urban D&B:

C/o a comment left on my Tw*tdanglin’ post, I’m led to an excellent blog who shares my admiration of the Daily Mail. Although I took a pop at the Daily Express elsewhere today, the Mail retains my real loyalty, particularly that doyenne of common sense and cultural cohesion, Melanie Ph*llips.

That’s Fucking Stupid – byline: “Common sense just isn’t very common anymore”. Their anti-regulatory, free speech, anti-hyperbolic and sensible take on political and social affairs might turn out to be a front for utter lunacy but I reckon not. Go and read it anyway.

Since actively entering the blogosphere there have been a clutch of blogs that I’ve read regularly and have grown to respect greatly. One of these is Simon Sellar’s Ballardian.  Whilst Simon’s writing and research is of consistently high quality, occasionally he posts something stand-out, like this post last week:

‘Unblinking, clinical’: From Ballard to cyberpunk

In his introduction to the Mirrorshades anthology, [Bruce] Sterling wrote: ‘The cyberpunks are perhaps the first SF generation to grow up not only within the literary tradition of science fiction but in a truly science-fictional world… the techniques of classical “hard SF” … are not just literary tools but an aid to daily life. They are a means of understanding, and highly valued.’ Sterling’s reference to ‘hard SF’ — time-honoured narratives infused with the spirit of scientific investigation — suggests an affinity with the traditions of the genre, a love of the dizzying ideas and sheer scope of the best SF writing. However, his positioning of the cyberpunk movement as ostensibly a form of realism indicates a shift in the genre’s relationship to the technology it once idealised…

Read the rest here.

Here’s a final reminder for all those who are able to get into London this evening:

Location map here. Everyone’s welcome, and it’s free, so please come along!

YouTube’s new geolocation/videolocation mash-up is a bit scary in that it allows you to find out what your neighbours have posted on YouTube. Wait until the Daily Mail hears about this one.

Nevertheless, I checked it out and was delighted to find this video of Space Pirates in the Greenwich Foot Tunnel. It was opened in 1902 to connect Greenwich on the south bank of the Thames with the Isle of Dogs on the north. Reclaim the, er, tunnels, people!

Readers of BLDGBLOG will have noticed that Geoff Manaugh, along with ‘chaoplexic warfare’ guru Antoine Bousquet, are appearing together on 26th November in central London. I’m pleased to say I’ve played a small part in getting the evening together, through my co-stewardship of the Complex Terrain Laboratory, who are hosting this first in a series of Battlespace/s events.

The blurb:

Contemporary political discourse on armed violence and insecurity has been largely shaped by references to spatial knowledge, simulation, and control: “human terrain,” “urban clutter,” “terrorist sanctuaries,” “failed states,” “core-periphery.” The historical counterpoint to this is to be found in the key role the successive technologies of clock, engine, computer, and network have all played in spatializing the practice of warfare. In this context, what implications do “feral” Third World cities, “rogue” cities organized along non-Western ideas of urban space and infrastructure, and “wild” cities reclaimed by nature, have for the battlespaces of today and tomorrow?

The event is free, and open to all, so please come along if you can, and let others know about it too. There are more details on the event at BLDGBLOG, Ubiwar, and CTlab.

Unknown “Structures” Tugging at Universe, Study Says (National Geographic):

On the outskirts of creation, unknown, unseen “structures” are tugging on our universe like cosmic magnets, a controversial new study says.

Everything in the known universe is said to be racing toward the massive clumps of matter at more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) an hour—a movement the researchers have dubbed dark flow.

The presence of the extra-universal matter suggests that our universe is part of something bigger—a multiverse—and that whatever is out there is very different from the universe we know, according to study leader Alexander Kashlinsky, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.

The theory could rewrite the laws of physics. Current models say the known, or visible, universe—which extends as far as light could have traveled since the big bang—is essentially the same as the rest of space-time (the three dimensions of space plus time).

This is a couple of years overdue in the posting. Don’t why I didn’t think of it before but the most progressive thinktank in the world, the Long Now Foundation, gels with one of the best bands in the world, High On Fire. I want to see Stewart Brand shaking his baldness to this one. Intention was to post HOF’s ‘10,000 Years’, as in the LNF’s 10,000 year clock, but the quality of the video is awful, so instead you get the absolutely brilliant ‘Blessed Black Wings’ instead. Nothing to watch, plenty to hear. Turn it up, grandma: