Saturday, May 02, 2009

[the books] state of play


For anyone contemplating being published, this article by L'Ombre should give you pause.

Anyway, my three [the trilogy] are done after so bloody long and are in the process of being uploaded [the site developed problems and I have a new blog to put them on - more later]. When they're up, I'll put something in my sidebar and send the pdfs to those I promised.

I'm on my next project now and have adopted Sackerson's suggestion of some short stories. The first collection, called Dark Logic, basically uses a common theme and a common set of characters but each is written in a different genre, e.g. SF, horror, erotica, human interest, mystery suspense etc. More on that down the track.

[texas] just one of many in the new nau

Theo makes some good points about Texas, including:

Maybe you don't know it, but Texas is the only state with a legal right to secede from the Union... (Reference the Texas-American Annexation Treaty of 1848.)

OK, now we'd agree as far as saying that Obama would be incapable of handling such a move and also note the other secessionist moves of late, e.g. Montana and California. Note the mood of unrest, e.g. in the Tea Parties as well.

Now, here's where you need to be a bit more clever than your average bear. Some of you will recall the SPPNA [I have many articles on it, accessible through my search window - here's one] and the control being handed over to the NAAC on March 21st this year. Right, now given the mindset of the CFR and assorted bozos, it is very much in their interests for the unrest in the former U.S.A. to take place [just how many pages of quotes would you like?].

After all, they are looking towards the NAU.

Watch closely, people and see history being made as the U.S. Constitution becomes an irrelevance.

Friday, May 01, 2009

[goyang inul] dangdut, seksi atau jahat?




I thought I’d see what Inul Daratista has been doing for six years now; it appears she’s doing much the same but is now an Indonesian icon.

From John Aglionby, The Guardian, Zamira Loebis, Jakarta, Bryan Walsh, Pelaihari, Kemal Jufri, Imaji, Time Magazine

The scene is 2003 - war has all but broken out again between the government and separatists in Aceh, and the first of the Bali bombing suspects is about to go on trial, but they struggle for airtime against the Inul saga.

The young men have traveled many kilometres to the one-mosque town of Pelaihari in Indonesia's South Kalimantan province to see the country's hottest and most controversial dangdut singer. They're rowdy, they're eager and, in clear defiance of the laws of physics, all 10,000 of them want in, now, through the soccer stadium's single narrow entrance.

Then Inul swaggers on stage, packed in tight red jeans and a glittering crimson tank top. She turns her back to the audience. The guitars crunch, Inul's hips swing low and hard.

The dance itself, it's less erotic than pneumatic. As Inul bends her knees and swings her butt in what appears to be a 120° arc, she resembles a glittering piston. Betraying her rock roots, Inul doesn't so much twist in time with the music as arrhythmically hurl herself around the stage like a dangdut Joan Jett.

Her wardrobe seems to consist entirely of Lycra, but her sartorial style and stage manner are tame compared with the scantily clad Indian stars who can be found shimmying away on any TV in the country.

She hasn't released a single recording, but one critic estimates that some 3 million pirated VCDs of her performances have been sold in Indonesia. Muslim clerics denounce her bump-and-grind dancing, attempt to ban her concerts, even pray for rain to keep impressionable fans away from her shows, yet politicians are lining up to recruit her support for the 2004 elections.

She's become the live wire connecting Indonesia's still nascent freedom of expression with the country's entrenched—and often hypocritical—moral majority, yet her popularity just keeps surging.

"She's the one and only one who can survive [in the country's cutthroat music scene]," says maverick TV and music producer Arswendo Atmowiloto. "She's what the people want."

Looking older but acting younger, clutching a pillow to her chest and resting her head on a TIME reporter's shoulder, in 10 hours she'll be doing her heavy-duty Fly Girl routine on a Pelaihari stage; 12 hours after that, she'll be in Jakarta running through a version of her moves for SCTV.

She hasn't seen her family in more than three months.

"The real Inul is the people's singer," she says. Her roots run deep in dangdut's heartland. Though she initially earned a mere 40ў per gig, Inul built a strong following in East Java, where her slam-dancing style was hardly unique.

"A singer like Inul is quite familiar there," says Bre, who's been following Inul for two years. "You could find so many Inuls in any small town in East or Central Java."

Born poor in the East Java village of Kejapanan, Gempol, in 1979, she’s just a well-brought-up, lower-class Muslim girl who had stars in her eyes from an early age and desperately wanted to be a dangdut singer. She started her performing career as a rock singer at age 12 but soon switched to dangdut.

Her real name is Ainul Rokhimah; the stage name Inul Daratista actually means "the girl with the breasts”.




Dangdut

Dangdut is a folky pop with Malay and Indian origins that dominates Indonesia's non-metropolitan music scene. Drilling is a funky, somewhat erotic dance style.

Basically, it involves rotating the hips in increasingly energetic circles while steadily bringing in the limbs until one becomes a flurry of appendages.

Originally the music of the lower class, complete with bawdy lyrics and sexually suggestive dancing, dangdut was cleaned up in the late 1970s and '80s when it was popularized by singers like Rhoma Irama, who diversified the music and turned the lyrics safely sweet. Cynical politicians began using dangdut musicians, including Suharto favorite Rhoma, to court the lower classes.

"Dangdut has been corrupted for the political campaigns," says Kompas music critic Bre Redana. In a familiar Indonesian story, the music of the people became a tool of the powerful.

In January, Inul came to Jakarta and performed on Warung Tojedo, a national television program. Virtually overnight, Inulmania swept Indonesia, and within weeks, Inul was bumping and grinding on the cover of major national magazines and appearing on television more often than the country's President.

Inul's concert fees rose dramatically, to anywhere from $1,100 to $1,700 per show. TV programs in which she appeared consistently drew 14 share points, well above the norm for music shows.

Indonesians snapped up copies of illegally recorded VCDs of Inul's old East Java performances—making her perhaps the first musician to owe much of her fame to piracy.

Approbation

To the Indonesian Council of Ulemas, one of the ruling bodies of Indonesian Muslim clerics, her performance is a debased display of pornographic lasciviousness, circumscribed by its July 2002 fatwa against pornography.

In February the Ulemas council issued an edict against Inul. Other conservative groups quickly jumped on the bandwagon, but the row merely elevated Inul's status - and performing fee.

The whole saga was given a new lease of life after the "King of Dangdut", Rhoma Irama, called a press conference to vilify her.

He and his cabal banned her from performing their songs (which would virtually silence her) and said she was corrupting both dangdut and the nation's morals and - after an alleged rapist claimed he was aroused to act after watching an Inul performance - inciting crime.

Authorities in devout Yogyakarta banned Inul from performing, fearing that she would "degrade the morality of the highly civilized and educated residents" of the city.

Even the television stations profiting from her appearances paid unintentional homage to Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show by cutting away from Inul's hips when gyrations commenced.

Defenders

Former president and respected Muslim leader, Abdurrahman Wahid, virtually blind and therefore having no visual frame of reference, made the point that Inul has a right to do what she does under the principle of free expression.

Virtually every academic and "cultural expert" has since entered the fray, with the vast majority backing Inul.

Taufik Kiemas, President Megawati Sukarnoputri's husband, was photographed shaking his considerable booty behind Inul after a TV performance.

Many middle-class and upper-class Indonesians read their papers and shook their heads at the controversy—then told their drivers to pick up a copy of Inul's VCD

Inul’s view?

"Write this down," she commands [a reporter]. "The MUI should realize that Indonesia is not a Muslim country, it's a democratic country."

Inul, who says she prays daily, insists that her art doesn't clash with her Islamic beliefs and suspects the religious hierarchy castigates her because the real threats to Indonesia's fragile morality, particularly corrupt officials, are too dangerous to attack.

"Why should they care about me when there are pornographic VCDs and prostitutes in the street? They choose me because I am an easy target."

[bank of america] pirates at the helm

Vox comments on the Bank of America debacle:

Speaking as an entrepeneur, let me state unequivocally that one of the biggest problems in corporate America is the fact that the professional executive class is the most useless bunch of thieving scum in the country. (The Human Resources departments are useless too, but at least they're not thieves.) Most corporate executives are not businessmen, they're not capitalists, they're simply parasites busily engaged with siphoning off as much corporate money as they think they can get away with.

To which I replied, 'Not only in America, Vox.'

[bank holiday weekend] sun's out for now


The day started out superbly, the sun was shining and as I popped into my favourite caf in a town not far from here, the sun broke out and the tattooed girl said, 'Smashing day,' which made my heart sing and so I replied, 'It's going to rain - bank holiday weekend you know.'

'S'pose you're right,' she sighed. She made a further comment in the local dialect which I didn't catch but replied anyway, 'Yeah, for a while anyway,' at which she looked at me strangely and said, 'There's a funeral, like.'

Spinning round, I could see through the window that there was a funeral at the local catholic church, a bloody big funeral with hundreds of people. 'What's it all about then?'

'Doan know, do I? I got me spy over there now.'

Her mother came back and reported it was some local bouncer called Steve Fromme, aged 55 and he'd croaked it. The cleaner came past and said to me, 'You're real friendly like. I like friendly people,' at which I replied, 'Life's too short, innit?'

I swear it's true that 'What a wonderful day' was being piped through the tannoys at that moment.

With joy in the heart and the sun still out, next stop was the bank where the lady in front had to dash off for something and when she came back, she put herself at the back of the queue. 'What are you doing then?' I asked, 'Come on, I've saved this spot for you,' checking with the old guy behind me who said, 'I've got plenty of time today.'

Now these are the sorts of things which make you want to live in Britain. It is friendly up this way, the living is civilized, even for socio-economic E2s like me and it was in that spirit that I cycled back home to collect this letter from the letterbox [and I quote]:

Dear Owner/Occupier

You have not responded to our recent warning that your address is scheduled to receive an enforcement visit. So as your address remains unlicensed, it is now included on the list of unlicensed properties to be visited this month by the North Wales enforcement team.

Using TV receiving equipment to watch or record television programmes without a valid licence is against the law. If my officers suspect that an offence has taken place at your address, you may be cautioned and interviewed in compliance with the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984 or Scottish criminal law. This interview may then be used for the purposes of prosecution.

You could avoid this visit, interview and any consequent legal action [including a court appearance and a fine of up to £1000] if you buy a TV licence now. YOU MUST NOT IGNORE THIS LETTER. If you watch or record TV at this address, you need a TV licence.

Yours faithfully,
John Robinson
TV Licensing Enforcement Manager

Welcome to the Bank Holiday weekend. I neither have a TV nor have any intention of purchasing or renting one. My computer does everything I need but thanks, Mr. Robinson for your compassionate customer relations technique.

Hope you all have a lovely weekend anyway.

[vortigern] lovely chap who invited us here


Appropriate day to post this. The Celtic site continues:

Vortigern was a warlord in Britain during the 5th century A.D. By all accounts, Vortigern appeared to be a usurper and a pretender to the rule of Britain and was shown to be a man of low character and inclinations. He achieved his position through assassination and treachery, killing even the young king, Constans, to whom he was an advisor.

Constans' baby brother, Uther, was unknown to Vortigern and so escaped his treachery. Vortigern ruled Britain with the aid of Saxon mercenaries who kept him in power until he, too, dealt with them harshly.

The Saxons eventually turned on him and Vortigern met his death in a blazing castle tower in Wales at the hands of Geoffrey of Monmouth, although some sources claim that the tower was mysteriously struck by lightning, catching it on fire.

(Later, when the Tarot decks of the middle ages and renaissance were designed, this imagery became the inspiration behind the card "The Tower". Vortigern is the figure in the foreground plummeting headfirst from the lightning-blasted tower.)

After Geoffrey's rule of Britain, Constans' brother, Uther Pendragon, became ruler of Britain, and Uther Pendragon was the father of the legendary King Arthur.

It all goes to remind us just how pagan and barbaric Britain has actually remained under the surface and how relevant the sacrificial groves [I’m quite near some Welsh ones and often pop down to observe proceedings], Rosslyn, Glastonbury, the Once and Future King et al, are to these dark satanic times. The Wicker Man found his ignorance of the real Bretagne to his cost.

Dark doings might penetrate the night, the Keepers of the Dawn might usher in the Morning Star, for whose delectation the Eastern Star awaits, the sacred feminin may be enshrined elsewhere and the Moriah avenging wind could well be poised to consume all. Kabbalah shabbalah [or whatever manifestation the message takes at the time] maitreya betrayer delayer [as it fails to pan out as planned], whichever image your master currently chooses to utilize, sorry to blunt your daggers, oh robed and hooded ones - the grand vision just ain’t gonna happen, however much you symbolically hang out your Calvist messages for all to see, beneath Blackfriar’s Bridge or splattered over Pillar 13.

The thing is, yawn, there’s the infuriating little Davidian problem of the Cross to overcome first. You might have torn the hearts out of the messengers, Agents Smith but you can never tear the heart out of the message.