Ged Carroll

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  • Be nice to myself

    I received an email from my old partner- in-crime Si. I don’t know where he got ‘Be nice to myself’ and ‘I love every body’.  They sound like how a good Saturday nights in a club feels. Enjoy.

    From:

    To: ged carroll

    Date: Sun Jul 11, 2004 03:42:24 PM BST

    Subject: couldn’t have said it better myself……..

    Remind Me To Be Nice To Myself

    Tower block rises majestically above the picturesque plains, and ever-so-gentle rolling hills of Stepney and Poplar, Bethnal Green and BOW. Bears silent witness to the daily trials and tribulations of the noble plains-people of these ancient provinces.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    Tower block by night. It has very bright white lights attached to its top surfaces as a security measure, I can’t imagine what against. These lights, they are wonderful, they serve to illuminate this monument to pointlessness.

    Yes, the night time’s the best time:

    The wind blows furtively, drives the rain irregularly against the windows.

    And all the time the short-wave drones. Beautiful isolation – hermetically sealed surrealism at tow hundred and fifty feet.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    There’s a girl lives next door, been to India. She’s an American Swedish hippy at a bus station in Northern Holland sort of a person- vaguely opiate-like – Yeah! Sometimes I scream to her, From my nineteenth floor balcony:

    “I will not continuously qualify and justify what I say”.

    I smile benignly – return to my flat, imagine her demurely murmuring: “Don’t patronised me”. I feel, we’re both happy with this arrangement, as it’s cordiale enough without threatening our own individual, desperate loneliness with any degree of intimacy.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    Tower block, external symbol of our inner desolation a scenario so bleak, it brings a tear to your eye. A nostalgic, sentimental tear, as if in vague subliminal remembrance of a barren airless landscape of a different planet,

    one million years ago. Tower block, Oh ancient timeless representative of all that is meaningful, oh nearer my God to thee.

    By the way, remind me to be nice to myself.

    I LOVE EVERY BODY

    And now the buildings change. Now the people change. Everything changing.

    Spirit and matter most apparent. Realised there never was anything to worry about, to doubt was insane. The limited, callow individuals living on housing estates in Chingford, Large detached houses in Kew Tower blocks on the Tottenham marshes, Become my gods. I see an accounts clerk from Tooting: I see Zeus. A sanitary inspector from the London Borough of Haringay, And Brahmin stands resplendent before me.

    For five minutes I love everybody. There is only love. All action ceases.

    The Mile End Road, once a blood-stained battleground of Bacchanalian excess, becomes the Garden of Gethsemane. A bitter, 72-year old ex-docker becomes the ever-compassionate Buddha. A Cypriot minicab driver becomes St Francis of Assissi. The 22-year-old Glaswegian checkout girl IS the divine mother.

    I love everybody. My spirit is free.

    I am limitless in space, time and matter, Simultaneously the planet Neptune, part of the structural support to Vauxhall Bridge. I am your left breast, I am Stepney, I am Peru, I am divine and so are you.

    I love everybody.

    I am nothing except a mere cluster of notes, a road sign in Skelmersdale.

    I ran the Roman Empire. I was a lavatory attendant in Hull. I am everybody and everybody is me. Spirit.

    Who put the spirit in matter? LOVE More related posts here. Si left us in the summer of 2016.

  • State of the Union

    State of the Union seems to be BBC Radio 4’s way of replacing the late Alistair Cooke’s Letters From America. Replacing Letters from America is a really tough role to fill. State of the Union has got really big shoes to fill.

    The 15-minute slot from 20h50 – 21h00 on a Friday and repeated from 08h50 – 09h00 on a Sunday is hosted by a different American journalist each week. You can have a listen here. I was a relatively recent convert to Alistair Cooke; but the short time that I experienced his programmes immediately made me realise what I had missed out on. Cooke was an institution and a relic of when Britishness meant life as a character in an Agatha Christie novel and acting like Cole Porter show tunes were still all the rage. State of the Union is very now, and a good way of ensuring that the presenter doesn’t get unfavourably compared to Mr Cooke’s legacy. It won’t be cult listening, but listenable all the same.

    The BBC’s own spiel: In this US election year, a new series, State of the Union tells the stories that define the American nation. Drawn from the Pacific and the Atlantic coasts, the deep South and the mid-West heartland, each week a distinctive American broadcasting voice reflects on everyday America.

    The first one was done by Betty DeRamus, a Pulitizer prize winning columnist from the Detroit News. State of the Union will continue until November. It will be followed by Letter, first-person reports from Beijing, Delhi, Johannesburg, etc, which already goes out on the World Service at 05h30 on Sundays. More related content here.

  • Getting burned

    Interesting article in Bambi Francisco of CBSMarketwatch’s regular email. It seems despite the dot.com bust, investors are still up for getting burned.

    SAN FRANCISCO (CBS.MW) – Sometimes, you do what you can to stay afloat.As many market watchers have already observed, there are companies out there that appear to be promising candidates in a hot business area, but make their money off of something entirely non-related.

    Some investors may have heard of a company called Mace Security International, whose shares traded to a recent high of $6.68 in mid-June after trading below $2 earlier this year. The stock went gangbusters because the company’s been touting its anti-terrorist, surveillance security products.

    One would think Mace housed a number of technologists in cubicles. Yet those techies weren’t techies at all, unless washing cars requires an engineering degree. Apparently, Mace generated 85 percent of its sales this year from being a car wash, which a big signal that investors will be getting burned.

    Mace shares eventually got washed up a bit as its true colors were exposed. Let’s face it, being a car wash isn’t a competitive advantage for a security company. (Now, if they were impersonating a car wash but were really a security company — I’d say that was impressive.)

    But here’s what we can learn from Mace. Sometimes you have to be creative if you want to stay in business. More related information here.

  • Spray can revolution

    If you live in London or have been to Shoreditch you’ve probably came across the spray can stencilled graffiti art of Banksy. Talent, anger, political statement and a black sense of humour via Andy Warhol to create provocative stencil art.

    In the interest of spreading spray can derived revoluton here is Banksy’s guide to creating creative grafitti:

    A guide to cutting stencils- First off, stencil anything. If you wait for the perfect idea you will be waiting for ever. Cleverness is never as entertaining as blatant stupidity, failure and public humiliation

    • Obtain a fucking sharp knife. Blunt knives result in fluffy pictures and make the whole process long and boring. Snap off blades of British steel are best.
    • Draw your artwork on paper, glue onto some card then cut straight through the both. Acetate is apparently quite good but any sort of free cardboard is okay. Stiff 1mm to 1.5mm board is ideal.
    • Get a small roll of gaffa tape, pre-tear small strips and stick them on your shirt inside your coat.
    • Find a suitable piece of card to act as a folder. For instance when using red paint cut the stencil into the bottom of a pizza box so when you get paint all over your fingers its not so suspicious.
    • Leave the house before you find something worth staying in for.
    • Spray the paint sparingly onto the stencil from a distance of 8 inches.
    • If you’re in a place with lots of security cameras wear a hood, move around the city quickly and act like a sad old drunk if you attract attention.
    • Be aware that going on a major mission totally drunk out of your head will result in some truly spectacular artwork and at least one night in the cells.
    • When explaining yourself to the Police its worth being as reasonable as possible. Graffiti writers are not real villains. I am always reminded of this by real villains who consider the idea of breaking in someplace, not stealing anything and then leaving behind a painting of your name in four foot high letters the most retarded thing they ever heard of.
    • Remember crime against property is not real crime. People look at an oil painting and admire the use of brushstrokes to convey meaning. People look at a graffiti painting and admire the use of a drainpipe to gain access.
    • The time of getting fame for your name on its own is over. Artwork that is only about wanting to be famous will never make you famous. Any fame is a bi-product of making something that means something. You don’t go to a restaurant and order a meal because you want to have a shit.

    This reminded me a lot of the golden rules we used to have whilst fly posting for events. More related content here.

  • GoatCactus and Screen Ghosts

    GoatCactus

    What are GoatCactus and Screen Ghosts? Before you ask we haven’t been hitting the magic mushrooms again. Facetop is a project at the University of North Carolina to ‘screen ghost’ video conference participants on to a computer screen, check here. No more annoying iChat screens. GoatCactus is a piece of software that uses computer math to generate music. The results are quite surreal, check this example out. More related topics here.

    History Repeating

    Thanks and maximum kudos to Ted Dolotta who posted this New York Times Op Ed to the Interesting People email list. The New York Times online piece can be found here (registration required, but well worth it).

    Their George and OursJuly 4, 2004

    By BARBARA EHRENREICH

    When they first heard the Declaration of Independence in July of 1776, New Yorkers were so electrified that they toppled a statue of King George III and had it melted down to make 42,000 bullets for the war. Two hundred and twenty-eight years later, you can still get a rush from those opening paragraphs. “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” The audacity!

    Read a little further to those parts of the declaration we seldom venture into after ninth-grade civics class, and you may feel something other than admiration: an icy chill of recognition. The bulk of the declaration is devoted to a list of charges against George III, several of which bear an eerie relevance to our own time.

    George II is accused, for example, of “depriving us in many cases of the benefits of Trial by Jury.” Our own George II has imprisoned two U.S. citizens – Jose Padilla and Yaser Esam Hamdi – since 2002, without benefit of trials, legal counsel or any opportunity to challenge the evidence against them. Even die-hard Tories Scalia and Rehnquist recently judged such executive hauteur intolerable.

    It would be silly, of course, to overstate the parallels between 1776 and 2004. The signers of the declaration were colonial subjects of a man they had come to see as a foreign king. One of their major grievances had to do with the tax burden imposed on them to support the king’s wars.In contrast, our taxes have been reduced – especially for those who need the money least – and the huge costs of war sloughed off to our children and grandchildren. Nor would it be tactful to press the analogy between our George II and their George III, of whom the British historian John

    Richard Green wrote: “He had a smaller mind than any English king before him save James II.”

    But the parallels are there, and undeniable. “He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power,” the declaration said of George III, and today the military is indulgently allowed to investigate its own crimes in Iraq. George III “obstructed the Administration of Justice.” Our George II has sought to evade judicial review by hiding detainees away in Guantanamo, and has steadfastly resisted the use of the Alien Tort Claims Act, which allows non-U.S. citizens to bring charges of human rights violations to U.S. courts.

    The signers further indicted their erstwhile monarch for “taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments.” The administration has been trying its best to establish a modern equivalent to the divine right of kings, with legal memorandums asserting that George II’s “inherent” powers allow him to ignore federal laws prohibiting torture and war crimes.

    Then there is the declaration’s boldest and most sweeping indictment of all, condemning George III for “transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of acivilized nation.” Translate “mercenaries” into contract workers and proxy armies (remember the bloodthirsty, misogynist Northern Alliance?), and translate that last long phrase into Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

    But it is the final sentence of the declaration that deserves the closest study: “And for the support of this Declaration . . . we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.” Today, those who believe that the war on terror requires the sacrifice of our liberties like to argue that “the Constitution is not a suicide pact.” In a sense, however, the Declaration of Independence was precisely that.

    By signing Jefferson’s text, the signers of the declaration were putting their lives on the line. England was then the world’s greatest military power, against which a bunch of provincial farmers had little chance of prevailing. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t kidding around with his quip about hanging together or hanging separately. If the rebel American militias were beaten on the battlefield, their ringleaders could expect to be hanged as traitors.

    They signed anyway, thereby stating to the world that there is something worth more than life, and that is liberty. Thanks to their courage, we do not have to risk death to preserve the liberties they bequeathed us. All we have to do is vote.

    Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company