my quick review of Homesick - by Eshkol Nevo

I bought this book as I was looking for a book in English (as I can't read Hebrew) about every day people living in Israel since I've been visiting Israel. I wanted to get more of a feel for the people and their lives. plus I've been feeling homesick for my own country and home. many of the places and things mentioned in the book were very familiar to me since my stay here and the characters seem like friends now. at first I found it hard to work out who was speaking as all the characters say "I" - they are each telling their own story in first person throughout the book. once I got used to this the characters grew on me. I loved the simple details mentioned in the book about everyday life and I have a mental picture about them living their lives now. I'll be keeping an eye out for more books by the author as I really enjoyed this one and recommend it to anyone who would like to read about life in Israel (ie not the media-portrayed view of Israel)

Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective in critical and cultural theory.

Open Humanities Press journals are fully peer reviewed, scholarly publications that have been chosen by OHP's editorial advisory board for their outstanding contribution to contemporary theory.

OHP's journals are independent, published under open access licences and free of charge to readers and authors alike.

A grassroots response to the crisis in scholarly publishing in the humanities, Open Humanities Press is an international open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide.

visit http://openhumanitiespress.org for more details and to see their included publications

Sound Unbound
Sampling Digital Music and Culture
Edited by Paul D. Miller aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
MIT Press, 2008

Contributors include Pierre Boulez, Chuck D, Cory Doctorow, Brian Eno,
Jonathan Lethem, Moby, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Steve Reich, Saul Williams,
and more.

Buy the book @ Amazon
http://tinyurl.com/63phj2

List of Contributors
http://tinyurl.com/5vbbth

Download "Fear of a Muslim Planet" chapter by Naeem Mohaiemen @ http://shobak.org/text/hiphop.shtml - this was honourably mentioned by the jury of the Vilém Flusser Theory Award

Swept off the Map: Surviving Resettlement and Eviction in Bawana JJ Colony by Kalyani Menon Sen and Gautam Bhan is a documentary look at the demoliton of "the Yamuna Pushta ‘jhuggi-jhonpdi’ colony, a string of settlements home to around 35,000 working class families - more than 150,000 people – some of whom had lived here for over three decades" to make way for a "riverside promenade with parks and fountains" by the Yamuna river, marketed to the tourists who visit Delhi.

this should be an interesting read, as I read about similar demolitions whilst I was in Delhi - it even happened to businesses; even large well built shopping centres. the book is available @ Yoda Press in India.

** NEW THURSDAY CLUBS: CHANGES and UPDATES **

Supported by the Goldsmiths DIGITAL STUDIOS and the Goldsmiths GRADUATE
SCHOOL

6pm until 8pm, Seminar Rooms at Ben Pimlott Building (Ground Floor,
right), Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, SE14 6NW

FREE, ALL ARE WELCOME

** PLEASE NOTE THAT THE DATE FOR ELENA COLOGNI'S CLUB SESSION HAS BEEN
CHANGED FROM THE 28th of FEBRUARY TO THE 6th of MARCH **

--

*28 FEBRUARY with RAYMOND HARMON
:
Painting in Light: Experimental Film and the Advent of Improvisational
Cinema*

The traditional model for cinematic expression is as a controlled
environment moving forward in a linear direction. From its inception the
art of filmmaking has been dominated by a single form of chronological
development. Each film exists as a series of frames that are static at the
start of the film.

Improvisation, a language largely defined within the practice of music, is

The Brisbane Sound - Curated by David Pestorius

http://www.ima.org.au/pages/whats-on.php

The Brisbane Sound will map cross-pollination between the indie and experimental music scenes and the art scene in Brisbane during the post-punk years, 1978–1983.

TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
VISIT TECHGNOSIS AT: http://techgnosis.info
SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

Journeybook is a collection of tales of altered states, essays, history and manifesto for psychedelic culture in the 21st century. It covers the modern usage of sacramental plants and offers insights into traditional and contemporary shamanism, as well as analysis of the current state of global psychedelic culture and its place in a sustainable future.

It features interviews with Terence McKenna (previously unpublished), Dennis McKenna, Daniel Pinchbeck, as well as articles by Rak Razam, Erik Davis, Graham St John, Tim Parish, Tim Boucher and a fresh selection of bold new writers from around Australia. At 250 pages, it is fully illustrated with dozens of paintings, photography and digital graphics from the Undergrowth art collective, including new
works by Gerhard Hillmann, Oliver Dunlop, Iswoz, Ahimsa:Love, Tim Parish and others.

Read more or visit http://undergrowth.org/journeybook_sampler_free_to_download to find out more and download the 40 page sampler, and to place an order for the book.

I'm having to look up almost every second word to decipher VALIS, the book for the next few week's PKD course. so, some reading notes & research below ...

VALIS - by Philip K Dick

preface of the book
VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intel-
       ligence System, from an American film): A
       perturbation in the reality field in which a
       spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex
       is formed, tending progressively to subsume
       and incorporate its environment into arrange-
       ments of information. Characterized by quasi-
       consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth
       and an armillary coherence.
                                          -Great Soviet Dictionary
                                              Sixth Edition, 1992

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_surrogate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

There is a line in the I Ching reading, "Always ill but never dies." (pg 10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

"Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference." by Erik Davis
http://tinyurl.com/2xa3gf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo1.htm

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Nonfiction/Philosophy/Pater_Plato/Pate...

nous, or noos (Greek philosophy)
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-420882/nous

Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature
http://www.adherents.com/lit/Na/Na_367.html
Platonism California: Oakland 1971 Dick, Philip K. Valis. New York: Bantam (1981); pg. 17.

"Yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that God--or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics--had fired precious information at Horselover Fat's head by which their son Christopher's life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God's control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato's cosmology, noos or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity--or blind chance, according to some experts--into submission. Noos happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noos imposes order (although how this 'persuading' is done Plato nowhere says.) " [Also pg. 32, 220.]

week 5 VALIS
http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

---

Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference - by Erik Davis (originally posted on nettime)
http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the "Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of information" that we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. "We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read."[4] With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming "Matrix" of cosmic information. Instead, we are under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire," whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration.

I'm starting an online course tomorrow called " The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K. Dick". I'm not sure how I'm going to go, but I enjoy his books so it'll be interesting to find out more. the lecturer is Erk Davis who's well known for his studies on the author. I've just logged into the course page and read the intro and it sounds really interesting. I have a feeling I'm going to need to take it twice!

there's another one by Douglas Rushkoff which sounds interesting also - he sent the note about his course via his blog mail list, so that's how I came across the PKD one. there's others by R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame which I wouldn't mind checking out also. some of the others on the site seem a bit out there! but it's interesting to find out about things I don't know much about.

I have these books back home, but I'm going to have to find new versions here - I can't read hebrew and most of the book titles are in hebrew so I can't even tell if the book's in the stores here! time for amazon I think. we have to read a couple of books and watch Bladerunner (one of my favs) & A Scanner Darkly (saw this in sydney when I was home last)

the course site is http://www.maybelogic.org/ and the forum lives at http://www.maybelogic.net/

(the promo blurb from the site in case anyone else is interested)
http://www.maybelogic.net/

" Once a purely cult figure, Philip K. Dick (1928-1982) is now widely recognized as a pulp visionary of the highest order. This course will approach his work not as science fiction but as crazy wisdom. We’ll explore how his texts seem designed to illuminate our posthuman problems and our most ancient philosophical questions — and to then scramble those insights with a cheap ray gun. We will read two of Dick’s major novels, both chosen for their heavy gnostic themes. We will discuss drugs and archons and machines that break down, including, possibly, yourself. We will also explore the two greatest examples of the many PKD movies to date — further evidence that Dick’s spirit will only continue to permeate the culture at large. "

Olam Qatan is a spiritual books and world music store in Emek Refaim St, Jerusalem, Israel. I spoke briefly with it's owner Ya'qub ibn Yusuf, who explained some of the music and books available in his store. Sounds like there's a fusion of East meets West happening in Israel and Turkey, which is really interesting to hear. It's great to speak with Independant store owners - their passion for music & books is contagious and it's great to discover new sounds and genres.

If you can't make it personally to the store, take a look at their website, http://olamqatan.com/. From September (2007) the music will be available to preview online. The Articles and About Us sections are of particular interest as they explain more about the store and it's history. They used to run classes after hours, at the "Olam Qatan School" at the store, where people could hear lectures, attend workshops and listen to concert performances. Now the store is branching out to publishing books and spreading the word of the local music releases and performers. So if you're not familiar with Israeli, Turkish and Middle Eastern sounds, check them out.

The videos below are of Ya'qub ibn Yusuf, the store owner, explaining the music & books that can be found in the store. He also gives a brief summary of independent music in the region today which is interesting to hear. And he gives plenty of recommendations if you're looking for some sounds to listen to or books to read.

There are 3 videos discussing music and some of the music releases, and one discussing the books.

(I had to lower the video quality slightly to make the file sizes more managable so apologies for the quality of the video. I have higher res versions)

You can find out more about these books & music albums by visiting the Olam Qatan website or emailing info@olamqatan.com

video part 1 : music

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPc_RyRjw0w

video part 2 : music
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5hkF6BtnJ8

video part 3 : music

http://youtube.com/watch?v=CG3m5GS4Wrc

video part 4 : books

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jffklfWlL-4

I've just bought this book so I can read it when I get back to Aus for holidays. the World Changing site has heaps of useful articles so I'm hoping the book will too!

http://www.worldchanging.com/book/

the blurb from the site:

last year I was asked (albeit last minute!) if I'd like to contribute to a book tentatively called Videoblogging Hacks so I wrote up the following rather quickly and sent it off. I'd been playing with creating html links and href tracks previously and I think I'd mentioned it on the videoblogging yahoogroups list. anyway, the book was published and is now available from various online stores.

the book is called Videoblogging and the authors names are Jay Dedman, Joshua Paul. I received a copy and had a quick look through it on my last trip home to Sydney - it's a very throrough book! so grab a copy if you get the chance.

my section was cut/edited quite a bit. I was surprised it made it all. so below is what I sent through - I need to find the images and post/links them also. it's a useful reference for me also, but most of the info below is already available on the internet.

I did find it hard to locate information at the time, so this was a way of bringing it altogether in one place as a reference.

attached are the doc and rtf versions - hopefully the images show up in them. I can't see them here on the mac but perhaps I don't have the correct viewer installed.

there's a couple of other good books on videoblogging also along with the one mentioned above :

Videoblogging by Jay Dedman, Joshua Paul

Secrets of Videoblogging by Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand, and Shirley Craig
( this one's available on safari techbooks online if you have a login there )

Videobloggin g for Dummies by Stephanie Cottrell Bryant

---

Creating Clickable Hyperlinks in QuickTime video movies.
-- Kath O'Donnell

Everybody knows that html links, or hyperlinks make the internet go 'round. Wouldn't it be cool to include clickable links in the video files you create and publish also. Think of the possibilities! Depending on what your video content is, the links could enhance the viewers experience whilst watching your video and allow them to gain more information or visit your homepage once they've finished watching your video. Clickable links turn your video file into an interactive video.

Including hyperlinks in your video using Quicktime is a simple step involving adding a text track and HREF codes or adding a HREFTrack, but surprisingly few people use this feature. More advanced options include being able to display the clicked link into specified html frames or windows, or even sending JavaScript code or parameters to JavaScript scripts on your website. SMIL movie files can also be used to create links, though if you decide to use this method, you need to be aware of the different ways SMIL files can be played on a computer ie it may be played in a non-QuickTime Player so could behave differently to what you expect. For this reason, this guide concentrates on creating clickable links using text tracks in QuickTime PRO.

Sophie, the Institute's first piece of software, is designed for reading and writing next-generation electronic books. Sophie will facilitate the easy construction of documents that are designed to live on the network and to use multimedia and time in ways that are currently difficult, if not impossible.

I've been thinking about different publishing & distribution methods and as it often happens the conversation appears on a site or mail list around the same time. early in feb, the node-l (node-London) promo emails starting making the rounds of the net lists. it sounds like a great collective of grassroots, funded & professional new media organisations based in London. (read through the list of projects on their site!) initially I was thinking this would be great to have internationally or at least in Australia / New Zealand as well - node-b (brisbane), node-s (sydney), node-m (melbourne), node-a (auckland) or node-au (australia) & node-nz (new zealand). another section of their promo which caught my eye was the POD - print on demand. I followed the links and discovered the mute site is based on CiviCRM which is an offshoot of Drupal (basically it's Drupal with a nice installer and some extra custom themes). Drupal's my favourite CMS as anyone who knows me would know - this site is done in drupal. (finally upgraded to latest version, but haven't had time to add more features yet). anyway, the POD concept is quite cool. people could make their own custom pdfs. researchers could pdf their reference articles for research. endless possibilities. I might try out the 'save to pdf' feature. on the Stealth message board I frequent, Mark was talking about new concepts & suggestions for Stealth mag, so I posted the below message. there's heaps of other options but not sure if he's wanting to go the online publishing method. I think it would work well in conjunction with the print mag and he seems quite busy these days & it sounds like he has to do most of the work which would be quite a lot of work.

I've started reading the Interactive Convergence : Critical Issues in Multimedia e-book and so far it's providing some more useful names of other books/reports to chase up. The first chapter is about the different new media university courses in the UK. pasting snippets here as I come across things to follow up or ideas to think about.

Chapter 1
Locating Interactive Media Production

(page 2)

This paragraph has an interesting point.. there's not many books or published educational materials for teaching 'new media' - I suppose the plethora of academic papers are not used for this purpose??

(page 9-10)

It's great to see so many online libraries and different organisations such as archive.org and google running digitization projects. I've spent so much money over the years on technical books and general reading books, which, the tech books in particular, are out of date quickly that I've often felt I have wasted some of my money on them. Since starting the new job (well over a year ago now, so not so new), and having to travel more, I've been using some of the online libraries - partcularly Questia, Safari (tech books) online and archive.org. The blogosphere and online libraries reminds me of the Neal Stephenson book "Snow Crash" - the citizen journalist, uploading of information & media for future references, online libraries. The future is happening!

I'm currently reading a couple of books - an online copy of Dan Gillmor's "We the Media" and a paperback by Patrick Neate called Where you're at - Notes from the frontline of a Hip Hop Planet. Gillmor reminded me of the google print project which was what started this post. I still enjoy reading paper copies of books - there's nothing like reading in bed on a rainy day, or a weekend, but I like the idea of online versions also. One of the main reason's for this, is that I can search for books I have bought and read them even whilst I'm away and not have to pay excess baggage to carry all the books with me. Before I head back to the UK, I'll drop off the books in Sydney and note down their names so I can either borrow them from local libraries or read online versions. Local libraries! I've had a resurgance in using these also! When I was in primary school I remember we were always in the library looking for books for class assignments. Once I started making money I began to buy the books instead of using the library. I've come full circle again, as I'm enjoying heading to the Auckland City Library. They have a great collection of arts and culture books. I have a friend who used to take his recording equipment (laptop/MD) into the library and dub some audio from the archived films and tapes for samples to use in his music. Perhaps I should check out the media collection at the Auckland library - I'm sure they'd have some great Maori language and local speeches which would be interesting to hear. Maybe even footage of the Rainbow Warrior.. Any way, time to go read some more ... :)

freeNRG : notes from the edge of the dance floor - AliaK

AliaK spoke with Graham St John regarding his new book about Australian electronic music community, travelling sound systems and DiY party culture.

GRAHAM ST JOHN : EDITOR AND COMPILER OF "freeNRG : notes from the edge of the dance floor" @ FRIGID (HOPETOUN HOTEL, SYDNEY)
SUNDAY 17 MARCH

"freeNRG : notes from the edge of the dance floor" is a book about music - electronic music, the sounds, and methods of creating and sharing these sounds with other likeminded individuals. It`s about people, the passionate people who live on the fringe of society celebrating electronic music with their DiY ideals and also the spiritualistic insights that music can bring. It`s about technology, and how technology can be used to spread ideas and keep people informed. It`s about information, information that cannot be suppressed by traditional media. And it`s about history, the history of one sector of the Australian electronic music community, which to this day,

The Cluetrain Manifesto is a book published in the late 1990s, prior to the popularity of blogs and other social software systems such as flickr, mappr (USA-centric), myspace etc

an excerpt from the forward, http://www.cluetrain.com/book/foreword.html