|mind-gloaming.net|

this is pretty cool, though the song is forgettable [at least on my first and only listen] without the rest of Metric to give Haines’ vocals the pop hook that makes their albums delightful. I didn’t know she had a solo album and now I do. Knowledge is power.

Link via here via this Warren Ellis post.
Warren Ellis is author of many graphic novels, most notably, Transmetropolitan he’s also a curator of a blog on alternative culture, “the space detective of perv or something“The man is certainly, a little strange, he’s out there and he’s fine with that. He’s on whatever fringe is left now that the Internet has violently shaken up norms and made the outside the center, the first last and the last first, at least here in the ephemera. He’s a center of nowhere becoming somewhere? He *gasp* writes about sex. He *double gasp* writes about pornography. Worse than writing about pornography and sex, he does it well. Sex and I’d say, by perverse, unusual, fetishist, perhaps revolting extension, pornography, is a thing that is under the collective rug of our culture. It’s there and goddamn it we’re not Victorians, we can and should talk about it. We shouldn’t let our children talk about it perhaps but it bears discussion. Sex happens. (to some people more than others.)Perhaps, you’ll say, there are things that shouldn’t enter our public discourse. Obscenity is obscenity and it should stay closed up and taboo. Is repressing a thing that is taboo and not discussing it publicly a good? How bad could it get? It seems to me that perhaps a lack of public discussion of sex in our culture leads to things like this article I read in last week’s New York Magazine.

If true, the allegation suggests many things: reportorial zeal, or a kind of journalistic sting, perhaps; not to mention personal motives that would be hard for anyone but Eichenwald to understand. [...] But Eichenwald, for whatever complex reasons, is stuck in the world Berry escaped—caught in the gravity of youthful sexuality, which distorts everything it touches. “I didn’t do this for a news story. I didn’t do this to get people arrested. I did this because I thought this person was desperate … And now I sit here, desperate. And I don’t know how to get out of it.”

It seems that Eichenwald gets obsessed with the idea of saving Barry from sex and porn, from exportation but the whole thing is creepy. Eichenwald seems to not have pulled Barry up from the mire without becoming immersed almost completely himself in some capacity throughout his ‘investigation.’ It strikes me to some extent like Eichenwald is crusading and martyring himself for someone else’s fight. I guess this kind of highly personalized activism, putting on a bold face and throwing your whole life into fighting something that is of more concern to the society than it is to you personally. Eichenwald cites thoughts of his own child as motivating his campaign for Barry but he states “I put my son at risk! Because I chose to save somebody else’s kid! Do you have any idea how guilty I feel?” I just fail to wholly wrap my head around Eichenwald’s motivations since they seem so ambiguous even to him. It’s not the sort of thing I’m going to think about for too long.

It’s getting late and I’ve missed a second night of double posting. I’ve got papers to write tomorrow and new music to absorb.