What it isn't?

long time no speak

2009-02-04T08:30:00.000-08:00

I have a real life see, and it just got busier and busier since the year turned, and now it is all snowy and stuff and I got a bit of time to write again because London is cryogenically paralysed.
I was asked to post my setlist from fridays punk party, at which I played a set of punk, proto punk, pop punk and post punk..mostly British and Irish but with some choice, crucial european cuts too!
A 2 hour set was never going to be definitive, it would need 4 to 5 hours really, and I left out some big names for the sake of some lesser known bands, particularly because the urge at Strangeways is always to share and enlighten, such is the trade off between the global musicologists!
Here it is, many thanks to some great bloggers that help feed my obsession, Ib, Nolan, 7inch punk.com etc etc!
I started with John Martyn out of some respect, maybe not a musical punk but certainly had the attitude down! respect!
p.s. the other anomaly is thee headcoatees but that was a request on the night and always a pleasure!

Happy Wizard of Oz day!!

2008-12-25T12:15:00.000-08:00

because , because, because....

lonely at the top

2008-12-14T00:40:00.000-08:00

Running a club in SL is easy peasy...making it a success is a bit harder, but the key to it , in my opinion, is being aware and caring about the place and the people who use it...
When someone is DJing at Strangeways, most of the time I will be there to help out, to greet people and to support the DJ and the club...the only times I am not there is if I have to go to sleep or if some real life situation is precedent.
It is great fun and I have met lots of fantastic creative people, and every day I usually meet someone new.
The downside is that some of my relationships with people are very superficial.
Because I am the club owner then some people regard me with preconceived ideas, mostly based on their own self esteem.
Lots of stuff happens that I am not aware of, because I am teacher, and the kids like to play around behind teachers back...but really fuck that, I am not teacher, I am a free spirit...i will walk out of class before the bell rings, no problem.
The ones with low self esteem always impose the idea that the club owner is either some tough cookie bitch or a grinning soft touch idiot...again fuck that..i am just a human...I am not pretending to be anything other than a cartoon representation of myself, and I do this because I love music and I love art and I quite enjoy people.
It is hard to connect though...some people say all the right things but, I don't know them at all and regardless of what they say, I don't feel and see the desire and passion in them, and without that there is no point... the ethos of Strangeways is passion, if you lose the love then there is no point doing anything there; because the passionate ones turn the wheel, without them Strangeways would not exist.
Q.E.D.
Flattery gets you nowhere....everybody knows this is nowhere.

weirdos and wonderland...with samara sunday at 1pm slt

2008-12-12T13:20:00.001-08:00

Serge at Strangeways

2008-11-26T18:04:00.000-08:00

saturday 29th at ...DLs Samara 4pm and Izzy 6pm
Mzdeedee Dagger warming up at 2pm with Glam!
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cassiopeia%20Shores/28/185/26

the horror

2008-11-04T11:24:00.001-08:00

Samhain was fun at strangeways...

Mater Tenebrarum

2008-10-30T08:36:00.000-07:00

I got my dress for halloween (Tres Jolie) ...and a companion?

Mondays have become random

2008-10-30T08:13:00.000-07:00

Mondays at strangeways has become a random night, where someone wanders in and asks if anyone is DJ, so whoever feels like it at the time usually decides to take the stream in response.
The last monday was my turn at the wheel and I did a 4.3 hour set winging it all the way.
The crowd pulsated, different characters showing up at different times and a healthy discourse about the usual subjects; food and getting high, and music of course...the improvised playlists are always inspired by the conversations happening at the time!
Last week it was hotdogs, this week ribs...american foods that I am not familiar with in the ways they describe them. One of the greatest aspects of the second life experience is the global cultural interchange, it can never exhaust itself, it creates new culture, and it makes me hungry for more.

Green Cosmos Deerhoof
Body and Brains… Coachwhips
Ba Ba Ba... Boof Pussy Cat
Afrirampo .. Afrirampo
Shaved Pussy Poetry ..huggy bear
Sugar .. Bikini Kill
Moist Vagina..Sonic Youth
Pussy ... Dope Gong
Cocktail Cunt (Fisher Preyes Remix)
Uma .. OOIOO
Dirt (Featuring Aesop Rock).. Tobacco
T-Electronique ..Faust & Dalek
i want you (she's so heavy) .. the beatles
The Crystal Cat ...Dan Deacon
Death Trip 6:07 Raw Power The Stooges
White Light-White Heat ... velvet underground
Come Into My Mouth .. Thee Headcoatees
French Kiss...Lil' Louis
Je T'Aime...Brigitte Bardot
Fuck Off .. Wayne County & The Electric Chairs
If I'm in Luck I Might Get Picked Up ...Betty Davis
I Feel Love ... Donna Summer
Automatic Lover -...Dee D Jackson
Supernature ... Cerrone
Add n to x ... Plug Me In (
I Feel For You ...Chaka Khan
Sign 'O' the Times ...Prince
Courtship Dating ... Crystal Castles
M/a..ximum Reespek ..Darqwan
Pull Up To The Bumper ...Grace Jones
Walls … Crass
Bloody Revolutions ... Crass
Kaltes Klares Wasser … Malaria
Little Fluffy Clouds … The Orb
Soon … My Bloody Valentine
I Want Your Love … Chic
Love… Simian Mobile Disco
Love Like Blood ... Killing Joke
On the Corner ...Miles Davis
Planet Of The Wolves ... Lightning Bolt
A.C.I.D.... Acid Eater
Mind Thief … Melt-Banana
Turtle Vs. Bunny (Who Won?) … Melt-Banana
Doll maker ... Venetian Snares
Shut Up (Hellﬁsh Remix) ... Shitmat
Shoel ... Secret Chiefs 3
Girl/Boy Song .... Aphex Twin
Analogue Bubblebath ..aphex twin
Over The Ice ...The Field
ICE-9 ...Namke
Vitamin C (U.N.K.L.E. mix) ... Can
This Heat .... にせんねんもんだい Nissenmondai
Black satin,.. Miles Davis
Atomic Rotary Grinding God ... Acid Mothers Temple
Macerate and petrify... Venetian Snares

children of the night

2008-10-24T08:47:00.001-07:00

we had a pre halloween party on thursday 23rd...Gabbi did a great set of Halloween and horror themed tunes and i winged a set after her, searching through my hardrive with Horror keywords like vampire, ghost, witch etc
my setlist:
Horror Show - Scars
all this and more - dead boys (for sam..ty ib!)
Car Chase Terror -M83
Electric Funeral -Venetian Snares
bela lugosi's dead - bauhaus
Satan's Holiday - The Lancasters
Spellbound - Siouxsie & The Banshees
Suspiria - Goblin
Ghost Town - The Prodigy
Ghost Rider - Suicide
Confessions of a Psycho Cat - Acid Eater
Gross Magik -Tobacco
Dracula Mountain - Lightning Bolt
Satan's Chainsaw - Tad
Mágica - Os Mutantes
The Lions and the Cucumber - Vampires' Sound Incorporation
Speed Demon - Wayne County & The Electric Chairs (for davey, and tucker!)
Free Witch And The No-Bra Queen - Stereolab
Plot Of Fear - Daniele Patucchi
Logon Rock Witch - Aphex Twin
Baby Vampire Made Me - Helium
Bill Is Dead - The Fall
The Naked And The Dead - Orbital
Evil Woman - Black Sabbath

Some Cartoon Frocks

2008-10-18T15:37:00.000-07:00

My Cartoon me (wearing the blue Iota Ultsch creation) and the lovely Cartoon Samara perform fashion as dysfunction
I forgot to update..the mix i did of where's charlie is now a newer version with higher vocals and a few tweaks..
get it here!
and don't forget the original!

Cardboard Clocks and Cartoon Frocks

2008-10-18T15:00:00.000-07:00

Another cool SL music project is/are the Cardboard Clocks..Pasta Vendetta and Plam...both music lovers and DJs and heads and psychedelic, one based in the USA and one in the UK, they are concocting music through their friendship in Second Life..
i remixed one of their songs..worry about worrying..it is a lovely song, cute and beautiful without being banal or contrived.
The remix is different, but uses all of the original song, just warped through various filters and reduced to essential pulses and glitches, then widened into something suggested by the stoned sunshine smile of the Cardboard Clocks.
Cardboard Clocks meets Cartoon Lorna (meets Lynne Scratch Perry....)

Monday was pleasant

2008-10-14T14:21:00.000-07:00

outside the club there is a stone circle where animals wander freely...
monday was a spontaneous hippy night full of maternal passion and free love...
playlist:
See Emily Play 2:57 Pink Floyd
Factory Grime 3:29 Crushed Butler
Every Holy Shroud 5:56 Polvo
Assassins 3:44 Lightning Bolt
Green Cosmos 3:22 Deerhoof
Bontempi Latin 4:54 Holy Fuck
Lullaby of The Moths 3:10 Helium
Kyuukohan 5:12 にせんねんもんだい nissenemondai
Nakimushikemushi Goodbye! 7:59 Afrirampo
Sai 15:03 OOIOO
This Heat 8:06 にせんねんもんだい nissenemondai
JD 7:25 Bardo Pond
Babylon 4 Eva 5:53 Valet
Village 7:28 Kiyasu Orchestra
Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory 23:10 The Flaming Lips
where's charlie LV mix 4:43 Lornaesthetics Lorna

Where's Charlie? Strangeways herbal dub

2008-10-13T14:10:00.000-07:00

My RL avatar was away on a vacation with family, it was fun and full of everything you expect from existence...
this is something I did when I was less busy than usual:
Where's Charlie? Strangeways herbal dub....Adrian Carter and the Hellraising Chicks meets the Naked Stoned Mummy

Nightclubbing part two

2008-09-29T14:19:00.000-07:00

strangeways mark 2 january 2008...atop the giant cupcake, of course.

I used to go to clubs and concerts all the time once, before I caught babies.
After plunging into the virtual world of Second Life, I acted instinctively and the first place I found was a club, The Irie Vibes reggae club, still going strong today; and from then on, as long as there were fake clubs I would fake go to them, and the best ones are magnetic, especially for a radio child like me, who always searched through the channels looking for a good song.
My early days in SL were meandering journeys, following impulses and ideas, and between the spreading stain of the voyage, the nightclubs were stations. In search of great music and the opportunity to stand around wondering what to do, which is what I did most of the time, because I had some bad experiences early on with dance balls and such.
At first I followed my nose, which was really my ear, well two ears, and that way I found the clubs that had names with historic resonance, like Studio 54 and the Moulin Rouge, and after that I wandered hopefully, settling on spots like The Blarney Stone and the Witches Brew as places where great alternative music was guaranteed, and Club Vital Staff was another stumbled find, a Japanese house and Electro club...between the other clubs my most regular station was Odds & Ends for many reasons, the music, when good, was a bonus. In those days it had camping (being paid for being there, usually very low pay) dance pads in the club, that was a big draw, not least for the battles that raged every hour for the temporary possession of the high earning blue pad. The banter was usually high order when there were a few faces in the house, with a clientele mostly Generation X, so the music, which had lots of seventies and early eighties rock, was sometimes familiar.
Back then most decent clubs would have 15- 20 avatars as an average crowd and on good nights 30 plus was usual. At Odds & Ends I had been there when there were 60 plus in the club itself and over 80 avatars on the sim, the lag was horrendous but the atmosphere was incredible, really pulsating and maddening, with layers of conversations in different languages, dialects and loads of money filling the sploders (people paid money into the sploder and once a certain number of participants was reached it counted down and then spewed out the cash, distributing it unevenly amongst the players) sometimes over 10,000 lindens (game currency) a time, about 20 quid in British money, 40 US dollars etc
At that time popular places in SL received money from Linden Labs based on the amount of traffic through their sims, so clubs attracted people with the opportunity to earn money camping, in most cases dancing for up to 40 lindens (not a lot of money) an hour. At the same time there were various forms of gambling, like the sploders, which attracted custom. Linden labs scrapped the payments based on traffic, and not long after they banned gambling, so this changed the face of clubbing in SL.
I went to Odds & Ends for the banter with a few people I had met when I first started in SL, but I always wandered the clubs looking for decent music. Sometime in march 2007 on a tip from friends Gabbi G and Biff Stine, I checked out a few sims, one of which was the punk hangout, the Emerald City sim, and the club there grew into something special.
This was a place playing lots of punk, and alternative music, with really studious and inspired DJs, like Davey Goldkey, Gabbi Garfield, Sjofin Oh...the crowd was mostly real people, not hiding behind the cartoon but projecting vivid personality; and it was a decent place to linger and listen. It has recently been rebuilt and has a nice club there, The Broken Doll. The soundtrack isn't as punky anymore, it leans more towards the popular Indie music that many DJs play, but there are some exceptional DJs who play there now, so it is never predictable.
I had always wanted to run a club in SL, and my feeling was it had to be about music and art, that's all, no gimmicks, the music is art, the building is art and the location is art.
I had almost been involved with one new club way back before I built my own, but the ideas they had were a million miles from the low key thing I wanted to do. The one thing I saw that doomed so many clubs was the development of cliques. This happens easily as clubowners and DJs are seen as cool people to know, and the same faces tend to return to the same places. From an outsiders point of view, as someone who visited different clubs all the time, I was able to see the cliques grow, and they were impenetrable, because the people who maintain them do it for their own needs and outsiders are always a threat until they get group approval. This is typical of the exposed human in Second Life, where all the psychological manipulations of real life seem to manifest easily and blatantly in this pixellated world shaped from mental effluence.
Nowadays there are more clubs than ever, some small ventures and some more organised and proactive, and because of this, amongst the smaller clubs, the average crowd sizes have depleted and anything above 7 avatars can be considered reasonably busy, 12 -15 is well busy and over 20 is exceptionally rammed...times change, yet the soundtrack is homogenised in so many of these clubs that they should all form one massive Indie club that plays all those many new bands who all sound quite similar, it really would be less confusing that way.
I always visit clubs, even though I run my own, there is no competition, I am happy to just bring it to life when there is a need, and anyone else associated can do the same, it doesn't need to be the best club in Second Life because, crucially, it is a fake world where some people live out their frustrated fantasies, and some people play god, and some are fucking insane in a bad way, so really, best to be modest, it is the Kingdom of the Losers after all, and really, we don't want any of them finding out about us.

babies...colleen

my 36 favorite punk songs...jason forrest

Interlude: what makes us stay?

2008-09-29T11:59:00.001-07:00

The potential for rock and roll can be an avant garde emotion.
Fall In...adam & the ants

Nightclubbing part One and a half

2008-09-29T11:24:00.000-07:00

the strangeways lounge october 2007

Strangeways is a year old. I posted earlier about how it started in a side room off the Salford Lads Club (virtual recreation by Morrissey Lilliehook) and originally I had been helping Morrissey organise some Smiths tribute nights...and then I was offered the chance to create the Strangeways Lounge there, and it was more fun meeting lots of people and sharing music, sometimes DJing randomly based on what people were talking about...running clubs in SL is addictive, especially if you make everything from scratch, but Strangeways was never anything but a creative project, there was no business plan, it just pulsates...it definitely lives, because things that are shared by many in this terra digitalis are as sentient as the cartoons who inhabit them. When you search for art in Second Life, the topic of a future post, then don't look in the galleries at the things that are imitating the mediums and methods of RealLife art, look at the accesories and gadgets people make, and the environments they create...Strangeways was always more than a room.

NIghtclubbing part one

2008-09-25T05:23:00.001-07:00

every friday chicago Punk Davey Goldkey has been playing a set and i usually do a small session...it is a punk free for all where people from all over the world gather and argue about what Punk is and what is Punk...and play music we feel has that punk energy, attitude, or has a nostalgic shock factor that somehow can render even the most unPunk tunes as Punky..my personal Punk moments were hearing Kraftwerk for the first time, and seeing old footage of Jerry Lee Lewis..Davey drops in E.L.O. and it is appropriately Punk...the fun is in the music and the comical trail through the dust of some wistfully ironic corners.

OOIOO tease her

Where's Charlie?

2008-09-15T05:27:00.000-07:00

A purely virtual creation, the Canadian/Californian voice of DJ Domina, Gabbi Garfield, and the soul of Sheffield techno pivot Adrian Carter, the sound of a thousand nights!
A recording of an intercontinental phenomenon, music grown out of Second Life by people connected through the Grid: Gabbi's vocal full of references familiar to anyone who has danced in a virtual club..this hook up is an example of a trend within SL, and is a portentous and seminal work refracting the gleam of potential future artistic collisions...maybe?

Adrian Carter and the hellraising chicks....where's charlie?...mediafire

sorry

2008-08-09T05:40:00.000-07:00

I killed all the old links...i think...it was worth it

amazin!

2008-07-09T09:59:00.001-07:00

tegan and sara, nineteen. This is just a great performance by some talented ladies. tegan's voice is so emo! aw little poppet...love it.

On the Road

2008-05-13T04:10:00.000-07:00

In this story we all get to play the Wizard, and then the choice is ours, whether to be a good witch or a wicked witch, a tin man, a munchkin etc...we've seen them all and been them all between us..but foremost we are all directing our mimetic narrative from a transparent enclosure, projecting the illusion of the diegetic wizard, a manifestation rendered omnipotent (provided you pay the full fee and invest in land) and behind that screen, something frailer and human manipulating a psychogeographic eisegesis of an amorphous textual environment, posited as god amongst gods the curtain is always pulled back.
To put it another way...we are empathetically directing, simultaneously acting out, narrating, and interpreting our own stories of powerful beings lost in an everchanging environment. This world sometimes resembles our most bland suburbs and shopping centres, sometimes an oneiric, painterly apparition..strangeness is everywhere, even in the most familiar locales, the broken world outside is in hidden reverse*
We are cast a multiplicitous role... the lost Dorothy is our base characterisation, and we can choose to shift or stick, between the supporting personae; the psychodramatic shades of the internal epic performance... and simultaneously our character is imposed by others, sometimes badly dubbed and hamfistedly edited, always representing the archetypes, and always the Wizard behind the curtain directing the action.
Nobody likes being the Wizard, but we comply with the maintenance of each others facade, and empathetically submit to the visually manifest entity, forgoing the recognition of the other as the Wizard. This is reversed if any encounter is fractious, the pause button is pressed and the characterisation cast aside, suddenly the Wizards pull back their own curtains.
I have played many roles, sometimes the Wicked Witch of the West, green skinned, casting curses, melting in my own stewed anxieties..and I love the Totos, those cute scruffy loyal Greyfriars Bobbys who always leap to your guard when in peril...I meet Cowardly Lions and Tin Men, Scarecrows in system skins at orientation islands and infohubs...Good Witches turned bad and the opposite, on a road to redemption and continuous resurrection.
I believe this Second Life is the location of an engaging and vibrant, barrier transgressing, multifold form of writing, or textualising, fusing and fissuring the tendrils of narrative, shifting authority between poetic modes, colliding memes bounced off the reflective surfaces of information devices and communication portals, and fixed to a subjective interpretation of the epic and the banal...there's no place like home, everything is strange.

*This article was inspired by a critique of Dario Argento by Linda Schulte Sasse that described him as Disney's hidden reverse.

Second Life, Second rate?

2008-05-10T13:41:00.000-07:00

It may seem like I dislike SL but that is not true, I am constantly emphasising the positive creative aspects of the medium, and there is so much more to love and enjoy, but, I can't help feeling that there is a great danger in taking it all too seriously. I dislike what some people do in SL, because I dislike the same things in RL, and I don't see a division, I am not taken in by the notion of a Second Life. I dislike the name Second Life, because it sounds like a double life, like a secret existence. I detest the prevalent notion about SL being better than RL or being some evolutionary advance in the human condition, this particularly rankles; I am reminded of cultists like the Heavens Gate sect who committed mass suicide believing their spirits (?) would leave their bodies and ascend to waiting spacecraft, and I equate that mass delusion with the evangelists of SL who promote the grid as better world, or an improved version of RL and seem to want to disconnect from mortality and spiritually(?) inhabit this virtual world . Let's get it straight, here and now, there is no reality anywhere apart from that which affects our senses, we can rely on pain and pleasure, we can't know much more than those basic survival receptors and reactors, and nothing else that we call reality is understandable by science, religion, philosophy, art etc, etc, etc..the simple knowable things in our reality are material, like the hard chair I am sat on, the ecstatic agony of childbirth, thirst and hunger..the rest is endlessly debatable and unknowable..nothing else can be proved other than as the evidence of something we can never know, although we can feel it, and express it, and blow it like a holy ghost....
SL is videogame development software, for creating 3d visual art in the form of environment, debris, and the characters that represent the in vitro users of the artifice, and that is the base reality of SL; anything else there has developed within that context. Now what really grabs my goat by the horns and shoves a carrot up it's arse are the aspirations of many SL residents, which totally reflect their RL aspirations, and manifests in illusions of sex and power and the accompanying status symbols, the mansions, the bling, the pneumatic breasts and bulging biceps; and in such a potent creative environment it is just depressing to witness this lack of imagination actualised in pathetically second rate form. This is not exclusive to SL at all, it is a symptom of the braindead conformism of the lumpen mass of humans that populate this corner of the galaxy, and that makes me cry....

what a waste! - Ian Dury and the Blockheads

2008-05-09T04:47:00.000-07:00

I could be the driver in an articulated lorry
I could be a poet, I wouldn't need to worry
I could be the teacher in a classroom full of scholars
I could be the sergeant in a squadron full of wallahs

What a waste! What a waste!
What a waste! What a waste!

Because I tried to play the fool in a six-piece band
First-night nerves every one-night stand
I should be glad to be so inclined
What a waste! What a waste!
But the world don't mind

I could be a lawyer with stratagems and muses
I could be a doctor with poultices and bruises
I could be a writer with a growing reputation
I could be the ticket-man at Fulham Broadway station

What a waste! What a waste!
What a waste! What a waste!

Because I tried to play the fool in a six-piece band
First-night nerves every one-night stand
I should be glad to be so inclined
What a waste! What a waste!
But the world don't mind

I could be the catalyst that sparks the revolution
I could be an inmate in a long-term institution
I could lead to wide extremes, I could do or die
I could yawn and be withdrawn and watch them gullify

What a waste! What a waste!
What a waste! What a waste!

supernature

2008-05-02T13:34:00.000-07:00

Is it a game? If it isn't a game, what is? Life is a game not a sport with a goal so a Second Life is a game within a game.
In the "real" world we can dream whoever we want to be, in this Second Life we can visualise and roleplay those dreams..so it says on the box, but parallel problems emerge; sometimes people stress the RL side and expect others to have some verifiable human status beyond their avatar, and others take the roleplay side to a degree where it negates the fact that SL is freeform and not exclusive to characterisation, so in both cases the rules they are trying to impose don't apply to the medium. Sometimes people can forget that SL is primarily videogame development software, and that everything in SL has been created by it's residents, and that is an ongoing process..
The most blatant theme in this paradox is gender multiplicity..statistics get fired around about a high percentage, 60 to 70% of SL girls are actually boys, and the other statistic from a recent survey said 70% of women playing online RPGs use a male avatar..so obviously transgressing sexual identity is common in SL for varying motives and functions, and this is a standard situation of videogame immersion (there is no moral outcry about playing pre pubescent children in videogames such as Kingdom Hearts and in a raft of japanese RPGs, nor is there any gender conflict) but in the MMORPG context of a freeform Second Life that for many is an idealisation of their human desires, where they exist in extension of their personalities and use SL as a strictly social platform, then a dilemma surfaces as the question of confirmation of the human driver of the avatar is raised. This is a huge issue to anyone, and that's a lot of anyones, using SL for cybersexual relationships. The questions of who is behind the avatar? and does the avatar faithfully represent the driver? cause many problems because of what is invested in these relationships, as people naturally fall in love or lust with something idealised, the love for the other is a reflective love that is narcissistic at source, and because of the visually intoxicating form then in SL, all sexual and romantic relationships have a basic deception at their core..the visual lie..it is a mutually assured confidence trick....
In roleplaying communities the deception of character is essential to a smooth and rich storification, and here the rp is deep so any relationships and events are governed by the need to remain faithful to plot and character, therefore rl is excluded and there is a mutual acceptance of the fantastic.
Avatars represent and reveal much about our individual desires, and they have the potential to express our latent pandrogeny. For many the opportunity to be young and good looking and to switch gender, race, species etc is too good to be true..and most relationships in SL are too good to be true.
I suggest that in order to understand SL it is necessary to see it as an entity, as a biotechnological mass, and all moral judgements must be temporarily suspended for fear of becoming conservative and reactionary and getting sucked into everything it isn't; because the conservative, reactionary mentality clogging up the grid soon becomes fascistic, and with the standard human weakness when faced with ideas, it is easy to see how ideas can dominate without challenge, but in order to see what it is, it's necessary to have a clarity of vision that is only attainable through disinterest and aloofness; in essence, escape the thought police and see the bigger picture, which is sometimes like a Heironymous Bosch vision of hell on earth.
A lot of lonely people, frustrated people with too much time on their hands..see them live out dreams that have been sold to them, see them repeat the same mistakes humans have been repeating forever, see them buy into the idea of freedom without question of the origins of freedom, see the lust and the desire dripping off them, guiding their every movement and decision, the desire for interactive holographic pornography, the superheroic dream to fly...the quest for supernature.
On the SLwebsite homepage there are hooks and lures: own virtual land, meet people (accompanied by a picture of a cuddling caucasian hetero couple) and these memes transmit on the frequency of Loser, they appeal to the frustrated, alienated, impotent mortal...then SL is revealed as the ultimate expression of the rejection of mortality: the messy, gooey, fleshy, shitty business of everyday life..and underlying that is the abjection of the maternal, there's no womb at the inn..it's a mans world....what a waste!

over the rainbow, a broken rose

2008-05-01T15:12:00.000-07:00

I didn't hang around long on the orientation island where I was born, just long enough to fart around with the appearance editor to make myself look strange, and taller, and fatter and blue!
I was eager to get stuck in and once I had figured out how to fly I was out of there..
My first steps on the mainland were at the Isobel infohub, and my next challenge was, how to escape..it took some time to figure it out. There was a teleporter that took me up to somewhere else, and then I was stuck in a building, scared that I was trespassing, scared of all the avatars around and utterly rattled by all the pornographic advertisments that littered the immediate environment..but I could fly, so I flew, and carried on flying till I stopped...some stores and some distant avatars, and some fine reggae music..the place was the Irie Vibes reggae club, an open air dancefloor and some people smoking huge spliffs, and I hid in a shop to watch the proceedings, unable to move my camera well because I didn't hang around long enough on the OI and get wise..so I was already crippled by my own eagerness and further hampered by an overwhelming shyness and then a man approached, and gave me a rose....
Some things suddenly struck home when I approached the dancefloor..I didn't know how to dance, and everyone else looked much better than me..and I was the only blue skinned person there, but most important, how to dance? and I looked around and accidentally clicked the dancefloor which offered me the opportunity of being animated, so I took it on and so began a love affair with avatar animations..
so then I knew a few things: I could dance, I could hear good music, there were clubs around, and I looked crap..but I had a rose?
I wasted much time dancing and observing conversations, perhaps still not quite understanding how bad I looked was relative to how little chat was aimed my way..but the rose?
I decided to look at the map and see where I was..and as this was the first time I had looked at the map properly I waited and watched with amazement as the grid rezzed in full effect looking magnificently enticing, and I noticed the flags and labels and saw a word that would inspire the nascent mission to transform..so I followed the word and spun the map around till I found it a few times and then had a quick chance to pick one and click teleport..
The word came with other words that made sense and bade me, the word, Freebies..hooked alongside newbies, wrapped by a barrage of sexy enticements but one had the tingle of a path...
Odds&Ends..freebies..newbies..money tree..dungeon..something clicked and dinged like a place I should visit..so i hit and landed into a grey soupy slow motion trudge with a Yellow Brick Road before me, but it was like pushing against an invisible monolith...and thru the thick gravy barrier I saw a rosebed form infront of me and a hovering title offering Lindens for tending to the roses, but I couldn't reach them..time was stilling as I looked at the clock and hours had erased..it felt like a good time and a good place to quit..
Odds&Ends became my hideout then, in that moment as I quit, I set to return and follow that brick road..and find my first true friend, Daylight, who showed me the outlaw thrills and trials and tests on the quest to become a true princess, a broken rose for the struggle....

strangeways

2008-04-30T10:37:00.001-07:00

Strangeways is a club run by myself, devoted to music, art and dancing animals. I originally built it at the Salford Lad's Club, a Smiths devoted venue owned by Morrissey Lilliehook, but when he decided to move location he didn't want to have the Strangeways Lounge anymore, so I built my own club, like a modernist power station with a Centre Georges Pompidouesque tubular pipe theme..we have nights with musical threads and themes that emerge from conversations..and we specialise in wholehearted geek musicology and aural epiphanies.. anyone is welcome to DJ anytime as long as they are sweet to the attitude..which is all about a love of music...we have great clientele all varified and rising at distinct moments phasing in between fadeouts and soloing or harmonising and most the time I stay calm with rostrum camera stillness for fear of sudden process overload disruptions to the stream.........

Confession 1: my motive (at swim 2 birds)

2008-04-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

When I became a resident of Second Life I was motivated by a desire to locate a new form of writing in the hypertextual, multimedia world of virtual realities, and to impact my theoretical concepts on this paradigm: this was provoked by professional and personal interest and my hope was to dovetail the 2 concerns and use SL as the basis of an aleatory journalistic investigation.
I browsed and investigated many MMORPGs but Second Life came through some random stumbling..I had heard of it and was intrigued, and the potential to wander freeform and create was irresistible..it seemed that I had found the potential location of an avant garde medium, and with this notion to the forefront I created my "self" and entered into this brave new world.
Aside from my original motive, I soon realised that the social side of SL was filling a huge hole in my life; I had little daily contact with adult human beings as I was spending most of my time bringing up my baby boy and in many ways, the preceding years had been quite tough, with many trials; RL grown up universal stuff that happens etc..so like many people drawn to SL, I had an ulterior motive, which was to seek some resolution to my latent, discordant emotions and rediscover my - self, or a self that had been mislaid.
This blog is a critique of what I have experienced and seeks to nail SL down by exploring everything it isn't, and reveal what it actually is; through discussion of the moral and ethical implications of a second life.
My greatest joy in SL has been sharing a passion about music with friends from around the world, and discovering new stuff and turning others onto great sounds..and there has been a soundtrack all the way, therefore this blog will be enriched by songs and (tangerine) dreams..this is my gift for you to discover..thru metamorphic rock...and roll..
Once upon a time, in the beginning, I was way too tall and not so pretty..and I was blue!!..........

happiness...

2008-04-28T15:31:00.000-07:00

Sometimes i meet people who are searching for happiness, and maybe this is why they gravitated to SL (no ascension, just a sinking feeling) and there is a great distracted pleasure in the carousel of social jousting; every club has it's wry jokers and cynics, and the quick witted, fast typists have superpowers in comparison to lesser mortals like myself, who are just too clumsy and slow to thrive in those places. But it IS fun to listen, to a point. This happiness and contentment is mythological, often confused with exhausted exhilaration, which is a passing pleasure. In Sl particularly, one moments pleasure can be overthrown by one's own inability to press quit when it is way past one's bedtime. Sleep deprivation is the norm for the serious SL addict, and this leads to incredible lapses in judgement, people get married in there and set up home, they might buy a pet, or a prim baby (!) or most distastefully, adopt a child avatar who is an actual grown up (though intensely immature and potentially seriously damaged) adult human. Some folks (I am sure it's always men) build pimp palaces with helicopters on the roof and have superyachts; and some girls just shop and shop, and some have arses like sofas and tits like watermelons as if designed by a porn addict (well, we make ourselves don't we?) and at least half of SL is just a wank fantasy for bored men...but happiness is always achievable in small doses, and in SL everything is intensified, so sometimes it can feel outrageously pleasant..but the lows are as manic as the highs..it's dangerous shit...addictive, compulsive, and too easy..it takes real strength to walk away from it, even for a week..and people spend money on it, on nothing..people buy stuff they don't need, things that don't exist, and they buy with an indolent greed that is frightening..I have done it, and I feel guilty because that is money that is taken from my real babies, and it is money I could have given away to a homeless person or a charity..and this happiness that we seek is perhaps better located in some altruistic act or devotion in the real world, instead of this crappy painted vision of utopia..but of course I had to buy to try, and now I renounce my consumerism it is easy for me to preach..but happiness does not reside here, or anywhere else beyond the pale of the human heart, and no gaze from false eyes and photoshopped smiles are going to change the facts...beguiling software indeed, but soft all the same...happiness is a warm gun and in SL all the guns are cold..

Who am it?

2008-04-28T03:51:00.000-07:00

In SL I have the name Lorna Volitant...if there were E's in the name I would anagram it to contain Volatile..because I/she is a feisty one and quick to confront a fool or a tyrant...
LV likes to be heard and hates ignorance, and she likes to play music and talk about music, and will gladly talk about most things, especially if the subjects have some value beyond the usual currency of self gratifying, auto erotic bilge...
Most of all, I/she likes to use the software creatively, to make things...that has always seemed to be the primary function and objective of Second Life..it's a creators tool, and the creator has a master plan!

Advancing the human condition?

2008-04-28T02:43:00.000-07:00

Second Life sells itself as this revolution; as a community creating a new world that improves on the old and broken world, known as RL...I contend that there is no division between the worlds..SL is just software used by a wealthy minority who are creating an anti utopia of rampant hedonism and a neurotic, solipsistic tangle of uncounselled narratives in rhizomatic strands that combine to strangle and suffocate necessary reality..like knotweed....the same stories repeating themselves..and reading between the lines, the human condition perpetuated in SL is revealed as classic postmodern alienation and identity crisis..and in SL this is magnified to intense degrees..it is an unhappy place where tyranny flourishes and the mirror is always lying about who is the fairest!
I love it..but I love life, and this is life....