Perpignan #1
There will be only very few updates in the following days as Catherine and I are on holiday in the Southern Pyrenees. We have rented a gîte in Saint-Cyprien Plage 30 meters from the beach. The sun is quite discrete and often overshadowed by clouds but there is the sea which is wonderful even at 18 degrees and there are other things in life...
posted by Alexander at 7:42 AM

Nicht nur Berlusconi greift bzgl. der Ereignisse sprachlich schwer daneben.
Ariel Scharon sagte: "Jeder hat seinen bin Laden, unser bin Laden ist Arafat." Wirklich diplomatisch Herr Scharon.
Noch geschmackloser sind die Investmentbanker von Merryll Lynch: Zwei Tage danach schalteten sie eine Anzeige in der italienischen Wirtschaftszeitung Il Sole 24 Ore:"Von heute an hat der Aktienmarkt einen neuen Marktführer". Morgan Stanley, ihr größter Konkurrent hatte seinen Hauptsitz im WTC...
posted by Alexander at 7:24 AM

If Porsche wants to continue selling lots of sport cars in the US they finally have to find a successor to the 911. A change of name would be out of question I guess.
posted by Alexander at 8:43 AM

Weitere Stimmen zu 911 im Standard gesammelt. Kommentare von: Jacques Derrida, Bart Lootsma, Josef Haslinger, Renzo Piano, Woody Allen, Barbara Frischmuth, Keanu Reeves, Walter Laqueur, Samuel P. Huntington, Amos Oz, Alexander Kluge, Umberto Eco und Susan Sontag.

Jacques Derrida: "Wir brauchen eine Veränderung der Politik, insbesondere in Israel und Palästina. Nur ein politischer Wandel kann für die Zukunft eine solche barbarische und unmenschliche Attacke unmöglich machen." und
"Ich glaube angesichts dieses Verbrechens an die politische Unschuld von niemanden."
posted by Alexander at 8:40 AM

Bin Laden has disappeared according to the Taliban. Did he ever exist? Probably he beamed himself up to Mars with all the money he gained from the put options on American airlines.
posted by Alexander at 8:09 AM

Bush's Faustian Deal With the Taliban By Robert Scheer. Published May 22, 2001 in the Los Angeles Times.

Alternative titles in the view of 911 (only if Bush is right that Bin Laden is the responsible):
How many ceramic knives can you buy for $43 million? or
How to sponsor Mephisto's trident
posted by Alexander at 7:44 AM

Die Wiederkehr des Menschenopfers von Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Ursprünglich in der FAZ, aber mal wieder nur für Abonennten online, nun im St. Gallener Tagblatt gratis.
Enzensberger ist für mich seit ich die Verteidigung der Wölfe gegen die Lämmer von 1962 in meiner Schulzeit entdeckt habe der deutsche Vorzeigeintellektuelle. Ein Freigeist, Kosmopolit und hochintelligenter Analytiker des Zeitgeschehens in Lyrik-, Prosa- und Essayform. Er sieht die Anschläge als eine Art Vollendung der Globalisierung. Als ein absolut zeitgenössisches Phänomen, das kaum durch religiöse Traditionen wie z.B. den Islam motiviert ist. Aber auch Enzensberger hat keine Antwort auf die Frage, wie und warum es geschehen konnte.
posted by Alexander at 7:20 AM

Osama where are you hiding?
According to The News International, a Pakistani newspaper, Osama bin Laden has already left Afghanistan.
Their source of information are the Taliban who are obviously interested in making Bush believe that Osama is not in Afghanistan anymore. Hmmm.
If I was Bin Laden I would consider hiding in the US. Reason number one is that they would not expect me there (maybe a little naive). Reason number two would be that the US would have to declare war to itself as Bush announced to treat hosting countries of the terrorists like the terrorists themselves: "They will hand over the terrorist, or they will share in their fate".

What would happen if Bin Laden (who is quite ill I read somewhere) was found dead of heart-attack or some other natural cause? I am sure Bush and his advisors are already prepared rhetorically for this worst case scenario. After the soap opera sequel son of star wars there would be sons of Bin Laden.
posted by Alexander at 6:07 AM

Die deutsche Internetseite mit den meisten und aktuellsten Infos und Links zur Situation nach dem 11.9. ist KriT. Muss-Lektüre für alle, die sich ihr eigenes Bild machen wollen.

Günter Gaus, den ich schon immer für seine ruhige Sachlichkeit und seinen kritischen Geist bewundert habe, veröffentlicht einen Tagebucheintrag. Über George W. Bushs populärchristliches Gestammel von der Auslöschung des Bösen schreibt er:
"Der so gläubig wie routiniert vorgetragene Anspruch, das Böse, das die imperiale Macht selbstherrlich nicht als einen Feind, sondern als das Böse schlechthin ausgemacht hat, in der Welt zu tilgen - diese Anspruch ist hybrider noch als jeder Turmbau zu Babel."

Die Selbstherrlichkeit und die über jeder Selbstkritik stehenden Ausführungen Bushs sind unerträglich und hoffentlich nur Rhetorik. Hoffnung macht, dass der perfide Name Infinite Justice für die geplante Militäroperation aufgegeben wurde. Ein glaubwürdigerer Ansatz à la Churchill wäre das Eingeständnis einer Niederlage und die Vorbereitung des amerikanischen Volkes auf einen langandauernden und sehr kostspieligen Prozess der Einstellung auf die neue Situation gewesen (s.a. das Interview mit dem Historiker Fritz Stern in der Frankfurter Rundschau).

Mathias Bröcker schreibt in Heise Telepolis eine Reihe über das WTC Conspiracy (Interview und Links zu den derzeit sieben Folgen). Auch wenn er teilweise etwas wirr argumentiert, so ist es doch erfrischend mal etwas zu lesen, das nicht dem Mainstream der Medien folgt.
posted by Alexander at 5:21 AM

R. James Woolsey, CIA boss under Clinton warns to concentrate entirely on Bin Laden as main suspect. The WTC bombing in 1993 was probably the work of the Iraqi intelligence. Apparently the person behind, a Pakistani named Abdul Basit, was an Iraqi agent who had changed his identity! Doesn't this ring a bell concerning the false identities of the 911 attacks?
posted by Alexander at 4:06 AM

Why didn't the US get rid of Bin Laden before? (article by Michael Griffin in The New Statesman).
This may sound cynical but couldn't it be that they needed him? Now everything that happened can be blamed on Bin Laden. He is the devil. He is the enemy America needed. If he did not exist, he would have to be invented. Maybe in the future there will be homunculi created by genetical engineering which can be blamed for all terror attacks. Brave new world.
posted by Alexander at 3:55 AM

Susan Sontag's critical evaluation of the mass media after the attack now in English together with accounts and reactions of nine other authors in The New Yorker.
posted by Alexander at 3:41 AM

Meta
Kritik an der Medienkritik von Susan Sontag.
posted by Alexander at 3:20 AM

An article from Salon dated September 14th I only discovered now:
An Afghan-American speaks
"You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants."
posted by Alexander at 3:06 AM

"Tatsächlich befinden wir uns bereits in einem Krieg, aber er betrifft nicht Nationen, er betrifft die Kommunikation. Wir befinden uns im Info-War, in dem - wie schon im Golfkrieg - von amerikanisch administrativer Seite aus versucht wird, die Berichterstattung über das weitere Vorgehen (und das tatsächliche Ausmaß des sich in New York ereignet habenden Schreckens) zu lenken." Quelle: Süddeutsche Zeitung
posted by Alexander at 5:07 AM

And life is eternal
And love is immortal
And death is only a horizon
And a horizon is nothing
Save the limit of our sight
attributed to William Penn
posted by Alexander at 4:40 AM

There is something rotten in the United States
I can just understand that the WTC towers have been destroyed. But not the Pentagon. Where was the radar system? Any airplane coming too close to the Pentagon should have been shot down immediately. The Pentagon as the nucleus of the military strength of the only remaining superpower must have been the best defended building in the world. What was all this talk about the son of star wars if the US are not even able to put a shield over the Pentagon?
I get more and more the impression that the US are just looking for a scapegoat outside of the country. It is a terrible suspicion but it must be legitimate to be outspoken: It could very well be that parts (probably a network of spies) of the CIA are involved in the attacks. The terrorists must have had very sensitive informations to carry out their plot. All the accusations against Bin Laden have never been really substantiated. It all seems speculation. The list of Arab suspects who were in the death planes with at least one person who had nothing to do with it and is still alive (who had reported the loss of his passport a couple of years ago) is 100% dubious. And now Mohammed Atta one of those suspects has supposedly met Iraq intelligence services. To me all these speculations and misinformations seem to be red herrings. Why are there hardly any news on the total failure of the American defense system? That cannot be an accident.
posted by Alexander at 9:30 AM

Does Dubya have such a huge vocabulary? (via Kris)
posted by Alexander at 6:32 AM

Susan Sontag schreibt in der FAZ über das Mediendesaster bzgl. der Anschläge. Natürlich nicht online. Eine kurze Zusammenfassung hier im Spiegel online. Sie ist in Berlin und konnte bis gestern nicht zurückfliegen. Endlich mal jemand der Klartext redet. Nach so vielen nichtssagenden Solidaritätsbekundungen und falschen Gerüchten. Eine kurze Rede in der American Academy in Berlin am 13.9..

GWB kommt mir vor wie eine Comicfigur, die nur in Sprechblasen spricht: «Wir werden ihre Höhlen ausräuchern, wir werden sie jagen, wir werden sie der Gerechtigkeit zuführen».
posted by Alexander at 12:06 AM

Blogging and reading blogs has become such an idle exercise in the past days. I can't do it. There are no words appropriate for what has happened. Too much empty talk and speculation. There seems to be a terrible equilibrium between the aggressors and the attacked. Both still think in these stupid categories of the good and the bad. The American president who used to be the most powerful person in the world has no clue of what is happening. I feel more qualified as president than him. We are governed by puppets. What can you expect of a dummy? Just a crash.
posted by Alexander at 1:12 PM

Helpless
posted by Alexander at 12:46 PM

Ich habe mir schon lange die Frage gestellt, ob man in diese Welt noch Kinder setzen sollte. Da bin ich wohl nicht der Einzige, da in fast allen wohlhabenden Industrie- bzw. Dienstleistungsländern die Geburtenrate sinkt. Nach dem, was jetzt in New York und Washington geschehen ist, ist die Entscheidung für Kinder noch kritischer geworden. Ich sehe die Zukunft der Menschheit nun noch düsterer als vorher. Die Lebenserwartung der Menschheit scheint mir nach diesen Ereignissen nun endgültig geringer geworden zu sein als die eines Menschen. Vielleicht sehe ich zu schwarz, aber düstere Propheten wie Oswald Spengler, der jeder Zivilisation eine relativ konstante Dauer von ich glaube ca. 1000 Jahren zuschrieb, scheinen Recht zu bekommen. Wir sind nun in ein Zeitalter eingetreten, in dem es keine Supermächte mehr gibt. Wir wissen jetzt nicht mehr wer unser Feind ist. Wie einfach und im Nachhinein beruhigend war doch der kalte Krieg zwischen den USA und der Sowjetunion. Die Fronten waren klar. Wieso hat sich so etwas wie vorgestern nicht schon viel früher zugetragen? Das ist die eigentliche Frage. Wir haben bis jetzt so wahnsinnig viel Glück gehabt. Und dabei hat das große Schreckgespenst der Menschheit nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg, die Atombombe, noch gar nicht zugeschlagen. Ich möchte meinen Kopf in den Sand stecken, was unsere Zukunft angeht. Es gibt nun wirklich nur noch das JETZT.
posted by Alexander at 2:42 PM

It's the end of the world as we know it
posted by Alexander at 1:41 PM

A chess legend
I always had a big esteem for the BBC as a source of news. That is history. Check this article on Bobby Fischer playing on the Internet Chess Club. There are at least two huge flaws in there. Fischer replayed Spassky in 1992 somewhere in former Yugoslavia which is not exactly identical to Sibera. And how can Short have a score of 0-8 against Fischer in only four games? He would have bloody deserved it anyways!
posted by Alexander at 3:57 PM

wanking is good for you
posted by Alexander at 3:26 PM

JD and NO again
My favourite blog subtitle is "I start many things and have yet to finish a single one" from somnolence. That describes quite precisely how I proceed usually.
One of the things I have started in my mind which will probably never see the light of the day is a kind of Joy Division "project".
First I would like to research the story and background of each of the 40+ JD songs.
Then give an exact account of what is musically happening in each song (most difficult part for me as I am no musician, Josh is quite good at this).
After that I would like to write about the impact of each song on me. There I am thinking of listening to the songs with eyes closed and writing down spontaneously (a little like in Kerouac's spontaneous prose style which was actually very much inspired by Jazz) what comes to mind. That could be natural phenomenons like rainstorms, earthquakes or buzzing insects but it could also be more abstract. For example the feeling of being locked in a room or losing a good friend.
At the end I would try to interpret song by song from the lyrics.

I feel a little bit ashamed of the fact that New Order shows up first in my best of 2001 list on the left. That is just because it was the last purchase. Somehow I am still looking for this year's grand cru Bordeaux. Get Ready would certainly qualify for a cool, fresh and sparkling viñho verde with the gaz slowly emanating.
posted by Alexander at 1:25 AM

Joy Division revisited
posted by Alexander at 1:53 PM

the squirrel's hiding
up in the hazelnut tree.
we cannot see it.
posted by Alexander at 10:10 AM

DE
ein neues auto
steht in unserem garten.
das eichhörnchen lacht.
posted by Alexander at 1:43 PM

New music
Neumu's Michael Goldberg writes on next week's release of Love and Theft by Bob Dylan. He is excited. That sounds a little exaggerated to my ears. But his article is quite interesting. The album is supposed to be bluesy. That makes me think of an old birthday article in DIE ZEIT my favourite German paper (as all serious papers it is weekly) where a neighbour from Hibbing said that he never liked Robert Zimmerman's music as he disguises (correct English? maybe "changes" is better) his voice when he sings.
Another article from an Australian news site (found via Daypop) on Gold the new album by Ryan Adams. The beginning seems a little bit over the top: "So you thought Heartbreaker was a stunner. Gold will leave you wide mouthed in disbelief." But I surely will buy it without listening to it first. The surprise element is higher that way. And I know Ryan Adams cannot do bad music.
I have listened to some audio snippets over at cdnow of the new Laurie Anderson Life on a String. Another album that will enlighten and sweeten the dark, rainy and cold season in front of us.
posted by Alexander at 4:37 AM

Up-to-date music search
I guess Daypop the news/blog search I mentioned in my last post is my no. 1 weblog search engine now. They have accepted almost all 30 music blog/news sites I submitted yesterday and now you can look for indie music related stuff of my fellow music bloggers. Yesterday's posts are indexed. A search for Radiohead Amnesiac gives 17 results with some of the sites I submitted.
And the Daypop cache of my site is now more up-to-date than Google's which is also quite fresh. Congratulations danchan.
Actually I also submitted I Love Music my favourite music forum which still does not have a search I think. Unfortunately it was not accepted as it is not really a blog I suppose. Only main pages of blogs are searched by Daypop. First level links are indexed for news sites. I see I Love Music as a news site. Enough meta now.
posted by Alexander at 3:08 AM

Blog searching
My favourite search engines for weblogs are in descending order of preference:
- weblogs.com: my favourite search as it covers thousands of weblogs (all manila sites plus all at weblogs for free registered sites). It is very slow but it finds the exact text string and is updated every hour so that even very recent posts are indexed. Only the main page is searched. Also very useful for defining favourite weblogs.
- daypop: a new search by danchan. Very fast. Sites are crawled daily. The no. of sites is still quite small. News sites are included as well. You can submit urls which are included within 48 hours in the list. I submitted my blog the day before yesterday and it showed up in the search results already today. Today I submitted about 30 music news and blog sites (more or less my Quickbrowse collection music daily). When searching for "Laurie Anderson" I realized that there seems to be a problem with some sites showing up many times (don't know the term for this, maybe clustering). There was a Swedish news site with almost 90 results. I guess that only the main page of the weblogs is crawled.
- bloggle: a German blog search engine. Archives are included I think.
- google directory search: you can search all sites within the Google directory. Disadvantages are that the German blog directory of dmoz is not in the Google directory and the fact that most weblogs are only crawled monthly by Google. Advantage is that archives are searched as well.
- linkwatcher: only a few blogs are included. It seems to be difficult to submit your blog. I tried and got a response email but I am still not in the list. Fast. Only main page.

Evan Williams the man behing Blogger is still working on the Blogger search which is supposed to search all blogger powered weblogs. This search would be very interesting as Blogger is the most widespread blogging tool. Unfortunately the search does not work yet. Check blogger status for the current state of the search feature.
Google indexes already some weblogs (e.g. Scripting News) on a daily base. Probably they will index most weblogs daily soon and they will have a feature where you can search only weblogs. Btw the current Google cache of my blog dates of today!
posted by Alexander at 1:08 PM

Lies and omissions
I have not been 100% honest in my last posts as I just realize:
#1 Badger gave me the idea to compare the Doors and Joy Division
#2 Actually I loved New Order when I heard their music first. One of my early favourites was Bizarre Love Triangle. Especially the acoustic cover by the Australian band Frente! (Angie Hart's voice is terrific). Still one of the nicest pop songs of all-time. And it did not click with Joy Division in the beginning. I bought Substance first and thought it was ok. Later I got the original albums Unknown Pleasures and Closer and they overwhelmed me.
#3 There are more exams I did not pass. For example the Concours for functionnaires (civil servants) of the European Commission. But I guess I am not the only one.
posted by Alexander at 12:08 AM

Some thoughts on Joy Division/New Order
When thinking of Ian Curtis disbanding Joy Division May 18th 1980 by hanging himself the end of The Doors comes to mind.
Jim Morrison died under never fully explained circumstances probably on an overdose in Paris in the spring of 1971. Their end is not the only similarity between them. I doubt that Morrison was an epileptic like Curtis but nevertheless when you see him in some live videos it becomes clear that this guy was mentally insane. The way he danced and did not look at the public shows that he was on an extreme ego trip. Same is true for Curtis. Even the way Curtis sang with this grave low baritone voice is very reminiscent of Morrison. Only difference is that even if The Doors music is quite dark for the US of the late sixties it is incredibly sunny compared to Joy Division. The Doors were from LA and that is not exactly a very sombre place. Manchester on the other hand...

Very soon after Curtis suicide the remaining band members decided to continue under the name of New Order. After the release of the terribly foreboding Love Will Tear Us Apart which Curtis had written shortly before his death New Order toured the US substituting Joy Division who had planned that tour already. In the beginning Bernard Sumner, the guitarist and singer of NO tried to sing with the same mannered grave voice as Curtis. But very soon NO followed a totally different path. I think they did this musical U-turn consciously. JD’s sound had been dooming and dark and the lyrics had been depressing and devastating. NO created dance music relying very much on electronics. The drum machine and the synthesizer play an important role in their music. And the lyrics sung by Sumner in a boy’s voice are devoid of any meaning. They consist of banalities and platitudes. They just sound nice and fit very well to the sunny shallow music. I think that this is intended. The remaining members of JD decided maybe unconsciously that they could not continue with the serious music JD had created. That music with those sad and pessimistic philosophical lyrics had been a dead end. It had cost the life of one band member. They had invested too much of themselves in that music. To no avail except Curtis death. Therefore they reinvented themselves completely. They tried to make perfect dance pop music, the most superficial kind of music imaginable. JD had been an album and a live band. NO was just a singles band. The lp records and the live concerts were rubbish.

Somehow both bands are great. JD as a legacy of punk and probably the most influential indie band (together with the Smiths) after Velvet Underground. NO as the New Wave band which opened the way for Techno.
The new album of NO is great as I said before. I would say it is their first real album. Only track 9 is a bit weak. The rest is not on par with their best singles but it is amazingly consistent slightly melancholic dance music with the typical NO sound. And the lyrics are totally useless again. I think it is an art to write hollow lyrics which sound good to the music. NO have succeeded in this discipline again. I was inspired to these ramblings by this really bad negative review of the new album which misses the point completely.
posted by Alexander at 12:24 PM

More of the same
Can someone tell me why there is a category on German weblogs in the dmoz open directory but nothing in the Google directory which is based on dmoz?
I can only think of one possible reason. Google is out-of-date again. The Google directory is just an old version of dmoz (dating from when? one month? six months? one year?).
posted by Alexander at 6:00 AM

Egoblogging
Maybe a more adequate name for my blog would have been wanking in front of a mirror.
posted by Alexander at 2:56 AM

Life is so unjust ;-)
Have you ever felt that terrible pain when fellow weblog writers withdraw their links to you? Recently I was hit by it three times and I still have not fully recovered from those strokes (sic!). The first act of link withdrawal I noticed came from Zirbel a female German blogger from the nice and very old town of Trier (I know it a little as I lived in Luxembourg which is about 40 miles away for seven years). Btw she just had her first anniversary (nice quilt Zirbellina). In her weblog link section there is a part called "have a look logs". In there was a link to my blog. Was and is no more. I did not pass the test. This has only rarely happened in my life. I remember two times. My first driving test and a stupid university course called "Wirtschafts- und Sozialstatistik" (economical and social statistics) which I only passed in the second round because of laziness.

I received my second uppercut when I checked the blog previously called Rumble Strip which is now named "Air guitar boulevard". Do not look for content there, it is promised but not yet there. I used to be in the link section of the old Rumble Strip which was given up after only one month but I am not here anymore.

Finally the Indieblogs webring managed (or not managed) by Nanette has excluded me as well. Though a couple of days ago they sent me the code I should put on my page (It has been there for the last 2 months already!). What have I done that all these people have suddenly decided to ignore my internet presence?

To be honest my recent post on giving up blogging did not ignite a fire of emails begging me to continue. But I got an email from Kris who was a co-founder of Netdyslexia and who also started Disturbing Search Requests. He invited me to participate in the new collective music blog First class songs for the jet set which looks quite promising. Thank you very much for your email again Kris. I would like to contribute but right now my time window is extremely small. And you are right the number of visitors, links, search requests etc. is not important. Me too I prefer a few regular visitors with similar interests who participate with emails and posts in the forum. Btw Netdyslexia is still getting more visitors than this site even so the shop has been closed a couple of months ago.

I will try to minimise these stupid meta posts as much as I can. Maybe I should create a second blog on self-referentiality. For music related content check tonight. Promised.
posted by Alexander at 1:13 AM

Google is a sphinx
Google gets stranger and stranger. I mentioned before how Google's cache of some blogs was up-to-date and of others including mine it was a month old. One or two days after that post Google suddenly seemed to crawl me daily as its cache of my blog was always one day old. But right now the Google cache of my blog is almost a month old again. The last post in the cache dates from August 5th. The same is true for a couple of other blogs I checked. So they have replaced an up-to-date cache of my site with an old one. What is that? To me that seems to be a bug somewhere in Google's spidering and/or caching algorithm.

But that is not all. If you look closely at Google's cache of sex & sunshine you can see that in the table on the left the archives of September are already linked. Changes I made in the link section in the meantime are nevertheless not reflected in the cache. Somehow Google must know something about the archiving functionality of Blogger powered blogs. The internet is a strange strange world.

P.S. When I emailed Google with some questions recently they did not answer. Shortly afterwards I read somewhere that they do not answer email requests anymore as they cannot cope with the amount of emails they get.
posted by Alexander at 7:44 AM

Just curious (or another boring meta post)
I am in such a mood again. What would happen if I would just stop this? No more rambling and ranting. Would anybody care? Would I receive hundreds of emails begging me to continue? I don't know why but I don't think so. Maybe I will try. Just to see what happens. Would you miss me?
I won't do it. Be assured. But there is only one reason. I would have to bury my dear weblog. And I would not know where. Definitely not at this place. That blog seems to be dead itself with the last entry dating of August 5th. I would have to create a decent weblog cemetery (in blog form of course) where you could write an epitaph, ornament the blog tomb with virtual flowers, choose the music (streaming) to be played at the mass etc.
posted by Alexander at 1:49 AM