BigShinyThing

Of all of the stuff we learned about while studying Sexual Dissidence (true!) at the University of Sussex, the existence of Slash Fiction was the oddest and most intriguing. According to its (lengthy) Wikipedia entry:

Slash fiction is a genre of fan fiction. It focuses on the depiction of sexual or romantic relationships between two or more characters, who are not necessarily engaged in relationships in the canon universe. While the term originally was restricted to fan fiction in which one or more male media characters were involved in an explicit adult relationship as a primary plot element, it is currently more generally used to refer to any pairing between male characters. The term is also sometimes applied to fiction focusing on relationships between female characters; however, some fans distinguish femslash as a separate genre.

The name arises from the use of the slash symbol (/) in the description of the primary pairing involved in the story, as compared to the ampersand (&) conventionally used for friendship fiction.

During the 1960s, fan-created comics (vividly) depicting a romantic relationship between Captain Kirk and Mr Spock were apparently HUGE and mainly among heterosexual women. This consumer-created stuff ain’t new you know. Kirk/Spock was so big that it even merits its own Wikipedia entry:

Many believe that the origins of Kirk/Spock lie in deliberate homosexual subtext in the Star Trek episode Amok Time (1967), written by noted science-fiction author Ted Sturgeon. There is good reason to believe Sturgeon’s part in this is deliberate; Sturgeon was known for introducing homosexual themes to science fiction during the homophobic 1950s. He also wrote a scene in an earlier Star Trek episode, “Shore Leave” (1966), in which Captain Kirk apparently believes that Mr. Spock is giving him a backrub.

More fuel was added to the fire by certain emotionally-charged scenes in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), and because of an ambiguously-worded footnote in Gene Roddenberry’s novelization of that movie. (Slash fans took the footnote as validation; those opposed to slash also took it as validation.) From the novelization also comes the Vulcan word t’hy’la, which is defined as meaning friend, brother, lover. Spock uses the word twice to refer to Kirk. It is important to note, however, that in the novel Spock is depicted as asexual.

The full text of the footnote runs thus: “I was never aware of this ‘lovers’ rumor, although I have been told that Spock encountered it several times. Apparently, he had always dismissed it with his characteristic lifting of his right eyebrow, which usually connoted some combination of surprise, disbelief, and/or annoyance. As for myself… I have always found my best gratification in that creature called woman. Also, I would not like to be thought of as being so foolish that I would select a love partner who came into sexual heat only once every seven years.”

Friend of BST, Henry Jenkins, has a more elegant explanation:

When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series.

Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.”

[Fans, Gamers and Bloggers]

Anyway.

Slash Fiction is alive and well and kicking — and big in South Korea. As are comics full stop. Businessweek reports:

According to one manhwa (Korean for comic) publisher, comics accounts for about 25 percent of all book sales in South Korea, while more than 3 million Korean users access paid online manhwa and 10 million read free webcomics. And, thanks in part to a comics industry that tends to cede more control to artists, manhwa allows for a level of individual expression, in storytelling and style, that is not always found in manga.

Now, as a growing number of comics publishers in the U.S. have begun treating manhwa as a distinct form, newcomers to Korean comics have access to a diverse range of genres, from raucous comedies and tense science fiction and fantasy to high-octane adventure, period dramas, and slice-of-life romances. Even “boys’-love” stories for women—romances that don’t address gay themes in a traditional sense but focus on intense emotional connections between beautiful male protagonists—are making their way to American bookstore shelves.

We say, fandom finds a way.

Illustration from Kirk/Spock ezine SidebySide. Link NSFW unless you work at Prowler.

Another plea for help for a London music institution. For the last 12 years, The Spitz venue, restaurant and gallery in Spitalfields has been serving up a creative nightly schedule of non-mainstream music, and has established an international reputation for its festivals. Now the venue is facing closure before year end. Seems that their landlords have decided to serve notice on them. Given the rapid homogenisation of the area’s retail, our guess is that they’ve decided that they would make more money with an All Bar One or similar on the site — none of that edgy artsy nonsense, just a trustworthy, tourist-friendly franchise. Sigh. Read more details on their website, and sign their petition (1300 signatures and counting)

What else can you do to show support?

Up until the end of September the most immediate way to support The Spitz is by using it as much as possible. Whether you book a table in the restaurant for lunch or hold your party in the gallery or come and see a gig we would be delighted to see you. Please show your support by voting with your feet.

Off you go — it’s on Commercial Street. You know what to do, so do it.

The Economist (yes we’re catching up with our feeds) reports that porn may no longer be the world’s favourite online pastime. In Britain search sites overtook sex sites in popularity last October — the first time any other category has come out on top since tracking began, says Hitwise. In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised “net communities and chat” — chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to those sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now (see lovely chart):

The Economist muses:

Does this mean the internet has matured as a medium? After all, pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television. “Sex is a virus that infects new technology first,” as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn . Although this may soon be true for the web, however, it is not true for the internet as a whole. Much pornographic content may simply have shifted from the web to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, for example.

We think — with absolutely no scientific back up — that this is really a non-story, fun though it is to info-graphic. The Economist is measuring interest in sex in old media terms — passive watching and searching for images. They’re right to flag that people are consuming content in different ways — after all, why look at a grainy webcam image when you can file-share HD?

But what about all the people out there using the Net as way to get a shag? After all, the first ’social networking’ success story wasn’t Facebook or MySpace — even though they have a dating service aspect. No it was Gaydar. And what has really driven the fascination in Craigslist? You guessed it. People using it for (ahem) ‘dating’. It’s not what people are looking at but the connections that are being made. And believe us, everyone’s at it.

Despite the fact that this actually happened at least 3 months ago (we know — it’s on our bus route) the BBC is only today reporting on how London Transport ordered that one of the most iconic Banksy works in London should be painted over. It’s fantastic illustration of powers-that-be plonkiness:

Transport for London said a tough line had to be taken on graffiti because it created an atmosphere of social decay.

This is our favourite bit:

The spokesman added that the company recognised that there were some who viewed Banksy’s work as legitimate art but that their graffiti removal teams were “staffed by professional cleaners not professional art critics”.

Brilliant. WhoIsSick.Org mashes up Google Maps with user-contributed data about who is unwell, where they are, and what ails them.

And has an inspiring origin story as well:

The genesis of the idea for Who Is Sick was actually from an acute need that our founder had when his wife started experiencing severe stomach pain while they were on vacation. With no way of knowing whether the pain was from appendicitis, food poisoning, or some other stomach illness, our vacationing couple went to the emergency room and waited for 4 hours (BTW – this was from 11pm until 3am) to be seen by a doctor…only to be told that there was a stomach flu going around and that if the pain didn’t go away in 24 hours, to come back. Wow. 4 hours wait for that…in the middle of the night… (of course the doctor did check to see if it was appendicitis so they weren’t all bad…).

Our founder thought, “if only there were a website that had current AND local sickness information, maybe we could have avoided the long wait.” Needless to say, this started the wheels spinning and a couple of months later, Who Is Sick was born.

There’s obviously a way to go before this becomes a seriously useful epidemiological early-warning system — self selecting reporters, and rudimentary demographics aren’t the researcher’s best friends! And we seriously hope that they don’t get sued by Trivial Pursuit for their wedge-based symptom-reporting tools. But, like many of the best mashups, the idea is in retrospect so obvious and, well, right that it seems amazing that no-one has done this before. Expect bigger, shinier versions of this to pop up all over the web until someone gets it just right. Don’t expect that someone to be the NHS, mores the pity!

[Via Search Engine Journal]

Children’s drawings and paintings of the coca eradication spraying programme in Columbia.

Via DrugStrat via Alcohol and Drugs

According to official government figures, 100% of homes in the South Korean capital are now connected to broadband. By early this year, 85 per cent of households had broadband — the most broadband connections per head of population in the world.

Via the Institute for the Future.

Kurt Vonnegut, author, counter-culture hero, has died at 84, from reported complications resulting from a fall. Time to re-read Slapstick, Mother Night, Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, and of course Slaughterhouse 5. And to listen to the man himself reading Breakfast of Champions in 1970. RIP.

Turking meets art meets politics in Aaron Koblin’s online work The Sheep Market.

Koblin used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk webservice to recruit 10,000 workers for a simple task — to each submit a drawing of a ’sheep facing left’. All sheep can be viewed on the website, and what a diverse flock they are: from fluffy and well-proportioned, to stick-legged and wobbly.

The work is open to critical interpretation or simple woolly appreciation. You can even purchase (while stocks last) sets of stickers of your favourite sheep.

Many Dalston residents are less than happy about plans for regeneration (or gentrification, depending on your politics and focus) of the Dalston Junction area. Regardless of local opposition, development seems to be powering ahead.

For the past couple of months, the banners and signs of the protesters have been fighting a propaganda war with official posters portraying the brave new world planned by London Transport, Mayors Pipe and Livingston, and a consortium of developers.

The battle for hearts and minds escalated over the Easter break: the blandly cut-and-paste architectural renderings of the happy happy ‘Dalston to be’ riveted to the hoardings at the 38 bus stop on Dalston Lane have accumulated some creative amends at the hands of anti-development activists.

Note the sinister concentration-camp motto over the razor wire penning in the citizens of the gated community: SHOPPING MACHT FREI.

We’ve uploaded more high resolution images on Flickr. As in Hogarth, there is much detail worthy of attention: ASBO-branded shopping bags, anyone?

If you want to visit, go soon before the Powers That Be erase all sign of it. Map here. The site is just across the road from the Dalston Peace Mural — a 1985 celebration of Hackney’s collective anti-nuclear action during the Cold War.

Miranda July’s lo-tech site for her new book mightn’t exactly be up there with Chris Marker’s La Jettee but is nonetheless a nice story well told against the grain of online visual convention: no Flash, no video, just humour and an excellent sense of timing. Nice.

[Via IF:Book]

Last night we went to Cybersonica’s Late at Tate night. Some very fine things, including loops of Illustrious’s spatialised audio in the Rotunda, accompanied by visuals from Body>Data>Space (shown above), and the Modified Toy Orchestra’s set of circuit-bending retro electronica, fittingly introduced by Brian Duffy as

No laptops, no MIDI, no instruments that work.

All good stuff. We’ll be uploading more pix after Easter. And of course there are already many photos from others on Flickr and some footage (not ours), on YouTube. Enjoy.

[Thanks as always to Lisa Devaney]

Forbes reports that because an ordinance intended to keep predators away from children has made it nearly impossible for them to find housing, the five convicted sex offenders are living under a noisy highway bridge with the state’s grudging approval. The five men under the Julia Tuttle Causeway are the only known sex offenders authorized to live outdoors in Florida, said state Corrections Department spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger.

They have fishing poles to catch food, cook with small stoves, use battery-powered TVs and radios and keep their belongings in plastic bags. Javier Diaz, 30, has trouble charging the GPS tracking device he is required to wear; there are no power outlets nearby.

You just pray to God every night, so if you fall asleep for a minute or two, you know, nothing happens to you.

says Diaz, who arrived this week. He was sentenced in 2005 to three years’ probation for lewd and lascivious conduct involving a girl under 16.

The conditions are a consequence of laws passed in Florida and elsewhere around the US to bar sex offenders from living near schools, parks and other places children gather. Miami-Dade County’s 2005 ordinance says sex offenders must live at least 2,500 feet from schools.

“They’ve often said that some of the laws will force people to live under a bridge,” said Charles Onley, a research associate at the federally funded Center for Sex Offender Management. “This is probably the first story that I’ve seen that confirms that.”

Before taking up residence under the causeway, some of the men were initially told to live under the Dolphin Expressway flyover near 12th Street and 12th Avenue. It is used as a parking lot for a courthouse, but it is also across the street from Kristi House, a center for sexually abused children.

Trudy Novicki, executive director for the Kristi House, wasn’t pleased when she learned about her new neighbors while reading the Miami New Times, which first reported the story.

“As a child advocate and someone that treats children that have been sexually abused, my answer is keep them in jail,” Novicki said.

“This is not an ideal situation for anybody, but at this point we don’t have any other options,” said Plessinger. “We’re still looking. The offenders are still actively searching for residences.”

“If we drive these offenders so far underground or we can’t supervise them because they become so transient, it’s not making us safer,” Plessinger said.

Twenty-two states and hundreds of municipalities have sex offender residency restrictions, according to a California Research Bureau report from last August. It states in the executive summary:

“Banishment: to expel from or relegate to a country or place by authoritative decree… to compel to depart.” Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary. Second Edition.

Banishment was a form of legal punishment in Ancient Greece and Renaissance Italy and England. Colonial America received its share of banished English thieves and other offenders, as did Australia. During the American Revolution, the colonies banished English loyalists. More recently, the former Soviet Union restricted inmate’s rights upon release from the Gulag to 101 kilometres from large urban centers, resulting in a number of rural settlements.

Today, some communities in the United States banish sex offenders from living in their midst, resulting in a difficult dilemma: where can these offenders live, and where can they best be supervised and receive treatment, if available?

As of Sunday April 1st, the Arts Council’s Grants for the Arts scheme will suffer a whopping 35% cut. This means that during the funding year 2007/2008, only £54m will be awarded, down from £83m in the current financial year. If, like us, you were always the last to picked for the team at school or if you simply believe that the arts matter then Get Involved: you can join the Arts Council debate. Also, read The Guardian’s blog on the matter — today’s post is by Peter Hewitt, Chief Executive of the Arts Council. Go on. Add a comment.

And go to this:

OPEN SPACE EVENT TO ADDRESS FUNDING CUTS:
11TH APRIL, 7PM, SHUNT VAULTS, LONDON BRIDGE

This meeting is free of charge. To reserve a space please email: hannah@shunt.co.uk.

We’ve talked before about how much we love Flickr (despite that little falling out a while back). Mainly we love it because we think it knows us — Flickr presents our life in a tag cloud. And so it should — what we photograph says a lot about who we are (shiny shoes!).

Cunning brands out there should be looking into how their brand is defined through Flickr’s folksonomy… here’s Abercrombie & Fitch’s. And here’s how Abercrombie & Fitch describes itself:

The highest quality, casual, All-American lifestyle clothing for aspirational men and women.

We’d argue that Flickr’s suggested description — “try a search for af, model, abercrombiefitch, newyork or gay instead?” — is right on the nail. Where the brand sits within Flickr is the consumer perception regardless of how the brand sees itself. In world defined by folksonomies and not taxonomies what matter is not what we’re told about a brand but how we feel about it.

Everyone loves to talk about the iPod’s ‘halo effect’ whereby consumers fell in love with one product and then got sucked into the whole Apple brand. But now Rei Kawakubo and her husband, Adrian Joffe of directional Japanese fashion label Comme des Garcons have hit on a new way to pull ‘em in.

Instead of air-lifting the usual flash flagship store (we’re talking about you, Abercrombie & Fitch) into the capital, Kawakubo and Joffe opened a market in Dover Street, Mayfair, which Vogue describes as “a 13,000 sq ft, six-floor love letter to all things design and visual”. They invited a number of exclusive luxury brands such as Lanvin, Azzedine Alaia and up-and-coming ones like Undercover and Giles Deacon; let them design their own spaces within the store and then mixed it up with taxidermy, vintage Chinese posters, rare books and a bakery.

The space breaks many retail rules — not least in that the designers weren’t allowed to dictate who they sat next to in the store. It is essentially a posh co-op. Thirty percent of the shop is taken up by designer concessions, from whom Dover Street takes a small cut of their profits; 30 percent more goes to the smaller designers who Joffe, Kawakubo and the store’s general manager Dickon Bowden find, what to help out and buy from. Rei doesn’t even edit the collections, allowing the designers to create their own mini-markets within it. Joffe says,

Rei thinks it is not that clever to have a big ego, but that it is much easier, much nicer, much more intelligent to give people their freedom.

The resultant mish mash has attracted not only the cream of the fashion world (that should probably be creme) but lead Vogue to breathlessly describe the space as “the coolest shop in the world”.

One of the featured designers, big-in-the-80s accessories guru Judy Blame, says, “Being in Dover Street has made people look at my work again. Theirs is a real creative generosity, which is unusual in this business where everyone is usually so guarded. Because it’s Rei’s store, it has a personal tone and is like being invited into a family home.”

And it’s not just the invited designers who are doing well. Joffe says that since Dover Street Market opened, sales of their own line Comme des Garcons have gone “way, way up… because we have gained customers who wouldn’t have come into the old store. They had a preconceived notion of what Comme des Garcons was all about and now that has been changed for the better.”

Vogue terms this effect ‘commercial karma’ — a revolution in the bitchy world of fashion retail. We like to think of Dover Street as fashion 2.0 because a collective intelligence prevails. Just listen to Rei describe her vision — it mirrors that of Linux, Wikipedia and so on:

I want to create a kind of market where various creators from various fields gather together and encounter each other in an ongoing atmosphere of beautiful chaos: the mixing up and coming together of different kindred souls who all share a strong personal vision.

Mannequin wears Judy Blame, Dover Street Market. From WhatAboutBlack’s flickr.

Featuring 120 pages of the freshest urban talent from: Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, i-jusi, Sputn*kk, A1one Writer from Iran, Helen Lyon, mattblack, ASK! ELLiS, Szutka Fabryka, Blend, Paul Hartnett and shit-loads more… plus a FREE DVD offer featuring all video content from Issues 1 & 2 plus exclusive episode of the legendary ‘100proofMIXTAPE’…

What more could you want? With thanks to King Adz.

The programme is being broadcast online and will feature gay presenters discussing gay issues. The makers hope it will increase tolerance in a society where homosexuality remains a major taboo. Until 2001, Chinese authorities still classed homosexuality as a mental illness. How the programme fares within China’s notoriously censorious online environment remains to be seen.

The weekly 12 episode show has been produced by Hong Kong listed broadcaster Phoenix Satellite Television. The show’s producer Gang Gang told Reuters, that the show will be a forum “to get in touch with each other and communicate.” He added:

In a lot of major Chinese cities, gay people are playing sports, swimming, working out, singing karaoke — they are getting together for all types of activities.

Such coyness about what gay people actually do when they get together is to be expected. Whilst this is definitely progress, don’t expect Gaydar China to launch anytime soon.

In the article, BusinessWeek writes about the GoogleZon film (old news) and asks, “Is Google Getting Too Powerful?”

Sound familiar?