Viva Davidoff #3

the issue #3

Full of black and white and not very colorful contents

mostly talking about

alternative thinking including a real secret society, cool radio waves, an ideal for living, a stranger, travellers, utopists, letters and a repressed man.

.2 #3 !

This is the third issue of Viva Davidoff, obviously this is not the most colored one.

Pictures and layout are from Jean-Bernard Libert, Content mostly from Ricky Pedia. www.flickr.com/photos/jblibert www.jblibert.com

Pensée unique is a critique of mainstream conformism that claims that neoliberalism is the only possible society. Use of the term points at the fact of enforced reduction in political discussion by mainstream politics that, for example, prominently reveals itself in the famous populistic TINA argument (“There is no alternative”) of Margaret Thatcher that is widely adapted by other politicians, for instance as Gerhard Schröder’s argument, translated word-for-word from Thatcher’s (“Es gibt keine Alternative…”).

The expression was coined in a January 1995 editorial article in Le Monde diplomatique by Ignacio Ramonet, the editor-in-chief and, apart from many other functions and memberships, is a special honorary member of the Association pour la taxation des transactions financières et pour l’action citoyenne (Attac). The pensée unique argument is usually adopted by by political left-wing and alternative parties and organisations like Attac.

contents

The day free publishing started

4 6

A Fistful of Letters

8 10

The School of Night

3.

2038.01.19

30 32

…

We All Pray for Simple Things

26 28

iekyf romsi adxuo kvkzc gubj

Free Space

20 24

…

Ideas on the Absurd

16 18

An Ideal for Living

Left of the Dial

12 14

A Fight for Culture

Beat Box

34

First Things First

The day free publishing started

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 in England established parliamentary sovereignty over the Crown and, above all, the right of revolution. A major contributor to Western liberal theory was John Locke. Locke argued in Two Treatises of Government that the individual placed some of his rights present in the state of nature in trusteeship with the sovereign (government) in return for protection of certain natural individual rights. A social contract was entered into by the people.

Until 1694, England had an elaborate system of licensing. No publication was allowed without the accompaniment of a government-granted license. Fifty years earlier, at a time of civil war, John Milton wrote his pamphlet Areopagitica. In this work Milton argued forcefully against this form of government censorship and parodied the idea, writing “when as debtors and delinquents may walk abroad without a keeper, but unoffensive books must not stir forth without a visible jailer in their title.” Although at the time it did little to halt the practice of licensing, it would be viewed later a significant milestone as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom.

Milton’s central argument was that the individual is capable of using reason and distinguishing right from wrong, good from bad. In order to be able to exercise this ration right, the individual must have unlimited access to the ideas of his fellow men in “a free and open encounter.” From Milton’s writings developed the concept of the open marketplace of ideas, the idea that when people argue against each other, the good arguments will prevail. One form of speech that was widely restricted in England was seditious libel, and laws were in place that made criticizing the government a crime. The King was above public criticism and statements critical of the government were forbidden, according to the English Court of the Star Chamber. Truth was not a defense to seditious libel because the goal was to prevent and punish all condemnation of the government.

John Stuart Mill approached the problem of authority versus liberty from the viewpoint of a 19th century utilitarian : The individual has the right of expressing himself so long as he does not harm other individuals. The good society is one in which the greatest number of persons enjoy the greatest possible amount of happiness. Applying these general principles of liberty to freedom of expression, Mill states that if we silence an opinion, we may silence the truth. The individual freedom of expression is therefore essential to the well-being of society.

Mill’s application of the general principles of liberty is expressed in his book On Liberty : “If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and one, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”

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Truth indeed came once into the world with her divine Master, and was a perfect shape most glorious to look on : but when he ascended, and his Apostles after him were laid asleep, then straight arose a wicked race of deceivers, who, as that story goes of the Egyptian Typhon with his conspirators, how they dealt with the good Osiris, took the virgin Truth, hewed her lovely form into a thousand pieces, and scattered them to the four winds. From that time ever since, the sad friends of Truth, such as durst appear, imitating the careful search that Isis made for the mangled body of Osiris, went up and down gathering up limb by limb, still as they could find them. We have not yet found them all, Lords and Commons, nor ever shall do, till her Master’s second coming [...] from John Milton’s Areopagitica

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Beat Box

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New Age Travellers are groups of people who often espouse New Age or hippie beliefs and travel between music festivals and fairs (mainly in the United Kingdom) in order to live in a community with others who hold similar beliefs. Their transport and homes consist of vans, lorries, buses, narrowboats and caravans converted into mobile homes. They also make use of improvised bender tents, tipis and yurts. New Age travellers largely originated in 1980s and early 1990s Britain.

The movement originated in the free festivals of the 1970s such as the Windsor Free Festival, the early Glastonbury Festivals, Elephant Fayres, and the huge Stonehenge Free Festivals in Great Britain. Later events included the Castlemorton Common Festival, a huge free and illegal event which attracted widespread media coverage and prompted government action. Some legal festivals, such as WOMAD, continue to take place in a variety of countries.

Many people see the Castlemorton Common Festival in 1992, a weeklong festival that attracted up to 30,000 travellers and ravers, as a significant turning point for New Age Travellers in Britain, as it directly resulted in the government granting new powers to police and local authorities under the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 to prevent such events in the future. The Criminal Justice Act included sections against disruptive trespass, squatting and unauthorised camping which made life increasingly difficult for travellers, and many left Britain for Ireland and Europe, particularly Spain.

However, thousands of people still live a traveller lifestyle in Britain. As of 2010 they are normally known simply as Travellers. Few, if any, travellers live on the local authority sites reserved for Gypsies, Scottish Gypsies/Travellers and Irish Travellers, so instead stay on unauthorised sites throughout the countryside, particularly in Wales and the south-west of England, and in urban areas. London hosts a large number of traveller sites in places such as disused factory or warehouse yards, and there is often a crossover between travellers and squatters, with travellers parking up in yards attached to squatted buildings. Typical traveller sites might have anywhere from 5 to 30 vehicles on them, including trailers and caravans as well as buses, vans and horseboxes converted to live in. Although most travellers in Britain are British, large numbers of Continental Europeans also “travel” in the UK. As unauthorised sites are evicted and travellers moved on frequently, accessing basic services such as health and dental care, refuse collection, benefits, and education for children can be problematic. Many traveller families home-school their children.

Although travellers have only taken to the road since the 1960s, as of 2010 many traveller families have reached their third or fourth generation.

Despite widespread popular assumptions about travellers living on state

handouts, many do seasonal or temporary work, on farms and building sites or in factories and pubs for example. Others work as self-employed mechanics, electricians and plumbers, or make money selling scrap, or running stalls at markets and car boot sales. Festivals during the summer also present many opportunities for travellers to make money through offering entertainment, services and goods to festival goers. A high level of mutual aid, the sharing of childcare and vehicle maintenance and “skipping” (collecting food from local supermarket skips) within communities allow travellers to live on very low incomes.

The Traveller and Free Party scenes often have close links, and many travellers run or are involved with the sound systems of raves and squat parties.

A Fistful of Letters

Typesetting is the composition of text by means of types. It requires the prior process of designing a font and storing it in some manner. Typesetting is the retrieval of the stored letters (called sorts in mechanical systems and glyphs in digital systems) and the ordering of them according to a language’s orthography for visual display.

During the letterpress era, moveable type was composed by hand for each page. Cast metal sorts were composited into words and lines of text and tightly bound together to make up a page image called a forme, with all letter faces exactly the same height to form an even surface of type. The forme was mounted in a press, inked, and an impression made on paper. Copies of formes were cast when anticipating subsequent printings of a text, freeing the costly type for other work. In this process, called stereotyping, the entire forme is pressed into a fine matrix such as plaster of Paris or papier mâché called Flong to create a positive, from which the stereotype forme was cast of type metal.

Hand composing was rendered commercially obsolete by continuous casting or hot-metal typesetting machines such as the Linotype machine and Monotype at the end of the 19th century. The Linotype, invented by Ottmar Mergenthaler, enabled one machine operator to do the work of ten hand compositors by automating the selection, use and replacement of sorts, with a keyboard as input. Later advances such as the typewriter and computer would push the state of the art even farther ahead. Still, hand composition and letterpress printing did not fall completely out of

use, and since the introduction of digital typesetting, it has seen a revival as an artisanal pursuit. However, it is a very small niche within the larger typesetting market.

Phototypesetting or “cold type” systems first appeared in the early 1960s and rapidly displaced continuous casting machines. These devices consisted of glass disks (one per font) that spun in front of a light source which selectively exposed characters onto light-sensitive paper. Originally they were driven by pre-punched paper tapes. Later they were hooked up to computer front ends.

One of the earliest electronic photocomposition systems was introduced by Fairchild Semiconductor. The typesetter typed a line of text on a Fairchild keyboard that had no display. To verify correct content of the line it was typed a second time. If the two lines were identical a bell rang and the machine produced a punched paper tape corresponding to the text.

With the completion of a block of lines the typesetter fed the corresponding paper tapes into a phototypesetting device which mechanically set type outlines printed on glass sheets into place for exposure onto a negative film. Photosensitive paper was exposed to light through the negative film, resulting in a column of black type on white paper, or a galley. The galley was then cut up and used to create a mechanical drawing or paste up of a whole page. A large film negative of the page is shot and used to make plates for offset printing.

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Left of the Dial College radio (as it is generally known in the United States) became commonplace in the 1960s when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) began issuing class D licenses for ten-watt radio stations to further the development of the then new FM band. Some colleges had already been broadcasting for decades on the AM band, often originating in physics experiments in the early 20th century.

One of the first college radio stations in the country is WRUC from Union College in Schenectady, New York. Its first experimental broadcasts under the call sign 2ADD were in 1920. WHUS, (the UConn HUSkies), the radio station of the University of Connecticut went on the air as WABL, a 100-watt AM radio station, in 1922 with two 103-foot (31 m) steel towers serving as the radio station’s antennae. In 1925 power increased to 500-watts and the call letters changed to WCAC (Connecticut Agricultural College, at that time the name of the university). Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida started WDBO (Way Down By Orlando) in 1924. WDBO was given away by Rollins College in 1926.

College radio returned to Rollins College when the FM radio station, WPRK began broadcasting on December 10, 1952.

Most of the FM radio stations received higher-class licenses than ten watts, typically a few hundred watts. A few got several kilowatts, and a small handful got licenses in the range of tens of thousands, sometimes reaching up to maximum-power 100-kilowatt outlets. Still, due to strict class D regulations, some radio stations were prohibited from a wattage upgrade for possible signal interference with adjacent radio stations, such as KWUR 90.3 FM interfering with KWMU 90.7 FM in St. Louis, Missouri. KTUH 90.3 FM in Honolulu, Hawaii has had many increases in its wattage since they started broadcasting at 10 watts as a Non-commercial educational FM radio station in 1969. In 1984 KTUH received permission from the Board of Regents to increase to 100 watts of power. More recently, in 2001, KTUH began transmitting at 3000 watts of power. KTUH is heard on 3 frequencies in Honolulu 90.3 FM, 91.3 FM and 89.9 FM as well as online at KTUH.ORG and on digital cable channel 866.

The earliest college radio stations carried news, intercollegiate sports, and music along with educational shows and sometimes distance learning courses. In the latter portion of the 20th century, many U.S. radio stations played what came to be known as “college rock” (later known as alternative rock), a type of rock music that had not yet hit the mainstream.

Most radio stations have now diversified, with many following a very commercial-like music rotation during the weekdays, and having specialty shows on evenings and weekends. A few radio stations still employ a Freeform programming.

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College radio stations are typically considered to be public radio radio stations in the way that they are funded by donation and grants, but as a radio format the term “Public radio” generally refers to classical music, jazz, and news.

A more accurate term is community radio, as most staff are volunteers, although many radio stations limit staff to current or recent students instead of anyone from the local community.

By the late 1970s, FM had taken off, and competition for channels for new radio stations was intensifying. The National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) and the newly founded National Public Radio (NPR) convinced the FCC that local low-power radio stations were somehow detrimental to broadcasting, and class D licenses were no longer issued for applications made after 1979, except for broadcast translators to repeat NAB and NPR members’ radio stations. Making matters worse, the radio stations were demoted to a second-class status, meaning that they would be forced off the air if any full-power radio station wanted their space.

Many radio stations were forced to upgrade their facilities at considerable expense to the students. Many other radio stations were eventually (and still continue to be) forced off the air, because they could not afford the upgrades at all, or not in time to avoid being locked in by other expanding radio stations.

There have also been situations where some college radio stations have been forced off the air by a school administration. In one instance, the student media director of WUSC-FM in Columbia, South Carolina implied that the radio station’s broadcast license had been “flagged” by the FCC due to an out-of-control staff and inappropriate songs being played on public airwaves. This serious charge proved to be false, but it led directly to WUSC, which had been named as 1992 Spin College radio station of the Year, being shut down in 1995. The entire executive board of the radio station (students elected by their peers) was fired for supposedly promoting a culture of irresponsibility. This caused most student DJs to quit in protest. After silence for 45 days, WUSC came back - but it had abandoned its popular alternative music radio format, playing songs it never allowed before. As a result, CMJ New Music Report and the now-defunct Gavin Report dropped WUSC as a reporter of new music they played on air.

Many college radio stations in the U.S. also carry syndicated programming, such as that of National Public Radio and affiliated regional networks. Some radio stations have had their student programming forced off the air and taken for other uses, such as WWGC and KTXT. The original WGST was the subject of an involuntary takeover which saw the state’s board of regents sell the radio station out from under Georgia Tech as “surplus” property.

A very few radio stations have been added to the airwaves in very isolated cities with the return of the LPFM license to the U.S. The restrictions that the U.S. Congress placed on LPFM radio stations as a result of the NAB’s misleading lobbying have seriously limited the effectiveness of this, however.

HD Radio also creates RF interference which LPFM radio stations cannot object to, and which they cannot convert to themselves because it is costprohibitive even for many commercial radio radio stations. One example of a well organized LPFM radio station is WIUX-LP of Indiana University,

which is able to cover the entire city with its LPFM signal and is competitive in listenership numbers to nearby higher-powered commercial radio stations.

A number of college radio stations have been shut out of traditional broadcasting methods and are available only as streaming audio over the Internet. One such example is DePaul University.

Some radio stations use a variety of methods, such as Lewis University’s WLRA (The Start) who uses terrestrial FM, streaming, and mobile media apps.

Michigan State University’s WDBM (The Impact), Northern Kentucky University’s WNKU, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s WSUM. All three radio stations broadcast traditionally and via online streaming internet radio.

Black is the badge of hell The hue of dungeons and the school of night.

The School of Night l'ecole de la nuit

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The School of Night is a modern name for a group of men centred on Sir Walter Raleigh that was once referred to in 1592 as the “School of Atheism.” The group supposedly included poets and scientists such as Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman and Thomas Harriot. There is no firm evidence that all of these men were all known to each other, but speculation about their connections features prominently in some writing about the Elizabethan era.

Raleigh was first named as the centre of The School of Atheism by the Jesuit priest Robert Persons in 1592. The School of Night is a modern name ; it derives from a passage in Act IV, scene III of William Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labour’s Lost, in which the King of Navarre says “Black is the badge of hell / The hue of dungeons and the school of night.” There are however at least two other recorded renderings of the line, one reading “suit of night” and the other reading “scowl of night.” The context of the lines has nothing to do with cabals : the King is simply sneering at the black hair of his friend Berowne’s lover. However, some writers have seen the line as an allusion to Raleigh’s ‘school of atheism’, and have used The School of Night as a name for the group. The theory was launched by Arthur Acheson, on textual grounds, in Shakespeare and the rival Poet (1903). In 1936 Frances Yates found an unpublished essay on scholarship by the Earl of Northumberland, an associate of Raleigh and supposed member of the movement, and interpreted it as inspiring the key celibacy theme of the play. The supposition is discounted as fanciful by some, but nonetheless received acceptance by some prominent commentators of the time.

Atheism It is alleged that each of these men studied science, philosophy, and religion, and all were suspected of atheism. Atheism at that time was a charge nearly the equivalent of treason, since the monarch was the head of the church and to be against the church was, ipso facto, to be against the monarch. However, it was also a name for anarchy, and was a charge frequently brought against the politically troublesome. Richard Chomley, an anti-Catholic spy for her Majesty’s Privy Council, charged in an affidavit Marlowe had “read the Atheist lecture to Sr. Walter Raleigh [and] others,” substantiating charges of atheism against the group. The group was controversially said to be satanists and pagans who worshipped pagan gods at night.

Fiction The novel The School of Night by Alan Wall is the story of a present-day researcher who becomes obsessed by connections between Shakespeare’s plays and members of the “school”. A play of the same name by Peter Whelan, dealing with the relationship between Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe, was presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company at The Other Place theatre in November 1992.

Ideas on the Absurd

Many writers have addressed the Absurd, each with his or her own interpretation of what the Absurd is and what comprises its importance. For example, Sartre recognizes the absurdity of individual experience, while Kierkegaard explains that the absurdity of certain religious truths prevent us from reaching God rationally. Camus regretted the continued reference to himself as a “philosopher of the absurd”. He showed less interest in the Absurd shortly after publishing Le Mythe de Sisyphe (The Myth of Sisyphus). To distinguish his ideas, scholars sometimes refer to the Paradox of the Absurd, when referring to “Camus’ Absurd”.

His early thoughts appeared in his first collection of essays, L’Envers et l’endroit (The Two Sides Of The Coin) in 1937. Absurd themes were expressed with more sophistication in his second collection of essays, Noces (Nuptials), in 1938. In these essays Camus reflects on the experience of the Absurd. In 1942 he published the story of a man living an absurd life as L’Étranger (The Stranger). In the same year he released Le Mythe de Sisyphe, a literary essay on the Absurd.

He also wrote a play about Caligula, a Roman Emperor, pursuing an absurd logic. The play was not performed until 1945.

The turning point in Camus’ attitude to the Absurd occurs in a collection of four letters to an anonymous German friend, written between July 1943 and July 1944. The first was published in the Revue Libre in 1943, the second in the Cahiers de Libération in 1944, and the third in the newspaper Libertés, in 1945. The four letters were published as Lettres à un ami allemand (Letters to a German Friend) in 1945, and were included in the collection Resistance, Rebellion, and Death.

In his essays Camus presented the reader with dualisms : happiness and sadness, dark and light, life and death, etc. His aim was to emphasize the fact that happiness is fleeting and that the human condition is one of mortality. He did this not to be morbid, but to reflect a greater appreciation for life and happiness. In Le Mythe, this dualism becomes a paradox : We value our lives and existence so greatly, but at the same time we know we will eventually die, and ultimately our endeavours are meaningless. While we can live with a dualism (“I can accept periods of unhappiness, because I know I will also experience happiness to come”), we cannot live with the paradox (“I think my life is of great importance, but I also think it is meaningless”). In Le Mythe, Camus was interested in how we experience the Absurd and how we live with it. Our life must have meaning for us to value it. If we accept that life has no meaning and therefore no value, should we kill ourselves ?

In Le Mythe, Camus suggests that ‘creation of meaning’, would entail a logical leap or a kind of philosophical suicide in order to find psychological comfort. But Camus wants to know if he can live with what logic and lucidity has uncovered – if one can build a foundation on what one knows and nothing more. Creation of meaning is not a viable alternative but a logical leap and an evasion of the problem. He gives examples of how others would seem to make this kind of leap. The alterna-

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Religious beliefs and absurdism tive option, namely suicide, would entail another kind of leap, where one attempts to kill absurdity by destroying one of its terms (the human being).

Camus points out, however, that there is no more meaning in death than there is in life, and that it simply evades the problem yet again. Camus concludes, that we must instead ‘entertain’ both death and the absurd, while never agreeing to their terms.

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Meursault, the absurdist hero of L’Étranger, has killed a man and is scheduled to be executed.

Caligula ends up admitting his absurd logic was wrong and is killed by an assassination he has deliberately brought about. However, while Camus possibly suggests that Caligula’s absurd reasoning is wrong, the play’s anti-hero does get the last word, as the author similarly exalts Meursault’s final moments. Camus made a significant contribution to a viewpoint of the Absurd, and always rejected nihilism as a valid response.

“If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.” Second Letter to a German Friend, December 1943.

Camus’ understanding of the Absurd promotes public debate ; his various offerings entice us to think about the Absurd and offer our own contribution. Concepts such as cooperation, joint effort and solidarity are of key importance to Camus, though they are most likely sources of ‘relative’ versus ‘absolute’ meaning.

While writing his thesis on Plotinus and Saint Augustine of Hippo, Camus became very strongly influenced by their works, especially that of St. Augustine. In his work, Confessions (consisting of 13 books), Augustine promotes the idea of a connection between God and the rest of the world.

Camus identified with the idea that a personal experience could become a reference point for his philosophical and literary writings. Although he considered himself an atheist, Camus later came to tout the idea that the absence of religious belief can simultaneously be accompanied by a longing for “salvation and meaning”. This line of thinking presented an ostensible paradox and became a major thread in defining the idea of absurdism in Camus’ writings.

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A fight for culture

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Cultural hegemony is the philosophic and sociological theory, by the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci, that a culturally diverse society can be ruled by one social class, by manipulating the societal culture (beliefs, explanations, perceptions, values) so that its ruling-class worldview is imposed as the societal norm, which then is perceived as a universally valid ideology and status quo beneficial to all of society, whilst benefiting only the ruling class. Cultural hegemony has deeply influenced Eurocommunism, the social sciences, and liberal and progressive activist politics.

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Honesty compels us to recognize that Be sure that we are sorry about that even if it So, as compensation, this double pag

19.

t this issue is really not very colorful. t’s not gonna be better in the following pages. ge is reserved to make your own way.

An Ideal for Living

.20 Joy Division took time to develop their sound.

As Warsaw, the band played “fairly undistinguished punk-inflected hard-rock”. Critic Simon Reynolds asserted that “Joy Division’s originality really became apparent as the songs got slower.”

The group’s music took on a “sparse” quality ; in Reynolds’s description, “Peter Hook’s bass carried the melody, Bernard Sumner’s guitar left gaps rather than filling up the group’s sound with dense riffage, and Steve Morris’s drums seemed to circle the rim of a crater.” Guitarist Bernard Sumner described the band’s characteristic sound in 1994 : “It came out naturally : I’m more rhythm and chords, and Hooky was melody. He used to play high lead bass because I liked my guitar to sound distorted, and the amplifier I had would only work when it was at full volume. When Hooky played low, he couldn’t hear himself. Steve has his own style which is different to other drummers. To me, a drummer in the band is the clock, but Steve wouldn’t be the clock, because he’s passive : he would follow the rhythm of the band, which gave us our own edge.” Over time, Ian Curtis began to sing in a low, baritone voice, which often drew …

21.

… comparisons to Jim Morrison of The Doors (one of Curtis’s favourite bands).

Sumner acted as the unofficial musical director of the band, a role that he carried over into New Order. While Sumner was the group’s primary guitarist, Curtis played the instrument on a few recorded songs and during a few shows.

Curtis hated playing guitar, but the band insisted he do so. Sumner said, “He played in quite a bizarre way and that to us was interesting, because no one else would play like Ian.” During the recording sessions for the album Closer, Sumner began using self-built synthesisers and Hook used a six-string bass for more melody.

Producer Martin Hannett “dedicated himself to capturing and intensifying Joy Division’s eerie spatiality”. Hannett believed punk rock was sonically conservative because of its refusal to utilise studio technology to create sonic space. The producer instead aimed to create a more expansive sound on the group’s records. Hannett said, “Joy Division were a gift to a producer, because they didn’t have a clue. They didn’t argue.” Hannett demanded clean and clear “sound separation” not

only for individual instruments, but even for individual pieces of Morris’s drumkit. Morris recalled, “Typically on tracks he considered to be potential singles, he’d get me to play each drum on its own to avoid any bleed-through of sound.”

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Lyrics Ian Curtis was the group’s sole lyricist. Curtis would write frantically when the mood took him ; he would then listen to the band’s music (which was often arranged by Sumner) and used the lyrics that were most appropriate. Words and images such as “coldness, pressure, darkness, crisis, failure, collapse, loss of control” recur in his songs. In 1979, NME journalist Paul Rambali wrote, “The themes of Joy Division’s music are sorrowful, painful, and sometimes deeply sad.” Musicologist Robert Palmer wrote in Musician that the writings of William S. Burroughs and J. G. Ballard were “obvious influences” to Curtis, and Morris also remembered the singer reading T. S. Eliot.

The band refused to explain their lyrics to the press or print the words on lyrics sheets. Curtis told the fanzine Printed Noise, “We haven’t got a message really ; the lyrics are open to interpretation. They’re multidimensional. You can read into them what you like.” The other band members later admitted they paid little attention to what Curtis was writing. In a 1987 interview with Option, Morris commented : “We just thought the songs were sort of sympathetic and more uplifting than depressing. But everyone’s got their own opinion.” Deborah Curtis recalled that only with the release of Closer did many who were close to the singer realise “his intentions and feelings were all there within the lyrics.” The surviving members of the band in retrospect regret not seeing warning signs in Curtis’s lyrics. “This sounds awful but it was only after Ian died that we sat down and listened to the lyrics,” Morris said in 2007.

“You’d find yourself thinking, ‘Oh my God, I missed this one.’ Because I’d look at Ian’s lyrics and think how clever he was putting himself in the position of someone else. I never believed he was writing about himself. Looking back, how could I have been so bleedin’ stupid ? Of course he was writing about himself.

But I didn’t go in and grab him and ask, ‘What’s up ?’ I have to live with that.”

Live performances In contrast to the sound of their studio recordings, Joy Division typically played loudly and aggressively during live performances. The band were unhappy with Hannett’s mixing of Unknown Pleasures, which reduced the abrasiveness of their sound. According to Sumner, “the music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars.”

In concert, the group interacted little with the crowd ; Paul Morley wrote, “During a Joy Division set, outside of the songs, you’ll be lucky to hear more than two or three words. Hello and goodbye. No introductions, no promotion.” While singing, Curtis would often perform what was referred to as his “’dead fly’ dance”, where the singer’s arms would “start flying in a semicircular, hypnotic curve”. Simon Reynolds noted that Curtis’s dancing style was reminiscent of an epileptic fit, and that he was dancing in the manner for some months before he was diagnosed with epilepsy. Live performances became problematic for Joy Division, due to Curtis’s condition. Sumner later said, “We didn’t have flashing lights, but sometimes a particular drum beat would do something to him. He’d go off in a trance for a bit, then he’d lose it and have an epileptic fit. We’d have to stop the show and carry him off to the dressing-room where he’d cry his eyes out because this appalling thing had just happened to him.”

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Strange as it may seem, we all pray for simple things

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2038.01.19 3 :14 :07

Early problems In May 2006, reports surfaced of an early manifestation of the Y2038 problem in the AOLserver software. The software was designed with a kludge to handle a database request that should “never” time out.

Rather than specifically handling this special case, the initial design simply specified an arbitrary time-out date in the future. The default configuration for the server specified that the request should time out after one billion seconds. One billion seconds (approximately thirtytwo years) after 9 :27.28 pm on 12 May 2006 is beyond the 2038 cutoff date. Thus, after this time, the time-out calculation overflowed and returned a date that was actually in the past, causing the software to crash. When the problem was discovered, AOL’s server managers had to edit the configuration file and set the time out to a lower value.

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The year 2038 problem (also known as Unix Millennium Bug, Y2K38 or Y2.038K by analogy to the Y2K problem) may cause some computer software to fail before or in the year 2038.

The problem affects all software and systems that both store system time as a signed 32-bit integer, and interpret this number as the number of seconds since 00 :00 :00 UTC on Thursday, 1 January 1970. The furthest time that can be represented this way is 03 :14 :07 UTC on Tuesday, 19 January 2038.

Times beyond this moment will “wrap around” and be stored internally as a negative number, which these systems will interpret as a date in 1901 rather than 2038. This will likely cause problems for users of these systems due to erroneous calculations.

Further, while most programs will only be affected in or very close to 2038, programs that work with future dates will begin to run into problems much sooner. For example, a program that works with dates 20 years in the future will have to be fixed no later than in 2018.

Because most 32-bit Unix-like systems store and manipulate time in this format, it is usually called Unix time, and so the year 2038 problem is often referred to as the Unix Millennium Bug. However, any other non-Unix operating systems and software that store and manipulate time this way will be just as vulnerable.

Solutions There is no universal solution for the Year 2038 problem. Any change to the definition of the time_t data type would result in code compatibility problems in any application in which date and time representations are dependent on the nature of the signed 32-bit time_t integer. For example, changing time_t to an unsigned 32-bit integer, which would extend the range to the year 2106, would adversely affect programs that store, retrieve, or manipulate dates prior to 1970, as such dates are represented by negative numbers.

Most operating systems designed to run on 64-bit hardware already use signed 64-bit time_t integers, effectively eliminating the Year 2038 problem in any software that has been developed to use the extended format. Using a signed 64-bit value introduces a new wraparound date that is over twenty times greater than the theorized age of the universe : approximately 292 billion years from now, at 15 :30 :08 on Sunday, 4 December 292,277,026,596. The ability to make computations on dates is limited by the fact that struct tm uses a signed 32 bit int value for the year. This limits the year to a maximum of 2,147,485,547.

Alternative proposals have been made (some of which are in use), such as storing either milliseconds or microseconds since an epoch (typically either 1 January 1970 or 1 January 2000) in a signed-64 bit integer, providing a minimum of 300,000 years range. Other proposals for new time representations provide different precisions, ranges, and sizes (almost always wider than 32 bits), as well as solving other related problems, such as the handling of leap seconds.

Keep calm !

Everything is gonna be OK. Viva Davidoff will find a solution

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iekyf romsi adxuo kvkzc gubj Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS (23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954), was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of “algorithm” and “computation” with the Turing machine, which played a significant role in the creation of the modern computer. Turing is widely considered to be the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. He was stockily built, had a high-pitched voice, and was talkative, witty, and somewhat donnish. He showed many of the characteristics that are indicative of Asperger syndrome.

During the Second World War, Turing worked for the Government Code and Cypher School (GCCS) at Bletchley Park, Britain’s codebreaking centre.

For a time he was head of Hut 8, the section responsible for German naval cryptanalysis. He devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of the bombe, an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the Enigma machine.

After the war he worked at the National Physical Laboratory, where he created one of the first designs for a stored-program computer, the ACE. In 1948 Turing joined Max Newman’s Computing Laboratory at Manchester University, where he assisted in the development of the Manchester computers and became interested in mathematical biology. He wrote a paper on the chemical basis of morphogenesis, and he predicted oscillating chemical reactions such as the Belousov–Zhabotinsky reaction, which were first observed in the 1960s.

Turing’s homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954, just over two weeks before his 42nd birthday, from cyanide poisoning. An inquest determined it was suicide ; his mother and some others believed his death was accidental. On 10 September 2009, following an Internet campaign, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown made an official public apology on behalf of the British government for the way in which Turing was treated after the war.

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Recognition Since 1966, the Turing Award has been given annually by the Association for Computing Machinery to a person for technical contributions to the computing community. It is widely considered to be the computing world’s highest honour, equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

On 23 June 1998, on what would have been Turing’s 86th birthday, Andrew Hodges, his biographer, unveiled an official English Heritage Blue Plaque at his birthplace and childhood home in Warrington Crescent, London, later the Colonnade Hotel. To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, a memorial plaque was unveiled on 7 June 2004 at his former residence, Hollymeade, in Wilmslow, Cheshire.

Turing has been honoured in various ways in Manchester, the city where he worked towards the end of his life. In 1994, a stretch of the A6010 road (the Manchester city intermediate ring road) was named Alan Turing Way. Part of this road runs alongside the City of Manchester Stadium, where Manchester City play their games. A bridge carrying this road was widened, and carries the name Alan Turing Bridge. A statue of Turing was unveiled in Manchester on 23 June 2001. It is in Sackville Park, between the University of Manchester building on Whitworth Street and the Canal Street gay village. The memorial statue, depicts the “father of Computer Science” sitting on a bench at a central position in the park. The statue was unveiled on Turing’s birthday.

Turing is shown holding an apple – a symbol classically used to represent forbidden love, the object that inspired Isaac Newton’s theory of gravitation, and the means of Turing’s own death. The cast bronze bench carries in relief the text ‘Alan Mathison Turing 1912–1954’, and the motto (“Founder of Computer Science”) as it would appear if encoded by an Enigma machine : “IEKYF ROMSI ADXUO KVKZC GUBJ”.

A plinth at the statue’s feet says “Father of computer science, mathematician, logician, wartime codebreaker, victim of prejudice”. There is also a Bertrand Russell quotation saying “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture.” The sculptor buried his old Amstrad computer, which was an early popular home computer, under the plinth, as a tribute to “the godfather of all modern computers”.

In 1999, Time Magazine named Turing as one of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th century for his role in the creation of the modern computer, and stated : “The fact remains that everyone who taps at a keyboard, opening a spreadsheet or a word-processing program, is working on an incarnation of a Turing machine.”

The logo of Apple computer is often erroneously referred to as a tribute to Alan Turing, with the bite mark a reference to his method of suicide.

Both the designer of the logo and the company deny that there is any homage to Turing in the design of the logo. In Series I, Episode 13 of the British television quiz show QI presenter Stephen Fry recounted a conversation had with Steve Jobs, saying that Jobs’ response was, “It isn’t true, but god, we wish it were.”

2012 has been designated as the Alan Turing Year.

The First Things First manifesto was written 29 November 1963 and published in 1964 by Ken Garland. It was backed by over 400 graphic designers and artists and also received the backing of Tony Benn, radical left-wing MP and activist, who published it in its entirety in the Guardian newspaper.

First Things First

Signed :

Reacting against a rich and affluent Britain of the 1960s, it tried to re-radicalise design which had become lazy and uncritical. Drawing on ideas shared by Critical Theory, the Frankfurt School and the counter-culture of the time it explicitly re-affirmed the belief that Design is not a neutral, value-free process.

It rallied against the consumerist culture that was purely concerned with buying and selling things and tried to highlight a Humanist dimension to graphic design theory. It was later updated and republished with a new group of signatories as the First Things First 2000 manifesto.

We, the undersigned, are graphic designers, photographers and students who have been brought up in a world in which the techniques and apparatus of advertising have persistently been presented to us as the most lucrative, effective and desirable means of using our talents. We have been bombarded with publications devoted to this belief, applauding the work of those who have flogged their skill and imagination to sell such things as : cat food, stomach powders, detergent, hair restorer, striped toothpaste, aftershave lotion, beforeshave lotion, slimming diets, fattening diets, deodorants, fizzy water, cigarettes, roll-ons, pullons and slip-ons.

By far the greatest effort of those working in the advertising industry are wasted on these trivial purposes, which contribute little or nothing to our national prosperity.

In common with an increasing numer of the general public, we have reached a saturation point at which the high pitched scream of consumer selling is no more than sheer noise. We think that there are other things more worth using our skill

and experience on. There are signs for streets and buildings, books and periodicals, catalogues, instructional manuals, industrial photography, educational aids, films, television features, scientific and industrial publications and all the other media through which we promote our trade, our education, our culture and our greater awareness of the world.

We do not advocate the abolition of high pressure consumer advertising : this is not feasible.

Nor do we want to take any of the fun out of life.

But we are proposing a reversal of priorities in favour of the more useful and more lasting forms of communication. We hope that our society will tire of gimmick merchants, status salesmen and hidden persuaders, and that the prior call on our skills will be for worthwhile purposes. With this in mind we propose to share our experience and opinions, and to make them available to colleagues, students and others who may be interested.

Edward Wright Geoffrey White William Slack Caroline Rawlence Ian McLaren Sam Lambert Ivor Kamlish Gerald Jones

Harriet Crowder Anthony Clift Gerry Cinamon Robert Chapman Ray Carpenter Ken Briggs

Bernard Higton Brian Grimbly John Garner Ken Garland Anthony Froshaug Robin Fior Germano Facetti Ivan Dodd

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Thanks to Michael, Peter, Mike & Bill for soundtracking my life, for turning the bitter into bittersweet.

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Š Jean-Bernard Libert 2012