Category: Communications

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In a thousand years, when the alien anthropologists want to understand fin-de-siecle human civilization before the war or the flooding or whatever it is that mercifully wiped us out, they will find no better site to dig than the satellite signals squiggling through space of CNN International, the omnipotent atlas-straddling face of Ted Turner’s Atlanta based dream child, now a Time-Warner product.

Last night I got into a conversation about what constitutes “poetry”.

It took me quite a long while to decide if I ought to write this column…

On the surface, it seems like a great idea; long before bloggers became commonly known, a group of predominantly leftist social activist, tired with their complete lack of access to the mainstream media, decided to start a clearinghouse of information for those disaffected by or disturbed (more accurately) by a whole raft of issues, from globalisation, to the World Trade Organisation to animal rights and the environment.

How do you measure the year in the life of publishing? In the number of fan mails you receive, or eggs thrown at you, or in the amount of laughter you’ve given your readers, or the volume of thought you’ve provoked in them?

My first job in Singapore, I was hired at a local publishing house, and after reading so many local pieces that lacked any kind of personality whatsoever, I was determined to apply a healthy dose of wit to every assignment.

Indy media and the death of journalism in Genoa…

Was Art laughed to death by Dada? Or perhaps this sardonocide took place even earlier, with the first performance of Ubu Roi? Or with Baudelaire’s sarcastic phantom-of-the-opera laughter, which so disturbed his good bourgeois friends?

(or how to say everything and nothing at the same time)