MemeMachineGo!

An interview with Matthew Branton :

The culture industry in Britain since the early Nineties has come to consist almost entirely of consumer capitalist propaganda dressed up as ‘better living’: young people are made to feel that living some kind of cross between Sex and the City and Cold Feet with a swindling mortgage and a swindling pension and a house stuffed full of cheap tasteful shit manufactured for sub-breadline wages in China is the best you can hope for in this life. Lots of people (not just let’s-run-a-vineyard type yuppies) have rejected this and pissed off out of it to try living another way that doesn’t make you so ashamed. Do you remember that census last year that showed a million young men unaccounted for? The only comment was facetious: maybe they’re all in Ibiza. No. We’re in the remote places of the world, growing our own food, working in kind for what else we need. You don’t hear about us because really, why should we tell you?

Branton , an established author, is giving away his new novel free on the web over the next 4 weeks, in lieu of book publication or making money from it.

Meanwhile, Michael Swanwick gives props to Warren Zevon in a short short, a sort of memorial-before-the-fact for the fatally ill Zevon .

It’s the sensibility. It’s the voice. It’s the perspective. We’re talking a guy who was so far out of the consensus that he saw things as they are. We’re talking someone who was angry at the shit that the people in charge are trying to force down our throats and wasn’t willing to call it chocolate.