video

DO I have to say his name? DO I have to speak his name?

Music, video
Published on



There will be a hell of a lot of Bruce and E-Street Band fans tonight who’ll be listening to some variation on the song above, in memory of the Big Man, King of the World, Emperor of the North Pole, Clarence Clemons, who died this Saturday due to complications from a stroke. Only 69 years old as well, way too young to die.

It was his saxophone, as much as anything that defined the sound of Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, always there in the background, driving the songs and sometimes in the foreground, making them. Rosalita is one of these songs, a concert favourite, unthinkable without the Big Man there to lay down the horns. Jungleland is of course the other one:



Sometime in the mid-eighties Clarence Clemons also had a rare hit without Bruce and the rest of the E-Street Band, working with Jackson Browne on their own album, coming out with a song so very eighties that it makes me happy each time I hear it:



Goodbye Clarence; you’ll be missed.

Living life in the bike lane

Amsterdam, funny, video
Published on



Suddenly the petty concerns of my bike commute in lovely Amsterdam do not seem so bad anymore. Casey Neistat was ticketed for not riding his bike in the bikelane in NYC, but his video clearly shows that sometimes riding the bikelane is actually either impossible or highly dangerous….

(Via Michael Minneboo.)

Gil Scott-Heron

science fiction, video
Published on



Could there be any other poem to honour Gil Scott-Heron for a science fiction fan/space age believer than this?

Srebrenica: why humantarian intervention isn’t

Antiwar, Oh Those Crazy Cloggies, video
Published on



The arrest of Ratko Mladić today has put the Srebrenica massacre back in the spotlight. It was the greatest warcrime in postwar European history and it’s our national shame. Srebrenica is the reason why I stopped believing in humanitarian interventions: here finally there had been a clearcut case, a chance to stand against the same sort of evil we had been liberated from fifty years before and we fucked it up.

In Srebrenica Holland had the opportunity to prevent genocide, but instead we enabled it. For fifty years we’ve grown up with the stories about World War II and the moral choices our parents and grandparents had to make, for fifty years we had known that we would’ve made the right choices, that we would have been part of the resistance, as every book, movie and television series told us we would’ve been. Yet at the first real test, the first chance for us to prevent the same sort of evil we had read so much about, we fucked up. Our commanders liked the Serb leaders much better — so cultured and European — than the not quite civilised Muslim combatants. Our soldiers were glad to trade in their guns and bullet proof vests for a chance to go home and tried to think too hard about the men they were supposed to protect. Our politicians spoke of a tragedy and a crime but were firm and insistent that the Netherlands were not to blame, that “our boys” had “done their best” and that there had been nothing more that they could’ve done. It would’ve been better had we not been there.

Had we not been there to establish a safe haven that wasn’t, had we not been there to give people a false sense of security, all those Bosnian Muslims wouldn’t have been trapped there and some 8,000 men and boys might still be alive today. At the very least they wouldn’t have been trapped unarmed and been handed over to their murders so easily. Our humanitarian intervention only make things worse and since then I’ve always been convinced it almost always will.