They had a thing on the PDP-1 called ‘The Unknown Glitch’ [“Glitch” - a kink, a less-than-fatal but irritating fuck-up]. They used to program the thing either in direct machine code, direct octal, or in DDT, In the early days it was a paper-tape machine. It was painful to assemble stuff, so they never listed out the programs. The programs and stuff just lived in there, just raw seething octal code. And one of the guys wrote a program called ‘The Unknown Glitch,’ which at random intervals would wake up, print out I AM THE UNKNOWN GLITCH. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, and then it would relocate itself somewhere else in core memory, set a clock interrupt, and go back to sleep. There was no way to find it.
—Alan Kay, in Stewart Brand’s 1972 article for Rolling Stone: “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums”
Ready or not, computers are coming to the people. That’s good news, maybe the best since psychedelics. It’s way off the track of the “Computers – Threat or menace?” school of liberal criticism but surprisingly in line with the romantic fantasies of the forefathers of the science such as Norbert Wiener, Warren McCulloch, J.C.R. Licklider, John von Neumann and Vannevar Bush.
Director David Lynch has created a new short documentary about the lithographic atelier Idem Paris. – By David Ng (Los Angeles Times – February 13, 2013)
The art of fine-art printing gets a loving albeit brief ode from director David Lynch, who has fashioned a seven-minute ç about the famous Idem Paris atelier.
Idem Paris recently posted the video online and we’ve embedded it below. Virtually wordless, the movie observes the lithographic process with a detached eye, documenting the steps.
Idem Paris was created in 1880 by the printmaker Emile Dufrenoy. The atelier is located in the city’s Montparnasse district, and occupies a 15,000-square-foot space, according to the company’s website.
BLACK LABEL BIKE CLUB
The Black Label Bike Club is an international freak/mutant bicycle organization specializing in tall bikes and choppers, established in 1992. Jacob Houle and Per Hanson started the club as the “Hard Times Bike Club” in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the club has grown to include a chapter in New York, Reno, Austin, Stockholm and a Nomad Chapter loosely based out of New Orleans known as “Nowhere.”
BLBC are credited with being the first “outlaw bicycle club”, as well as the originators of tall-bike jousting (while C.H.U.N.K. 666 (see below) are inclined to less be-spiked and more into nerdy/hacking-type pursuits (to wit, aquachoppers, fire-bikes…)).
With regard to these revels, parties like Bike Kill and Bike Brawl, events bent on repurposing medieval jousts by editing them into vegan-friendly, crust-dotted, anti-authoritarian affairs, their collective limbs grafted onto human-powered Hell’s Angels-esque choppers and subversive square-wheeled bikes… Others in the aether have noted an autonomous subcultural form within the contaminated modern metropolis. I tend to see a pinch of that mixed with liberal amounts of grease, beer, music, fire and ingenuity. Perhaps I am recalling the naughts in NYC through a simplifying lens more thinly lacquered with identity politics, but I feel the right mix of elements in my mind’s eye.
C.H.U.N.K. 666 C.H.U.N.K. 666 is a bicycle club and civic betterment society based in Portland, Oregon, USA. Its modern incarnation was founded in 1992 or so, and is based on the classic cycling and drinking clubs of yore.
The club started when a few geeks found that the urge to create choppers and tall-bikes was too strong to resist. They didn’t know it, but they were being goaded by messages from the future, which were intended to prepare their recipients for the imminent apocalypse. Our mission is unclear, but we do know that once we began riding these devices, it was difficult to stop.
After the apocalypse, everything will change, including the laws of physics as we know them. We, due to our experience in riding chopper bicycles, tall-bikes, and the like, will finally find ourselves at the top of the food chain, and it is we who will lead humanity out of the rubble and into the pleasure gardens. It is the promise of the gift of Prometheus. In the meantime, the world is fucked. Are we delaying Armageddon, or hastening it? We don’t know for sure, but we do know that we are enjoying ourselves while making Portland a better place for the children.
Together in NYC
The Minneapolis-brewed Black Label Bike Club and the PDX-bred C.H.U.N.K. 666 were two outfits that metastatisized into NYC-form and held influence in New York during the naughts. Continually pushing mutant bike culture and (e.g.) freak/tall-bike building… We still feel their influence and occasionally catch a glimpse of a mutant skidding tire.
