An Albanian woman writes about her experience with prostitution and drug dealing in Greece (defending her choices all the way), setting up a grassroots support organisation, and about NGOs in Albania as agents for the interests of centralised elites. This was first published in the Harm Reduction Communication newsletter, Summer 2001, but is still relevant considering the increasing presence of EU/NATO military forces and NGOs in the area given Kosovo's imminent declaration of independence. It also offers a more candid perspective on immigrant sex work than the ongoing compassion campaigns about - and deportation of - the 'victims of sex trafficking'.

At the age of fourteen I was engaged to young man from a nearby village who had regular work in Greece, although he was undocumented. We married and I moved with him to Greece, where we worked on a farm and shared a little house with several other undocumented couples. Unfortunately my husband was severely injured in an accident. Being “illegals” we had no insurance or right to medical care. Friends took my husband back to Albania. His mother agreed to nurse him.

URGENT BIOPOWER UPDATE, not in the dubious, never-defined sense of 'biopolitical struggle', but in its everyday, concrete meaning.  That is, institutions directly claiming administrative sovereignty over masses of human life-matter, with absolute priority over any subjective impulses from the flesh in question.  And of course it's not just any institutions or any flesh: US medical authorities are demanding that the medical system intervene to maintain ALL women's childbearing capacity regardless of those women's own wishes.  In the bluntest practical terms, this means enforcement action against behaviour deemed destructive of 'reproductive health'.  To see this as an anachronism or peculiarly American would be utter folly.  There may not be an all-conquering Christian anti-abortion lobby in the UK right now, but the themes of 'pro-active', 'pro-health' medical intervention (particularly targeting 'at-risk', i.e. working class, bodies) and motherhood as the 'objective' meaning of female life could not be more local or more contemporary.

http://www.counterpunch.org/taylor06072006.html

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting

A new zone of media theory, netporn, revealed itself at this October’s The Art and Politics of Netporn conference in Amsterdam. Willing voyeur Sebastian Olma remained largely unaroused – except by the Italians, who were quite affecting.

Want to go to a conference on internet pornography in Amsterdam? Alright, stop twisting my arm! The Art and Politics of Netporn is organised by the Institute of Network Cultures in collaboration with Katrien Jacobs and Matteo Pasquinelli. Rather surprisingly, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's is on the bill. Autonomia meets netporn – sounds rather interesting.

Lutham Blissett on gender, networks and the PGA conference in Serbia

"Strange En counter 2004"

"It is often better to write your account of a conference before you go, then the facts don't get in the way of the truth", Lutham Blissett

Strange En counter 2004

Stewart Home sniffs out some links between art, farts and modernist materialism in three novels by French songwriters and litterateurs Boris Vian and Serge Gainsbourg

Tam Tam Books is a very small and fiercely independent publisher dedicated to bringing the cream of French literature to English language readers. Aside from the three books reviewed here they’ve also put out Guy Debord’s Considerations On The Assassination Of Gérard Lebovici, and recently announced plans for the forthcoming publication of Boris Vian’s Autumn In Peking. Vian was one of the most popular novelists of the mid-twentieth century in France and he serves to illustrate very well the global nature of what within the Anglo-American world is sometimes wrongly taken to be quintessentially Gallic culture. Aside from being a writer, Vian was also a trumpet player and jazz critic who was fascinated by all things Afro-American.

Ilya Gridneff visits one of the granddaddies of transgressive performance art and discovers that, when it comes to upsetting authority, shit, piss and self-immolation have definitely entered their neo-classical period

Few artists can spend seven years in jail for rape and molestation, arrive in London and be welcomed with open arms, perhaps even celebrated, by a two-month show in an established gallery. One exception is Austrian performance artist/film maker/commune creator and lord of the abject, Otto Muehl. His new show at the T1+2 Gallery, East London, opened this week and runs till mid December. This fresh work dabbles with the digital as part of our post-human condition. The result are four short videos, which montage images of grapes, naked women and demonic pictures of the artist himself into a kind of electric painting.

Shocking

Digital Diaries: risky
One step beyond Jennicam is Digital Diaries by Natacha Merritt. Natacha fucks people and photographs herself doing it. Edgy, voyeuristic, very real and already spreading virally among Mutoid porn fans. [Taschen £16.99]
HK

Digital Diaries: risqué
What is it that makes today’s digital porn stars so different, so appealing? Is it the relaxed obedience of their soapy suds; the tame tedium of their cute and curvy ways; their down ‘n dirty 24-hr work ethic or the warm glow of clean, pale-skinned sexual ‘equality’? This DiY Bo-peep would rather the limbless slug and horse uniforms of old, scary pre-liberation Bizarre any day. How bizarre. [Taschen]
PvMB

Pauline van Mourik Broekman and Hari Kunzru

The desire to move beyond traditional gender constructions has led women to myriad experiments with online identity. Artists like Francesca da Rimini have made its fluid shapes their prime focus of activity and continue to morph text/erotics/play to port flesh into virtuality and virtuality into the flesh. Sue Thomas looks at two sides of the coin: sexual liberation and online suicide.

Tom McCarthey reviews C. Penley's latest book

The Challenger disaster of 1986 may have plunged NASA's scientists into a dark night of the soul, but it pales into insignificance when set against the catastrophic scenario envisaged by Peter Hyams' 1978 film Capricorn One. Here, the agency fakes a manned voyage to Mars, filming the landing in a television studio only to have its empty capsule burn up and its astronauts escape to spill the beans. Hyams' critique is two fold: not only is the agency incompetent, but it is corrupt and devious as well - accusations which cut to the bone since, for NASA, image has always been of paramount importance. Funding is dependent on good PR, as is the more symbolic task of forging paradigms of America as the launching pad for enterprise and freedom. And the Star Trek series, Constance Penley argues, gave NASA its paradigm par excellence.