Philip French: Behind the Candelabra

A brilliant performance by Michael Douglas illuminates an affectionate and funny portrait of the flamboyant entertainer

Behind The Candelabra

Michael Douglas as Liberace in Behind the Candelabra: ‘sheer brilliance’. Photograph: HBO/Everett Collection
http://youtu.be/4gxpYz4YBSI

Liberace was a fabulously rich, self-created midwesterner, the child of humble immigrant parents known for his extravagant lifestyle and vulgar tastes, as well as his worship of the American dream and the mystery in which he was wrapped. He was in effect a gay Jay Gatsby. His life was not, however, tragic, that is until his death of an Aids-related illness at 67, and he can be considered a success in that he achieved the acclaim and celebrity he had always dreamed of, and he died believing that he had taken the secret of his homosexuality to the grave.

  1. Behind the Candelabra
  2. Production year: 2013
  3. Country: USA
  4. Cert (UK): 15
  5. Runtime: 118 mins
  6. Directors: Steven Soderbergh
  7. Cast: Dan Aykroyd, Debbie Reynolds, Matt Damon, Michael Douglas, Rob Lowe, Scott Bakula
  8. More on this film

[pullquote] All the big Hollywood studios nixed the project, regarding it as too risky, “too gay,” until HBO embraced the production and made it into a modern, instant classic. The leads give stellar performances, and the rest of the cast is simply superb. The rave reviews are well deserved. [/pullquote]

Steven Soderbergh‘s cinebiography of Liberace, Behind the Candelabra, is (so he claims) his final movie, and it had to be made for America’s HBO network because no Hollywood studio would finance a film for the big screen that presented its subject’s private life with this degree of candour. This has resulted in the odd situation of the movie having its premiere in competition at the Cannes film festival followed by a theatrical release in Europe and its US premiere on television. It’s thus being reviewed in the States by TV critics and on this side of the Atlantic by film critics. Henceforth, it will appear in reference books in Europe, but not in the States, as the last addition to Soderbergh’s filmography.

The trademark candelabra on Liberace’s grand pianos were inspired by those in A Song to Remember, a popular, much-mocked 1940s movie starring Cornel Wilde as Chopin (with whom Liberace evidently identified as a fellow Polish pianist) and Merle Oberon as George Sand. At its centre, Behind the Candelabra is less a biopic than an intimate love story of the five-year relationship between two men, the world-famous star Lee Liberace and the unknown Scott Thorson. The film is based on Thorson’s published memoir, and inevitably assumes a position similar to that of the critical hero-worshipping Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby.

Soderbergh and his screenwriter, Richard LaGravenese, take us behind the candelabra in three clever moves. The naive young Scott (Matt Damon, excellent in a difficult role), an animal wrangler for TV commercials with ambitions to be a vet, is picked up in an LA gay bar in 1977 by a handsome, worldly man, a little older than him. After they become lovers, Scott is taken to Las Vegas to see the 58-year-old Liberace (Michael Douglas) appear before an ecstatic audience of middle-class women. The vulnerable, orphanage-reared Thorson is as dazzled by the act as are the women. And so are we. For us, it’s the sheer brilliance of Douglas’s performance. As the outrageous star, he prances around the stage, flashing smiles, cracking familiar jokes, playing a boogie-woogie number at double speed. His white, rhinestone-covered coat-tails catching the light are like night-time Vegas seen from the sky. On the spectrum of gay deportment, shall we say, he’s closer to the camp director in Mel Brooks’s The Producers than to the grave doctor played by Peter Finch in John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday.

A backstage introduction leads to an invitation to Liberace’s house to view the man’s possessions. We’re now getting further behind the candelabra, but still they are there all around. “I call this ‘palatial kitsch’,” he tells Scott proudly, like Gatsby showing his mansion to Daisy. The smile takes on different forms – professional, warm, chilly, menacing – and his extravagant camp demeanour is modulated and moderated, but always there, blazing like a fake fire in a movie hearth.

He takes up the young man’s offer to treat his ailing dog, and very soon they’re in a bubbling hot tub, and then in bed, the entertainer’s sexual prowess explained in those pre-Viagra days by expensive implants. The ultimate intimacy, however, comes when Liberace reveals himself to Thorson without the enormous wig that conceals his baldness.

There’s real love and affection here, but it’s jealously possessive in the manner of that between the elderly movie star and the two-bit writer in Sunset Boulevard. Thorson becomes part of the great charade of Liberace’s life by becoming his chauffeur. It’s a piece of extravagant theatre in which the whole of America, from its president to its suburban housewives, have agreed to take part. It’s Wilde’s love that dare not speak its name translated into a conspiratorial cross between the mafia’s omerta and the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell”.

All the people around Liberace become grotesques, from the bewildered Thorson, who attempts to understand him, to his mother (an unrecognisable Debbie Reynolds with a prosthetic nose and a thick Polish accent) who doesn’t want to question her son too closely. But they make the obsequious lawyers and businessmen, who arrive in Savile Row suits to serve and exploit him, seem detestable.

Certainly, Soderbergh, LaGravenese and Douglas view Liberace with affection and admiration in their genital-warts-and-all portrait. In a tender and extremely touching movie he comes across as a colourful figure of some courage, as defiant in his way as Quentin Crisp, a gay contemporary of Liberace’s who confronted his homosexuality in a rather different manner and was also brilliantly impersonated by a straight actor, John Hurt, in The Naked Civil Servant.



Iran To Send 4,000 Troops To Aid President Assad

Revolutionary Guards on parade (al-Arabiya)

Revolutionary Guards on parade (al-Arabiya)

By Robert Fisk
Source: The Independent

Washington’s decision to arm Syria’s Sunni Muslim rebels has plunged America into the great Sunni-Shia conflict of the Islamic Middle East, entering a struggle that now dwarfs the Arab revolutions which overthrew dictatorships across the region.

For the first time, all of America’s ‘friends’ in the region are Sunni Muslims and all of its enemies are Shiites. Breaking all President Barack Obama’s rules of disengagement, the US is now fully engaged on the side of armed groups which include the most extreme Sunni Islamist movements in the Middle East.

[pullquote] Their overthrow is a human survival imperative. [/pullquote]

The Independent on Sunday has learned that a military decision has been taken in Iran – even before last week’s presidential election – to send a first contingent of 4,000 Iranian Revolutionary Guards to Syria to support President Bashar al-Assad’s forces against the largely Sunni rebellion that has cost almost 100,000 lives in just over two years. Iran is now fully committed to preserving Assad’s regime, according to pro-Iranian sources which have been deeply involved in the Islamic Republic’s security, even to the extent of proposing to open up a new ‘Syrian’ front on the Golan Heights against Israel.

Emblems of the criminals who hold the world hostage. Their influence on contemporary history

Emblems of the criminals who hold the world hostage. Their influence on contemporary history and constant turmoil in the Mideast  remains disastrous.

In years to come, historians will ask how America – after its defeat in Iraq and its humiliating withdrawal from Afghanistan scheduled for 2014 – could have so blithely aligned itself with one side in a titanic Islamic struggle stretching back to the seventh century death of the Prophet Mohamed. The profound effects of this great schism, between Sunnis who believe that the father of Mohamed’s wife was the new caliph of the Muslim world and Shias who regard his son in law Ali as his rightful successor – a seventh century battle swamped in blood around the present-day Iraqi cities of Najaf and Kerbala – continue across the region to this day. A 17th century Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbott, compared this Muslim conflict to that between “Papists and Protestants”.

America’s alliance now includes the wealthiest states of the Arab Gulf, the vast Sunni territories between Egypt and Morocco, as well as Turkey and the fragile British-created monarchy in Jordan. King Abdullah of Jordan – flooded, like so many neighbouring nations, by hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees – may also now find himself at the fulcrum of the Syrian battle. Up to 3,000 American ‘advisers’ are now believed to be in Jordan, and the creation of a southern Syria ‘no-fly zone’ – opposed by Syrian-controlled anti-aircraft batteries – will turn a crisis into a ‘hot’ war. So much for America’s ‘friends’.

Its enemies include the Lebanese Hizballah, the Alawite Shiite regime in Damascus and, of course, Iran. And Iraq, a largely Shiite nation which America ‘liberated’ from Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority in the hope of balancing the Shiite power of Iran, has – against all US predictions – itself now largely fallen under Tehran’s influence and power. Iraqi Shiites as well as Hizballah members, have both fought alongside Assad’s forces.

Washington’s excuse for its new Middle East adventure – that it must arm Assad’s enemies because the Damascus regime has used sarin gas against them – convinces no-one in the Middle East. Final proof of the use of gas by either side in Syria remains almost as nebulous as President George W. Bush’s claim that Saddam’s Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

For the real reason why America has thrown its military power behind Syria’s Sunni rebels is because those same rebels are now losing their war against Assad. The Damascus regime’s victory this month in the central Syrian town of Qusayr, at the cost of Hizballah lives as well as those of government forces, has thrown the Syrian revolution into turmoil, threatening to humiliate American and EU demands for Assad to abandon power. Arab dictators are supposed to be deposed – unless they are the friendly kings or emirs of the Gulf – not to be sustained. Yet Russia has given its total support to Assad, three times vetoing UN Security Council resolutions that might have allowed the West to intervene directly in the civil war.

In the Middle East, there is cynical disbelief at the American contention that it can distribute arms – almost certainly including anti-aircraft missiles – only to secular Sunni rebel forces in Syria represented by the so-called Free Syria Army. The more powerful al-Nusrah Front, allied to al-Qaeda, dominates the battlefield on the rebel side and has been blamed for atrocities including the execution of Syrian government prisoners of war and the murder of a 14-year old boy for blasphemy. They will be able to take new American weapons from their Free Syria Army comrades with little effort.

From now on, therefore, every suicide bombing in Damascus – every war crime committed by the rebels – will be regarded in the region as Washington’s responsibility. The very Sunni-Wahabi Islamists who killed thousands of Americans on 11th September, 2001 – who are America’s greatest enemies as well as Russia’s – are going to be proxy allies of the Obama administration. This terrible irony can only be exacerbated by Russian President Vladimir Putin’s adament refusal to tolerate any form of Sunni extremism. His experience in Chechnya, his anti-Muslim rhetoric – he has made obscene remarks about Muslim extremists in a press conference in Russian – and his belief that Russia’s old ally in Syria is facing the same threat as Moscow fought in Chechnya, plays a far greater part in his policy towards Bashar al-Assad than the continued existence of Russia’s naval port at the Syrian Mediterranean city of Tartous.

For the Russians, of course, the ‘Middle East’ is not in the ‘east’ at all, but to the south of Moscow; and statistics are all-important. The Chechen capital of Grozny is scarcely 500 miles from the Syrian frontier. Fifteen per cent of Russians are Muslim. Six of the Soviet Union’s communist republics had a Muslim majority, 90 per cent of whom were Sunni. And Sunnis around the world make up perhaps 85 per cent of all Muslims. For a Russia intent on repositioning itself across a land mass that includes most of the former Soviet Union, Sunni Islamists of the kind now fighting the Assad regime are its principal antagonists.

Iranian sources say they liaise constantly with Moscow, and that while Hizballah’s overall withdrawal from Syria is likely to be completed soon – with the maintenance of the militia’s ‘intelligence’ teams inside Syria – Iran’s support for Damascus will grow rather than wither. They point out that the Taliban recently sent a formal delegation for talks in Tehran and that America will need Iran’s help in withdrawing from Afghanistan. The US, the Iranians say, will not be able to take its armour and equipment out of the country during its continuing war against the Taliban without Iran’s active assistance. One of the sources claimed – not without some mirth — that the French were forced to leave 50 tanks behind when they left because they did not have Tehran’s help.

It is a sign of the changing historical template in the Middle East that within the framework of old Cold War rivalries between Washington and Moscow, Israel’s security has taken second place to the conflict in Syria. Indeed, Israel’s policies in the region have been knocked askew by the Arab revolutions, leaving its prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, hopelessly adrift amid the historic changes.

Only once over the past two years has Israel fully condemned atrocities supposedly committed by the Assad regime, and while it has given medical help to wounded rebels on the Israeli-Syrian border, it fears an Islamist caliphate in Damascus far more than a continuation of Assad’s rule. One former Israel intelligence commander recently described Assad as “Israel’s man in Damascus”. Only days before President Mubarak was overthrown, both Netanyahu and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia called Washington to ask Obama to save the Egyptian dictator. In vain.

If the Arab world has itself been overwhelmed by the two years of revolutions, none will have suffered from the Syrian war in the long term more than the Palestinians. The land they wish to call their future state has been so populated with Jewish Israeli colonists that it can no longer be either secure or ‘viable’. ‘Peace’ envoy Tony Blair’s attempts to create such a state have been laughable. A future ‘Palestine’ would be a Sunni nation. But today, Washington scarcely mentions the Palestinians.

Another of the region’s supreme ironies is that Hamas, supposedly the ‘super-terrorists’ of Gaza, have abandoned Damascus and now support the Gulf Arabs’ desire to crush Assad. Syrian government forces claim that Hamas has even trained Syrian rebels in the manufacture and use of home-made rockets.

In Arab eyes, Israel’s 2006 war against the Shia Hizballah was an attempt to strike at the heart of Iran. The West’s support for Syrian rebels is a strategic attempt to crush Iran. But Iran is going to take the offensive. Even for the Middle East, these are high stakes. Against this fearful background, the Palestinian tragedy continues.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Briton Robert Fisk is one of the most experienced reporters in matters concerning the Middle East. 



Western Emperors Have No Clothes

Just a simple question

Qusayr celebrates liberation from the rebels.

Qusayr celebrates liberation from the rebels.

By Timothy Gatto

Why were the 30,000 inhabitants of Qusayr obliged to hide in their homes for the past year while gangs of Libyan, Egyptian, Tunisian, Saudi, Chechen, Yemeni, French and British self-styled jihadists and, yes, local Syrian criminal opportunists, roamed the streets, looting and brutalizing? When these Western-backed killers and bandits were eventually run out of Qusayr last Wednesday, why did the inhabitants greet the Syrian army and their Lebanese Hezbollah comrades with relief and gratitude? Why have street celebrations been held in Qusayr feting the restoration of civilian life?

Submitters Website: http://liberalpro.blogspot.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SURPRISE: NBC’s “The Professionals” and Joy Behar have no use for NSA leaker

EDITORIALS—
The ever-disgusting state of the “free press” —
“Guilty! Guilty! Guilty”— proclaim a thousand voices from their high perches.

bona fides totalitarian system of mass communications.

By Patrice Greanville

Glorified news reader Scott Pelley. It'll be a cold day in hell when he dares criticize the system.

Glorified news reader Scott Pelley. It’ll be a cold day in hell when he and his confreres dare criticize the system.

Not content with ganging up on NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden using its overpaid pundits, anchormen, and five-star “journalists” the corporate media can’t resist trotting out any available voice it can grab to add credibility to their character assassination. Students of CIA dirt recognize that media smears are dangerous, straight from its time-tested amoral propaganda manual, and that, by blackening the name or creating a lynching atmosphere toward certain political figures (or entire nations) such propaganda can easily pave the way for real attacks and physical elimination.  The shameless dishonesty of the corporate media comes through in brilliant technicolor when we observe its highly selective stigmatizations.

hmadinejad and Syria’s Assad, have all been mocked and demonized, heavyweight criminals that the Washington mafia endorses are given a pass or even open support. This selectivity, of course, extends to entire nations and ideologies. And while plenty of articulate dissenters can be located in America and “the West” without much trouble, none are ever allowed inside the sacrosanct perimeter of the national debate, nor offered sufficient time to explain their positions.

[pullquote] As a leading member of the lynching mob, NBC has now trotted out even lightweight programs like “The Professionals,” supposedly the voice of the (educated) “man in the street”, to justify its one-sided condemnation of Ed Snowden. In that NBC is marching in lockstep with the rest of the “free press”, which will not tolerate injuries to the propaganda system protecting the global empire. [/pullquote]

Such consideration should give a responsible journalist pause, but the corporate media are not staffed with real journalists or people of sturdy decency but with thinly veiled propagandists for the corporate status quo, blatant fools or cynical opportunists. For the ultimate triumph of capitalist propaganda, US-style, has been to infect so many minds that just about anyone hired or allowed on television will already carry the loyalist virus, or some sort of disabling character deficiency in abundance, making any vetting for ideological purity somewhat superfluous.

The examples below come from television, the pre-eminent medium of mass disinformation and indoctrination in the United States, since print media —in sharp decline for decades—occasionally offer more nuanced and even closer-to-the-truth accounts of contemporary reality. (Warning: Half-truths may be more insidious than straight lies or omissions, but that’s another story.)  Since in the United States, in particular, the “free press” enforces a sort of diffused McCarthyism in support of the imperial establishment’s goals and methods, it’s not surprising to find even the periphery of the great media constellation occupied with witnesses shouting their condemnation of Ed Snowden’s daring act. 

Let’s examine a couple of these modern autos-da-fé.

Loyalist Genuflecters #1: NBC’s The Professionals

The role of this bunch is to represent “educated, reasonable opinion” supposedly mirroring the public’s attitudes toward specific issues. Unfortunately, from the start the very composition of the panel cast doubt as to its ability to reach even such modest goals.  Let’s take a look at the current members:

DONNY DEUSTCH

donny-deutsch-on-gayles-cbs-gig-365x240Hyperegotist Donald “Donny” Deutsch (born November 22, 1957)[1] is an American advertising executive and television personality. Deutsch is the chairman of Deutsch Inc., an advertising agency founded by his father, which he sold to the Interpublic Group of Companies in 2000 for US$ 265 million.[2] 

This guy’s specialty—apart from frequently being a strident, obnoxious jerk— is to be a crony to many of tv industry’s top honchos, and corporate media in general. Being part of the advertising industry, this is of course a natural fit, and that’s how he’s wormed his way into limelight. An intellectual mediocrity of the first order (perhaps his only true distinction), Deutsch, with more than a quarter billion dollars in net worth, is an unapologetically opinionated imperialist establishmentarian, with all the toxicity that that implies. It’s a fair bet that in a truly meritocratic media system this idiot would be invisible. Donny’s opinion? “Snowden’s a traitor with capital “T’!”

STAR JONES
starJonesAccording to her suspiciously inflated Wiki profile, Star Jones (previously Star Jones Reynolds; married to an investment banker), born March 24, 1962, “is an American lawyer, journalist, writer, and television personality. She is known for her former role as a co-host of the ABC weekday morning talk show The View from 1997 to 2006. She was one of sixteen contestants of the fourth installment of Celebrity Apprentice, coming in fifth place.[1]”  

And there’s more. Impeccably and ostentatiously insensitive to the plight of animals, Jones was named to PETA‘s “worst dressed” list four years in a row.[12] An anti-fur ad from PETA featured drag queen Flotilla DeBarge dressed as Jones in a spoof. Jones threatened to sue PETA and DeBarge as a result of the ad.[13]  As a bourgeois feminist avatar, Jones, on account of her fides as a dyed-in-the-wool careerist, was named the national spokesperson for the National Association of Professional Women in January 2012.[14] Jones has since participated in chapter meetings in Florida, California and New York, where she recorded interviews that were aired nationally.  Jones’ opinion of Snowden? “He’s criminal!”

DR. NANCY SNYDERMAN
nancySnydermanSILOPossessing true quality as a person, Dr. Snyderman is the odd man out on the panel. She’s normally the voice of reason on many issues that require some thinking. A woman of undeniable beauty (her movie star telegenicity didn’t hurt when it came to getting gigs on tv), Nancy L. Snyderman, MD (born 1952)[1] is an American physician and broadcast journalist. Since 2006, she has been the chief medical editor for NBC News, and frequently appears on NBC‘s Today and MSNBC to discuss medicine-related issues. Snyderman is also on the staff of the otolaryngology-head and neck surgery department at the University of Pennsylvania, located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She is certified by the American Board of Otolaryngology in head and neck surgery, and specializes in head and neck cancer.  Snyder’s take on Snowden? Actually her real opinion is not clear since she directed attention elsewhere. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Patrice Greanville is The Greanville Post’s founding editor. 

_______________________________________

Loyalist Genuflecters #2: Joy Behar, on Current TV
A Panel of 3 with 3 attackers
Joy Behar’s show is deceptively named “Joy Behar’s ‘SAY ANYTHING!’.  As this panel proves, it’s anything but. Readers should recall that Current TV (recently acquired by Aljazeera) was home to quasi-alternative views, embracing hosts like Keith Olbermann, Bill Price, etc. So much for corporate-owned “anti-establishment” media.
http://youtu.be/A6ACwXTeXdk

OFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT

On the heels of House Speaker John Boehner decrying Snowden as a “traitor,” Joy Behar, Robert Zimmerman and Boris Epshteyn discuss NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s decision to flee to Hong Kong and the possible implications of his choice. Behar, Zimmerman and Epshteyn share the same view that Snowden should not have released confidential NSA files and speculate on his motives.

“Why escape?” questions Behar, while Zimmerman expresses concern that Snowden has jeopardized “important intelligence gathering of information and does create a climate that puts millions in jeopardy.”

Epshteyn thinks anti-Snowden sentiment is bipartisan sentiment: “What is great to see is the agreement that’s coming out right now, there is a consensus between Republicans and Democrats,” he says.

While others have shown support for Snowden’s decision to expose the NSA’s electronic surveillance of people worldwide, Zimmerman wants Snowden held accountable: “I don’t see any way that he CAN’T be convicted of serious crimes,” he says.

Epshteyn wonders if financial compensation fueled Snowden’s choice: “I wouldn’t put it out of the question that he’s getting paid by somebody,” says Epshteyn.
SOURCE: http://current.com/shows/joy-behar/videos/robert-zimmerman-on-nsa-leaker-edward-snowden-at-the-end-of-the-day-hes-a-coward/

<https://www.greanvillepost.com/videos/behar-snowden.flv>



Get Internet Access When Your Government Shuts It Down

From our archives: Revolutionary How-Tos
From PCWorld
We thank the editors of PCWorld for this service

By Patrick Miller, David Daw, PCWorld, Jan 28, 2011 
These days, no popular movement goes without an Internet presence of some kind, whether it’s organizing on Facebook or spreading the word through Twitter. And as we’ve seen in Egypt, that means that your Internet connection can be the first to go. Whether you’re trying to check in with your family, contact your friends, or simply spread the word, here are a few ways to build some basic network connectivity when you can’t rely on your cellular or landline Internet connections.

Do-It-Yourself Internet With Ad-Hoc Wi-Fi

Even if you’ve managed to find an Internet connection for yourself, it won’t be that helpful in reaching out to your fellow locals if they can’t get online to find you. If you’re trying to coordinate a group of people in your area and can’t rely on an Internet connection, cell phones, or SMS, your best bet could be a wireless mesh network of sorts–essentially, a distributed network of wireless networking devices that can all find each other and communicate with each other. Even if none of those devices have a working Internet connection, they can still find each other, which, if your network covers the city you’re in, might be all you need. At the moment, wireless mesh networking isn’t really anywhere close to market-ready, though we have seen an implementation of the 802.11s draft standard, which extends the 802.11 Wi-Fi standard to include wireless mesh networking, in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) XO laptop.

 

However, a prepared guerrilla networker with a handful of PCs could make good use of Daihinia ($25, 30-day free trial), an app that piggybacks on your Wi-Fi adapter driver to turn your normal ad-hoc Wi-Fi network into a multihop ad-hoc network (disclaimer: we haven’t tried this ourselves yet), meaning that instead of requiring each device on the network to be within range of the original access point, you simply need to be within range of a device on the network that has Daihinia installed, effectively allowing you to add a wireless mesh layer to your ad-hoc network.

Advanced freedom fighters can set up a portal Web page on their network that explains the way the setup works, with Daihinia instructions and a local download link so they can spread the network even further. Lastly, just add a Bonjour-compatible chat client like Pidgin or iChat, and you’ll be able to talk to your neighbors across the city without needing an Internet connection.

Back to Basics

Remember when you stashed your old modems in the closet because you thought you might need them some day? In the event of a total communications blackout–as we’re seeing in Egypt, for example–you’ll be glad you did. Older and simpler tools, like dial-up Internet or even ham radio, could still work, since these “abandoned” tech avenues aren’t being policed nearly as hard.

In order to get around the total shutdown of all of the ISPs within Egypt, several international ISPs are offering dial-up access to the Internet to get protesters online, since phone service is still operational. It’s slow, but it still works–the hard part is getting the access numbers without an Internet connection to find them.

 

Unfortunately, such dial-up numbers can also be fairly easily shut down by the Egyptian government, so you could also try returning to FidoNet–a distributed networking system for BBSes that was popular in the 1980s. FidoNet is limited to sending only simple text messages, and it’s slow, but it has two virtues: Users connect asynchronously, so the network traffic is harder to track, and any user can act as the server, which means that even if the government shuts down one number in the network, another one can quickly pop up to take its place.

You could also take inspiration from groups that are working to create an ad-hoc communications network into and out of Egypt using Ham Radio, since the signals are rarely tracked and extremely hard to shut down or block. Most of these efforts are still getting off the ground, but hackers are already cobbling together ways to make it a viable form of communication into and out of the country.

Always Be Prepared

In the land of no Internet connection, the man with dial-up is king. Here are a few gadgets that you could use to prepare for the day they cut the lines.

Given enough time and preparation, your ham radio networks could even be adapted into your own ad-hoc network using Packet Radio, a radio communications protocol that you can use to create simple long-distance wireless networks to transfer text and other messages between computers. Packet Radio is rather slow and not particularly popular (don’t try to stream any videos with this, now), but it’s exactly the kind of networking device that would fly under the radar.

 

In response to the crisis in Egypt, nerds everywhere have risen to call for new and exciting tools for use in the next government-mandated shutdown. Bre Pettis, founder of the hackerspace NYC Resistor and creator of the Makerbot 3D printer, has called for “Apps for the Appocalypse,” including a quick and easy way to set up chats on a local network so you can talk with your friends and neighbors in an emergency even without access to the Internet. If his comments are any indication, Appocalypse apps may be headed your way soon.

Tons of cool tech are also just waiting to be retrofitted for these purposes. David Dart’sPirate Box is a one-step local network in a box originally conceived for file sharing and local P2P purposes, but it wouldn’t take much work to adapt the Pirate Box as a local networking tool able to communicate with other pirate boxes to form a compact, mobile set of local networks in the event of an Internet shutdown.

Whether you’re in Egypt or Eagle Rock, you rely on your Internet access to stay in touch with friends and family, get your news, and find information you need. (And read PCWorld, of course.) Hopefully with these apps, tools, and techniques, you won’t have to worry about anyone–even your government–keeping you from doing just that.

Patrick Miller hopes he isn’t first against the wall when the revolution comes. Find him on Twitter or Facebook–if you have a working Internet connection, anyway.

David Daw is an accidental expert in ad-hoc networks since his apartment gets no cell reception. Find him on Twitter or send him a ham radio signal.