Grand-Place, Belgium
About
restraint.org is a loose collection of writing, links, ravings, photos, news, fiction, and bad poetry by Jairus Khan. This website has been here (off and on) for ten years or so, and was around in various other forms for three or four years before that.
I spend most of my off-hours working (in Ottawa, Canada) to promote underground arts and media, and trying to keep independent music from being smothered by an anachronism popularly known as ‘the industry’. I DJ weekly, promote concerts/festivals regularly, make beep-beep noises in an industrial-metal band, and release CC-licensed albums for my industrial-slash-experimental-electronic project Ad·ver·sary, which sounds something like robots fucking to My Bloody Valentine.
When I’m not working with, promoting, listening to, or writing music, I design very angry websites, flyers, book jackets, and the sort for various arts projects. I supplement my music/design income (roughly enough to buy a pocketful of buttons a month) by developing counter-hacking courses and moonlighting as a web coordinator for the man.
I also bake very tasty cookies.
6 Comments
Beautiful.
That is so fucking awesome.
You thinking about staying?
glad you loved it as much as i did and i’m happy i got to show you the bits of the city i know….it’s just so overwhelmingly beautiful; we’d need months to see it all properly…
x0×0
i think i’ve convinced him to retire there with me :) although we still have to live in Amsterdam first so we can set up the 24 hour arts/music/performance cafe we’ve been planning for a few years from now…oh yes, there is a master plan!
isn’t it? have you been Mishelle? if not i cannot stress just how GORGEOUS this city is, how wonderful the people have been to me every time i’ve been there, and the effects of the incredibly history has on the culture; there isn’t that cut-throat, get there faster, quicker, cheaper mentality; there is instead a liberation that comes with knowing that everything has been done before, that the only way to stand out is to do what you do uniquely the way you do it, and to succeed you needn’t do it at someone else’s expense, instead you are encouraged to take your time, do things RIGHT, not cut corners [since there is no race to get someone first since everything has been done before] and adding your own flavour to what you do is the only way to impress anyone with anything you do…it’s SO different than so much of North American [esp. American] goals and attitudes….i want to retire here, after i do Amsterdam properly for a number of years first, of course :)
PS HOW ARE YOU MADAME?! love from both of us :)
I haven’t been, but would LOVE to go. I need to travel way more. *sigh*
I’m doing great!! Totally in the rat race of Toronto but loving every minute of it. How are you guys! I want ESD poutine!!