antipopper

Taking stock: I just found some old notes of mine on a screening of Occupied Minds at the Dialogue Under Occupation conference last November. I met the film-makers Jamal Dajani and David Michaelis (a Palestinian/Israeli team) there, and they were great fun.

Basically, it’s an accessible and personal exploration of the occupation that looks at how it’s experienced or enacted by Palestinian and Jewish Israeli communities. Palestinians in the Territories are deliberately portrayed as not necessarily heroic, but yet incredibly stoic. There’s a great sequence where they help an old Palestinian woman through a crack in the Wall, and the poor thing’s really got the shits. When she bitches about “the Jews” deserving “a catastrophe” while her leg’s stuck in a crevice, it’s patently obvious to everyone — including the liberal-apologist Israelis in tonight’s audience — that her apparent “antisemitism” has no real connection to traditional European antisemitism, and that at least in this instance it’s actually quite funny, in a sad and ironic way — because she’s this old lady stuck in a fucking huge Israeli apartheid wall! And yet she crawls through it. Hurray! They also talk to a Jenin resistance fighter who bitterly lost faith in the Israeli Left when his mother was killed by the IDF, and none of her Jewish peacenik friends — whom she had cooked for in her house — even called to see how they were. Fucked up shit.

Given the Palestinian/Israeli setup, it’s refreshing that the film doesn’t try to give “equal weight” to Zionism. A leading left-liberal Israeli intellectual is exposed losing his cool, blurting that Palestinians have no right to set the parameters of debate in his interview, and that this is “what You People always try to do”. They even interview an ultra-Zionist settler leader, whose peace proposal is kicking all the Palestinians out of the Territories AND “OFFERING” THEM JORDAN to resettle in. When Jamal remarks that uh, Jordan ISN’T THEIRS TO OFFER, the guy says that ACTUALLY, IT IS, because they occupied part of it 2000 years ago. He smiles paternalistically. Truly surreal. It’s like Ali G or something.

Today I became a Consultant. Hurrah!

[ tags: consultancy, work ]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvNpvM2Nf28

I’ve mentioned my love of this song before. Is she not magnificent? Sigh. Still no progress on unpacking the crazy UFO angle I touched upon last time, though.

Boomer passed out on the Wacom tablet, but I had to move him over…

I got a new phone yesterday — a Dopod 838Pro — and for the first time in many years I’m using a device running under a Microsoft operating system. Yep, it’s a Windows Mobile PocketPC thing. Most people know me as an Apple snob, and I am, but I was also one of the few people on the planet to put Windows 1.0 to serious use. I stopped using Windows when I got to University, where I could finally use Macs, which were in abundance there — I’d been relegated for years to lusting after the whole modern Apple user experience from afar. I mean, in 1985, as I put up with Windows 1.0, I used to decorate my school diary entries with ballpoint renditions of Apple Lisa user interface widgets, for fuck’s sake. (Hmmm, should I be admitting this?) A lust for “real design”.

Meanwhile, I’m not one of those people who simply wants a phone that just makes calls really well. While I can appreciate the elegance of the concept, I simply don’t make enough phone calls to justify such a single-use gadget in my pocket any more. So instead I’ve gone down the foolish route of getting ridiculous, button-encrusted, Swiss-Army-knife-style PDA phones that try to do everything, but which end up being rather mediocre on most fronts. Bad design. I wait, as always, for the iPhone, which might arrive in Australia in 2008. Good design. But in the meantime, my last phone was falling apart, and my dodgy phone provider was letting me upgrade…

More interestingly, I also liked the idea of challenging my own brand/design fetishism and buying a phone that was openly from a Taiwanese original design manufacturer called High Tech Computer (!), whose ubiquitous products are usually rebranded in English speaking countries under much more, ah, reputable names like HP/Compaq. (Dopod is HTC’s own consumer brand.) In the widely perceived affective/design hierarchy of Asian consumer electronics brands, you have Japanese companies like Sony (now perched precariously) at the top, then Korean ones like Samsung and LG increasingly rumbling from below, and then the anonymous Taiwanese and PRC manufacturers at the bottom. Sony already equals “design”, while the recent design revolution in Korean consumer electronics has been notable. (The success of LG and Samsung in this particular domain, and the relationship between design and manufacturing, would be really interesting to contextualise in terms of the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s…)

So: how are the Chinese people that design and manufacture for companies in Europe and the US figured in terms of their own “design excellence”, their capacity for credible, sexy originality? While the Dopod 838Pro isn’t exactly a design masterpiece, it’s relatively stylish as such things go, like other Taiwanese tech products. In other words, it’s sexier than you think, and why is that? And yet the veneer of the iPod-like über-commodity is still yet unavailable — seemingly disqualified in advance, as if will be for emerging, self-branded Mainland Chinese consumer electronics products. The idea that there’s a castrating absence of a sophisticated, cosmopolitan consumer population in the Chinese-speaking world that contributes to this disqualification is like the idea that there’s no civil society in the Middle East; the correctness or incorrectness of such mythologies aside, the fantastic imperatives invested in their maintenance are far more interesting. Meanwhile, my iPod was “Designed by Apple in California” and manufactured by anonymised “horde” of Chinese Foxconn workers in “the East”. How tenable will it be to sustain the geopolitical division of design/manufacturing labour that such über-commodification relies upon? These are the things I ponder as I stroke my new phone. :)

[ tags: apple, capitalism, design, dopod, phone ]

I’ve been wondering: are there many bands where the lead singer has developed at least part of their vocal style in imitation of another member of the same act? For instance, I’m convinced that Dave Gahan from Depeche Mode mimics the demo tapes he gets from main songwriter Martin Gore — to great effect. And of course there’s Frank Black from The Pixies, who has made his whacky impression of Kim Deal a significant part of his vocal persona.

[ tags: music, pop, vocals ]