June 2003 Archives

After a few months of Gnutella issues, this weekend I got myself mlMac, went on an eDonkey filesharing spree, and caught up with the final few episodes of Buffy. {Sigh} Let's just say that while I can intellectually appreciate Buffy's descent over the past few years into a steely meditation on the pain of alienation, I need to enjoy my television. Sure, it was really interesting for the Big Bad of Season Six to be a trio of lame geeks, but did it play well? And if the final season needed the ultimate apocalypse for it to mean anything, it was masterful to make The First such an incorporeal menace. But in the end I was bored by everyone getting "taunted to death" -- The First was kinda "done" after the fabulous "Conversations With Dead People".

Team Joss really did try some different stuff out over the years, which is noble, but how flexible were the parameters of the show, really? The high school years remain my favourite Buffy years because the basic metaphor of the show -- "being a teenager is hell" -- was situated so flawlessly: it was all about an in-between girl, pulled between all sorts of desires and duties, going to school on the Hellmouth. It was like a golden goose, able to effortlessly dispense all these different kinds of stories and spawn all kinds of wonderfully monstrous ideas, but once that situation necessarily ran out, Team Joss really had to work it to come up with the goods. And work it they did, producing wonderful stuff like "The Body" and "Once More With Feeling". Even a lot of the "dumb" episodes, like "Beer Bad" and "Doublemeat Palace", were really enjoyable. But had time run out for Buffy? Season Seven was a welcome return to a more engaging kind of storytelling after the "mundanity-of-evil is, um, mundane" trap of the previous year, but it felt like a valiant attempt to reinflate a burst balloon.

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Meanwhile, Angel has become the most manipulative of shows lately, full of bad faith and button-pushing... and jaw-droppingly entertaining plot ideas. In a lot of ways, Angel reminds me of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which started as a daggy but charming spinoff, only to ditch the somewhat boring integrity of its premise in favour of a what-will-they-do-next unpredictability. Which, for better or worse, made the show much more of a rush. Similarly, these last few seasons of Angel feel as if the producers got together in a room and said, "Wouldn't it rock if we did this to them? How fucked up would that be?" -- playing a distant God, rather than being embedded in some kind of molecular creative process.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing, either; while Buffy usually had a fundamental sense of play to save itself from over-earnestness, Angel needed saving from its own "integrity", a way to acknowledge its own artifice. But that this has come from an arbitrarily wrathful God, moving players about on a huge chessboard, is a mixed blessing. (They've even had the cheeky nerve to write this metaphor directly into the final arc of Season Four, in which they realise that most of the series has been part of a huge setup by a manipulative deity.) But hell, it certainly is gripping. I'm still gaping over the Season Four finale. They did what??

Got myself a copy of Illegal Alien. I wonder why? Hmmmm. : )

Am now ripping Clipse's Lord Willing. How naughty.

Paula's quoting me in a paper for Signs, and needs the source/attribution (which she's misplaced), but I can't for the life of me remember where the quote's from. Does anybody know where I said the following?

I think there’s an absolute responsibility for white feminists to destabilise the completely totalizing bind that we currently find ourselves in: racializing anti-Muslim hysteria vs. liberalism.

I know it was about the "Lebanese gang rapist" hysteria, but where and when?? Fool.

It seems to have gone missing. (Oooh, oooh!)

When you're recovering from a dumb deadline that involved deep-etching lots of photos of women wearing bikinis, you're still on Photoshop autopilot. You're all twitchy. You do things. Stupid things. Like this:

Oh, fuck it, why should I even bother apologising? I'm unrepentant. Anyone up for a few t-shirts? Perhaps with "TOWARDS THE FORGING OF THE BRITNEYIST INTERNATIONAL" on the back. Or something.

The Filth finally starts kickin'! The image of Greg Feely shouting "Right you. I'm not having it. I'm not fucking having it!" as he pulls a tentacled eyeball out of his television is worth the price of admission alone! {Goes back to read it all from the beginning again}

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Got the latest issue of Colors on Friday, only to immediately lend it to one of our short-term freelancers. Why? Well, the issue's all about fucking Birmingham in England, and Matt's the second Brummie freelancer we've had in six months. (Which reminds me of that Bentley Rhythm Ace song: "Midlander: There Can Only Be One". Ha.) I lived in Birmingham for a year when I was little, which is why I bought the thing in the first place. How cool to see what's basically an extremely clever corporate brochure of a magazine, which was originally so focused on exoticism, finally having the nouse to tackle what's commonly held as the moribund, the average, the middle of the road. As those of you who had to sit through my rantings on 8-Mile and Detroit know, I'm really into this angle on urban geography.

In fact, for the last eight years I've wanted to start a magazine of popular geography. A radical, obviously non-corporate version of Colors. One that talks about power and (sub)urban space. Small and big things. One without an obvious, overarching editorial "ideology", but with a methodology that's all about piecing together the stuff in the interstices of everyday life. Surveillance cameras and studded park benches meet Sesame Street-style stuff, like "from cow to beefsteak in the freezer". I got totally politicised by studying Geography in high school; our final year syllabus was all about agribusiness, the politics of famine in "the Third World" and class war in the gentrification of London's Docklands. Then there's psychogeography and the wealth of interesting pre-Situationist stuff, just waiting for a rerun. Anyway, I've always had this weird tagline for the project: Real Life is Science Fiction -- coming to grips in a materialist way with the infinite mappings that the technical narratives of everyday life entail. And the name? I just rediscovered an ancient blog that I set up a few years ago for the thing, but never used, called Exploded View. As in a style of diagram in which everything is pulled apart.

One of my sites was shortlisted in the Cannes Lions international advertising awards. Ha! When you're up against half a dozen Nike sites (which are all really amazing, actually), you don't expect to win.

Fuck, I'm supposed to be writing my critical response to the I Remember 1948 exhibition. All I can say for now is that it was fuckin' excellent. More later. Back to Photoshopping women's crotches. (Don't ask.)

Tom Coates has a funny idea: ubiquitous personal digital cameras that form local wireless networks within the viewfinder's line of sight. Using such technology, these devices would have reactive settings (like "no photos!") that would enable people to hamper their picture being taken or distributed! Interesting and cool as a "social play" phenomenon, and an inversion of the usual "cyber stalker" smart-mob model (i.e. according to your PDA, person X within your immediate vacinity is your perfect match.)

But what about this proposition as a serious (if soft) measure, as a form of "justice"? (No, I doubt that is Coates' intention, but it's an interesting thought.) Yes, if wireless digital cameras become ubiquitous, surveillance is an obvious concern to arise. But the point is that surveillance is already an issue, and has little to do with what "consumers" are doing, and everything to do with the power of the State and capital. It's not so much an issue of "I don't want my photo taken by your consumer camera", it's "we don't want to be policed by the corporate media and the State".

In a possible world of transmissive imaging ubiquity, what role could transparency, rather than privacy, play? David Brin's perverse vision of a transparent world without privacy may crassly misinterpret "extreme disclosure" as "justice" (just as liberal democrats confuse the formal right-to-vote-for-the-next-scumbag with "democracy"), but Brin's vision does question the bourgeois individualist notion of privacy as the bulwark of resistance against the surveilling power of the State (even if it does substitute it with what Howard Rheingold, after Foucault, would call the "always-on panopticon"-effect that smart mobs could entail). If resistance to surveillance must equal more than "I don't want my photo taken by your consumer camera", then is Coates' communicative model of liberal-pragmatic "avoidance" amongst "citizens" beside the point?

So what happens when police who are beating people up have their PDAs set to "no photos, please"? What happens to those guerrilla networks of grass-roots reporting, those next iterations of Indymedia or even Ohmynews, which have the potential to create strategic areas of transparency in our opaque world? Coates envisions a roughly consensual universe with a "rude" mode override, so of course this isn't a problem. But in an episode of Galactica: 1980, Troy and Dillon go back in time to stop the evil Xavier giving the Nazis enhanced V2 rocket technology. They're almost too late: the enhanced V2 launches. Dillon gets his laser pistol out and fires, but nothing happens! "Damn, it's set to stun," he mutters, before resetting his gun and firing again, in the nick of time. But what if he hadn't been so quick to override? Therein lies the lesson, kids. Always shoot to kill. : )

Note the new tagline of this blog. [At time of writing, "FOR THE UNCONDITIONAL MILITARY DEFENCE OF BRITNEY FROM SEXIST WITCH-HUNTS!"] I've discovered a new kick: adapting the dodgy, declarative slogans of Trotskyism to popular culture. It's a take on my own "wannabe player" relationship with pop culture. Just as Trotskyists have this ridiculous desire to make "foreign policy" pronouncements from the imaginary headquarters of their states-in-waiting, I want to have an egocentric stake in the culture industry. (Other than one that makes me feel like a Russian inmate doing digital penance in a Gibson-inspired new media sweatshop, that is.)

Yes, over the last decade or so, I've come to love pop music. Of course, I'm not an earnest believer in the totality of the pop industry (as if anybody is, or could be), but down deep I'm really still a hermeneuticist, prone to the earnest impulse to totalise from above, rather than someone who actually lives (in the pores of) pop culture in a radically embedded and ambivalent way. So in the Trotskyist vein, I reconcile my love of pop stars in the same way Trots believed that the USSR was a "deformed workers' state" that deserved unconditional defence. (I don't know if I really believe any of the above explanation. But it sounds good, doesn't it?) And of course there's the Spartacist League's wonderful slogan, "DEFEND MICHAEL JACKSON FROM RACIST WITCH-HUNT!". A corker. HAIL RED ARMY IN AFGHANISTAN, I say. (Did you know that the International Bolshevik Tendency split from the Sparts over that slogan? They thought it too "Stalinophilic". I got it from their Truth Kit on the Sparts. [A Truth Kit on the Sparts -- the people who invented Truth Kits!])

So why is this blog called Antipopper, given my love of pop? (No, it doesn't stem from my anti-rationalist hatred of Karl Popper, either, despite some clever readings in that vein.) Well, a couple of years ago my colleague Chris and I wanted to start a pop-culture magazine called (funnily enough) Popper. "Oh, that's a brand of juice that comes in a Tetra-Pak." "Uh, so?" We were actually going to rip off the entire Popper corporate identity -- the jolly logo, everything. For a laugh. It was going to be a really glossy (UV gloss varnish -- mmmm), deluxe, print-magazine affair, with more of a promotional website than a content-driven one. (Chris had never done print design at this stage, and found it strange and sexy. Which it is.) The only problem was that the domain "popper.com" was already taken. So Chris (in strangely dialectical fashion) thought up "antipopper" -- Popper's evil Web twin, as it were, like matter and antimatter. I registered the domain, but as with many ambitious backyard projects, we just didn't have the time to follow through. So when I decided to write a blog, I had this domain lying dormant, and just used it. I do like the idea of an evil twin, though. All doppelganger-like.

BTW, Chris' excellent Pantone Orange toys are now available at Kid Robot. I have one -- a little white bear with droogish iconographic markings and the words "ULTRA VIOLENCE" on his back. Yeah. (The whole Pantone/Clockwork Orange thing is partly an obscure play on the "Kubrick" range of toy bears.)

Was rootling around for unfilmed scripts on the Web, and obviously found William Gibson's rejected Alien 3 script. Which somehow then led me to Michael Chabon's rejected X-Men script. (BTW, check out the rest of Chabon's site, which feels like a scrapbook of footnotes -- he'd do well with a wiki or a blog.) There's an interesting interview with Chabon at the Onion AV Club about his novels and his interest in comics. A typsetting grandfather! Jack Kirby! Nikola Tesla! Cool!

Finished the booklet for A's funeral. A typographic crisis: wanting to do something warmly elegiac and somewhat crafty (like a book of Seamus Heaney poems should look), I chose to set it in Caslon. But when I set the display type in Caslon Antique (after a wonderful old paperback cover of To Kill a Mockingbird I remember from school), it gave off too much of a strained naturalism vibe. So I went on a wild typographical goose chase, trying out low x-height stuff like Mrs Eaves and Cochin and finding them far too cold, trying out block woodcutty fonts for display type and finding them way too much like Rolling Stone... I finally came full circle. Feh. I should trust my initial instincts.

(Not having done any multiple-page print design in OSX before, I decided to learn InDesign overnight, and was quite impressed with it how intuitive it was. Quark has a lot of manipulative power, but like many typesetting technologies, it's so arbitrary and quirky, and certainly isn't what one would consider a well-polished application..)

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Listening to sad songs, like "A Change is Gonna Come". Remember that moment towards the end of Spike Lee's Malcolm X, when he's driving to what turns out to be his death? Just thinking about it makes me choke up.

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Perhaps in denial about issues of mortality, I've been obsessing about strange techy things like seamless remote file synchronisation. iSync keeps my Safari bookmarks synced wonderfully, but it needs .Mac to do this, which is lame, since I already pay for a webserver, and I haven't found any other frequent-scheduling file-sync apps to my liking. This is interesting, tho.

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Don't worry Britney (don't worry Brit-ney), everything will turn out all right.

Last night on the train, I was sitting next to a window with a thin slice of water trapped between its double panes. The subtlest lurching movement of the train sent waves crashing across my field of vision, all the way home. With the Red Hot Chili Peppers' By the Way sounding like a hymn-book, and looking through this window of waves, I thought about how this week I'd watched a man die.

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Last night's wave machine brings to mind A.K. Dewdney's wonderful book The Planiverse (a tribute of sorts to Edwin Abbot's classic Flatland), in which a class of computer science students make interdimensional contact with "Yendred", a young being in a two-dimensional universe. Yendred goes fishing with his father on a boat, and they get caught in a fierce storm. Here we learn that when limited to two dimensions, the vortices of turbulence are far more savage than their three-dimensional equivalents, having one less dimension into which they can dissipate. (As it happens, these vortices are illustrated on the book's current paperback cover on Amazon.) The Planiverse recovers your sense of wonder. How do you live technologically in a world in which you can't tie a knot? Or attach a wheel to an axle?

It's been a strange couple of weeks for interpretation. Firstly, the feedback from various people on this blog has lately brought up questions of what I actually mean when I use the particular words. All of this dialogue has been interesting and welcome.

Less welcome has been an incident within That Virtual Community I recently rejoined: a comment about "a large Abo", made by an American, which singularly brought into focus a whole bunch of issues that I've had with liberal concepts of communication. Basically, my extreme anger and revulsion at the careless stupidity (at the very least) of the comment, and its transparently colonialist context (this "large Abo" served as a mystical inspiration for some art), was met with entreaties to recognise the "obviously not racist" supposed "intent" of the comment, and actual calls for an apology from me. Was I ever out of there in a hurry! It's so untenable for me to share something of myself with a community that basically encourages a blindness to social power and to anything, indeed, that exists outside of declarative statements. It's a culture that fosters misreading, under the sign of "fairness", but towards anything but that. Not to mention the utter viscerality of my reaction: I was physically sick for hours afterward, and I don't think I've ever been more upset by a textual interaction, ever.

So what does this range of interpretive issues tell me? A story: yesterday I went to a lecture by Paul Davies on the theoretical possibility of time travel, and it was refreshing to plunge back into that world of black holes and warped spacetime after being such an enthusiast as a small boy. Anyway, Davies' main talent was his ability to convey, in laypeople's terms, the idea that while Newtonian physics is fine for roughly describing everyday matters, it is absolutely incapable of dealing with extremes of circumstance or scale. At certain events, or if you look hard enough at the everyday, relativistic and/or quantum phenomena reveal our assumptions about time and casuality to be without foundation.

So it is with liberal communication theory. An individualised subject who communicates with conscious intent in an arena that's been mysteriously evacuated of knowledge and power may work descriptively if you're wondering whether someone was being sarcastic when they said, "you look nice today". In such cases, you really can ask, "what was their actual intent?". But when all symptoms point to someone carelessly channelling a whole bunch of colonialist tropes, I don't think a lack of "racist" "intent" can reasonably entered into the equation. Indeed, like the netherworld of quantum physics, "intent" doesn't really exist here. Social responsibility, however, clearly still does. And this is my beef with liberalism this week, because it reverses this, fetishising crap versions of intent and responsibility that lead towards the dodgiest ethics around.

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It has occurred to me that in Pattern Recognition terms, I've been acting like a weird cross between Parkaboy and Mama Anarchia -- stomping loudly out of a virtual community, but saying stuff like "where is our praxis?". Ha.

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I got Tron on DVD. Excellent. It loses focus and trails off into panel-van art towards the end, but Syd Mead and Moebius' work on the movie is peerless, and the electro-cheesiness is good in both earenest and ironic senses. And check out this shot:

In the Phantomly Menacing world of contemporary sf film-making fx, you don't get shots like this any more. ILM seem to have perfected an endless parade of bland medium-to-long shots, in which all visual detail competes for equal meaninglessness. It's as if George Lucas deliberately frames his actors to maximise the display of the overdesigned and overpriced digital real estate around them, on a rendering-time-per-square-inch formula. Whatever happened to the whites of the villain's eyes?