July 2003 Archives

Our road trip back from Adelaide is over. After Sonics/Synergies, we stayed in town for Staking A Claim: Global Buffy & Local Identities, which was deeply strange. But amidst all the over-serious analysis and somewhat defensive justifications for studying or even LIKING Buffy (including David Lavery's "Buffy makes me feel smart -- this is what I got a PhD for"), I did get to reappraise Seasons Six and Seven, which proved fertile ground for participants to spin some interesting shit. Best, tho, was bumping into Trisha Pender, who's briefly back in the country from her duties at Stanford. We were Buffy fans together in Nineteen Fucking Ninety Two!

We got to meet some really nice students during our stay in Adelaide. Shout outs to Pipstar Buchanan, Kylie ("it's all neoliberalism") Jarrett and Danni Nicholas-Sexton (who steered us in the right direction). And I'm really disappointed to have missed Katy Stevens' "Spike as Buffy's dolly" paper. Boys generally seemed very thin on the ground.

•  •  •

Morphic resonance: As Peter Carey's My Life as a Fake is released, I go to the Art Gallery of South Australia and see a bunch of interesting Sidney Nolan portraits of Ern Malley (a indistinct chimera of a fellow), Max Harris and the Angry Penguins crowd.

•  •  •

Lena got stalked by this weird guy with few teeth. At the end of Sonics/Synergies, he waited for her after everyone left and attached himself to us as we walked down the road. Making dumb smalltalk while Lena deliberately called someone on her mobile to escape, I said, "So, are you sticking around in Adelaide for the Buffy symposium?". He looked at me and said, "I wasn't going to, but I might now". D'ohhhhhh. And lo and behold, he arrives at the end of the Buffy symposium, and we have to make a run for it.

A new spin: After our very amusing dinner with him in Adelaide, we hooked up with Tommy DeFrantz again to see Maya support 1200 Techniques in Melbourne. (We were late, but what we caught of Maya was fantastic. Her new single "Move", which Spider produced, is getting airplay on Triple J. Yay!) Amidst all the gossip ("shut up!"), Tommy revealed that he had been stalked by No-Teeth Guy as well, in Melbourne! ("That Guy is here! I met That Guy!!" There were eeeeks all around.) On tour with Doug Kellner, Rhonda Wilcox and David Lavery, they'd all been taken out to dinner by some local academics, and No-Teeth Guy just turns up and has dinner with them. It appears that their hosts know him well, and firmly have to turn him away after dinner. And the next day, Tommy's shopping with Rhonda when No-Teeth Guy turns up again. "I'm sorry," says Tommy to No-Teeth Guy, "I need some time alone with Rhonda". Tommy's a funny guy.

•  •  •

The drive from Adelaide to Melbourne was very pretty, but deathly cold and rainy, and we all got a bit cranky. But during a pitstop in tiny Meningie, we met these really lovely guys who worked at a dodgy bistro. Noting that their wine was the same as the stuff in the wineries we'd visited earlier that day, but cheaper, we asked them whether this was because they didn't do the wine-wank commentary. "We can do wank!" they offered, and lo, it was good.

Boy, no access to the Net for a coupla days -- too hectic.

Had a video linkup with the ultracharismatic Tricia Rose, in which she determinedly faced certain questions about hip hop that had up to then been consistently elided during this conference -- namely, the consumption of images of blackness by white people, and what the market has to do with this, and what everyday lived and interpersonal experiences of cultural exchange have to do with this (if anything). Obviously these are great questions to ask of those who misread their own antihumanism and think that these days "everything goes everywhere", or that various sedimentations of power relations are something to be easily evaded by a few throwaway comments about the impossibility of authenticity.

Basically, Rose's thesis was that we're in a tragic era, in which huge swathes of white consumers are uncritically eating up images of pimps and ho's by way of various market mechanisms, and that the still brilliant possibility of a politics of resistance within mainstream hip hop is further away than ever. She demanded that we ask, "what should hip hop be?", and felt moved to explain why another Public Enemy so obviously doesn't seem to be on the cards for ultracommercial hip hop.

In some ways, her ideas seemed to be a mirror of Douglas Kellner's approach to media spectacle, in that for all intents and purposes, we must read everyday reality through the image of the market, and that it's very easy for cultural theorists and ethnographers to overemphasise and celebrate the marginal without waking up and smelling the coffee. As I said in my last post, I think while this move is a really important one to make, on its flipside is a danger to fall into a kind of tabloid politics that chases the crassest impulses of the market, rather than finding and working with practices of culture that might somehow come into contradiction with it. Rose talks about the resistant possibilities of hip hop, eclipsing what I think is far more important: the virtuality of resistance.

Responding to Rose's somewhat over-ideological reading of "resistance" leads me to Deleuze's distinction between the possible and the virtual. Rose tries to map the future of what hip hop "should" be, and fetishistically wants the possibility to declare one's ideological affiliations through the genre -- a somewhat instrumentalist, prescriptive approach to culture. It's the leftist flipside to commodity fetishism. Meanwhile, what about the virtuality of resistance, a project that isn't about (self) consciousness or declarations, but about radically expanding the space of freedom that comes with participating in various cultures of movement? Within that expansion, that furthering of social autonomies, I'm sure there can be lots of analysis and reflexivity, and even a few declarations. But the underlying quality of its movement can be radically political in a way which would make it invisible to Rose. Not in a desperate attempt to "find resistance where there is none", as she puts it, but in a different way of thinking about resistance altogether. Of course I don't think, therefore, that relatively privileged white kids listening to hip hop in their bedrooms are ready to tear down global capitalism because that would be a fashionable escape from the sedimented realities of the political geology of the world. And I think that there obviously needs to be more analysis and reflexivity to come if the virtuality of resistance is going to herald much structural change on this planet. But rather than think about what hip hop "should" be (saying), isn't it more productive to see how hip hop's enactment in its many cultural spaces might herald a coming community?

Postscript: After just talking to Tommy DeFrantz about this issue, I'd again underline that no, I don't want to privilege white boys in their bedrooms over more grounded and active social practices of hip hop as culture. His insistence on materialism is an ever-welcome corrective to flights of fancy. But I've said it before, and I'll say it again: those of us who do use stuff about "mobile concepts" in a luxurious and evasive manner are confusing subjectivity with the individual liberal subject, and this this continual slippage in the textualist humanities is very much at the heart of the depoliticisation we find there. People who imagine that disengaged academic types are simply self-indulgent wankers are only half right, just as those who obsess about Stalin's undeniably butcherous drive in an analysis of authoritarianism in the USSR are committing a massive kind of liberal reductionism. I don't agree with it, but Trotsky's critique -- that the repressive "Soviet" bureaucracy "arises" from Stalin's theoretical "mistakes" about "socialism in one country" -- is useful to flag here. The luxury of disengaged academics crucially involves the kind of effective theoretical error of which the slippage between subjectivity and the individual is a prime example. All of this -- theoretical slippages, self-indulgence -- is what happens when the individuating mechanism is enacted, and this has to be teased out, rather than accepted on its own terms -- that "they're just self-indulgent fuckwits". Otherwise we are doomed to their repetition.

I'm at the Sonics/Synergies: Creative Cultures conference in Adelaide. Douglas Kellner's keynote paper kinda underlined the bankruptcy of much well meaning, "progressive" cultural studies. I found it vacuous and descriptive, with a fashion-victim tendency to follow the most obvious example of memetic icons. If you wanna talk media spectacles, be my guest, but to overdiagnose these as the pulse of late capitalism by offering some run-of-the-mill liberal media criticism just strikes me as woefully overrated. To classify this as a particularly critical or even theoretical project is, well, just silly. Nice enough guy, though.

Last night: an erotic dream involving a visual-effects motion control camera. I'll stop now, before it gets even more incriminating.

Why wasn't this kind of documentary about the occupation of Palestine made years ago? (Via Miguel de Icaza, architect of Gnome.)

Okay, Nat Friedman's Dashboard is out of the bag. This is basically half of the killer app that I've wanted to create for the last five years, but never got round to getting my shit together for. My working title was the Assodissonance Engine. Friedman talks about his "association engine". Damn.

Just to underline how in love with FLCL I am, here's a little trailer. (You need DivX for Windows or Macintosh.)

Tonight I picked up a couple of episodes of FLCL. I cannot explain how utterly astounding this anime series is. Where else could you find an alien girl who rides a yellow Vespa and uses a Rickenbacker bass as a weapon against evil? And mod men-in-black with seaweed eyebrows? And dialogue like "Tomorrow, so many will come for my mini-zine of justice"? I kid you not. Made by various Evangelion alumni. Of course.

I've been thinking vaguely about the "WMD scandal", and what it means for those who've had any "reservations" about the war on Iraq (i.e. various antiwar elements, plus those who staked their support for the war purely on the idea of Iraq's immediate and long-range threat to their "security".) The thing is, no matter how much various commentators are trying to give Bush, Blair and Howard their own Watergate (involving impeachments, resignations or dismissals), I somehow doubt that this "missing weapons" flap is going to develop into such a "scandal of state", despite the real furore that exists, and despite the very real "crimes against humanity" involved.

Of course, it's important for us to get a clearer picture of how our leaders so shallowly try to dull us with double-talk. The deceptions at hand reveal both a pathetic and incompetent desperation to fulfill the various robotic imperatives of war, and the utter contempt in which various self-styled untouchables hold us (e.g. "don't worry about making it watertight -- we don't care what the public thinks, if anything"). This particular knowledge should be put to good use, but I nonetheless get the feeling that any attempts at scandalography that conform to the limits of legality, individualised truth and statecraft are doomed to encounter widespread disinterest on any practical level.

Why? One only has to think about the previous decade's genocidal, UN-enforced sanctions on Iraq to realise that the real imperatives of imperial warmaking are not hinged on questions that can be settled with lie-detector tests, by following the law, or through "multilateral diplomatic solutions". And I think a substantial number of people in the world, whether they oppose such imperial adventures or not, already realise this on some level. Of course, liberals will interpret this as the mindless apathy of the masses, but I just see it as an undifferentiated potential that could be ideologically coded in numerous ways. In any case, these sorts of realisations lie outside any type of "public" that would be the imaginary audience for the "scandals of state" that liberals are hoping for.

Our leaders don't care what "the public" thinks of the thin justifications for their violent adventures, and "the public" doesn't think much of them because "the public" doesn't exist. The governmental contempt for "the public" is indeed a contempt for us, but why should we conform to this corporatist fantasy? The only people that do conform in this regard seem to be pundits, and especially those who have a proximity to (and a touching faith in) the state -- including Nixon's former counsel, in this particular case! These are the people who talk in terms of "respecting the duties of public office", etc., and who look wide-eyed with false naïveté when it's revealed that the people in power cheat and murder. Meanwhile, the variegated spheres of circulation and community that do exist in society are continually trying to escape this totalising image of themselves in relation to the state, even if it's "just" through drinking, or fucking, or simply hanging out with each other.

And what is "lying" all about, these days? As with John Howard's "children overboard" mini-scandal, obsessive questions about individuated knowledge/speech acts on the part of the commander-in-chief are somewhat beside the point. That the Australian Federal Government initiated a cancerous orgy of racist deceptions to consolidate its power should be known to all, but whittling away at the collective political culpabilities of class, state and nation until they disappear, and all we're left with is whether X lied about Y, is unacceptable. What use is it to tie ourselves in knots over individuated lies when it is clear that these acts occurred, and continue to occur, in a much wider ethical vacuum? I fail to see how calling for a Royal Commission challenges the racist operations of the nation-state.

So it is with the weapons of mass destruction, and, indeed, the whole question of US Government complicity in the events of September 11. The spiral of 911 conspiracy theories betray a kind of hermeneutic sickness. When systemic lies like "we're fighting for freedom when we bomb the shit out of poor people in Afghanistan" are standard, individuated lies and mundane conspiracies are a given, and to ferret them out and accord them an overinflated grandiosity in ways that fail to challenge the parameters of the game is to give up on a fundamental level.

Oh yeah, Q is also available for download from the Wu-Ming Foundation site. (Copyleft is such a nice idea.) Go, my agents of anticapitalism! Flying monkeys, simian minions -- destroy, destroy! Or something.

Ah, the Trotts to the rescue. These two funny stories from those cuties Ben and Mena Trott magically describe exactly what happens in our own Ben and Lena Show. Except that I'm also the designer. {Unreconstructed harrumph.}

I recently went to my parents' house to clean out some boxes of old junk, and found some really amusing old documents, including some old printouts of an online column I used to write in the mid-'80s, called Electric Graffiti.

How, uh, of its time. : ) In the first issue: a briefing on the then-new Apple IIGS.

• Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle could be the greatest movie ever made.
• Drew Barrymore could be God.
• Family from Vancouver are here for a few weeks. On Monday night, I had a long conversation with my little cousin James, who is ten, I think, and an endless stream of questions on tap. We started with the ontology of The Matrix Reloaded, and then moved onto World War II cryptography, Alan Turing, the porcelain tiles of the Space Shuttle, dreams of benzene rings, why viruses are an odd form of life, and why Wolverine is cool.
• On my Farscape DVD procrastination marathon today, I found the following line from D'Argo most amusing: "No offense, but I say we take this tree-hugger, shove him out the access port and get the hezmana out of here." Oh yeah, baby.
• Did I mention that I work with some of Claudia Black's friends, and that they are just as terrifyingly ferocious as Aeryn Sun?
• I'm doing some web work for an Xbox game with a lot of buzz surrounding it. To help me choose some dialogue soundbites, the developers sent the entire goddamn script of the game. It's the most amazing document, not least because all the stage directions are written in some kind of pseudo-object-oriented manner, e.g. BobEnterHouse, BobExplode, etc. Excellent.
• Amber from Microsoft Redmond could be the most perky person I've ever dealt with. She's, like, awesome.
• Drew Barrymore could be God.
• I got Luther Blisset's Q. I love how the back cover is upside down, so you look like a moron when you're reading it on the train and someone to your right looks across.
• Ha ha, I'm going to an International Buffy Symposium and you're not. Okay, you might be, in which case I'll be seeing you.
• Drew Barrymore could be God.