August 2003 Archives

Chris, who sits next to me: "I wonder what Nas and Kelis are doing right now?"

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Shane of the Exciting Life (pray for us) asks whether I like Tweet. Yes, and on your recommendation in the first place. I think Timbaland's stuff is better when he doesn't lay it on too thick (or feel the need to get his mumbly vocal paws all over something), and in Tweet I think he and Missy have found someone amenable to something really slinky. And I recall that last year, some people were outraged by a performance* at the Performance Space by some Koori girls last year, in which they did a silhouetted striptease mime to "Oops (Oh My)". If girls are only allowed to have an expressive sexuality within the confines of some moralistic, indier-than-thou and implicitly privatised sandpit, rather than engage with whatever popular culture may be circulating in their domain, then heaven help us. Critically exploring how sex and commodification are necessarily negotiated in a libidinal economy dominated by the market is one thing. Knee-jerk moralism is another. As ever, I'm reminded of a Spartacist headline: "UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF BOURGEOIS FEMINISTS AND ULTRA-RIGHT-WING SPARK ANTI-SEX WITCHHUNT!". No doubt I've grievously offended certain comrades, but what the hell.

* Part of a community cultural development project facilitated by MC Wire, who also helped workshop the Wilcannia Mob's hit "Down River" (Track 2 in the "Tracks" section of Morganics' site).

Check out the hot action:

We call for decentralised actions everywhere during the WTO Ministerial in Cancun from September 10th until 14th. At the same time we want to celebrate as a global movement. We want to continue our search, asking questions like the Zapatistas, towards a different world here and now. We want to question the patriarchal capitalist logic of war. Not only during summit protests like in Hyderabad, Geneva, Seattle, Prague, Bangkok, Quebec, Genoa, Quito, Buenos Aires and everywhere -- but also in our everyday life we want to creatively turn our anger into resistance.

Allo, Angel Season 5 geezers. Meanwhile, Alyson Hannigan and Kelly Rowland trip out:

I'm so tired. Sometimes I feel like I've got nothing left to give. It's shit. Some of you know about my alarming dependence on energy drinks -- ever since I got involved in new media brand-building shenanigans, I've been lost in some kind of guarana/caffiene k-hole. An endless tunnel. I've written elsewhere about this kind of chemical augmentation as a disturbing form of self-imposed work discipline (as opposed to drugs for fun). It's creepy.

I drink "V", a caffiene/guarana drink made in New Zealand. Additionally, Australian Fashion Week is sponsored by Red Bull, so there's a bottomless fridge of Red Bulls living a few metres from my person, but Red Bull tastes shite. So last week I was minding my own business at work one morning, sipping on my V, when the Red Bull Girls happen to be refilling the fridge for the week. (The pert and uniformed Red Bull Girls drive around in a VW Beetle with a huge Red Bull can protruding from its roof.) One of them comes up to me and says, "You can't seriously tell me you prefer V to Red Bull!" I fucking kid you not. "I like the taste," I reply. "But you don't drink Red Bull for the taste, you drink it for the performance," she announces firmly; and "did you know that Red Bull contains twice the amount of active ingredients? If you don't like the taste, you can do what athletes do -- dilute it with water." What. The. Fuck. (Actually, to be honest, V tastes a little like piss, but that makes it seem all the more like it's replenishing various vital organic substances in my body.)

And fuck, V's packaging is designed to lure pathetic fanboys like myself:

Actually, that burst of sf pulpdom (I mean, advertising) was just an excuse to get to Warren Ellis' Planetary, which is returning this week! As someone with only a scattershot relationship to the world of comics, I've only recently gotten into Ellis' work. Shane mentioned Stormwatch to me the other day, and I haven't a clue. Meanwhile, I've found whatever little Transmet I've read to be somewhat obviously cyber-gonzo-lite. I really don't think people like Ellis, Alan Moore and Morrison should be automatically elevated to godhood status -- whatever their indisputable talent, such a move is too damn... predictable. (Like saying that Blade Runner is your Favourite Movie of All Time. Boring!) But I really, really like Planetary. Its reworkings of classic pulpy tropes are unpretentious, but very elegant. You want Doc Savage, Fu Manchu and Tarzan versus the JLA? You got it. But in a lovely, understated and tangential way. The self-contained issues haunt you, like coins dropped in a lake.

And speaking of homages, I just saw a shrinkwrapped bundle of Alan Moore's 1963 at the store! I loved "Mystery Incorporated" when I got it in an Easter Show comics showbag! Especially this priceless panel:

Excellent. And to complement the beverage product shot above: I no doubt missed the fuss about this a few months ago, but here's something Lena picked up from the supermarket today:

Tasty!

In the mid-'80s, I thought the world could have ended at any moment. Like many other children, I was waiting for the Blinding Flash of Light. All the time. There's been plenty written about nuclear war tropes in pop culture of the '50s and '60s, but by the 1980s, I think the imagery of Mutually Assured Destruction had reached a new refinement, a new "pregnancy" -- the arsenal was so huge that it overflowed the constraints of traditional Cold War affiliations, and leaked into the realm of Generalised Death. It had a planetary dimension, probably only made possible by the notion that human beings had stood on the moon and seen our world from another. (As Donna Haraway says, it sounds cheesy, and invites a whole bunch of dodgy "mother earth" metaphors, but it's still true.) It's probably this planetary generalisation of the idea of nuclear armageddon, rather than whatever maneouverings of state were actually going down, that made things seem so urgent in the '80s.

It seems so distant sitting here now, huddled in the cold with the fucking flu, but for me it was one continuous Summer of the Apocalypse. It was very pop. And strangely enough for me, very "Australian". In many ways my experience was held together by dodgy pieces of a mythological national imaginary. The shimmering image of an orange sunset above the Cahill Expressway, cars snaking onto the Sydney Harbour Bridge, like a mirage. A quintessentially '80s "Australian" image that seems almost impossible now. And one which I can't conjure without the backdrop of, say, GANGajang's "Sounds of Then", and the simultaneous Knowledge of the Bomb. A public culture in denial of its multi-ethnic population, with populist progressive politics of the time celebrating an imaginary, black/white "dual custodianship" of a land without non-Anglo migrants. The desert. Images of which in the '80s could somehow not help but be haunted by the murderous nuclear testing at Maralinga in the '50s and '60s. The Sunset on Civilisation that was Mad Max II, and (for better or worse) the more consciously mythological (and more explicitly post-nuclear) Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. INXS's video for "Listen Like Thieves", and tangentially even "Kiss the Dirt (Falling Down the Mountain)". The national landscape, full of light and heat. (And weirdly irrelevant to the highly urbanised experience of the majority of Australians, but iconic nonetheless, probably because of this. The hot, strangely irradiated mythological landscape as a molten slate to project onto, or carve into. Now I get the sense that the landscape is not so much a touchstone in contemporary Australian life. It's not "needed" as much.) Tsunehisa Kimura's cover art for Midnight Oil's Red Sails in the Sunset, reproduced here, also included a bunch of images inside the gatefold that were more oblique but just as apocalytic. (Couldn't find them, sorry.) Doomladen kangaroos and whales, hapless humans. Perhaps pointing to a future without "us".

It's all dubious. But it's how I lived the '80s.

On the talk back show
On the radio
At the local bar
In the hot traffic by the red tail lights

Everybody’s down on their knees
Listen like thieves
But who needs that
When it’s all in your hands

And we take it down
To the end of town
Where they have control
But they’re losing touch when the lights go out

Everybody’s down on their knees
Listen like thieves for the end signs
But who needs that when you’ve got it all in your hands
It’s all in your hands
It’s all in your hands

You are all you need
You are all you need
And that is everything
So don’t hesitate
There’s no time to waste
You just do it for yourself

On the Prince/Slayer controversy, I will only say this:

And as for the whole "transgressive authenticity of stencilling" controversy that Nik and Az have been exploring, I'd say only this: whoever's coopting what, just keep doing dangerous things, whatever form they might take -- coopted, peripheral, whatever. Entire genres or fields of practice are not what's at stake here. Trust me, I work in advertising. :) In fact, this could be the substance of what I have to say at my This Is Not Art panel. Thanks guys.

This is the best blogging idea I've heard in a long time.

Shane, you might think that the Slayer's scythe has metal hair band guitar connotations, but I'd say that the truth lies a little closer to home...

So when Apollonia gives Prince his "axe" in Purple Rain, she does it with great authority. :)

Watching the fairly unremarkable Romeo Must Die on TV, but getting all sad about Aaliyah nonetheless.

Personal music players are great, whether they're walkmen, iPods, whatever. Because you can do dumb things that you'd never do in a public sonic space. Like listening to the first few bars of "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" twenty-six times in a row. (Idea: a film soundtrack that mimics the chopping and changing of trax that comes with living inside your headphones, complete with weird volume problems, skipping, obsessively repeated bits, etc.) Headphones also provide a kind of social armour. A technique of the self. Today, Cyndi Lauper and my translucent pink nail polish established a network of mutual support. I think they like each other.

Since I'm on the Internet most hours of the day, how could I have possibly not noticed that Joss Whedon's Fray finished a month ago? And I was at a fucking Buffy conference a few weeks ago! Feh. Not the best comic in the world, but it totally trumps most tie-ins, and does feature the first appearance of the nifty scythe that turns up at the end of Buffy. (It's highlighted in the Fray segment of Tales of the Slayers that really seems to echo Adrienne Rich's radical feminist poem, "Diving into the Wreck", which was about rediscovering lost lineages of sisterhood. Yes, it sounds like blechy, essentialist radfem stuff, but it's actually really moving.) Having demons step in to fulfil the Watchers' role (because the Watchers have turned into raving fundamentalist whackos in the 26th Century) was a nice touch, too. Fuck. Joss put the series on hold for months when Firefly got in the way, and I basically gave up. Now I'm going to have to buy the trade paperback.

This video of octopus camouflage in action has been doing the rounds lately. I find it terrifying -- in the way the only really great scene in M. Night Shyamalan's film Signs is terrifying. As UFOs descend across the globe, Joaquin Phoenix's character camps in the closet under the stairs with a television, watching obsessively. Suddenly, in breaking news, there's a home video from Brazil: at a children's birthday party, some kids start screaming; the camera turns to the window, looking down an alley, and for a breathless second we see a large alien walk past. The previously dismissive and skeptical Phoenix points at the screen, screaming hysterically.

Of course, the aliens in Signs use a very creepy kind of camouflage, but this isn't what suggested the link to me; in fact, I'd forgotten all about that until I sat down to write this. Rather, it's the shock of seeing an unexpected, strange being that turns our world inside out. The camouflage in Signs just concretises the deeper kinship between that shot and that of the octopus -- the experience of having our system of seeing disrupted. Shyamalan piles it on: after Phoenix screams, the news program then scrubs the video backwards and replays it, zooming in slow-motion towards the alien's first emergence into view, and thus producing a virtual kind of Hitchcockian tracking shot on behalf of its "parent movie" -- the film itself. And as the diver swims towards the coral, the octopus video is also a tracking shot.

Naturally, this brings the dreaded spectre of Slavoj Zizek and psychoanalysis. In Looking Awry, Zizek compares Hitchcock's tracking shots to the phenomenon of anamorphosis in Hans Holbein's painting, The Ambassadors. Holbein's painting skewers the perspectival system of Renaissance vision by placing an optically distorted skull across the portrait of two noblemen. To view the skull properly you have to be at an angle that in turn renders the noblemen (and our sense of self so rigorously maintained by persepective) completely distorted. Go on: stick your head in the lower left hand corner of the screen and look up at the picture. (Especially if you're in an Internet cafe.) Nice. Tracking in towards a terrifying, previously unseen visitor does this on a conceptual level. And as Mel C says, after this encounter "we'll never be the same again". This is why Joaquin screams -- not because his world is simply "falling apart around him", but because there are no longer any coordinates from which he can see the world even fall apart: like us and the noblemen, his place in the equation has been totally screwed, and all he can see is death's head. And this is why I find that octopus to be some fucking scary shit. And okay, I screamed.

I had to do something fun during my Weekend of Total Braindeath...

The latest on the Disembodied Women of Microsoft HQ: I'm now dealing with Jyoti, who doesn't put a husky word out of place. I initially had the suspicion that these women on the other end of the phone -- always projecting flawless business-speak -- weren't human Microserfs at all, and were actually artificially intelligent Turing Test candidates. But the thing is, sound is really visceral. At Sonics/Synergies, I think Katy Stevens' rereading of the aural properties of Freud's primal scene narrative really uh, nailed this point: you don't have to see your parents fucking as a child to get that deeply imprinted sensory "trauma" -- you can overhear their moaning (a fact that destabilises the privileging of vision in traditional approaches to sensory experience).

This viscerality of the aural doesn't have to be some kind of primal scream to be felt in everyday life. Indeed, often it's the exact opposite of a scream that gives us access to the stuff that Freud regards as the "primal". Like Aaliyah's often placid tone (which is itself the gothic R&B equivalent of Suzanne Vega's vocal texture), Jyoti-from-Microsoft's voice is just so. And this neatly "pneumatic" quality cannot but have a shadow side, an "aural unconscious", full of more dangerous meanings. Beneath the veneer of Jyoti's constant diplomacy, I kept reading an infinity of sadness. This reminds me of a comment that Allison Anders made about her film Grace of My Heart (which was a tribute to the Brill Building era): that ironically, polished pop is often much more emotionally wrenching than contemporary grunge-whine because it doesn't wear everything so literally on its sleeve. Pop bites harder.

Christ, I can believe I'm doing a record review of a Microsoft web producer's fucking phone manner. Must have something to do with the music-based Fluxblog free-for-all that I've been writing for.

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C, K and D's accident has been a bit of a freakout. I hope there is healing in all respects, but also strange openings. "In an interstellar burst / I'm back to save the universe."

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Mars is SO FUCKING BIG that I think I might explode.

The "Onward, Britney" range of merchandise (see the backstory: 1, 2, 3) is now available at the Antipopper Store. I'll post the "open source" iron-on transfer soon, but in the meantime, the commercial route was too funny to pass up.

Meanwhile, I saw Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle for the third time, and it just gets better. After caucusing with Caro and Claire about having to confront the dutiful and moralistic disavowal of trash culture by various comrades, I've decided that my new slogan of the moment is DEATH TO JOYLESS CRITIQUE! FREE CHARLIE'S ENGELS! Or something.

Last night we had dinner with Sean Scalmer, whom I hadn't seen for years. His current book project, which documents activists' personal reflections on their involvement in social movments, put me back in touch with the more visceral feelings that come with radical encounters -- feelings I usually sublimate in theoretical terms. And so in an email exchange about more abstract apsects of the Woomera 2002 event with John Hutnyk, I decided to disclose more about my experience there in a document called "Remembering Woomera" (I've added it to the "PAPERS" section of the site).

(Crap, it's three hours later and I've realised that my Word>HTML filter skipped every second paragraph of the document. It's now correct, in hand-coded glory.)