antipopper

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.)