antipopper

It’s not minimalism.

Any other ideas?

For the people of Miami:

Someone always playing corporation games
Who cares, they’re always changing corporation names
We just want to dance here / Someone stole the stage
They call us irresponsible, write us off the page
Marconi plays the mamba, listen to the radio
Don’t you remember
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll
We built this city
We built this city on rock and roll

It’s just another Sunday, in a tired old street
Police have got the choke hold — oh, and we just lost the beat

Yes, it’s Starship. I have no shame. (Did you know it was first written for John Farnham??)

We’re getting new carpet laid, and so I’m throwing a lot of old shit out so they can move the furniture. Naturally that means, uh, not throwing shit out once I find how fascinating it is. For instance, under the “What skills can you offer LA?” section of the 1995 Left Alliance Membership Survey, there’s the question, “can you rob banks?”.

Soon I will go out into the desert and rethink everything.

Am I the only person who likes Eve in Season 5 of Angel? Anyway, I love shake-ups and format changes in genre shows; the shift to dodgy war melodrama in Deep Space Nine, the retroactive continuity of Dawn’s introduction in Buffy — it’s all good. Angel’s return to monster-of-the-week-isms is a welcome respite from all the overwrought arc intracacies of previous years. Just like as I’d fantasised years ago with Deadly (my imaginary TV show), dumb studio pressure has magically aligned with real dramatic needs, and resulted in something that’s strangely punchy, and all the more subtly unsettling for it. And Harmony is brilliant.

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Speaking of the garden of Eden, I just discovered that most brilliantly dodgy piece of opportunism: the BLOGPSOT caper. This has been around for a while, but I’ve only just discovered it; Hon mistyped his blog’s URL in his comment below, and it leads to this — some whacko Christians have bought the blogpsot.com domain.

I’ve found that I positively cannot use social software like Friendster, because when I have to fill out a profile of myself — listing my favourite X, Y and Z — nothing comes out. You all know I’ve got incredibly strong opinions about many things, but “favourites”, especially when split into forms and genres, are something I completely lack. I proceed via odd incremental actions and habits, not by declaration. I am an amoeba.

Shane is right about “panty-raiders” as the proto-revolutionary cadre. This is exactly what happened in France, too — dormitory curfews at Nanterre sparked May ‘68. Now this has always been the crux of my beef with neo-Leninist approaches to cadre-building, which is all poxy demands of the state, made in manipulative bad faith from a bunker housing a government-in-waiting. As if that’s going to get the masses pumping.

But the answer to this is not to logically present a totalisingly coherent analysis of the world, which the enlightened masses will then “obviously” choose. (Noam Chomsky, go away.) This was the position the ISO ascribed to Ben Ross back in the ’90s, noting that the demands which sparked May ‘68 weren’t about a refined analysis of capital flight, but were all about dormitories. It’s amazing that they could recognise this and yet totally miss the point, seeing this instrumentally as a way of manipulating panicked people with reactive and relatively conservative rhetoric as a precursor to revolutionary indoctrination once they’ve been recruited. How infinitely crap. The point about dormitories is that it’s about power and everyday life. I mean, to me, kicking against the repressive pricks is objectively more radical than pressuring the the left of the left of the ALP to pressure the rest of the ALP to pressure the Liberal Party to not be so over the top in their implementation of a border protection policy that the ALP Left first implemented.

This kind of historical misperception by Leninists goes back to their own founding mythologies. At their core — in their lived expression by people at large — the demands for PEACE, BREAD and LAND during the 1917 Revolution were not a dishonest and rhetorical policy of reformist manipulation, though no doubt it did fit nicely into Bolshevik opportunism. Rather, in the wake of Tsarism and in the middle of World War I, those things were an immediate necessity for simply living everyday life, let alone a just life, and the Russian provisional government was clearly not going to provide any of those things. Any Leninists in the “free the refugees” campaign who try to justify cozying up to the bastards who started mandatory detention by implicitly citing “Peace, Bread, Land” as an example “non-revolutionary demands leading towards revolutionary ends” are clearly in a state of absolute delusion. This reduction of the revolutionary materialities of the fabric of life and dealth to some excuse for political jockeying is not just mistaken and ineffectual, it insults the desires of working people — in the Russia of 1917, and in the here and now.

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Am enjoying Kylie’s Body Language. Much of it doesn’t go quite far enough into the wonderful, abstract electrotude of “Slow”, but bits are fun.

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Received my first cheque from CafePress, which was weird. I sold those Magento Was Right t-shirts for no profit at the Antipopper Store, but CafePress apparently gave me a bonus for the volume of sales, anyway. I feel all guilty’n’shit.

Here’s where I admit my bizarre spiral into consumer electronics addiction. My new iPod never leaves my person, and neither does my Sony Z1 camera.

A commodity appears at first sight, a very trivial thing and easily understood. It’s analysis shows that it is in reality, a very queer thing…
– Marx, Capital

Lena and I just had an almost religious consumer electronics experience. Walking down the road, she grips my arm suddenly. “Oh. My. God.” There is a new AppleCentre on the other side of the road. We enter, into a crystal wonderland of Quartz Extreme, Exposé and anodised aluminium. If it’s possible, Apple have reached a new plateau of visual fetishism with their new gear, to the point where they’re almost in the same league as prestige car manufacturers rather than in a niche with Sony. I don’t think this has been strictly true before, but the use of so much metal — even the latest aluminium PowerBooks’ keyboards have a metallic finish — has now reached a critical mass.

I wouldn’t underestimate this apparently superficial change in industrial design direction. My cousin’s girlfriend was once a colour consultant for Apple, and showed us how she chose the colours for the iMac when we visited them in San Francisco a few years ago: there were strange sculptures — tangled extrusions of coloured, translucent plastic — in her room, a telling trace of the industrial design process. Colourful plastic was a revival of the sexy-yet-populist “computer for the rest of us” ideology that Jobs had revived at Apple, but now the contradictions seem to have been erased — it’s now all BMW.

Via Anne Galloway: the Urban Tapestries project. Years and years ago, I was daydreaming about running community cultural development projects involving young migrant people’s hypertextual annotations of urban space, perhaps on the web or CD-ROM. But Urban Tapestries takes it to another level:

Urban Tapestries allows users to author their own virtual annotations of the city, enabling a community’s collective memory to grow organically, allowing ordinary citizens to embed social knowledge in the new wireless landscape of the city. Users will be able to add new locations, location content and the ‘threads’ which link individual locations to local contexts, which are accessed via handheld user devices such as PDAs and mobile phones.

It may sound abstract to some, but in a fundamental way this approach removes a level of abstraction that occurs when an archive tries to map one’s experiences of a space, but outside that space. Interesting. I sense a wealth of radical, everyday uses for this kind of infrastructure, once the technology becomes commonplace.