November 2003 Archives

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

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.

+  +  +

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.

+  +  +

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.

+  +  +

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.

The other night I saw a snippet of Frank Capra's Lost Horizon on TV, and was captivated by its seemingly avant-garde use of splitscreen stills over dialogue. I only just discovered that these parts were a much later restoration of lost scenes. But they were the good bits!

Hon's marking of Born in the USA as having the worst album cover ever got me thinking about Bruce Springsteen again. I'm not really a fan, but I think his contradictory codings are really interesting, not least the utterly mistaken recuperation of "Born in the USA" by the American right wing. And then there's the whole gaggle of loaded issues around "classic rock", "authenticity" of performance and masculinity. Springsteen's position in the scheme of things is a tragically ironic one -- he tries to say moving things, which always come out as self-deifying and grandiose gestures of the Ordinary. It's this tyranny of the gesture, the weakness for the anthemic, that allowed "Born in the USA" to be evacuated of content and taken for its polar opposite (in the way William Blake's bitterly ironic lament over the progress of industrial capitalism somehow became "Jerusalem", the battle hymn of the British Empire).

Springsteen obviously loves the girl groups of the '60s, and his songs are crammed with gorgeous, ringing Spectorisms. But the whole post-Dylan edifice of the masculine singer-songwriter weighs these pop aspects down, making them thick and lumpy. The sublime sound of the Ronettes gets filtered through the lens of... a Regular Guy. (This specific set of influences and filters mark other late Boomer MOR artists like Billy Joel.) But wearing a Regular Guy fictionsuit isn't an open and shut case; everything that can't fit in it boils underneath, and so the very act of putting it on can still look weird. Look what happened to David Bowie: his suits and ties of the '80s were originally in the same vein as the unnerving sharpness of New Wave and mod culture, but then he got lost in a terrifying dialectic of interpretation, in which these markers were increasingly read as safe, family-friendly entertainment. The music followed.

But before this disaster, Bowie understood the perverse context of the Regular Guy; witness his wonderfully camp cover of Springsteen's "It's Hard To Be A Saint In The City" (available here for a short time), in which he draws out the nuances that can't get chiseled in the granite of Springsteen's official story. With such an arch delivery, "I felt his hot breath on my neck as I dove into the heat" takes on all sorts of new vibes. What's amazing is that it's really not that different from the original. (Of course, the most ironic thing about Regular Guy iconography is the often central position it occupies outside heterosexuality, as in the exaggerated, hyper-performative masculinities of Western-metropolitan gay "clone" culture in the 1970s. As Bowie says in "Boys Keep Swinging", "When you're a boy / You can wear a uniform / When you're a boy / Other boys check you out".)

Oh don't lean on me man, cause you can't afford the ticket
I'm back from Suffragette City

I almost missed out on Bowie tickets!!! And they were just as expensive as those goddamn Prince tickets, which I passed on because I thought they were outrageously expensive!!!

Look ma, no Matrix Revolutions blogsmog!

+  +  +

The girl behind the counter at the comics store likes my fingernails, and tells me that I have good taste for buying Paul Pope's THB 1.v.2.

The much-feted Australian collective Rinzen have designed this latest volume. Rinzen's recent work has begun to soften my skepticism about them; up until recently, I found their stuff, like much overhyped Australian design, to be more a set of stock visual mannerisms (with a good PR machine). It was precisely the kind of stuff that Adam Greenfield takes to task in his A List Apart article on "genuine design versus vacuous stylism", which identifies many problems with contemporary design superstardom, but can only offer a humourless, elistist functionalism in its place. (And hey, I like Nigo!) In any case, Rinzen are growing on me.

This week I learned two things:

• If headphones are armour, then an iPod is like a fucking NORAD HQ bunker.
  
• The more water I drink (which is currently lots), the more I feel like crying. Why is this?

I spent an entire non-working day in front of my Mac yesterday, and this got me thinking: OS X has ushered in a new era of hobbyist commoditization, with great, well-branded little products like NetNewsWire and SubEthaEdit, written by single people or small teams, which work on the desktop, but extend it in really interesting ways. Out of favour for a decade or so (and smothered by dotcom avarice), this particular kind of hobbyist-oriented action is really hot right now. It's not so much about being a rugged individual than the fact that more than ever, you don't need to be a huge corporation to make a cool, well-polished product. It's the Revenge of the Well-Pitched Hack. This is clearly true for OS X's culture, which requires both elegant UNIX geekery and an appreciation of what makes a cool consumer product. The latter has always been undervalued in Linux geek culture, which is why its many innovations will stay in the ether, and why its desktop ambitions have always been completely unrealistic. Of course, the anti-commodity tendencies of Linux culture can often challenge the whole dodgy idea of "the consumer" and "usability" in the first place, which is great, but too often it's the good stuff about consumer culture (the well-honed experientiality, coming out of a perverse but undeniable relationship with real desires) that gets thrown out.*

Meanwhile, Apple has always been about the spectacle, of how the commodity becomes pure image. I don't like capitalism particularly much, but Apple certainly performs its sexiest theatricalities with panache, if not very much market share. Steve Jobs has always known how to clothe a commodity well, and like a lot of pop culture in general, there's a lot to be said for that. So when he brings both his marketing genius and an elegant, object-oriented UNIX framework to Apple, the scene is set, in a kind of social-Darwinist fashion, for a particular kind of hacker -- an ideal cross between Steve Wozniak (Apple's original engineer) and Steve Jobs (marketer). I use classy little OS X tools every day -- right now I'm writing this in Kung-Log, and shortly I'm going to make a little stop-motion movie with some Dalek salt-and-pepper shakers and iStopMotion -- and it's a pleasure to behold such all-round canniness.

But Apple's problem is that the emerging hardcore market for OS X is very specialised: aesthetic alpha geeks. The well polished, powerful OS is great for "the rest of us", but in many ways that's not the point, as Microsoft has proven. Meanwhile, the Mac's mainstream core market -- the publishing industry -- is still largely stuck in OS9 (Quark only ported to OS X a few months ago). So basically, OS X has become the platform of choice for a ghetto of influential enthusiasts. How this will play out is anyone's guess, but it's certainly an exciting time to be in the Mac ghetto. That is, if you don't work in print design. :)

In my dream last night, I was in an excellently dodgy '80s movie with Molly Ringwald, whose character falls in love with her kidnapper. The highlight was scene where the authorities are chasing the kidnapping antihero after Molly has been freed, and Molly and I are in turn pursuing on BMX bikes.

Although in many ways this has been a totally fucked up wasteland of a year for me, I've found my dreams to be quite compelling. (I guess that's no surprise.) I'm now thinking of making a short online comic inspired by my Whoreboy dream. With animated tentacles.

+  +  +

Another piece of the maximalist puzzle: for fuck's sake, all year I've been wearing a pink and maroon houndstooth silk cravat with my grey suit. It's as if I've been on autopilot, and not realising the bigger picture that was assembling itself around me... And pink floral designs are everywhere in mainstream laydeees' fashion for Spring in Sydney, which is fantastic. The trick, I guess, is to create an edge, if only by imagining that all those flowers are actually Triffids, with extra-long tentacles. The old Royal Tenenbaums wesbite always had that feel for me -- "classily" ornate kitsch taking on an unnatural life of its own, like a biological mutation-acceleration experiment gone terribly wrong -- and I guess it's been a big influence, personally, surprise surprise.

Sorry to everyone who's been trying to get hold of me -- I've been hiding.

+  +  +

Two more things to increase my attention deficit: John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and Marx's Grundrisse.

+  +  +

Amazingly, the friction of Tarantino's Total Fetishism can generate real wonder. I think Kill Bill really is more than the sum of a bunch of Kato masks, hordes of Asian goons, Japanese schoolgirl fantasies, yellow jumpsuits and samurai swords (which are all still great fun). This has probably been true of all of Tarantino's films, but even more so in this case -- despite the heightened focus of the fetishism in this film. It's notable that he's shifted away from wordplay, and towards a succession of images that unfold in a mythic fashion.

The question of Cool as Objectification remains, and through the prominence of a fetishised Asia, this process is ever so heightened. But Coolness has never been otherwise, whatever the focus, and perhaps like gender does more prominently in critical film readings, the race angle casts a light on commodity fetishism in general. Recently in a televised interview I heard Tarantino suggestively compare his work as a director to that of a chef -- "stirring a big pot, putting all this stuff in". All the exotic ingredients! But the auteur mythology can never fulfil itself -- film is always a necessarily collaborative medium, and a whole host of interesting issues remain about Kill Bill's status as a Chinese coproduction. How much is Kill Bill one of the very films it's appropriating?

In the meantime -- captivated by the colour of the film -- I'm looking for some bright yellow nail polish to match Uma's Bruce Lee jumpsuit.

+  +  +

"Cool" is the ability to manipulate arbitrary aesthetic nodes with a certain amount of aloofness, almost "indifference", into a temporary constellation. Interesting.