antipopper

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!

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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.

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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.

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

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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.

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