December 2003 Archives

farscape-o-matic list, with racoons

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it is cool to:

  • look like a racoon this season -- everyone who's managed to pull this off is to be congratulated;
  • be doing prosthetic makeup for THE FUCKING FARSCAPE MINI-SERIES -- everyone who's managed to pull this off (i.e. Coco) is to be congratulated (yay Coco);
  • have gotten ACTUAL HUGS from Ms Gigi Edgely -- everyone who's managed to pull this off (i.e. Coco) is to be congratulated (yay Coco);
  • be a bridesmaid at Claudia Black's wedding next week -- everyone who's managed to pull this off (i.e. the office amazons) is to be congratulated (yay the office amazons).

infernal war apologia

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"Oh my god, this War On Terror is gonna rule! I can't wait till the war is over and there's no more terrorism!"
"I know! Remember when the US had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can buy drugs anymore? It'll be just like that!"
"Right! God if only that War On Drugs hadn't been so effective! I could really use some fucking marijuana right now!"
-- Get Your War On, #1

Infernal Affairs = the best cop thriller I've seen in ages. Double-narc smackdown!

Speaking of cops, it's been a long time coming, but I've been catching up with a bit of Christopher Hitchens' "pro-war Left" rhetoric lately (e.g. flicking through his book Regime Change), and am amazed at the relentless identification with the State, the unquestioning liberal reduction of complex economic theatres to the playgrounds of coherent national actors, and the most appalling erasure of political possibilities, in which any challenge to an agenda of global militarized control must somehow involve support for other reactionary regimes. So where do cops come in? I think the populist reaction (since it was raised during, say, Panama and the first Gulf War) against "USA as global cop" has much truth to it. It's usually expressed in an uncritical, knee-jerk anti-Americanism, but it doesn't end there: a cop for what kind of system? There's the opening.

Once you see the murderous farce of the last decade as a police action, the utter myopia of Hitchens' position (and his "fight against fascism during World War II" analogy) is made clear. Imagine: you have corrupt succession of mayors who've been effectively propping up the Mob in the poor parts of town, through which millions of dollars ironically pass via the drug trade; once the Mob starts to act outside its brief during a period of property market consolidation, City Hall plaster the town with propaganda about how evil the Mob are -- shock horror! -- and gets the trigger-happy Police Department to send in their entire SWAT division to put down and occupy the entire neighbourhood with live ammunition and concussion grenades under the banner of the War on Drugs, so they can lucratively "redevelop" the neighbourhood with the help of some rich pals and some other local rival gangsters. People who oppose this don't always agree: there are people who don't like yet more violence in the neighbourhood; there are people who think City Hall simply shouldn't interfere; there's a minority who support the Mob for various feudal reasons; there are some cop-lovers who just want confirmation that the Mob were planning to bomb City Hall before we actually send in SWAT to crush the region for "redevelopment"; the mayor of the next town is afraid the commotion will hurt commerce in the region; some respect the idea of a police force for fighting crime, but think that sending in SWAT to crush a neighbourhood in the current context has little to do with that; others fret about whether the proper warrant process was adhered to; and there are people who think that the cops are the hired thugs of the continuing regime of fatcats, of which the stupid mayor is the latest public face.

IMHO, all but the last of those positions {*twinkle*} are to some extent misguided or naive, and a few are actually crazy, but for Hitchens, people who hold any of them are effectively supporting organised crime. Of course, being against organised crime somehow must equal support for the War on Drugs, regardless of how corrupt the mayor is. Hopefully posterity will make clear how monumentally and stubbornly devoid of nuanced logic or perspective this argument is. Meanwhile, the very real and sometimes embarrassing confusion amongst the opposition to this police action isn't as terrible as it seems. Some people don't have a totalising intellectual analysis of why they feel queasy when they see the cops let loose with semi-automatic weaponry and random raids on a poor neighbourhood that happens to be run by rich gangsters who used to work for the mayor. They just have a generalised ethical problem with that kind of loaded violence. Other people have everything worked out, but could be a tad impractical when the situation is actually around them.

All such people can and do come together, not necessarily in a "united" way, and despite various analytical and tactical differences, when they specifically oppose police violence, class and ethnic criminalisation and community deprivation under the War on Drugs. Hitchens, meanwhile, obviously lives on Planet Aging Enfant Terrible (otherwise known as the Public Sphere), in which he gets to hobnob with dignitaries and other essayists, otherwise he'd know that supporters of rich gangsters who do come to community meetings about police violence aren't exactly welcomed with open arms. By analogously implying this, Hitchens spits in the face of every mother whose opposes a militarised police presence on her street because her son has been bashed and put away for years after a petty offence. Because she loves the mafia, obviously. She wants more crack babies born in the area, and hey, while she's at it, according to Hitchens, she gives succour to the violent abuse of women via the criminal management of prostitution in the area, too. My god, that's what they do in that neigbourhood! The corrupt mayor must be a saint in comparison! Why doesn't she support his War on Drugs and murderous law and order reforms? Oh, her crazy next door neighbour does. And funnily enough, so do the rival "gangland" figures -- geez, they must have turned over a new leaf! Others are resigned to the violent "cleanup", and want to maintain a stake in the neighbourhood's future. See, there's support in the local area! It's the right thing to do, you armchair leftists! Call in SWAT! They welcome the paramilitary liberation from "drugs" with open arms over there, I tell you.

And what about the people protesting the fatcat developer friends of the mayor, who are going to build a mall when the neighbourhood is "cleaned up" of indiscriminate riff raff (especially anybody who'd want to organise industrially while working in said mall), and also build a nearby prison to house them -- all after a long ban on supplying basic goods and services to the local area (which City Hall justified with the rhetoric of "beseigeing the mafia")? To Hitchens, such protestors are working against the poor by blocking the only conceivable aid the neighbourhood could see. Yep. (How much more reactionary can Hitchens get? It's not so much him becoming a quitter because of a crumbling of internal psychological morale under external pressure, as the Spartacist League explain every swerve to the right by ex-radicals, but instead a conceptual extinguishment of hope on the abstract plane over which both desire and analysis play.)

So it is with the conquest of Iraq. Yeah, the extended analogy sounded a bit patronising, but I've only belaboured it to hammer home the systemic reality of global policing that the inane terminology of international relations and national sovereignty -- used by both liberals and conservatives, for and against the war -- serves to mask. This is the crux of Hitchens' error, where hope is extinguished because the only thing that acts in the world is the nation-state, or at best, a compromised-yet-still-civilised Western Capitalism versus a generalised Something Worse (which for me is implicitly as racist as "those gangstas and their crack ho's in the ghetto who suffocate their own babies", to use a drugwar trope). The whole dodgy situation of corrupt mayors and mafia bosses, under which everybody loses, vanishes in the face of this State fetishisation. It is the error of Identification. So rather than the antiwar Left supposedly supporting the old Saddam status quo, it's Hitchens who is nostalgically fixated with the mirages in the current desert called "politics" -- the real status quo, under which Darth Vader's plea, "join with me -- it is the only way" seems so seductive. Like Luke, I'd recommend jumping into the ventilation shaft at that point -- for some fresh air, after the stench of Hitchens' embalmed political absolutism.

The only thing I'd agree with Hitchens about is that some liberals and centrists who are nominally against the war are really better off in the pro-war camp. If you happily agree with the systematic war on poor neighbourhoods as long as the warrants are all correctly stamped, you should probably rethink your petty position on the UN, international law and the War on Terror/"Saddama"/Evil, too, and get the fuck out of the antiwar movement. I do acknowledge that conversely, there are people who are sincerely appalled by the murderous prospect of "full spectrum dominance", but can only habitually couch this opposition in terms of adhering to various international rubber-stamping procedures. These people still have much to offer, even if they're "wrong". Meanwhile, note that neither oil nor weapons of mass destruction have any clear equivalents in my War on Drugs analogy, not because such things are irrelevant, but because people's characterisation of this war as a repressive police action does not in fact hinge on such things, but rather on recognising the cynical application of repressive violence when they see it -- something Hitchens and the rest of the pro-war Left seem incapable of doing. Meanwhile, the rest of the multitude who for various reasons refuse the current situation will continue to converge. And often not in the "public sphere", because many of us know it's a divorced-from-reality sandpit, where certain essayists like to hang out.

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Now that I've probably lost most of my new readers, I'm going on holiday. See you soon.

sirensongs

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The latest in my series of charmers: Jodi Phyllis of The Clouds, who sings "Pocket" from their 1991 album Penny Century, and "Apollo" from the 1992 Octopus album. This band were the darlings of Sydney's indie scene, which no longer really exists for various (mostly unfortunate) reasons, but besides the sorry fact that pub culture is a gross white ghetto, one factor that most don't want to face is that indie guitar music can get really boring. But not The Clouds. They were tangential. They were pretentious, in a good way. They were also pretending to be a 4AD band, but their obvious debt to The Pixies in particular never seemed to count against them, because they wore their love on their sleeves, swerving science-fictionally from noisy ray-attack to sublime and surfy quiet. And quiet love is what these songs are about: melancholy indie longing, a long white sigh. It seems like so long ago.

more namedropping!

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A whole bunch of people with whom I used to work have now gotten books published in time for Christmas, the most noteworthy being Tony Mott's Every Picture Tells a Story. Tony is Australia's premier rock photographer, and not because he takes particularly great pictures -- he'd be the first to admit this. Rather, it's because he's so affable, generous and funny, and presumably unflappable in the face of tantrum-driven stardom. Anyway, the book's title is a laugh, because Tony bears an uncanny resemblance to Ronnie Wood.

One quibble: there's a section on his magazine covers, and I was surpised to find one for JUICE that I designed (back when JUICE was still in a vague position to rival the Rolling Stone dinosaur in Australia; now it is no more). It's a shot of little ol' Silverchair (ha!), of which Tony is evidently proud. Only, the original shot was so flat, underexposed and generally dodgy that I had to Photoshop it to hell and back to make it work, you bastard, after which it was almost unrecognisable. So nyah, Tony. :)

A great Tony Mott anecdote you probably won't find in the book: he's backstage with Fleetwood Mac just as they're due to go on, and Stevie Nicks is flitting around in a confused daze, desperately asking "which gate are we? which gate are we??". She thought they were at the airport.

shoot to kill

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I thoroughly enjoyed Peter Weir's Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. As usual, I guess an ideological reading of the various political positions tendered in the film is rather fruitless, since it's mostly reactionary, schoolboy stuff, and everybody knows it -- I actually had a hankering to watch a stodgy war film, and I'd been recommended Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin novels a while ago, during a discussion about all the boys'-own naval allusions in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The idea behind that conversation was that Star Trek was always better when it was militaristic, and that its liberalism actually worked against it; when the setup was so obviously naval, tacking on feelgood moralism just made it cringeworthy.

I'm not sure exactly what I think of how Master and Commander's intense homosociality was played, especially since it reprised a lot of Weir's well-worn and pukeworthy private-schoolboys-together tropology. But there were moments of real tenderness (the younger officers were all really, deliberately cute), and conversely, I think Weir evoked the stench of paranoid masculinity and sublimated energy in an enclosed space quite well. Myself, I was swooning over Paul Bettany, who plays the ship's surgeon Stephen Maturin; as a skeptical, humanist foil for his captain, he's the ultimate template for Star Trek's Dr McCoy -- he actually blurts, "Me, I'm against authority!" at one point. Only, McCoy wasn't such a looker, or a dandy, and neither did he play string duets with Captain Kirk in the latter's quarters (ooh err!), at least in a non-slash, canonical universe.

As the film paints the rather pointless miseries of inter-imperialist slaughter with a somewhat sympathetic brush, so too does it extend this ambivalence to the study of nature, of which Maturin is such an enthusiast. The natural sciences of the Enlightenment were slipping into the worst kind of mechanistic domination, on all levels, but Weir somehow manages to conjure a luminosity around Maturin's fascination with beetles and birds. The ship's brief visit to the teeming Galapagos islands is breathtaking, and all the more compelling because Maturin's zealous collecting obviously foreshadows Darwin's visit in the Beagle. Thus, Maturin also offers a template for Spock, the Science Officer and object of desire who shares a certain intimacy with the Captain. (Substitute 3D chess for the string duets.)

So speaking earnestly, perhaps Master and Commander represents the "best" of what Star Trek was attempting: an ambivalent but still sympathetic military adventure, with a sense of wonder. But without the camp fun and the bumpy heads, that's a little too earnest for my liking. Ha!

On another note, Peter Weir's daughter Ingrid used to do some design stuff with me when we were at university together, so I was happy to note that she designed Master and Commander's main titles! And Iva Davies, erstwhile of '80s Australian electropoppers Icehouse, cowrote the score. To celebrate, here's their cutest song, "Hey Little Girl", from 1982's Primitive Man. Hey, it was Number 1 in Switzerland!

carrying a torch

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On the heels of Zooey Deschanel, and spiralling further into terminal unhipness, I present two more irresistible chanteuses-out-of-time: Kristen Vigard (left) and Mary Margaret O'Hara.

      

I've written elsewhere about Vigard's definitive rendition of Bacharach and Costello's "God Give Me Strength" for Allison Anders' Grace of My Heart soundtrack. Hers is a tangential story. As a child, Vigard had the starring role in the original production of Annie, and appeared in The Black Stallion (which was shot by Zooey Deschanel's father Caleb). She later acted in a few soaps, and in the late '80s fell in with the Red Hot Chili Peppers, with whom she recorded her one and only album in 1988. (To fall out of step with blogospheric consensus, the Chili Peppers aren't an open and shut case of suckitude -- I'll have you know that their last album is free from cock-in-sock dudeness, and is actually quite delicate and moving.) "Slave To My Emotions", written with the Chili Peppers' John Frusciante, is delivered gorgeously, but also suggests that if she doesn't fade into obscurity, her destiny lies in interpretation -- Burt Bacharach and Elvis Costello really fumbled the ball when they failed to immediately write her an album's worth of material in the wake of "God Give Me Strength". I mean, if Costello could write an entire album for Transvision Vamp's Wendy James...

Mary Margaret O'Hara also only recorded one stand-alone album, also in 1988: the haunting Miss America, which inspired a generation of skewed indie songstresses. It opens with "To Cry About", which recently received a lot of attention via Everything But the Girl's Back To Mine compilation. O'Hara followed the album up with an EP of (yes) Christmas songs, from which this version of "What Are You Doing New Year's Eve" is taken, and then nothing. But like Vigard, she's done some recent soundtrack work -- 2001's Apartment Hunting -- for which her fans are thankful.

As always, the only way I can make this post sound like I don't have a hopeless crush is to say blah blah blah, the polished mirror spanning the aural unconscious, blah blah blah. Yeah.

master race

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iStopMotion is great fun. After finally clearing a bunch of crap from our study, I spent a couple of hours using the app to animate a couple of Dalek salt and pepper shakers.

Look ma, see what I made. (You'll need QuickTime to view it.)

uran, milady?

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An early Christmas present from Lena. Yay!

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So cool: Tom Jones and Catatonia do a version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside". Tasj tells me that Tom steams his voice every night.

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I feel like doing something with my body now, Mister Spinoza. Pippa, with her wonderful, everyday corporealities, has reminded me that bodies exist. Thankyou. And that weird "mammalian" feeling in Movern Callar is a touchstone, too. Thanks, Flux, for that recommendation. (Indeed, go visit him now to download that insane LCD Soundsystem song, and maybe you'll crash Apple's .Mac servers. A smoking heap of wreckage -- I can see it now!)

current preoccupations

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Mel C and Zooey Deschanel. How, I ask you, could they not rock? Their contributions to "boring mainstream culture" are Actually Good. This sometimes involves the odd duet -- Mel C with Lisa Left Eye (bless 'er soul) or Bryan Adams (she makes him sound half decent), and Deschanel with Elf costar Will Ferrell, doing a luscious, in-the-shower version of "Baby, It's Cold Outside". (How is it that I actually enjoyed a feelgood Christmas movie?) Deschanel does an even more charming version (available here for a short time) with Leon Redbone for the soundtrack, singing through a lazy smile -- a perfect hybrid of Ella Fitzgerald, Doris Day and Astrid Gilberto. These Big Marquee Duets are on constant rotation here. So strange! Weirdly, the lyrics of "Baby, It's Cold Outside" are borderline date-rape stuff -- I mean, Deschanel does a wonderfully deadpan "say, what's in this drink?" halfway through. Whatever. Duets are the new black. I'm off to look for my Tom Jones albums...

i'd sell my soul for total control

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Desktop computers may never be ready for prime time. Back in the early '80s, they didn't do enough for anyone but hobbyists to use them, and now they create complex ecosystems that only the very patient can navigate. Meanwhile, there's that huge swathe of people who Just Want Things to Work. People don't expect their phones to crash. People don't debug their phones. Well, okay, they do with the new crop of phones that run Java apps, but you get the idea: we want seamless experiences.

This week I installed Mac OS X Panther, and there were enough teething problems for me to wonder how people at large are coping with administering their own desktop systems. For instance, under Panther, my inkjet printer is no longer supported by either its manufacturer, Apple or the open source GIMP Print project. I knew this before I installed, but was certain I'd figure something out. And after many hours of research, I did come up with quite an elegant solution: I had to get a hold of Acrobat Reader 4 for OS9, and place an alias of it in a new directory, "/Library/PDF Services", so I can seamlessly open -- from the Print dialog box -- a PDF of the document I want to print in the Classic compatibility layer, which does support my printer. But I noticed that after opening Acrobat in Classic, my Mac would slow down appreciably. I opened up Panther's new integrated Activity Monitor, and noticed that when Acrobat's open and doing nothing, it chews up %30 of the system-wide CPU usage. Same with the otherwise excellent NetNewsWire. So I'm sure to close Acrobat when I'm done printing, and I've replaced NetNewsWire with Shrook, which is much less of an attention-seeker, and can also export RSS newsfeeds to my iPod (yay!). All very good. But unless they like pottering around with this kind of shite like I do, how are people supposed to figure this kind of stuff out?

Update: NetNewsWire's CPU leakage problem has been fixed in the latest version. But I'm still sticking with the iPod-tastic Shrook.

simple things mean a lot

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It's the terror of knowing

What this world is about

Watching some good friends

Screaming "Let me out"

Pray tomorrow gets me higher

Pressure on people

People on streets

Turned away from it all like a blind man

Sat on a fence but it don't work

Keep coming up with love but it's so slashed and torn

Why -- why -- why?

-- "Under Pressure", David Bowie & Queen

I watched the video for this song today, and it made me cry. A lot.

we are the dead

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Unbelievable: I've seen some awful publicity photos for Dead Like Me that glam up Ellen Muth to try and make her not look like a murderous Yoshimoto Nara kid! Stupid. The truth:

speak + spell

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Spellbound provides an interesting slate for readings that deal with race and class, particularly the idea of the American Dream -- a meritocracy mythology -- being internalised by migrant families. Just like Idol (Paulini wuz robbed!), there seems to be so much stake in one's own allegiances to the competitors; for instance, I was rooting for Ashley, a young black girl from Washington DC to whom the National Spelling Bee was "just another obstacle", and afterwards felt a weird camaraderie with people who had Ashley sympathies.

i can't frelling believe it

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Claudia Black from Farscape just popped into the office!!

[grid::brand]

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Okay, I've got no energy to say anything useful or new, and no real energy to think much about what|others|have|said.

So instead, I'll cheat, and reproduce a rant from a while ago:

Saturday 1 March 2003

Branding: Just Do It

I feel barely human after the killer deadline (hence my short posts of late). All the madness, just for this: the silly Lee Jeans website. Hours and hours of late night digital photography, DV camerawork, endless Photoshopping, video editing, Flash crises… I guess the best thing about the site is that you can abuse it by sending naughty graffiti postcards of defaced photos from the catalogue to all your friends. I started doing this as soon as we sent it live. Picture of a boy and girl humping on top of a fridge = “FUCK THE WAR, LET’S FUCK”. Picture of a boy with gold chains = “YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS”. Etcetera.

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Am absolutely furious with the latest issue of Adbusters . I’ve said this elsewhere before, but while I’m obviously sympathetic to the whole anti-corporate culture-jamming mission, I’m somewhat dubious about the tendency for anti-consumerist types to fetishise “brands” as being the ultimate evil — a move which I think is a tragic misattribution of the way power operates in culture and the wider material world, which leads to an impotent politics of product boycotts and the like. This kind of phobic disavowal of mass culture is actually quite reactionary, I find, and is a covert form of commodity fetishism, deflecting analysis away from how society is actually organised.

But nothing prepared me for the amount of self-righteous, moralistic bile in this current issue. So much smug, self-satisfied sneering at people too ordinary to be enlightened, bicycle-riding vegetarians. An almost religious (and certainly feudal) mythology of “Nature” being the antidote to all that is “artificial”. The branding of anyone who wears products with logos on them as corporate zombies and whores who love to exploit people in the Third World. Hell, I’m a corporate whore with the best of them — I even work at a company that does PR work for Nike, ferchrissakes — and even I can tell, from a revolutionary perspective, that this is moralistic nonsense.

Don’t get me wrong, Adbustery types: I think any revolt against alienation must include some enjoyable smashing of the commodities that often dull us, and which certainly paper over the material relations of production. Just be prepared for the idea that the people who most often do this kind of thing in everyday life are the unenlightened, Nike wearing zombies you so despise.

bad refugees

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This is an excellent, radical critique of liberalism by Shane. (No permalink -- the flakey blogspot archive strikes again.)

mainly mouth

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This is a drawing of a dinosaur that I must have done when I was about four years old.

concerned person

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Xenu strikes again. This is a fax that my friend Caitlin sent to my place of work, about six years ago.