antipopper

Was looking for photos of the Divinyls, and found this:

…which of course reminds me of the story behind this:

…in which Vaughan Oliver (4AD’s sleeve designer) got naked, tied a belt made of half-frozen eels around his waist, and proceeded to dance around the room, spraying eel blood all over the place. Tasty!

Lost in Mike Chapman-style pop-rock. Specifically, the Divinyls’ version of “I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore”. This song has a special place in my heart because it underpinned the training montage in the original Buffy The Vampire Slayer movie. Joss Whedon may have a problem with the film, but nothing can touch that sequence — especially Kristy Swanson’s unbeatable roll-and-stake manoeuver. Take that, Gellar!

A weekend of raised fists.

Went to see Def Poetry Jam, which was more radical and inspiring than I expected. The mixture of spoken word and “progressive politics” can build a facialising mode of expression that fails to be actually subversive (I’m looking at you, Michael Franti), but most of Def Poetry Jam was engaging enough to break free of that. The poets talked about identity, and its material investments and sedimentations (so luxuriously imagined away by those who confuse nomadology with the subject), without falling into reactivity. So instead of noble caricatures of the oppressed, we got performances of “identity” that were like water bombs. Beau Sia’s ridiculously over the top “angry Asian” stage persona had me in tears. Some of you might remember the “Chinese waiters reserve the right to spit in your lemon chicken” piece I performed at the Sydney Writers’ Festival a few years ago; Beau Sia amplifies this approach by infinity. We met the poets and DJ backstage after the show, but instead of thinking what untouchable gods they were, their work made me proud of the work we’re all doing in cultural politics. Oh, and one more reason why Beau Sia rocks:

Also went to see the Asian Dub Foundation’s live rescoring of La Haine. Now, I’ve always been more of a fan of the idea of ADF than of their music itself, and that idea has been tremendously influential in my world. When Lena and I went to London a few years ago, I noticed that Community Music — the music training programme from which ADF had originally emerged — was putting on a show featuring its recent graduates. Because of this cool ADF association, we went along, and were blown away. We decided to visit Community Music’s headquarters, and met the people who ran the programmes. We had a great, rambling discussion about the politics of race and class in our respective countries, and it became immediately clear to Lena that London’s infrastructure for cultural community development in the field of grassroots popular music was something we could learn from, and began planning a London/Sydney exchange on the spot. A couple of years later it became a reality, and Lena took a bunch of MCs to tour and train in the UK. Since then, two of those MCs, Trey and Maya, have released the most significant local hip hop albums of the past year (and don’t let the fact that I designed the cover of one of them distract you from this important fact :) ). And perhaps more importantly, they’ve strengthened their commitment to grassroots community music programmes, running hip hop workshops across the country.

So ADF are a really important inspiration for us. Unfortunately, I found their new live score for La Haine a little too self-consciously “hardcore” and unrelenting. There were passages of great power, but the moments of quiet humour in the movie were obliterated by its new soundtrack. It wasn’t necessarily a problem with “dynamics” per se, but creating the space for engagement with the medium. There wasn’t enough of this space. But I was glad I was there.

Okay, you people coming here to see the animated Daleks, go easy — my webserver has slowed to a crawl.

Just returned from a nearby, self-described “organic fruit and vegetable market”, which was actually a health food store with a smattering of vegetables that were three times as expensive as the stuff we usually buy.

Tell me: how does this benefit anybody except those stupid white hippie yuppies with a large wallet and a sense of entitlement? And the pseduo-scientific-sounding “organic” label rankles as well. Uh, given that most food comes from some kind of lifeform, you’re pretty much guaranteed that it’s “organic”, you hippie dickheads. Sure, it’s a populist (and yet institutionally certified) corruption of “organically grown”, but that rankles as well; while I’m quite cognisant of the perils of capitalism’s destructive approach to the industrialisation of food, I find the assumption of a healthy, originary organicity — counterposed to “chemicals”, synthetic substances and genetic modification — dodgy at best, and utterly terrifying at worst, suggesting a feudal nostalgia.

This is bugs me so intensely because like many people living under late capitalism, I’m growing increasingly allergic to the sorts of preservatives, fertilizers and pesticides favoured by agribusiness. My current bind reminds me of a line (recalled from very hazy memory) in a paper by my old comrade Ben Ross: “While capitalism increasingly threatens the very capacity for the reproduction of life on this planet, I find it personally distressing that the available options for engaging with this problem consist of an assortment of tree-huggers and nature fetishists”. I’m with Farscape’s D’Argo on this: “No offense, but I say we take this tree-hugger, shove him out the access port, and get the hezmana out of here.” But to where? That is the question.

(Just to dissent against yet another apparent consensus.) But yeah, it’s really well done, and I guess I enjoyed it a lot.

MEMO

FROM: Jean-Luc Nancy

TO: Social software designers

Community necessarily takes place in what Blanchot has called “unworking”, referring to that which, before or beyond the work, withdraws from the work, and which, no longer having to do with either production or with completion, encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. Community is made of the interruption of singularities, or of the suspension that singular beings are. Community is not the work of singular beings, nor can it claim them as its works, just as communication is not a work or even an operation of singular beings, for community is simply their being — their being suspended on its limit. Communication is the unworking of work that is social, economic, technical and institutional.

– p.31, The Inoperable Community, trans. Connor, Garbus, Holland & Sawnhey, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1991

My brother saw Ian McKellen at a club on New Years’ Eve, wearing a rainbow t-shirt! (He’s doing an August Strindberg play in Sydney this month.)

A lovely, low-key lunch with Kirsten and Danny, before they head back to the States. Danny, who does stuff around indigenous media production in the Northern Territory, is now working on a project to get some young Aboriginal film-makers to Chiapas in Mexico so they can swap notes with with local radio producers! And meet Zapatistas! Cor!

My concerns of late are best represented in a discussion I’ve been having with Jean:

I [...] want to correct the impression that I think manipulation by “consumers” is simply utopian. That’s why I’ve got this beef about the “digital superego” of the user that needs to be challenged. For instance, the official narrative of user-centric software design has always been about making everything seamless and transparent to aid the smooth manipulation of data by the user. I find that idea vaguely horrifying! This is an easy collusion between corporate ideologies of workplace productivity and (perhaps less obviously) an idea of (internally) hierarchicalised and abstracted (self-)management as a fundamental part of the process of individuation (phew!). The User as Lord of Their (Petty) Domain.

But alternatively, an interaction with design could be like a kind of distributed therapy, in which a user’s relationship with the world is challenged, their teleologies interrupted. Metaphorically: instead of “auto-correct”, what about an “auto-mistake” feature, which would open up creative possibilities and make interesting disjunctures where they weren’t immediately apparent? This has interesting implications for interface design. So it’s not always “noble users challenging design” — we always need to think about design enabling a rethinking of the Self and the world.

This is connected to some long term thinking I’ve been doing for an ongoing “vapourware” software project — Silver Surfer: The Assodissonance Engine. Similar in genre to (and perhaps predating) the Association Engine of Nat Friedman’s Dashboard app for Linux, Silver Surfer would run beside other applications and organise various trains of thought by letting you link various chunks of data together, which it then would be able to track and display according to different schemas, searches or, more importantly, relatedness to whatever data you happened to be viewing at the time. Going beyond Dashboard, you’d be able to share these rhizome-schemas with other people, in a kind of groupware overlay for the Web and other public documents on the Internet.

But transcending all this fairly obvious guff, the interesting thing about Silver Surfer is that it would try to explode the inherent assumptions within “knowledge management” by fucking with the data. This is why it’s an Assodissonance Engine, rather than an Association Engine. In the background, it would always been trying to generate weird associations between data objects, based on various arbitrary rules and adaptations, with your own behaviour as some kind of modifier. Rather than just displaying brute-force related data via common strings, it would also display antonymic relationships, and also display chunks of catalogued data in different documents that had different degrees of separation from each other, leading to unexpected drifts. You could apply shared group schemas (with all their idiosyncratic behaviours) to your private documents.

Hopefully, Silver Surfer would act as a kind of anamorphic database. Like the thrill of a horror movie, this software would continually provide shocking moments of anamorphosis and desubjectification, like my goosebumpy feeling the other week of being swallowed by a whale, of engaging with an environment rather than being a manager, with all the danger that comes with real engagement. And yes, it would be a weird kind of creative prosthesis. The space between the links is the unconscious, an unravelled calligram. So instead of a digital superego, say hello to a cybernetic unconscious.