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.
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.
On the holiday bookstand: George Monbiot's The Age of Consent: A Manifesto For a New World Order. In the first chapter, Monbiot writes off the totality of both Marxism and anarchism in a couple of inane, "common sense" paragraphs, in favour of a boring kind of liberal internationalism. There's also an offensive aside in which he contrasts theorists of "anti-power" such as John Holloway with essentialistically "concrete" Third World Others, who of course have no truck with such nonsense like challenging the substance of politics itself, because they're too busy being "real". Feh.
Apple's announcement of GarageBand today was interesting -- it's bundled with all new Macs from this month onward! There are concerns that Apple's treading on third party developers' toes, but the emphasis of Apple's ever broadening iLife suite spans the gulf between the home user and the prosumer -- a territory that needs more definition. There are great little apps everywhere, and the pro packages loom from above, but Apple really is perfectly poised to deliver products like GarageBand that edge into that prosumer middle ground.
Of course, GarageBand, with all its sensible, good-taste presets, is also perfectly suited to making terrible, good-taste music, full of aspiring authenticity -- Steve Jobs even got John Mayer (who's due for a chainsaw haircut from Flux, if I remember correctly) to demo the software onstage at his MacWorld keynote. But fuck it, as a dabbler, I'm never going to learn any of those pro music apps, and at the other side of the spectrum, ultra lofi stuff like GameBoy chip music isn't my bag, so GarageBand is perfect. It has guitar amp presets like "British Invasion" or "Surf", which is, yes, totally evil, but also kinda cool for slackers like me. An analogy: dodgy desktop publishing software enabled a wave of horrible design, but in the hobbyist late-'80s, it was also my start in design. (That's supposed to be a good thing. Right?)
Speaking of a digital life, here's something I wrote while on retreat a couple of weeks ago:
brief hints of a hidden enormityLately I've realised that I like to play in a digital world because it is a theatre of control, of quantifiable manipulations. Of course, it's a lot of other things, too: a space of creativity, and of the weird, productive disjunctures between use and design. But the digital superego is undeniable. Sometimes it goes recursive, and it needs to be broken down, or at least recontextualised.
I have a special fondness for the south coast of New South Wales. Even in summer, it is not "perfect"; it's often moody, blustery, mercurial. I'm staying in a town on a beach, with a large mountain behind, its bulk curving down into a shoulder of a peninsula. Long after sunset tonight, I was on the beach, feeling myself bleed into the white noise of the ocean. I looked to the side and saw the mountain's huge shoulder looming, faintly silhouetted in a misty light. And above that, a massive section of sky, hollowed out in red. It seems that the locals are fond of shining extremely bright lights up into the night, and the effect is the opposite of what I'd have expected; rather than blandly revealing the world, the enormous, hidden bulk of it is barely suggested in the sea spray. It's like a permanent version of what happens when lightning strikes -- you catch a glimpse of the terrifying being of what you thought was a blank sky. Huge shapes. It's like being swallowed by a whale, as I imagined it from Pinnochio and Jonah.
In these moments I feel like an animal, a small mammal in a primeval world. The digital superego is shed, and in that instant I rediscover the pleasure of the self. A decentralised self, so not a genital pleasure, but one that literally moves across the surface of the body: I remember how to lazily shiver like a cat, my nonexistent fur standing on end in waves down my back and to my extremities. Goosebumps.
+ + +
Totally random -- my latest in footwear:
I'm gonna get me a barcode reader!
Just saw an interesting documentary about Paul Robeson. It was so long and gripping that we forgot to go out into the sunshine. Of all the tragic apologists for Stalinism and popular-frontism, Robeson is surely one of the most dignified, despite both his silence on the Terror and his embarrassing "strategic" alliance with US nationalism under the banner of anti-fascist struggle.
But it nonetheless bites. To unpack Hitchens' WWII-as-just-war metaphor for the Gulf even more: just as there's a difference between armed resistance to fascism and reducing oneself to choosing between fascist and non-fascist imperialisms, there's even a significant difference between that reduction and the even greater mistake of actually bolstering US nationalism as "the lesser of two evils", which is what Robeson unfortunately found himself doing. During the rise of fascism, the Comintern first had a line that all social democrats were "social fascists" -- that there was no effective difference between bourgeois democrats and Nazis -- which would have kept all the ultraleftists happy, but greatly reduced Stalinists' political influence. So they conveniently reversed their position in favour of an uncritical popular-frontism, which effectively meant policing the rest of the Left on behalf of those they'd previously called "social fascists". Such false choices are all underpinned by politics as identity, and at root, by statism. They have little to do with the fact that (unlike the case in Iraq) one of the world's most fearsome military machines was loyally in the service of a fascist state -- in itself the overriding real-world problem, which does pose tough decisions -- and more to do with power. (Anti-Hitchens aside: you'll rarely hear it, but the first Gulf War ended so abruptly because the disloyal Iraqi conscript army deserted in vast numbers and started a workers' revolution against Saddam and against the global ruling class. So the Allies bombed the living daylights out of them. As they would. Make no mistake what the Allies are doing during the current occupation: smashing unions, etc. It's a police action.)
But conversely, I'd also like to think that when examining social movements, we can do them the service of not reading them literally. Otherwise we reduce people's struggles to the ideological pronouncements of their leaders, which is my main beef with a lot of bookish ultraleftism -- its insistent ideological reductionism, itself a form of crypto-statism. To simply equate Robeson with the Soviet death squads that "liquidated" anarchists during the Spanish Civil War is to unconsciously recement a philosophy that leads to hierarchy and statism.
Anyway, the documentary had a great speech from a 1960 anti-nuclear rally in London, in which Robeson urges us to save the world from "the suicidal gyrations of a few men, who refuse to see that a new world has already been born". Rather than take that as a literal lionisation of the Soviet Union as the tribune of this "new world", I prefer to read it as a more complex acknowledgement that the preconditions for freedom already exist, and that what we need is to grasp this virtuality.
