antipopper

This just in from Linlee, our French correspondent:

so i am at work today minding my own business, arranging books, carrying on etc and then i hear “oh pharrell, this is linlee, she speaks english. if you need anything just ask her okay?”

Nice.

Disney has invited us to a sneak preview of The Incredibles. How exciting! And it’s the last Pixar film Disney’s distributing — ooh er!

Far be it for me to recommend any brand of Leninism, but I have a soft spot for the whacky ideological orgy that was non-hierarchical French Maoism of the early 1970s, particularly the strand known sexily as mao-spontex, or “spontaneist Maoism” — an anarchist-influenced kind of “post-Leninist Leninism” that dominated direct-actionist radical French politics in its day. While keeping a literal attachment to Stalinism, in practice mao-spontex groups like Vive La Revolution (VLR) and La Gauche Proletarienne abandoned concepts such as the vanguard party, embracing decentralised confrontations with the authorities. Of course, simply embracing “spontaneity” in lieu of Leninism was itself a dangerous capitulation to another kind of linear and authoritarian metanarrative, one that created an ad-hoc, cult-enforced “line” that was magically explained as the workings of the dialectic, and which could only result in reactive disillusionment after so many confrontations with the State (the right-wing New Philosophers of the ’80s were all old Gauche Proletarienne members). It’s not without reason that Felix Guattari casutically refers to mao-spontex as a phenomenon about which “one will never say enough bad things”. But hey, it sounds cool.

So it is with Whedon-spandex, the term that defines my blog’s new tagline. It arises from this, which is apparently the cover of the first of Joss Whedon’s new Astonishing X-Men comic:

There’s a thread on Barbelith that’s full of alarmist speculations on what the abandoment of the movie-style leather uniforms and the return of horrible, old-school spandex costumes could possibly mean. To put the cat amongst the pigeons, this is my imaginary soliloquy from the heart of the Xavier School, under new management:

“Xavier’s ‘X-Corporation’ sucked. We became the equivalent of men in suits, and we failed to avert a fucking human-mutant war, which is what the X-Men were supposed to be all about. Those jackets lulled us into such a false sense of security that our oldest genocidal enemy paraded around in one of them, right under our fucking noses. Those dudes in the Mumbai office had the right idea — the world needs the freakish difference and excess of superheroes, not the stifling conformity of stylish corporations. Break out the spandex, kids!”

Joss Whedon and John Cassaday’s abandonment of the black uniforms isn’t to my own taste, but even if they were made to do this by Marvel management, I really think they’ll be able to do something cool with it, for all the above reasons. Whedon-spandex. Apply it correctly, in a revolutionary manner, and see doctor if symptoms persist.

David Bowie was really good last night. The most curious thing, though, was the “mature and affable” persona that he’s been projecting since the Hours… album — after all the metaphorical maskwork of previous decades (even what critics cite as the his “pop” phase of the ’80s, as if he wasn’t pop before), he wants us to think that he’s “just a guy”, if one that has an alterna-iconic edge. But in its own way, this is yet another manipulation, this time of the disarming sort: at first glance, the crowd of middle-aged Anglo suburbanites seemed prepared for a solid greatest hits package at the very most. It’s amazing, then, that Bowie got away with playing so much material that was unknown to most of the crowd — more than a third of the set was stuff from the last ten years. And a good thing, too: the most theatrically thrilling moment was “Hallo Spaceboy” from his 1995 Outside album; after his polite onstage banter, the image of Bowie menacingly silhouetted against a brilliantly white LED screen was a return to the Bowie of dreams.

Bowie’s trying to reconcile various aspects of his career, and succeeds to a large degree. I always thought that his ’80s take on “China Girl” was a dubious trivialisation of the shambolic Iggy Pop original, but his “nice, slightly alterna guy” persona was still comfortable playing shiny pop of that sort alongside the Pixies’ “Cactus” and “A New Career In A New Town”, my favourite instrumental from Low! While the show wasn’t anywhere near as pretentious as I think a Bowie gig should be, this kind of eclecticism was still surprisingly challenging. Nothing from Station to Station though, which was a pity, because I know this band does a killer “Word On A Wing”. But Bowie really needs Carlos Alomar to return on guitar — Earl Slick’s great for the wonderfully stuttering glam hits, but his blustery rawk nature obviously pulled the set in that direction, and even a slightly embarassing lead guitar solo. Mike Garson to Earl Slick: my demented piano solo smacks down your rawk guitar solo ANY TIME, boy!

The funniest moment, though, was when Bowie introduced all the players, but pretended to forget Gail Ann Dorsey, his bassist. Everyone was yelling out at him in horror, as she fidgeted in the embarrassing spotlight, but he’d apparently moved on: “back in the ’80s I did a song with Queen; we really don’t have time to play it tonight, but if we did, the person who’d sing Freddy Mercury’s part would be… GAIL ANN DORSEY!”. They did play it, of course, and I cried. And that’s the crux of it, really: Bowie’s career reconciliation involves placing “Under Pressure” centrestage as a heartbreaking pop masterpiece, and I’m totally down with that.

Excuse me, but what the hell kind of journalism is this? I’ve never read Variety, so I don’t know how pervasive this almost autistic use of industry-speak actually is, but reading the article in question was like steeping into another dimension. And it’s got nothing to do with protecting “proper English” from “debasement”, either — I’m fully down with the idea that language is defined by its grassroots vernaculars. But shite, the language in that Variety article isn’t a grassroots vernacular, it’s simply insular and smug.

“Oh daddy don’t you want to be my subject?”

– Kelis, “In Public”

…on TV, for the time being, anyway: Angel was cancelled on Friday. In the words of Joss Whedon: “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I took the road less traveled by and they CANCELLED MY FRIKKIN’ SHOW.” Poor guy.

I almost totally lost it yesterday. Not only did French parliament vote to ban the Muslim hijab in public schools by something like a 16:1 ratio, but I lost a long and involved post about it.

The short of it: when huge portions of the Left cannot differentiate its debates about the politics of religion from “civilizing”, State-happy adventures in repressive colonialist “justice”, when they opportunistically place those who have endured murderous Islamic fundamentalist regimes in the appalling position of being “authentic informants” to provide the grist for the racist discourse of “they mistreat their women”, when they actually picket schools to keep Muslim girls out of the public education system, it is cause for genuine despair. It isn’t civilization under siege, but civilization doing the sieging.

If French socialists are supporting this under the banner of “secularism”, this action is to secularism as George Bush’s imperial rhetoric of “freedom” is to freedom, and further proof that the deep ethical cleavages that are disintegrating the old idea of “the Left” follow the contours of philosophical allegiances to, or escape from, the State. This isn’t, as Steven Shaviro has recently charged, to do with the somewhat misplaced anarchist fetishisation of the State as the source of all evil (at the expense of acknowledging Capital), but grappling with (conscious and unconscious) investments in the State as the actor of uninterrogated narratives of progress, to which both social democracy and socialism subscribe.

In a shocking blow to the interests of hypertextia and usability everywhere, I’ve been awarded an Australian Interactive Media Industry Association Award for last season’s Lee Jeans site, in the Best Advertising/Marketing category. Yay, me! This is the same site that was a finalist in the Cannes Lions Advertising Awards, and this time we uh, submitted our entry by accident — we meant to submit the current site, but somehow got the URL wrong in our incredibly detailed application, which the judges obviously didn’t read. Oops.

I’ve mentioned this before, but the best thing about the site is that you can paint animated graffiti postcards and send them to your friends, which can obviously lead to all sorts of mischief. Example: above is the first very g-card I sent. As you can see, my aerosol technique leaves much to be desired, but you get the picture…