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.
February 2004 Archives
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...
I'm recovering from Club Arak. I danced until my body turned into some kind of fuzzy gas, a weird kind of sublimation.
I wonder, though, about the rising tide of exoticist voyeurism at such events: a teeming horde of leering Anglo fucks dressed up in appallingly clueless "Arabian/Oriental/Asian" fantasy gear. And how is this connected to the potential for "self-Orientalisation"? In the final calculation, is the "Arabness" projected by Club Arak an invitation for the sleazy imperialism of racial fetishists? Of course, no such "final" calculation can ever be made, and the most persuasive argument against this is to consider the dynamic that's usually approached as "who owns the space?". When Nicole brought the house down with a fabulous rendition of "I Will Survive" in her best cabaret Arabic, it surely wasn't "on her own terms" as an authentic Arab (the suggestion of drag undermined this implicitly), but it was nonetheless on terms that engendered autonomy. The sexiest boys on the planet (that's you, Patrick), poaching the "feminine roles" of Arabic dancing as a kind of joyous (but nostalgia-free) cultural reclamation, are another illustration of this. And it was good to catch up with everyone.
Postscript: last night actually shook me up a bit, because I noticed that I was around three people on the dancefloor that I actually hadn't seen all together since our experiences at Woomera two years ago. When Caro and Hon came over for dinner the other night, the subject came up, and they told me that they didn't leave each other's side for two weeks after leaving Woomera. I had to admit to them that when I arrived back in Sydney, I had nobody to talk to. Lena was overseas doing community music stuff in London, and I came back to an empty house, and slowly went insane.
The Divinyls' "Science Fiction" counts as my the latest obsessive entry in "The Summer of the Apocalypse", my imaginary oz rock gallery of nuclear visions:
Never thought that we'd last this long, y'know Always thought they'd drop the bomb Drop the bomb Didn't I?
It's all wonderful and jerky. Chrissie Amphlett's "science fictional" vision is interesting because she's singing about love. Sure, it's used as an ironic opposition, because "I thought that love was science fiction / Until I saw you today", but merely associating the idea of romantic desire with narratives that use a language of technical parameters is still an intriguing move, and the song obviously takes its character from such an association. Of course, this reminds me of another imaginary project, which I've mentioned before: a post-Situationist magazine of (psycho)geography, called Exploded View: Real Life is Science Fiction.
I want to think more about love songs. I tell you, I find lines like "Why can't we give love one more chance?" incredibly moving and profound, and not inane at all, especially when they occur in a Queen/Bowie song/video that is actually all about the nexus between the transformative desires of social movements, their attempted thwarting through State repression and capitalist urbanism, the return of the repressed Dead Girl, and kissing. Yes, it's "Under Pressure", the most radical song ever written. I previously mentioned my weeping uncontrollably to it here, and I've now decided to put the stunning video for it here (you'll need QuickTime). Of course, my reading of the song is totally through the lens of the video, but hey, that's what reading's all about, right? The opening is undeniably there. Open the crack.
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My animated commercial looks like an Eadweard Muybridge motion study gone completely wrong. I'm not sure if this is a good thing.
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Today I saw a little girl kiss a ute.
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The other night I had a dream that I broke into Howard Rheingold's office and stole his laptop. Sorry, Howard -- I feel really guilty.
Today I had the choice of (a) slaving away on an animated commercial, or (b) going to the Good Vibrations festival with a backstage pass. I chose the latter, and I can't thank Spider enough for the pass. Spider plays in Lee Scratch Perry's band, and to be honest, Perry wasn't really firing on all cylinders today -- while still great fun, it couldn't compare with the phenomenal astro-dub that he, Spider and Mad Professor were pumping out last year in Sydney, which was simultaneously heavy and stratospheric. A great line, though: "There are no white people allowed 'ere today. You are all black because all your shadows are black."
Backstage, Spider introduced me to {gasp} Jazzie B and Daddae from Soul II Soul, whose set had been far more frenetic and garagey than I'd expected. I remember that Jazzie B got plenty of flak in the day for his one-dimensional attempts at "authentic" jah love shtick, but fuck it, Soul II Soul were my introduction to shiny, uncomplicated soul-pop that wasn't mired in melisma, and they still rock. We might have lost count of the increasingly samey albums, but and at least they didn't disappear up their own arses, unlike the trip-hop sneer of sophistication. Note: Daddae's vinyl case still has Derek Yates' original Funky Dred design! And they played Michael Jackson's "PYT"! My favourite! Unfortunately my batteries ran out quickly, so this was my only reasonable shot of the day:
Asian Dub Foundation were far more engaging this time. Now they had an audience that could dance, and the somewhat po-faced La Haine live soundtrack experience was banished from memory. Continuing Jazzie B's Michael Jackson theme, they even played a version of "Don't Stop Till You Get Enough"! Heavy! Afterwards, we had an interesting chat with the ADF's John Pandit, who mused about the lure of religious fundamentalism for non-Anglo young people in the face of repression, and how such traps need to be escaped via practical internationalism. By actually doing things internationally. As Owen Wilson would say: disengaged leftist ideologues, listen to your friend John Pandit -- he's a cool guy.
A seam of utter disgust: our man MC Wire was around backstage as a guest, and he was constantly harassed by security at every step of the way, for basically being Aboriginal. Security guards were everywhere, so it was interesting to see the same thing happen over and over again: they'd come up to Wire and basically make it plain that it wasn't okay that he existed, that he was intrinsically a security threat, a wild animal to be controlled, an intruder. And amongst all the blackness backstage -- all day, every act in our festival tent, from Blackalicious to Gangstarr, was black -- it was instructive to see how Aboriginality was specifically animalised. It's okay to be black if you're a cool overseas performer, but if you're a black Australian, forget it. At one point I was walking outside with Wire and Maya Jupiter (whose new haircut is hott!) when these guards come up and pointedly ask Maya and myself, "Is he with you?", as if he were an unleashed dog.
This panic-based typology of race reminds me of school. I grew up with a lot of loudly racist boys from the country who were insistent on the subhumanity of Aboriginal people. And it wasn't a simply "black" thing, either, at least in the sense of a liberal analysis of racism, which puts everything down to "ignorance" and a preoccupation with the "superficiality" of skin colour. To these boys I knew, Aboriginal people didn't really have a categorisable colour. Meanwhile, "real" black people from overseas -- say, from Papua New Guinea -- were acceptable and even cool, a "proper" identity that could be reckoned with. I think the danger with Aboriginality was that it could be anywhere, and most worryingly, it might be too close to home; I knew so many country boys who didn't look particularly Anglo/Celtic, and given the fallout of a government policy that attempted to "breed out the natives" by stealing Aboriginal children from their families, this kind of panic is no wonder, really. Maybe this specific situation of uncertainty is reflected metaphorically in the more general figures of Aboriginality and blackness in an Australian context. And today, perhaps Lee Perry's statement that "all your shadows are black" cut deeper than expected.
