After more than ten years, I happened to come across Kultur Documents on the web. Caution: it’s a fairly big download for scans that are so shite, but it rocks. Back in the early ’90s, such stuff was a major source of inspiration for Left Alliance material in Melbourne and Sydney.
Scooters stowed, they stride darkly down a scalloped pedestrian tunnel to the platform, in perfect formation, infrared goggles down, headphones pumping their own soundtrack through their local peeda network. Fucking kings.
I wrote that six years ago, and have been waiting for it to come true. (And I make no fucking apology for predicting the future retro-coolness of Fatboy Slim in said story. Okay, I apologise a little. But not very much.) In the last couple of years, iTunes streaming via Rendezvous has come close to achieving such a local, ad-hoc streaming music network, but only for laptops. But now we have tunA.
+ + +
And thankyou for your concern — I am okay.
In New X-Men #117, Cassandra Nova taunts Henry McCoy:
You’re a devolver! Where will your ‘gift’ take you next, I wonder? Will you become an insect? A worm? A slithering, incoherent slime mold still trying to charm women with its awkward poetry?
Well, over the weekend I turned into an incoherent slime mold, full of fear and loathing, as if someone had thrown up on my soul. It was as if all my higher functions had shut down. A good time to swap servers for my blog — in between psychotic attacks, I was remapping permalinks with htaccess files. No higher functions necessary for that activity, just autopilot.
But perhaps this could become a passage, a learning experience, if only it were somehow social and only theatrical. In Grant Morrison’s Invisibles, when Lady Manning visits de Sade’s new institute, she sees a horrible place called “The Semi”, full of illness and fevers. A young woman crawls on all fours out the front door, covered in filth. Manning later meets the woman, who is now beaming:
We abused each other, we experienced psychotic, morbid states of shame, disgust, greed, fear and power… the video’s in the library — “Turtle Comes Out of Her Shell” — it’s got me on the front covered in shit, spunk and Scott’s Porage Oats. But… the experience cured my shyness and anorexia. And the lump I had in my left breast is gone completely.
Perhaps.
On 8 April 1983, Steve Jobs said to John Sculley, "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to change the world?". (Sculley was then CEO of Pepsicorp, and Jobs was headhunting him to run Apple.)
Right now, I'm selling sugar water. Not much changing of the world going on, revolutionary or otherwise. What's scary is that sometimes I find what I do quite satisfying.
Today I had a really weird argument with a friend from work about Blur vs Oasis. He'd just seen the Britpop documentary Live Forever, and made the casual observation that in the interviews, Oasis came off sounding rather clueless, with an overinflated sense of their own historical importance, while Damon Albarn seemed more reasonable, reflexive and real about the past. This rather got my goat, and I started off on an extended rant about smug middle class wankers and the retroactive continuity of false graciousness, with extra added fighty goodness about how I preferred Oasis' superficial overt racism to the snide, know-better, liberal racism of Blur.
It actually got quite heated, and voices were even raised. I insisted that the "Blur are cleverer than Oasis" discourse was actually a form of class war, and even how this this was connected to Israel's assassination of Sheik Ahmed Yassin. Oh yes. I said the idea that "Blur are smarter and more gracious than Oasis" is a direct reflection of how liberal discourse and the rhetoric of reasonable statesmanship have allowed mass murderers to appear enlightened. I brought up how Shimon Peres rewrote his own history on TV last night, with his all-so-reasonable claims that assassinating Hamas leaders was "counterproductive", and how this reasonable rhetoric was placed next to footage of crazed Palestinians in the streets of Gaza, calling for Israeli blood. (This despite the fact that Perez himself ordered provocative assassinations of Hamas leaders while he was Israeli Prime Minister, and that under his Labour Party, Israel established more colonial settlements in Palestine than previous governments.)
I ended up pushing my own buttons, I guess.
Went to the Disney preview/briefing today. The Incredibles looks quite good -- Holly Hunter sounds cool as Elastigirl (who has a great elastic setpiece involving evil henchmen, a long corridor and various sets of blast doors), and there's a great throwaway Cyclops reference via a superhero called "Gazerbeam". More than half the footage we saw was still in an animatic or untextured state, and was really interesting to watch, like the time I went to the Disney animation studios and saw bits of an unfinished feature film as pencil drawn animation, complete with soundtrack.
I was wrong about it being the last Disney Pixar film, though -- there's a John Lasseter film in the works called Cars that Disney are releasing in late 2005. What worries me about that project is its potential magnification of the usual Pixar anthropomorphism, but seemingly without any kind of angle or critical lens, which at least Toy Story and Monsters Inc attempted, with their musings on the subjectifying requirements of industrial civilization. But in Cars we have automobiles running tyre shops, a fancy that just doesn't wash with me. Just going on the premise (there wasn't any footage to see), it seems to be all the worst elements of Pixar -- the "whacky zany" Californianisms, the fetishisms, the conformism and the weakness for trite fables -- rolled into one picture.
Oh, and the non-Pixar stuff that Disney presented? Total tank-o-rama. Feh. Except for a fantastic short called Lorenzo, which was like some kind of Edgar Allan Poe story for cats.
Flyboy, for the rest of the week, the content of my work can be summarised in three words: "STILLER", "WILSON" and "DOGG". Yeah.
I am, officially, an imbecile. I only just realised that the following things were in any way related:
The paint fumes at home are intense, and yet there's so much to do. At least my evil Israeli Defence Force gasmask has actually come in handy!
Hey, you can get limited edition prints of the stunning (pre-digital) motion graphics from the 1981 Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy TV series. Right on. The guy behind the magic: Rod Lord. Praise be.
Our home is slipping into another dimension. Today I come home and the walls are stark, the furniture under plastic. All our belongings packed away, the kitchen inaccessible. Eating from a sachet. Outside, the heat is too oppressive, so I stay in, and feel like the house in ET, smothered in a false womb... as the men in hazard suits close in.
Andrew, on the off chance you're reading, I spent my day visualising point-of-sale ideas for a world-conquering soft-drink. Thought you'd be amused.
I have very little to say in the nearby identity/commonality/difference controversy, except to note that the historically sedimented parameters of the broader debate in which this is taking place are fairly loaded and not particularly useful. (I'm talking the historicity of the very thing we call the individuated subject, not just what theorist/activist X said a few years ago.)
And in any case, whenever a debate starts getting into the territory of whether Deleuzian vectors are "good" or "not good enough", I like to remind all concerned that flash floods, earthquakes and bushfires deterritorialise. It's like a physics of microsociality, not an ideology. Hence the need to supersede morality with strategy.
Anyway, I'm writing this from my phone, and my hand is sore...
In my latest reading of Ender's Game, I've noticed that Orson Scott Card borrows Ursula Le Guin's faster-than-light communications device, the ansible. Alas, Card, that font of "respectable homophobia" -- the deep homophobia of reproductive civilisation -- apparently doesn't realise that Le Guin's "ansible" is an anagram of "lesbian".
This is a test post from my new 3G phone, a Motorola A920. It's more of a PDA than a phone, and after some frustration with the stupid network, I think I'm in love. I'm also determined to blog "properly" from my phone, i.e. not have a moblog sideblog as it were. Let's see how I go with the A920's handwriting recognition...
Here's my latest project, the new L e e J e a n s site, which was launched today. As with last season, you can move anything around, resize it, spin it, whatever, and then make customised screensavers, animated e-cards and desktop wallpapers out of your designs. And now everything's transparent, which was really hard to do. But unlike last season's impression of sloganeering, this time the campaign's rhetoric actually has some equivalence with some real "ideological" imperatives. I don't know if this is a good thing. But just for kicks, I added some extra words to the campaign's vocabulary to create a more gung-ho context. I hope I don't get fired.
Ah, Capital's recuperation of resistance is a funny thing indeed.
Why is it that when the T r o p f e s t people at work find evidence of S q u a t f e s t , they "naturally" ask me about it? Hmmm... (I animated the big hook this year for the T r o p f e s t ident. Additionally, I animated a jeans commercial that was shown exclusively at the festival. While my sympathies undoubtedly lie with S q u a t f e s t , I am, unfortunately, a corporate whore. For those with an investment in subcultural oppositional identities, I guess this is terrible news.)
Orson Scott Card is an awful, awful man. But yesterday, by chance, I started reading Ender's Game again, and lo, it is good.
