April 2004 Archives

Tike to Captain America: “This sticky, sweaty goo will keep you tied up long enough for you to chew over the imperialist crimes of your race.”

The Anarchist from X-Statix has all the good lines. That one’s up there with “We’re crazy superstar mutants! We can rip up that whole bourgeois, tight-assed, girlfriend/boyfriend book!”. After a bit of a lull over the last year, X-Statix seems to have picked up plenty, especially on the dialogue front. It’s quite Whedonesque — and on the Whedon front, how about this stuff from the soon-to-be-departed Angel, where the writing staff of late have been consistently out-Whedoning Whedon:

Illyria: All I am is what I am. I lived seven lives at once. I was power and the ecstasy of death. I was god to a god. Now, I… I’m trapped. On a roof. Just one roof. In this time. In this place with an unstable human who drinks too much whiskey and called me a smurf. You don’t worship me at all, do you?

and…

Spike [sound of can tab opening]: What? I’m listening. With beer.

Angel: Forget it. This isn’t a meeting, this is you being annoying.

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And it just gets better with the Japanese Von Bondies Experience: Chris actually did lovesong karaoke with someone who used to go out with Jack White. Am I embarrassing him enough? Perhaps not.

Nik, I agree with you about this Black Spot nonsense — “enough of the critique, let’s do someting positive!”, feh — but I think the left can learn a lot from corporations, and does already on everyday levels of appropriation anyway. What capital fundamentally lacks in the dynamic cultural ecosystems that produce creative life, it makes up in the monstrous and vampiric resources that it can marshall to come up with shit. Everyone knows all the cool stuff that comes out of the military industrial complex, and it ain’t just gadgets — it’s systems, too. And even though capital itself cannot fully internalise the systems that bring creativity, it can undoubtedly do well in cultivating creativity within its environs — it hurts, but we’ve got to admit that there are some corporations that are a lot more creative and dynamic than some activist collectives. And personally, I’m not completely sorry that I’ve worked in marketing for some very scary megacorporations, because I’ve learned stuff that you can’t pick up in some self-marginalising anticapitalist ghetto.

Anyway, back to sneakers: even on its own terms as a bizarrely idealist “antibranding” exercise that dematerialises the structure of the global economy as much as “branding” does, the biggest problem with Adbuster’s Black Spot initiative is that despite (and probably because of) its stated attempt to “rethink the cool”, it’s just not cool. It’s like telling people not to do drugs, and get high on life instead. It’s like Ben Stiller’s undercover Starsky saying, “don’t try and be something you’re not, just be yourself — because that’s what’s cool”. Black Spot is so not going to make Phil Knight quake in his boots. If you’re gonna reduce everything to a left-consumerist level of “social change through choosing between different commodities”, at least be tangential enough to escape the lame master-slave dynamic (which is something utterly different with both the “negativity” of critique and the need to engage with the current landscape). And on that level, it’s all about good marketing.

The eviltwin.com.au holding page is up online, and with my usual contempt for usability and accessibility, I’ve used the highest possible bandwidth for the lowest amount of usefulness and information, like, ever. Nice.

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Starsky: Biker bar, huh? What goes on down there?

Huggy Bear: I don’t know. Listen to Jim Croce, play darts… whatever the hell else you white people do.

So. Hot. Right. Now. Actually, Starsky & Hutch wasn’t nearly as inventive as it could have been — it’s no Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle — but the even-skinnier-than-expected Snoop more than made up for it.

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Chris hung out with the fucking Von Bondies when he was in Japan!

William Blaze writes possibly the best concert review ever.

underwater city! Right now!

Zooey Deschanel is the new Trillian! Why wasn’t I informed??

Back in our lame excuse for a hideous dotcom era, Chris and I worked on what our zookeepers envisioned to become a “style portal” (fnar, fnar). We were going through our obligatory pixel art phase, and oblivious to the demands of portaldom, we sneakily populated the site with little versions of ourselves. Here I am, sporting “the devil’s haircut”:

I wore my hair like that for a few months (before it became a drag to maintain — the inverted “horns” were a pain to shave, week in, week out), out of a desire to have the opposite of Wolverine’s hair — the pointy bits in negative space, as it were.

It was a secret for so long that I forgot to tell: at the Sydney Writers Festival, Lena is introducing Salam Pax, live on stage!

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Oh, and tremble before my new, all conquering venture:

Alternate name: Doppelganger. An all-purpose, umbrella brand.

So, what and where should I study? I live in Sydney. I have a plain vanilla BA, majoring in Fine Arts (Art History) and English Literature — all the wank of cultural studies, but without the rigour of its disciplinary antecedents. I’ve been a practising print/web designer for the last eight years. My interests should be semi-evident from this blog. I want to do/make actual, practical stuff and also create critique. I’ve got some ideas for disciplines and courses, but I’d love to hear yours. Suggestions, anyone?

Last night's dream: I enroll in a weird kind of social geography high school, where they go on field trips around the world, mapping social flows, patterns and stratifications. The principal introduces us new students at assembly, thanking us for joining the team. The school princess is Jessica Alba, who makes me kiss her feet as she parades past. Eminem is also a student here. A field team have brought back gold plated ears of wheat. I eat them all.

It isn't hard for me to find meaning in this. Last week I decided to quit my job, forsaking the world of marketing to return to study. We met Joseph Grima from the Multiplicity collective at Empires, Ruins + Networks, and despite their tendency to reduce socioeconomic phenomena to aesthetics, I find their project of mapping complex and shifting new geographies fascinating. Again, it reminds me of the Exploded View project I've been toying with for the last, um, decade, and it's the kind of thing I wouldn't mind going back to university to research.

And Eminem's been on my mind lately. I brought up 8 Mile at Empires, but unfortunately I got blank stares from most participants. Simryn Gill had presented her melancholy, haunting photographs of empty, unfinished construction projects in Malaysia, accompanied by readings that included J.G. Ballard's Drowned World. This immediately brought 8 Mile's evocation of Detroit's ruination in the wake of the auto industry's downturn: a city full of abandoned buildings, available for torching. And as Deleuze notes in The Time Image, post-catastrophic cinema, such as post-war neorealism, is full of empty buildings and missing populations. There are only mutants and scarred humans, desperately surviving. Here Comes Tomorrow.

And as for Jessica Alba, there's no reasonable explanation.

I haven't really been in the mood for writing. Tomorrow, I will be wearing the shoes of a dead man. Literally. To his funeral.

Anyway, more Empires coverage: something that really annoyed me about the conference was a general ignorance of basic Marxism. The question of whether capitalism has an "outside" is worth debating, but not when the smug response is invariably "no, so that means the only alternative is to 'work within the system'".

As I bitched to Andrew in a break, I thought this stuff had been settled a century and a half ago. Not in the sense of supplying definitive answers, but in terms of shattering the rules of the game forever. The whole point of a materialist theory of history is that it breaks out of the idiotic bind between idealist utopian socialism and cynical reformism, but here we have all these world-weary know-it-alls who are trying to drag us back into such one-dimensional political simulations of the world, in the guise of "living in the real world". Feh.

To answer your question about activism, Nik:

Tony made a passing comment during question time about an incident he experienced back in 1970. It was just after an uncle of his had been killed in a high profile Aboriginal-death-in-police-custody case, and his hippie schoolteacher had taken him to a big Vietnam moratorium rally. He saw students on the front lines, taunting the cops to their faces about this death in custody case. “Who killed XXXX? YOU DID”, or thereabouts. He remembered staring, absolutely amazed that there was a category of people in the world that could do such a thing and still be standing. It was all very well for everyone at this conference to talk about being “real” enough in their aesthetic world to consider “activism” as something to be interfaced with, but Tony insisted that for most indigenous people, “activism” was a mode of speaking to power that they simply couldn’t access.

Interestingly, Lena later made an equally impassioned intervention that was seemingly the complete opposite of Tony’s. In contrast to Tony, people had been writing off “activism” as ineffectual or passe from a liberal-pomo capitulationist standpoint, and Lena, utterly exasperated by the disengaged rhetoric flying around the room, reminded everyone that for certain people in the world, activism was their only choice to survive in the world.

Of course, the question here is what “activism” actually means: organised radical activity, or the reactive institutionalisation of a certain kind of privileged, moral speaking subject. To tease this out, I think that both Tony and Lena’s takes are equally important.

I'm in a cab on the way out from Melbourne. It was a lightning visit for the Empires, Ruins & Networks conference, with zero time to hang, so I'm sorry for not catching up with any of you Melbs peeps. (Though it was good to bump into you there, Andrew.)

{Now I'm in Virgin's whacky Blue Room at the airport, watching a Destiny's Child concert on a huge plasma screen. It reminds me: fuck Beyonce, Kelly ROCKS. I saw her come into her own at the Sydney show we went to, the day after we were beaten up by the cops at May Day 2002.}

Empires, Ruins & Networks had some really interesting speakers, but felt utterly stifling. Ostensibly an art/academy/activism hybrid, it was totally mired in precious, auratising processes that ended up isolating the speakers and silencing most of us. Everyone was frustrated. And so much institutional artwank, under the delusion that it was dangerous. Feh.

But Tony Birch is my hero, and a breath of fresh air. Not only did he put the boot into the sudden, righteous discovery of a bleeding heart by various Labor Party elements on the issue of asylum seekers, but he was also withering about Socialist Alliance's pathetic tailing of this. He also made some really interesting comments about how the spectre of "activism" is often a privileged mantle, and that a great many indigenous people, denied such "social capital", simply have to desperately get by with behaviour that liberals will interpret as beyond the pale.

I was glad to have hung out with Deborah Kelly, with whom I still disagree much but of whom I'm terribly fond and respectful. And I was thankful to talk about the social density of autonomist practice and the dullness of Luther Blissett's Q with the utterly charming Ilaria Vanni.

An admission: I fell asleep during every session.

More soon.