Richard Greenberg’s titles for Flash Gordon seem to have slipped through the cracks of popular culture, but like many other aspects of Mike Hodges’ campy 1980 film, they deserve constant celebration. Hot hail!
May 2004 Archives
Having recently set up my Mac again from scratch, I’ve made a decision to avoid Microsoft products: Mail.app under Panther is now fast enough to replace Entourage; Microsoft Word files can now be opened in Mellel (the multilingual wordprocessor I used to set the Farsi version of the Temporary Protection Visa guide); PowerPoint files open in Keynote. And now that I’m running a small business (eeeeeee!), I guess I’ll have to find an Excel replacement.
The ease with which I’ve ditched Microsoft Office indicates much more than the work of people creating equivalent products, though. Besides the availability of these products, I ditched Office because I hardly used it anyway — besides Entourage, there wasn’t one single office app that I used every day. Tech commentators have been worried for years about the lack of innovation in the desktop arena, but perhaps this arena is relatively stagnant because the very idea of the monolithic desktop office app is past its use-by date. Like a lot of people these days, I’m increasingly using a lot of small tools: I write in VoodooPad; I blog in Ecto; I read news in Shrook; I instantly message in multiple protocols using Proteus. It’s a bit obvious, but all of these desktop apps involve networked documents or packets of information, rather than discrete, standalone documents, which have become less and less important to me. The “office” model is disintegrating.
I finally saw Inna Thigh: The Sista She Story on the weekend, and it was possibly the best musical/theatrical performance I’ve ever seen. Everything you’ve heard about Sista She is true. No, everything you’ve heard is more true. I’ve always stayed away from any mixture of music and comedy, but since Buffy’s “Once More With Feeling” I’ve come around, and this feminist hip hop orgy of sophisticated crassness totally overwhelmed me. Sheila MC Eila and Rasheda Eda MC will ROCK YOUR WORLD. I think I’m in love. :)
Hmmm: the Angel series finale felt like a season cliffhanger because Mutant Enemy were being kinda defiant, and metaphorically the episode reflects that. On paper, that’s great. But as something that played out on a screen, there was almost no resonance there for me.
In other news, I’ve wrapped my first freelance job, and I feel good. Yeah.
After stressing about it so much, the Salam Pax event went really well. The dialogue was a bit abstract at first (I was sooooo nervous), but when it got comfortable enough, I whipped out the Destiny’s Child references and we had a bit of fun, and got to talk about cultural politics, which was cool. An affable, funny guy. Katina’s small daughter asked him this heartbreaking question about if he felt really sad walking the streets of Baghdad, and he gave a really thoughtful answer about all the ruins — didn’t patronise her at all. Empires, ruins and networks indeed. He’s leaving on Sunday night, but we’re pressuring him to change his plane ticket so he can come to Club Kooky with us. How cool would that be? Thanks for a great chat, Salam and Sohail. (The most surreal moment? When Salam turns to me and says, “you’re a blogger, you know how it is, when people link to you…” and I snort, in my best areyouforreal voice, “not like you do!”, eyebrow raised. Dude.)
Lena: You really had those sectarian Trotskyists going! They were so excited — they thought they were going to recruit you, and then you come out with that dirt on them. You really know how to push their buttons. [Pause.] Is that what you do with me?
Me: Yeah. I treat you like a Trotskyist sect.
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Meanwhile, the real Ben and Mena Trott were recently groping in the dark during that tornado about Movable Type 3 licensing. It feels wrong to add to the somewhat inbred blogospheric commentary on the matter, but I wanted to note that despite the sincere and heartfelt interview they recently gave about their business — how they want to listen to the immediate demands of their users, and so then wisely create tools that can be used in ways that they themselves never imagined — it’s clear from the mountain of recent misunderstandings that they still had no idea how people were actually using their software. (Three days ago, the original MT3 license unwittingly forced many existing users into the position of having to pay unusual amounts of money for less functionality if they wanted to upgrade.) In fact, the “leaky niche” of the product — a fairly flexible content management system that was originally intended for “developers”, but nonetheless branded like a shrink-wrapped product — almost guaranteed that this would happen. Ben and Mena’s error in judgement, and the resultant furore, were going to happen sooner or later, and now they’re scrambling to catch up with their irate users by altering the license and doing a little digging into the really-existing Movable Type landscape.
All of this serves to remind us that the crack in the world opened by the contradiction of “use” and “design” is, at base, uncontrollable. Ben and Mena have tried to handle it in good faith by trying to simultaneously
keep Movable Type’s commodity status (it’s no surprise that like their beloved Macintosh, it’s both a powerful brand and a largely proprietary system), and
focus on building MT as an “open” platform (rather than literally tacking on features as they’re requested).
The whole thing obviously spun out of control, which is more interesting than good or bad (although Ben and Mena might disagree). It caught up with them. Meanwhile, with something like Word, Microsoft try to handle the problem differently: they endlessly focus-group, and they find that most people don’t use most of the features, but that everyone uses a different subset of features. Chasing the ghost of an aggregated “user” — a postmodern Modulor Man — they then earnestly create a huge, bloated product that has every conceivable feature. The anti-niche. Thus, Microsoft Word’s presence in the world is an endless Dorian Gray-type moment, suspended in time, in which it is revealed as an over-engineered and overpriced monstrosity.
So if I had to choose between an inevitable gaffe like the current licensing scandal or the glacial torture of wordprocessing hell, I’d choose Ben and Mena’s current dilemma. Both express the limits of instrumentalist design in a world of flux, but some limits are preferable to others. But thankfully, we users don’t have to choose, at least on the blogging tools front, because there are plenty of tools to choose from, and a lot of the better ones aren’t proprietary. MT3 untenable? Move on. The avalanche of anger directed at Ben and Mena reminds me of Apple’s “iPod battery scandal” of last year: with both cases, the unusual frenzy of bitter complaints (rather than criticism) about getting “extorted by people who’ve sold out for big bucks” strikes me as the false naivete of consumer pettiness, underwritten by an unacknowledged fetsishism, rather than a critique of capital accumulation. Such overinvested apoplexy about a single boutique product can thus only spring from a weird, stalker-based kind of twisted brand loyalty, or even “loyal opposition”, which only arises with sexy cult brands like Apple and Six Apart’s Movable Type. And so ironically, the problem is again partly of Ben and Mena’s own making… The crack is out of control.
I’ve realised that without the constraints of a full-time job, I’ve gone to seed very quickly. Must work on that. Must drink water at regular intervals, have meals at the right time, etc.
Thanks for everybody’s suggestions regarding study, although it seems Deborah wants me out of the country for some reason :). Right now I’m eyeing, among other things, the MA (New Media) at the University of New South Wales. It’s a part time MA coursework thing, which suits me fine for where I’m at — I’ve been away from the academy for eight years, so an MA by coursework seems to be the stimulating thing to do. Hopefully it’ll have enough interdisciplinary hooks. And be affordable.
Parallel to this, I’m trying to assemble some kind of business plan for my freelance design work. For the getting of monies. Any advice, Abe? Bobbie?
If that wasn’t enough, I’ve been roped into a fucking onstage dialogue with Salam Pax on Thursday night. Nervous. Come if you can — it’s on at 6.30pm at the Parramatta Riverside Theatres. Salam’s also on a panel with Harvey Pekar on Saturday. (I know I can’t compete with a Salam Pax/Harvey Pekar combo bill, but come to mine anyway.)
Went to Natasja’s place for a preview of her Slayage conference paper. It’s on “Hush”, from Buffy Season 4, and it sounds fascinating. On a seeming tangent, she showed me freeze-frames of Giles’ notepad, in which there are all sorts of interesting notes about the Bill of Rights, and a shot of the local Sunnydale newspaper, which had a hilarious, barely-glimpsable article on the front-page about Bill Clinton being embroiled in a “presidential-enhancing drug” scandal. Bored art directors are us! And yet it’s incredibly suggestive about the texture of meaning in the episode. Given the context of well-dresed demons who steal speech, what exactly is democracy? Tantalising.
I’ve finally said goodbye to my job, and am basking in delicious bittersweetness, so I’m going to leave a few threads here hanging for a bit. I know you’re still waiting for my alternative to capitalism, Mr Blaze, so the sneakiest and most abstract reply is that Marx was vague about communism for very real reasons. I reckon a tantalising void is preferrable here to a “positive” project, i.e. having a clear blueprint for society. Besides being inevitably linear, ahistorical and closed to the real movements of change in the world, the latter always seems to require strong leaders and creepily willing subjects for implementation. (I’ll never forget someone from the local International Socialist Organisation — the sister organisation of the British SWP and American ISO — telling me that after the revolution, there’d be no Melrose Place. How forward thinking!)
The real “positivity” we need is the flowering and hybridising of already existing creativity and resistance into new, unheard of mutations. And despite the abstract language, this is a practical imperative for organising in the here and now. Rather than waste time on philosophically idealist fantasies of how, say, “the law” will work in the Anarchist Federation of the Future (latent authoritarian wish-fulfilment alert!), how can we productively engage with how people are currently problematising concepts of legality and creating new approaches to techniques of the social? For example, how are women in rural communities collectively dealing with issues surrounding rape? (I’d imagine that’d be far more important, interesting and extensible than any grand alternatives to capitalism that some armchair wanker like myself could theorise.) How can we take those things to different places in partnership with others? How can we connect these instances to form alternative principles to our current social contracts? You see, my policy is to always answer a question with a question. :)
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Meanwhile, I’ve been obsessively listening to incredibly white and frosty “troubled AOR”, which I find intoxicating at the moment. Black Box Recorder, Saint Etienne and especially the Pet Shop Boys’ Release. Acoustic guitars with drum machines, disturbingly tasteful bleeps and sad lyrics. Today the Pet Shop Boys’ “London”, with its eminently dignified story of emigration from the former Soviet bloc, had me in tears:
Looking for hard work
or credit card fraud
What do you expect from us?
We come from abroad
To get ourselves a new job
On a building site
They work you so hard but
We trained to fightWe were in London
Let’s do it, let’s break the law
We were in London
Tell it like it is
Not very PC, but it’s precisely this strange “inappropriateness” that makes it really moving, in a way that actually challenges the potential for any imperial or paternalistic condescension. This and Black Box Recorder’s “The Facts of Life” (you may have your way with me, Sarah Nixey!) have gotten me through this time of flux. There’s always thorns amongst the pretty petals. Perhaps this is what people didn’t get about Air’s 10,000Hz Legend — that to enjoy the sweetness of their debut album, one also needed to be sensitive to the spiky, uneasy undercurrent in their aesthetic. Most of the criticisms of 10,000Hz Legend seemed to paper over this, seeking an uncomplicatedly easy-listening experience.
And on another pole, Johnny Marr’s guitars on Release point, in a reversed way, to what makes me not mind Robbie Williams in the slightest. Oh yes. I haven’t really kept tabs on Robbie’s career, but I liked his early solo stuff because it sounded like an unlikely hybrid of the Pet Shop Boys and Oasis. Listen to the first track of his first album: “Lazy Days”. It’s the bridge that makes you realise that Neil Tennant’s cabaret whine and Liam Gallagher’s lumpen sneer are strangely similar. Robbie was a “gay Oasis”, as they used to say. And you know, I don’t mind that at all.
Abe and Az, I’d reiterate my initial preface to my BlackSpot critique: that “on its own terms [as antibranding], the biggest problem with BlackSpot is…” — I was deliberately not looking at the bigger picture. But I don’t think the bottom line of the matter is that we “progressive” types need to offer alternative commodities to appear viable as a social movement (eh?), nor that we need cheaper sneakers (although the latter would be nice).
Abe, I really don’t think that “anticorporate movements” are undercut by the fact that everything out there is produced under various dodgy conditions of exploitation. Global capitalism is kinda defined by having totalised the world in the logic of exploitation — just because “friendly flavours of capitalism” don’t seem to be winning any points in the taste tests is no reason for anticorporate movements to seem either hypocritical, impractical or full of wishful thinking. That’s kinda the point: this universal state of exploitation is what we live in, and one to which we must create real alternatives through the power of labour — the captive subject that actually makes everything happen — by creating mutant social spaces where labour is no longer subject to the demands of capitalist work, either virtually, momentarily or on a sustained basis. It’s clear that Adbusters’ Kalle Lasn is against this: he has explicitly stated that although the idea of BlackSpot production is to pay lip service to organised labour, they wanted to go “offshore” to avoid having to “buckle under the unions” in the “First World”, thus locating production in areas where I guess people are used to being more “flexible”. His idea of competing with Phil Knight is more a reactive form of whacky corporate ressentiment than anybody engaging in collective, liberatory practices. Occupying oneself in petty competition with another bosses while getting down with the real business of setting sustainable horizons for exploitation just sounds like a variation of business as usual.
Incidentally: given that I’ve only got a couple of days left as a corporate whore, I guess I should publicly tell the story of how Nike (yes, they’re a client) sent over a couple of damage control PR goons to our office to give us “the line”. After showing us a corporate video about how they’re now responsibly managing exploitation in Vietnam (the video actually opened with the immortal words, “No communist ideology here…”), they came up with some great obfuscation of the economic terrain in terms of reified geopolitical theatres, like how they were “able” to achieve such “humanely” sustainable exploitation in Vietnam because it was “so stable”, unlike in other “horrible” countries like Indonesia, where of course anything goes. (Unspoken, but inferred: the “instability” of having a Western-backed junta in power means that “we” naturally shift gears to get away with, uh, murder). Amazing. So the price of this “stability” in Vietnam? Oh, they get paid 20c an hour there. “Now we wouldn’t want to get paid that little, of course,” the goon said. “That’s why we should all be thankful that we live in a country like Australia.” Amazing!
But here’s the best bit: they got onto talking about those horrible protestors who are blockading their Niketown stores. “When it comes down to it, you can’t actually argue with these people,” one of them said. “I mean, you either believe in capitalist globlisation, or you don’t.” And you know, he was absolutely right — much more right than Kalle Lasn. These structural issues are what it’s all about. I think it’s a given that people who protest and engage in direct action against exploitation (whether they’re white students in Seattle or workers of colour in Vietnam) have little choice but to wear the products of that exploitation, whether it be Nikes or something more affordable. (Yes, Nikes seem to be designed for only those that can afford them, but that’s actually never been true in a strict sense — people who can’t afford Nikes are often the ones buying them, and those who simply sneer at this fact, I wager, are the ones who can, uh, afford to. “Stupid working class sheep — why can’t they be bicycle-riding vegans like us enlightened souls?”) So, to stoop to either half-assed, entrepeneurial competition with Nike or to collapse into a neurotically misplaced, phobic disavowal of brands is to refuse an engagement with these conditions. Funnily enough, Adbusters now does both.
