June 2004 Archives

I’m stuck in a whacky occupation of Worley Corporation, a war profiteering company that has an $800 million contract with the US Army to “reconstruct” oil infrastructure in Iraq. About thirty of us arrived at their office and started supergluing little toy soldiers to various surfaces, sticking up posters and generally making a polite nuisance of ourselves. Unfortunately we’re now in a negotiation deadlock with the company about confronting them with questions about their role in Iraq.

There are different positions amongst the occupiers as to how and why we should go about this: some want to get answers about how Worley’s contract is a reward for the presence of Australian troops; others think the quest for official word from these guys is somewhat irrelevant. I’m sympathetic to both kinds of position, but I also reckon that it’s pretty naive to think that a “valid” free-market contract, rather than one directly linked to Australia’s war involvement, would be much less scandalous. As with most of my opinions on the “scandals” surrounding the war, such things are horribly indicative of how things are working, but that our opposition shouldn’t hinge on corporations behaving or misbehaving according to various ideas of capitalist respectability.

We’re going around in circles with their minions. Tired now.

The most awful thing in the world is waiting for the train on a platform with lots of boys who’ve just been to an Offspring concert. Just the right mix of idiocy, smugness and overwhelming Aryanness. Fuck. Off.

The cutest moment in film history occurs in Stanley Donen’s Charade: “I bet you don’t really need those,” says Audrey Hepburn as she snatches Cary Grant’s glasses and tries them on. Her eyes widen. “You need them,” she intones gravely.

These are the kind of moments that Sarah Michelle Gellar had in abundance in the first few seasons of Buffy, before the weight of too-literal, over-psychological drama descended on her shoulders. Tasj’s interest in “Hush” recently led me to even reappraise Season 4, in which you can still find so many shining, throwaway Gellar moments like [frowning, fumbling with leaky writing implement] “stupid pen…”. Now that’s acting. I mean it. None of the macho method crap, which is just another form of rockism.

But as the show shifted dangerously into histrionic Party of Five-isms, the increasing unlikeability and brittleness of her character, while interesting on paper, really didn’t serve Gellar well at all, and launched a fantasy within Buffy fandom that Gellar can’t act. What do you want, the prog rock guitar solo of acting? It’s like turning on your favourite punksters because they didn’t fare well as the backing band for a Hobbits on Ice arena concept show with Rick Wakeman. While the show never really revolved around Buffy (she’s rarely anyone’s favourite character), Gellar’s strengths were also the show’s structural strengths — the ditzy elegance, the economy of intonation, and the savvy, popist implication of depth, rather than its detailed and uninteresting reproduction. Here’s to Gellar.

Fly’s on the money. Here’s where I admit that I bit the bullet and bought Cyndi Lauper tickets. But to do so, I’m probably not going to Kelis. True! Lena was outraged when Caro and I discussed this last night, but I’m sure we talked about this twist — she probably thinks I “forgot to mention” Kelis in order to “protect her from the tragic truth.” :) Anyway, to celebrate bittersweet fate, here’s the b-side to “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, “Right Track, Wrong Train”.

Okay, so I saw Troy the other day, and while it was infuriatingly pat — the whole Trojan war happens in like, three weeks (bah!) — it did prompt me to think more about how heroes figure in the battles of mythology. When Hector faces off against Patroclus, all the fighting around them stops, and when he slices open Patroclus’ throat, there’s dead silence. The idea of it seems so unlikely and ridiculous, like some kind of tacky JerryBruckheimerVision, but this scene of heroes flexing and bleeding in a sanctified bubble still somehow seems disturbingly appropriate. When confronted with this phenomenon on a reconstituted Trojan battlefield of the future, Hockenberry, the scholarly observer in Dan Simmons’ Ilium, notes:

I explained the Greek concept of aristeia — warrior-to-warrior or small-group combat in which an individual can show his valor — and how important it was to these ancients and how the larger battle would often pause so that the soldiers on each side could witness such examples of aristeia.

It’s not just displays of valor as a general substance that could coalesce anywhere, though — it’s no accident that aristeia is derived from aristos, “the best”, which also forms the basis for aristocracy, “the rule of the best”. And while heroes like Hector and Achilles have a logistical impact on the outcome of the war — they’re superhuman killing machines, and also serve as important attractors for morale because of this — their paths mostly occur on a higher, more “spiritual” plane to the logistics of battle. Their pivotal moments are imbued with significance other than military. Achilles doesn’t care about the war, he wants historical immortality.

In this I’m reminded of the function that Luke Skywalker plays in the Star Wars films. Luke gets his military-logistic duties out of the way in the first film by blowing up the Death Star, and then veers off onto another plane of dodgy spiritual significance. Interestingly, he only becomes a Commander in the Rebel forces, while Han Solo becomes a General, joining the characters like Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar who have real world authority, but who are quite incidental to the films. In Return of the Jedi, Luke’s final showdown with Darth Vader and the Emperor occurs in a completely parallel narrative: he lets himself be captured in order to face the true evil of the Empire on a moral plane, while the Rebels engages the Imperial Fleet militarily.

In a time in which formal aristocracies seem somewhat irrelevant, the spiritual element of rule and war, which has gone from monarchy to investments in fascism in the last century, is reemerging in a glut of epic movies. Besides being just good fun, I can’t help but think that the sword and sandal epic is also the pill we take to forget about stuff like Abu Ghraib — it’s longing for a mythical time when war wasn’t so dirty. For when it had aristeia.

Is it just me, or does the Pixies’ “Bam Thwok” sound more like an Amps tune? I always thought the best thing about the Pixies was the space between Frank’s hyperbole and Joey’s tributes to Queen. A fragile relationship, and I’m not hearing it.

Dr. Raymond Stantz: Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by dickless here.
Walter Peck: They caused an explosion!
Mayor: Is this true?
Dr. Peter Venkman: Yes, it’s true. This man has no dick.

Some things never get old.

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Was bowled over by Royston Tan’s Shiwu (15) at the Sydney Film Festival. Tan got real teenage Singaporean gangstas to play the alienated, “no future” kids in the film, and as one would expect, it’s some fucked up shit, refusing both humanism and pomo sarcasm with moments of pure pain and strange humour. But despite all the constant references to hopelessness and despair, most noticeable thing about the film is the amount of care and tenderness that the boys demonstrate to each other. It even gets self-consciously tear-jerky at points, but true to my own prejudices, Shiwu seems proud of that emotional truth. And it helps that one of the guys looks just like Richey from the Manics.

Artemisia Gentileschi’s “Judith Slaying Holofernes”, c. 1612-1613.

Gentileschi painted this stunning work shortly after she endured both (a) being raped by a fellow artist, and (b) the public torture she was subjected to in order to extract her testimony during the ensuing trial.

Not the torture and beheading you were expecting from my title, was it? Fucking blogosphere. And yet…

The toast of Cannes, and barred from the Oscars because “Palestine is not a country”, Elia Suleiman’s Yadon Ilaheyya (Divine Intervention) lives its status as a medium — in the occult sense. It brings the sterility and absurdity of occupation into the realm of the ecological, to strange effect. Under Israeli supervision, neighbourhood planning issues turn into a disjointed series of bizarre, petty incidents. Separated by the Israeli checkpoints between Ramallah and Jerusalem, well-dressed Palestinian lovers resort to whacky, sublimated encounters in parked cars, their hands caressing, eyes averted. Everything is crisp, turtlenecks are worn, and trip-hop plays in the background. It hard to tell whether Suleiman is (a) simply making a statement about the dulling of affect under occupation, (b) overturning stereotypes about the lack of “cultural sophistication” in the Middle East (i.e. the trope of the raving barbarian buffoon), or (c) being an arch but enthusiastic blow-dried MOR stylist, like Saint Etienne. Perhaps all three. It’s quite brilliant.

But where is hope in such an allegorical ecology? There are a couple of moments where the absurdity becomes wonderfully fanciful: Suleiman’s male protagonist lets loose a red balloon, emblazoned with the face of Yasser Arafat, which drifts triumphantly over Jerusalem; and in a dreamlike interlude, Israeli gunmen at a “kill-an-Arab” shooting range are overwhelmed by the glorious figure of Palestine embodied in an Arab woman superhero, complete with bullet-time fx. These moments are beautifully rendered, but to me they feel like moments of utter desperation, of clutching for transcendent, fetishised symbols (national mythologies) from the the quagmire. And given the way these moments contrast with the mundanity of living the occupation (there is a wonderfully effective checkpoint scene, driven by an insanely arrogant Israeli soldier, that takes forever), it seems that Suleiman knows this. And this is the most melancholy thing about the film. It may not be Suleiman’s project, but how would one attempt allegorise the vibrant, underground alternatives to civil society that sprung up during the first Intifada: the secret schools, infrastructural networks, women’s collectives and strike committees? And if these things are being relegated to the past, then surely it’s partly by the very thing lurking behind transcendent national symbols: the non-civilian militarisation of petty national authority that various Palestinian leaderships (e.g. Arafat) have played into — a Zionist trap if there ever was one. Sigh.

Some evocative commentary from Plums about Hanif Kureishi and migrant identity crisis. “Suddenly there was this book about people like me.” Funny you should say this, Plums, because last night on the train I noticed that practically all the kids in my carriage were asian, and it got me thinking of my own childhood (which was in the immediate wake of the White Australia Policy), and how isolating, marginal, wimpy and uncool it was to be a middle class asian kid in the 1970s.

Since the various shifts in Australian culture that have happened since the 1980s, the problems around race, culture and power that most non-Anglo kids in Australia have now are neither better nor worse, I imagine, but they’re definitely modulated in very different ways. One thing I envy is their relative untroubledness with simply walking down the street. And it’s got very little to do with white people being more “tolerant” (feh). Just seeing that really evokes so many emotions for me, and I challenge anybody with a literalist opposition to “identity politics” to explain how feeling like a powerless freak is not linked to a need for identification with other people like me. That need is not reducible to microfascism or the tyranny of homogeneity. (And yes, we probably need new terminology for it. Because it is a sharing of crisis as well as familiarity.) Often, I find that critiques of “identity politics” are nothing of the sort, and are instead a capitulation to atomisation, or an excuse to destroy our sensitivity to difference so that unacknowledged racism can happily replicate, unhindered.

Anyway, I was working up to mentioning Brian Wood and Becky Cloonan’s DEMO #6, “What You Wish For”, which really touched a nerve:

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Oh, and what self-obsessed post by me wouldn’t be complete without a starfucker story about Hanif Kureishi? But wait, I’ve already told that one…

I use John Gruber’s embedded software on a daily basis, and his lucid Mac nerdery is often really helpful. But his most recent arguments about why OS X has fewer security problems than Windows are nothing short of a form of class war:

Windows is like a bad neighborhood, strewn with litter, mysterious odors, panhandlers, and untold dozens of petty annoyances… The Mac is like a good neighborhood, where the streets are clean and the crime rate low. You don’t need bars on your windows in a good neighborhood; you don’t need anti-virus software on the Mac.

This appallingly phobic “good neighbourhood”, “bad neighbourhood” rhetoric, and his additional use of terms like “zero tolerance”, crystallise the war on the poor as the figure of “security” itself. Protecting oneself from malicious data loss = gated communities in cyberspace. Isn’t there a better way to talk about operating system security?

To cope with the heartbreak of missing Cyndi in concert, here’s some live tracks from 1984: “Money Changes Everything”, “She Bop” and “All Through the Night”. Notable in particular are that voice during her onstage banter, the muscularity of the arrangements, and the jaw-dropping ending to “All Through the Night”. Sigh. And I’ve thrown in her more recent, weird appeal for a maternal android (spookily fit for Spielberg/Kubrick’s A.I.): “I Want A Mom That Will Last Forever”, from yes, the Rugrats in Paris soundtrack.

Some boys take a beautiful girl
And hide her away from the rest of the world
I want to be the one to walk in the sun
Oh girls they want to have fun
Girls just want to have fun

These may possibly be the most moving lyrics of all time, performed by someone who, like me, cries when she listens to songs. But Cyndi Lauper tickets are too pricey for me. Damn.

Early colour photographs of Tsarist Russia. I had no idea, but colour separation photography was apparently used experimentally as far back as the 1860s!