July 2004 Archives

Hey, scroll down a bit or click here and you’ll find that Deirdre from More Crap For The Masses has left us a blow by blow account of her dream come true — playing support for Cyndi Lauper. Thanks, Deirdre.

On reflection, I should point out that my review of Cyndi’s show was largely fragmentary because there was simply too much to process or express. Deirdre is utterly right about Cyndi connecting on an almost cellular level with her audience: I have never been so moved or astounded by a performer, ever. I’m sure I’ll be trying to make sense of the intensity for years to come.

Split Enz were titans in Australasia, but never became a world-conquering force. It’s a pity. Setting aside the obvious explanation of “they looked silly!”, perhaps there were too many tangents for them to remain focused, with a total of three singers/songwriters — two at any one time. In the Britpop years I was happy to discover that Tim Finn’s pole of Split Enz had clearly influenced Blur at their best, but Noel Gallagher weirdly chose the wrong stream, taking Neil Finn’s later, better-known work with Crowded House as a template for his lamest Oasis material.

For those unfamiliar with this stuff, here are my favourite (and very obvious) hits of New Zealand’s golden age of New Wave pop: Split Enz’s “Poor Boy” and “Six Months in a Leaky Boat”, plus the perennially bouncy “Counting the Beat” from original Enz frontman Phil Judd’s one hit wonder outfit, The Swingers.

Some abstract notes:

I’ve been thinking about ignorance. When it surfaces in a narrative, it can mark a thrilling moment of crisis where structures of knowledge are simultaneously dissolved and presented to stretch to infinity. In fiction, keeping one’s characters ignorant is often seen as poor storytelling technique, but that’s not strictly true. An emphasis on ignorance can signify when a narrative turns epic, in a good way. Dramatic irony rests on ignorance — we have some inkling of the hidden structure of the universe, but the characters might not.

The key is a limited form of “identification”; without it, the irony is lost and becomes smugness. On the other hand, if we lived out a total, mindless identification with our characters, knowing only what they know, we’d be left with the dramatic equivalent of what Walter Benjamin calls the bland, “additive” methodology of traditional historiography. We need an arrangement in which the tension between knowledge and ignorance feels productive — as Benjamin puts it, the “constructive” approach of historical materialism. Perhaps it’s not so much “identification” with the characters that steers that course of friction, but genuine (non-sentimental) sympathy.

What if we approach political discourse in a similar way? For instance, in this period leading up to the US Presidential election, there’s been much disdainful liberal rhetoric in the blogosphere about the stunning ignorance of “the masses” about the real situation in both the US and Iraq. Indignant liberals know better than the masses of apathetic dupes who maintain the status quo, etcetera. Here’s a clear case in which the chance for the productivity of dramatic or tragic irony has been lost, and decomposed into smugness. Yes, ignorance exists. But in this case, our real ignorance of what the fuck is really going on, and what we can do about it — which cuts far deeper than knowing juicy bits of gossip about George Bush — is refashioned by liberal discourse into something that can be answered with “vote for John Kerry, you idiots”. The “ignorant” deserve another four years of George Bush, etcetera.

As I wrote a year ago, the long-running liberal attempt to create a populist scandalography of “the Fahrenheit 911 situation” fetishistically transforms the systemic functioning of the world into a limited series of individual failures and complicities, and the indifference of people at large to such an obviously inaccurate proposition is interpreted as “ignorant people getting what they deserve”. For radical change, we need real drama, and thus a productive appreciation of the dramatic irony of our current situation. For that to happen, we need to radically sympathise, without fetishistic identification, with the real ignorance — what the fuck is really going on, and what can we do about it? — that the protagonist of this story constantly grapples with. Because the dramatic setup for the story is that our hero has always had the power to win.

There’s been so much fucking death lately it’s not funny, and my brother has somehow succeeded in driving me into the waiting arms of Morrissey. Not really in the obvious, gloomy sense of his persona — I’ve never really been a fan — but more for the texture that his band produces as an ensemble. Morrissey’s voice is still a key element, but I’d like to ignore his current renaissance as a star and instead subsume his self-monumentalisation into a more “generic” vision of the comfort of men. It’s not particularly interesting music, sonically, but I find it strangely snuggley — much more than The Smiths, whose strength always seemed to be in being so unexpectedly sleek and shiny (here, too, Moz as an institution still perversely recedes from view for me). Meanwhile, Morrissey’s unassuming band makes dignified, romantic noise that sounds like warm grey rain. It’s comforting. And Alain Whyte and Boz Boorer are such strangely handsome rockabilly lads.

…you can bet your life we will destroy them. I just realised that Internet Explorer for Windows’ stupid CSS rendering bugs have been making my blog look totally whack-attack for weeks. Sorry guys. I’ve kinda fixed it now to work around Win IE. But regardless, do yourself a favour and get hold of Firefox instead. Firefox actually, uh, works.

Spiderman 2 is yet more proof that Kirsten Dunst is an acting sensation. Really. Does she create a complex and accurate simulation of internalised psychology? No. Does she go crazy with a wide regimen of excellently macho method acting mannerisms, developed specially for the role after much research — surely the marker of “great acting”? Uh, no. Does she make you identify with her character? Often not. In fact, her technique is fairly one-note: she delivers a killer look. And that look is so multipurpose, so welcome to an influx of determinations, that if used with great timing, it will be enough to carry her entire career.

The key is that her eyes go dead. Whenever any of her characters has a meaningful moment with another, watch the muscles above her cheeks slacken and her lids grow heavy as the irises seem to glaze over. Expressionless. It’s killer. On the most important level, Dunst has grasped that great acting isn’t about the supposed presence of emotion, and that often, it’s about the absence of that which we think signifies emotion. In Interview With The Vampire she sucks her first blood, gives us that look, and whispers, “I want some more”. There, it’s chilling. When she’s in a cafe with Peter Parker and her eyes go dead, it’s an engulfing void that says “I am your whole world”. In Bring It On, her cheerleading masterpiece, the dead look most often signifies bratty outrage.

It doesn’t matter whether it’s “authentic” (and thus somehow “convincing”) or not. What matters is that it creates the right effect. And that will always flatten that army of character-acting pretenders like the melismaphilic, over-emoting Mariah Careys they so resemble.

I admit I’m a bit of a brat attack, but contrary to earlier reports, I’m now fairly hopeful of going to see Kelis tomorrow night — for free. Ahahahahahaha…

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In retrospect, I’m now outraged that when I played Estelle’s wonderful “1980” to Lena and Caro yesterday, the latter exclaimed, “She was born in 1980? She’s so young!”. Um, Caro, weren’t you born in 1983? You have hereby waived your right to complain about people saying this to you in the future.

I said I was over it, but here’s one belly of the beast I wouldn’t mind entering: there’s an internship open at Intel Labs for their Urban Probes project. Intel have done some interesting, Situationist-inspired stuff about urbanism and mobility lately, like Asphalt Games, which originally came from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU, where Abe is at the moment. Yes, it’s co-option, but it’s nonetheless very interesting co-option, which is better than all the less-than-interesting co-option I’ve done for the last few years…

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Yesterday we caught up with Maria and James before they went back to London. James is doing user interface R&D for Symbian devices, and he had some tantalising things to say about the delineation of “sitting forward” and “sitting back” activities in a mobile UI context. I’ve been wanting to get in on this stuff ever since I wrote a paper on wireless futures four years ago:

Unlike the desktop Internet’s browsing model, the wireless device arena requires more of a boomerang model, in which elegantly returning is more important than doggedly navigating.

Since then, I never had the time or institutional space to adequately explore the implications and possibilities of mobile interactivity, so perhaps that’s something to aim for. Not the internship in particular, but a commitment to thinking and practising technosocial mobility in various projects.

Cyndi Lauper: so much feeling in such a small body. How could she have simultaneously been so dignified, crazy, elegant and uh, unusual? Highlights:

• Total engagement. The blurry shot above is one of many trips she made into the audience, jumping up and down on the seats. She is a crazy woman.

• She made an extended speech about how she lost her best friend Colin to AIDS in 1985, and then wrapped herself in a rainbow flag and sang “True Colors”. At the climax she paused with a clenched fist to a standing ovation that lasted several minutes, and then concluded the song with a delicate flourish. Sounds mawkish by my description, but it was really the opposite. I couldn’t help getting teary, but that’s what you go to Cyndi Lauper concerts to do — I mean, she mopes around the house listening to Tupac records, sobbing.

• The whacky “French folk song” version of “She Bop”.

• That voice.

• Her closing number was, of course, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun”, but her concept could so easily have turned dicey in lesser hands: (1) get the support band back up on stage for a jam; (2) have the support band’s riot grrl cheerleaders, a bunch of drag queens and various random stage invaders mill about aimlessly; (3) get everyone to gyrate to a Lion King-style jungle-boogie arrangement of the song. Amazingly, it worked. (I don’t think there was a properly scheduled support act, either — just some local plastic punk-metal troupe that she typically picked up a few days ago because their name was “More Crap For the Masses”, which she thought was priceless.)

Sushi. I love sushi!
— Cyndi Lauper, “Yeah Yeah”

You may recall that that I’ve mentioned Katy Stevens (1, 2) in the past. But I somehow never found her blog, Sushipop, nor her Jossology project. {Smacks forehead}

Oh yeah, Cyndi Lauper tonight — I’m almost wetting myself.

Is she not the greatest? And as ever, she’s dressed so appropriately — ready for a spot of Cave Clanning, or maybe joining the Dole Army…

The title isn’t a joke. Last night I was having dinner with Mum and Dad before they left for Peter’s funeral in Canada. We got talking about how my grandmother never forgave herself for sending her quiet son to another country to study, about how the pressure of being an already-withdrawn Chinese kid, alone in Australia during the White Australia Policy, might have contributed to Peter’s breakdown.

My father then disclosed something I’d always wondered about: he described how some of his fellow Chinese overseas students in Australia during the 1950s and 60s failed to cope with the pressure, and went mad. There was one guy who seemed otherwise completely “sane”, but who became convinced that he didn’t need to eat, and that he could produce energy within his body via nuclear fusion. He even went to the lengths of changing his degree to one in physics. The interesting thing is that Dad was fairly clear that race, culture and nation had something to do with this phenomenon — an angle he rarely takes.

Race, culture, nation and “madness”. Of course, then there’s an entire generation of migrant women in Australia whose personalities have been permanently altered by tranquilliser addiction. They would see doctors about depression, feelings of isolation and alienation, and would simply be given prescriptions for Valium — prescriptions that were never explained to them. Obviously, this kind of systematic, racialised psycho-medical malpractice isn’t something that we can relegate to a harsher past. I know one woman who suffered from an aching back from too much work at Kmart, and recently went to see a doctor about it. Feeling that she could confide in this doctor much like one could with a hairdresser, she also chatted about some of the pressures in her personal life. What did the doctor prescribe for her aching back? Prozac. No explanation, not for the ignorant migrant woman.

Some things make me very sad. Sad and angry.

The Cheese Man from Buffy explained.

My uncle Peter died today. I never knew him, and only met him fleetingly. Of all the people in the family, he looked most like me. An overseas student in Sydney in the 1960s, Peter went mad, was diagnosed with schizophrenia and institutionalised for the rest of his life, ending up in a home in Canada.

All I really have left of him is an album of fine Australian surf music — 1963’s Bombora, by The Atlantics:

This remnant of Uncle Peter’s music collection haunted my childhood. I grew up with spine-tingling instrumentals like “Bombora” and “Free Fall”. And I just discovered the brilliant, spooky “War of the Worlds” while trawling for more on the net. All corks on the ocean.

A note on my new banner: as I explained a year ago, the somewhat misleading title of this blog was always “accidental”. The “anti” was added to the already-taken “popper.com” as a way of creating an “evil twin” substitute, as it were — I liked the way it suggested a weird kind of ambivalence and contradiction, rather than phobic disavowal (otherwise I’d have never used the name). It reminds me of the more nuanced and radical take on Hegelian philosophy implied by the name of the communist journal Aufheben:

There is no adequate English equivalent to the German word Aufheben. In German it can mean “to pick up”, “to raise”, “to keep”, “to preserve”, but also “to end”, “to abolish”, “to annul”.

It makes you wonder if Deleuze and his mates are missing the complexity of Hegel. But in any case, I guess the ambivalence of the “antipopper” name wasn’t readily apparent to anybody else but me, so I’m now setting things straight by “bending the stick” and radically emphasising the “popper” part. (With a little help from everybody’s favourite Hegelians, the Situationist International.)