Tomorrow I’m starting the workshops for the Storybox program, a blogging project for young refugee people in Western Sydney. There’s a whole bunch of stuff in my head about storytelling, different kinds of literacies, upsetting conventions, access, “cultural capital”, anonymity, naming and the politics of public/private domains. I’ll let you know how it progresses.
September 2004 Archives
It had to happen sooner or later: “If music be the food of love, play on,” says lovesick yuppie Count Orsino to his iPod, in Bell Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. Ha ha. An uneven production with plenty of potential, full of wonderful crassness and wit that almost pays off. Unconvinced.
The connective tissue in beef rendang solves all problems.
Despite Katy’s worried rumblings about the prospect of future Richard Kelly projects after the Donnie Darko Director’s Cut, I’m still naively looking forward to Southland Tales. Okay, so I haven’t seen the Director’s Cut yet, but Stifler and Sarah Michelle Gellar in a musical of the future? What’s not to like? It starts shooting any day now…
Watched Brian Wilson on Tour, which was a horrible letdown: badly shot snatches of video footage, edited to kill all qualities of presence in the performances. Compared to my memory of Wilson’s Australian tour, the DVD feels like a dinky alternate universe in which everything sublime has been flattened, and in which the palpable, collective sense of affection for Brian that was expressed in the concert experience has been replaced by endlessly looped soundbites of fawning celebrity friends. A great shame.
Saw Georgina Naidu’s solo show “Yellowfeather”, which was part of the (disturbingly auto-orientalist) Orientation festival of Asian performance at the Sydney Opera House. Some points:
Evidence of the globalisation of discourses of ethnicity: Indian and other South Asian cultures are now being categorised in Australia as “Asian” — in contrast to the UK, the term “Asian” in Australia has pretty much always been reserved for East Asian/”oriental” cultures.
Georgina Naidoo’s physical comedy of embarrassment was fantastic. In my crude, un-PC terms, “Yellowfeather” is a “coming out as an ‘ethnic’ in a white world” story, full of identity crisis, which is why I think it’s less effective when it attempts narrative resolution — as with classic “gay and lesbian” coming out narratives, it ends with a triumphant, euphoric dancefloor epiphany that attempts to inscribe a newly comfortable politics of identity, under which all is reconcilable.
You’ll love this, Camel: there’s a great moment where the protagonist reads The Buddha of Suburbia, and this changes everything — she sees herself in popular culture for the first time, and she runs around, shrieking “that’s me! that’s me!”. Unlike the cheesy dancefloor ending, and as I’ve noted before, I don’t think this moment of recognition is one in which identities are neatly inscribed. Indeed, perhaps South Asian fans of Hanif Kureishi from the UK would be surprised at how much the “BoS moment” means to people who aren’t white in general, around the world.
There’s no way I can say this without seeming dodgy, but it was interesting to see how woggy Naidu’s performance flavour was. (In Australia, “wog” is a racist epithet for various Mediterranean peoples that has been reclaimed in common usage by those communities.) Don’t ask me to explain where this impression comes from — it seemed to be inflected in different layers of narrative and performance. Lena noticed it too. Is it that the cultural vocabulary for “talking from below” about one’s ethnicity in Australia has been set by Italian, Greek and Lebanese migrants, to be then taken up by other communities as they emerge? On the other hand, I’m fairly sure I’m not simply mapping a stereotype of what a “loud woman of colour with a sense of humour” could possibly be (i.e. “woggy”), but perhaps there’s an aspect of this at work, too.
So it was very stimulating. Meanwhile, in the larger context of the festival, the cultural politics of self-exoticisation await further investigation…
Better late than never:
Dodgeball: very stupid (and since when has that been a problem?), but glad to have seen it nonetheless. Seeing Alan Tudyk brings back fond Firefly memories:
“Yes… this is a fertile land, and we will thrive. We will rule over all this land, and we will call it… the land.”
“I think we should call it your grave!”
“Ah. Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!”
“Hahaha. Mine is an evil laugh.”
Yes, it’s Joss Whedon Alter Ego Moment #234987944.
A strange day. A lovely IM chat with my favourite Latin American ex-Trotskyist. You might not convince me of a 5th Internationl, Guillermo, but I’m almost tempted to reread the Transitional Programme. :) A bit of immobilising numbness. A strange exchange about Fleetwood Mac with the middle-aged woman on checkout at the supermarket. She looked oddly at me for a second, obviously thinking, you’ve got those weird horns shaved into your head, and you like my music?, but she also seemed genuinely pleased. These are welcome luxuries in such times.
I should declare that I had a good time at the Italian Effect conference, and thus differentiate myself from predictably dour activist judgements of such things. But that’s as much as I’ll side with Ned Rossiter, whose whacky paper on “processual democracy” seemed like an unnecessarily theoretical elaboration of plain old reformism.
(Rossiter, with both this paper and his earlier arguments that Aboriginal people should seek sovereignty in the intellectual property rights arena because they’re not getting far in the human rights field, seems to be returning to the cultural policy morass of the 90s, in which theorists eargerly greased the wheels of government bureaucracies by reading Foucault in a completely depoliticised way. It was a docile fascination with the processes of governmental co-option, and about generating flashy new vocabularies for mundane things like betrayal. In any case, partisanship aside, I find the intellectual energy of such endeavours stunningly misplaced at the very least.)
Highlights? I loved Paul waving his hands in the air, raving about how Italy in the 1970s was “a really heavy scene, man,” and delivering hyperbolic slogans about the power of P38 pistols. Ilaria Vanni’s wonderful paper on San Precario, the Milanese “patron saint of precarious workers”, suggested some intensely interesting things to me about temporality, the Benjaminian relation of theology to historical materialism, and non-teleological notions of community’s arrival. I really do think that when Benjamin says, “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter,” he’s actually talking about escaping the self-fulfilling prophecies of both Stalinist and social democratic temporality, towards an approach to activity in time that manifests the virtual, enabling new collectivities and subjectivities. By detourning religiosity through the playful creation of a new patron saint, the activists behind San Precario have created a system of symbols for which ideological readings are irrelevant. Despite the manifest content, San Precario’s appearances and interventions are neither about reviving religious traditions, nor a pointless joke, but point towards the generation of unknown futures — the real tasks of communism.
A great quote from Bifo: “When you’re walking down the street, or talking, you’re producing semio-… something.” But the best line all weekend was from Melissa Gregg: “I’m going to stand up to deliver my paper, so if you don’t really care about what I have to say, you can just check me out”.
It was lovely to finally meet people like Az and Steve, whom I’d only known online, and to catch up with so many comrades. You know, it really is true: when you face down mounted police together, there’s a connection forever. For me, at least.
People are always amused by my stupid non sequiturs. Wide eyed, I’ll tell people that the sun keeps things warm, you know. A radical notion. Here’s a new one for me: bodies are real, and they can move, and do different things.
It might have always been obvious intellectually, but only lately have I been able to truly understand: almost everything in my previous work context was unsustainable and stupid, simultaneously miserly and wasteful, so utterly devoid of interest or real desire. Most of you know that I’m no fan of reactive disavowals of commercial mass culture — I had my own radical analysis of my situation, thankyou very much. Indeed, part of my horror is that the shit in which I was involved didn’t even work on its own terms. No method, no engagement. It was the autonomic assemblage: a bunch of sometimes very smart people on zombie autopilot.
Oh, and while I’m whining, I want to register my increasing irritation with some people closer to home: those self-indulgent, reactionary, wannabe “psychogeographers” whose opposition to bourgeois capitalist culture is actually aristocratic, whose obsession with intensity is actually just an intellectual fetish, whose quirks of arbitrary taste are passed off as a political programme, and whose aspirations towards being “dangerous” will ultimately cover for misogyny, racism and greed. Rot in your little aesthetic fiefdoms. Okay, you are very interesting, though. There there.
…or some such commie rhetoric — hopefully my absence wasn’t too boring.
Well, what have you missed? Briefly: you work on a website for a month, under ridiculous pressure. Impossible things are accomplished. It goes live to great acclamation. The client almost wets their pants about it. Then, out of the blue, the Powers That Be, the meta-client, declare that they Don’t Get It, that it sullies their brand, and it gets unceremoniously pulled down. Feh.
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The trailer for Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars feels really daggy. Apologies to those I know who worked on the thing — I’m sure it’ll kick major arse regardless; but this has gotten me thinking about how after, say, Season Three of Buffy, genre television has returned to the realm of uncoolness. Am I the only person who thinks that despite its indisputible virtuosity and lovability, Firefly was almost terminally uncool?
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Here’s where I declare that I am now using whatever dubious lines of influence I possess in a hopeless bid to bring Joss Whedon to Australia as a guest of the Sydney Writers’ Festival. How’s that — a television writer, nay, a genre television writer, coming to smash the sacred prisms of the literati conspiracy! A portent: my agents have reported that the Powers That Be at the Festival kinda didn’t know who he was.
Another suggestion I made was Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return.
And a certain Mr Philip Pullman. Apparently they’ve already looked into the matter.
I wouldn’t hold your breath.
