antipopper

Yesterday I was a tech-wrangler at an event featuring IBM executive Mark Bagshaw, who opened his presentation with the surprising observation that “it’s very nice that some asylum seekers are being released today, but if you look at the wider context, with all that’s happening in the world, I think we have to face the fact that capitalism is in decline”. (!!!) The rest of his speech was about IT and disability, and while interesting, I think he couched it problematically in terms of lost productivity. (Of course, the very real desire for fulfilling activity and getting a life on the part of those excluded by the able-bodied “public” is bound to be expressed in terms of integrating into the work machine in most contexts. Unfortunate but true.) But I still can’t get over the capitalism comment!

[ tags: asylum-seekers, capitalism, disability, ibm, mandatory-detention, mark-bagshaw, refugees, technology ]

A lot of my paid work this year has been spent converting the VHS-based video library of a fairly old-skool industrial union to DVD. There’s a lot of interesting shit in there, I can tell you! For a start, there’s a really prominent obsession with the mortification of human flesh, which is fairly obvious when you think about it but simply amazing to watch nonetheless: ancient workplace safety films from the 1950s, complete with gruesome footage of industrial accidents, rub shoulders with a detailed examination of the effects of a nuclear bomb on a metropolitan population. And then there’s the concern with what comes after the flesh — surprisingly in-depth documentaries from the early ’80s about artificial intelligence.

They’re a fairly militant union, for what that’s worth, so it’s no surprise that much of the research evident in this archive unconsciously maps the territory in between the inventive, radically strategic thinking of savvy class war, and the self-defeating form of identity-maintenance — the disciplinary imperative to be a proper worker, a stable subject for whom justice can be served within a largely unquestioned context of waged labour — that has been the union movement’s albatross from the beginning. But despite this albatross, and perhaps unlike my many ultraleftist friends, I’m still in awe over how organised, self-resourced and loopy these organisations born of working class struggles can be.

[ tags: class-struggle, flesh, industrial-relations, labour-movement, media, nucelar-war, politics, unions, video ]

Thinking aloud: a few months ago, my supervisor offhandedly suggested that I could “create some sort of tool” as part of my research on blogging and “marginality”. Having let that brew for a while, I’m now thinking seriously about developing some software to dramatise the concepts deployed in my thesis. I’m interested in taking the metadata of the blogosphere to the limits of its own intelligibility, in order to create unexpected pathways and revaluations. It develops a line of speculation I tentatively offered in my BlogTalk paper:

If the Storybox participants can generate “neveryday” vocabularies in a wayward negotiation of their (pre)conditions of trauma, perhaps “information design” can, too. What this could involve remains to be seen.

RSS/Atom aggregation and folksonomic tagging will play a large part in this, coupled with my old flirtation with “automistake” functionality and the cybernetic unconscious. And perhaps it could help unpack the strange discussion that we had at BlogTalk about “protecting the Long Tail of the blogosphere”.

My move to software has also been lubricated by Samuel R. Delany’s “modular calculus”, a conceit with which he underwrote his self-deconstructing sword-and-sorcery series Return to Nevèrÿon. In Damien Broderick’s words, Nevèrÿon is, narratively speaking, “a generous, self-subverting machine for modelling practically everything mundane and contentious in our contemporary epistemic and social order”. Just what we need for neveryday life! But Delany also invests playfully in a dodgy scientific rhetoric that gives this vision a kind of cod-coherency, and this is where the software comes in — as an algorithmic generator of strained metaphors, a water balloon of strategic truth-identity that bursts on impact. Mysterious? It is to me, too :)…

[ tags: affect, aggregation, blogging, blogtalk, folksonomy, metadata, nevèrÿon, programming, research, samuel-r-delany, social-software, software ]

I was always a West Side Story fan as a kid, but I somehow never remembered Saul Bass’s killer titling design for the end credits.

Outstanding. Question: when did Hollywood films begin displaying credits at the end, rather than the beginning?

[ tags: design, films, saul-bass, typography, west-side-story ]

• apophenia: Privacy is a Privilege
  “Ever stop to wonder why most of you are straight, white and male? It’s kinda obvious if you stop to think about it. Repeat after me: privacy is a privilege.”
  (tags: privacy public-sphere danah-boyd habermas)
• Wired News: Blogs Taking Off in Cambodia
  “As part of a project launched by a pro-democracy nonprofit…” — the “non-partisan” International Republican Institute!!!
  (tags: blogs blogging cambodia global-south republicans)

The other morning I caught Justine Clarke presenting Play School and sighed. Now, I don’t remember Clarke from her stint on Home and Away; rather, for me she will always be Anna Goanna from Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. I’ve never thought that Thunderdome was a particularly good film, especially in comparison to the others in the series, but I find it remarkably resonant nonetheless (I’ve written about my fascination with Australian post-apocalyptica of the 1980s before).

So, for your listening pleasure: Tina Turner’s “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)”. I recently discovered that this piece of cruisy, blow-dried sessioneering (so ripe for recuperation right now!) was co-written by Terry Britten, once of The Twilights, a litle ’60s rock band from… Adelaide. How cool! I’m also in love with the bassline. No shame!

On Mad Max II: a couple of years ago I was at Australian Fashion Week, listening to a B-list celebrity Scientologist’s impression of “singing”. After a while I decided to leave, and on my way out I bumped into the supremely elegant Virginia Hey. Now, I didn’t think “Zhaan from Farscape!”, or even “Michael Hutchence’s ex!”, but rather, “Holy Fuck! It’s Warrior Woman from Mad Max II!!!”. Not being in Virginia Hey’s league (don’t you dare say “B-list celebrity at Fashion Week (yawn)”), I said nothing and left. Downstairs, I passed a comics store just as it was closing, and what do I see but a fucking Warrior Woman action figure in the window! If only I’d gotten there earlier… The next week, I happen to see her right next to the Galaxy Bookshop in town (obviously, another nerdsville hangout, which also stocks Warrior Woman action figures), and again I am too late to make a quick purchase and autograph request. Damn. So uncanny!

[ tags: film, justine-clarke, mad-max, nerdsville, pop-culture, road-warrior, science-fiction, stalking, terry-britten, tina-turner, virginia-hey, warrior-woman ]

Wahey, my abstract for the Re-Membering Place, Dis-Membering Home conference has been accepted! Hello, Brisvegans!

[ tags: brisbane, conference, queensland, research ]

“A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”

– Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

[ tags: angels, angelus-novus, historical-materialism, paul-klee, philosophy, theology, walter-benjamin ]

• In Angels In America, the central character, Prior Walter, is spectrally visited by two of his ancestors — “prior” instances of the name “Prior Walter”. Both Priors died of the plague — one during the medieval Black Death, and the other presumably during the 17th Century Great Plague of London.

• The latter plague was dramatised in a Doctor Who story called “The Visitation”, in which crash-landed aliens conspire to wide out humanity with a super-virus. But they botch it, accidentally causing the Great Fire of London, which effectively ends the plague.

• In 1984, while I was watching “The Visitation” on TV, I heard two muffled bangs in the distance. Later that night I learned that those bangs were the sound of the infamous hit-man Christopher Dale Flannery attempting to assassinate undercover drug-squad cop Michael Drury, who lived in the house around the corner from us. (This event was dramatised in the Australian television mini-series Blue Murder.) Flannery fled Drury’s kitchen and escaped via our backyard. Christopher Dale Flannery, in our fucking backyard!

[ tags: aids, angels-in-america, cops, crime, doctorwho, haunting, hit-men, plague ]

I was happy to bump into Louise D’Arcens at Writing Across Cultures.* Louise was one of my teachers twelve years ago, and taught a course about medieval women writers. I think she was the first person to introduce me to Deleuze and Guattari, and was also the best dressed person on campus — a funk fetish vampire diva. We all worshipped her, of course. (Funny: we’re chatting about escaping the master-disciple dynamic of postgrad supervision, and she says, “I don’t think I could be anyone’s master,” and I’m thinking incredulously, did you SEE how you dressed in the 20th Century?) I remember turning up to half of her classes, and then handing in what purported to be an essay about medieval women mystics’ visions of Christ and other divine beings, but which was somehow ended up being about the corporeal rapture of alien abduction narratives…

This brings me to Gregg Araki’s stunning Mysterious Skin, which I saw at the Sydney Film Festival a few weeks ago. There are lots of interesting things I could say about the film’s refusal to trot out any kind of “positive”, normative model of (homo)sexuality in the face of its concerns with the aftermath of paedophilia, and then there’s always Michelle Trachtenberg’s small role to consider. But right now, I’m most interested in the character of Brian, who constructs a lifelong obsession with alien abduction as a way of interfacing with his memories of sexual abuse. He places his slippery recollections of being inappropriately probed in an appropriately shlock-technoscientific narrative. But within the framework of the film’s “reality”, his family really does seem to be visited by a UFO, shortly after his experiences of sexual abuse. Whether this is the point at which the coherence of the film’s reality-effect deliberately breaks down is open to question, but the idea that these experiences can be placed in parallel as having a valid kinship is really interesting.

I can’t really take this any further without working through an event from my past: when I was a child, I, too, saw a UFO. There. I will ponder this a while, and get back to you about its significance. Just to assure you, it’s probably not the same as Brian’s.

And it’s not without reason that throughout this long train of thought, I’ve been obsessively listening to the Eurythmics’ “There Must Be An Angel”, the single greatest exception to my hatred of melistastic vocals, perhaps because Annie Lennox is so over the top about it: “I walk into an empty roo-oo-oo-oom / and suddenly my heart goes boo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oom”. It’s a beautiful, cold rapture. And underneath the cheery gospel literality of it all, there’s an awfulness — the edginess of awe. And Stevie Wonder!

The past couple of weeks have also been spent curling up in front of Angels In America. In the middle of extremity, we are visited by terrible beauty.

What does any of this mean?

(I spent more than a week chewing on this post, but decided to let it out unfinished.)

* It was strange. Despite a very significant engagement with postcolonial theory and politics, there was something troublingly “national” and “literary” about the conference that obviously lay deep in its longterm institutional investments — it was, after all, an Australian Literature conference. It was as if postcoloniality was met and arranged within markers that shouldn’t really remain tenable, but yet tellingly still remain. Of course, attempts were made to push those markers — Gail Jones delivered an unimaginably sexy keynote about heterotopic denationalisation, spectrality, the radical ethics of generosity, and memory escaping the project of the coherent reconstruction of (national) identity. Imagine if Kate Bush was an academic — that’s Gail Jones. Multiple swoonings! Perhaps any attempts to recognise the postcolonial in such a disciplinary framework are doomed to narcissism, simply because those rhetorical attempts are not material enough, but I’d take Gail Jones’ speculative “narcissism” over any one else’s, since too many other presentations stayed at the unambitious level of show and tell.

[ tags: aids, aliens, angels, angels-in-america, divinity, eurythmics, gail-jones, gregg-araki, michelle-trachtenberg, mysterious-skin, paedophilia, rapture, ufo ]