February 2006 Archives

Oh well, CafePress just pulled most of my merchandise at the Antipopper Store for potential copyright infringement. It’s not really a surprise — I’ve been waiting this to happen ever since I turned Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s “Magneto Was Right” t-shirt into reality, which was naughty, yes, but too cool to pass up. The rest of the stuff was all collage and parody, though, which irks me — I mean, a picture of George Bush with a faux-Flickr logo modified to read “FUCKR” isn’t exactly an attempt to made unauthorised Flickr merchandise, is it? Oh well.

[ tags: cafepress, intellectual-property, fair-use, copyright ]

Octavia Butler is dead.

[ tags: science-fiction, octavia-butler ]

Lacking finesse, obviously, but I couldn’t resist.

[ tags: race, nationalism, john-howard, assimilation, racism, australia ]

Last night I went to my first Cantonese class, in anticipation of our sojourn to Hong Kong later this year. (Having to pay to learn Cantonese is a cringeworthy matter for me and I guess many other alienated children of migrants who can’t properly speak their parents’ language. This inability makes me scared to go to Chinatown. It lies at the heart of an identity crisis which I’ve not yet been able to productively explore, even though this very local politics of race and “cultural identity” — which I approach by combining a sense of post-assimilation mourning with a refusal to accept a return to authentic wholeness — are what initially led me to my interest in cultural politics in general. The problem is that I’ve used my suspicion of “identity politics” as an alibi for this cringe-factor, which means that my critical work in cultural politics has always been inflected in ways that have completely erased my own experiences — I’ve basically stayed away from “Chineseness” altogether, both “theoretically” and in “everyday life”, if such a distinction is tenable.)

The coolest thing about the class is that our teacher is the most distractible person I’ve ever met. We were learning the Cantonese name for kiwifruit, which is apparently “kèihyigwó” — an obvious transliteration from English. When I asked her for the original name for the fruit (which, of course, comes from China), she told a very long and seemingly disconnnected bunch of stories. Twenty minutes later, after we’d heard about starving Chinese migrants in New Zealand wearing sack-cloth clothes and committing suicide in the cold waters of Dunedin, and an apparent non-sequitur about Bing Lee/John Woo/Nicolas Cage, she finally answered my question with the observation that there are many names for kiwifruit, and that such names are also often completely contingent — Hong Kong market people would simply market them, in impromptu fashion, under “cool” names like “Jade Fruit”. Very cool.

[ tags: aotearoa, cantonese, kiwifruit, migration, naming, new-zealand, suicide ]

More on Turin from Mark Vallen:

While watching the televised opening ceremonies for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, I was stunned to hear the anchorman casually mention the fact that the stadium had been “built by Benito Mussolini,” a fact to which was attributed no historical context or significance… While the international press focused on the colorful glitz of the opening ceremonies with its flaming rollerbladers, dancing cows, soaring acrobats, and appearances by Luciano Pavarotti, Yoko Ono and Peter Gabriel, it was the “Salute to Futurism” that really got my attention.

(Via Social Design Notes.)

[ tags: benito-mussolini , olympics, fascism, turin, torino, futurism, marinetti ]

I happened to catch a bit of the Olympic figure-skating tonight over dinner — my pesto will conquer all — and marvelled at the fundamental tackiness of it all. (As the Manics say, “Torville and Dean’s Bolero / redundant as a sad Welsh chapel”.) It was great, though, that one of the Chinese teams chose to burst out the other side of this aesthetic regime by performing to that loveable monument to overindulgence, Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir”. Without vocals, the song was begging for a rendition of Puffy’s “Come With Me”, of which I’m also perversely fond. Believe it. (“Uh huh, yeah”.)

But as with all spectacular totalisations of the city that things like the Olympics represent, I wonder about all the the stuff that’s being effaced in Torino in order to stage this event. And what does this mean in our current state of emergency? (These are questions we’ll soon face in Australia when Melbourne again hosts the “Stolenwealth Games”.) As I mentioned in an old essay, more than 25 years ago Torino’s spectacularisation revolved around its 1978 public exposition of a religious icon — the Shroud of Turin — and its state of emergency was a mixture of Italy’s repressive police state, widespread and unorthodox working class insurrection, the uncanny mirror of the State (or indeed, the actual State) in the Stalinist PCI (Partito Comunista Italiano), and the uncanny mirror of the militarised police in the suicidal spectre of the Red Brigades. So whack was the whole arrangement that the Church-State complex in Torino was obsessively fixated on the Shroud as a possible target for Red Brigade terrorism. As recounted by Ian Wilson in The Shroud of Turin, it was Stalinism to the rescue:

For full-scale exposition of the Shroud, Turin needed to be made ready for visitors, streets and public buildings cleaned, signposting erected and special crowd-control barriers prepared. On the Cathedral steps special gantries needed to be built, and inside the Cathedral a special posse of security men needed to be on guard day and night to avoid the Shroud becoming yet another Red Brigade object of ransom. Ballestrero sought help for these requirements from the unlikeliest source, Turin’s Communist administration. He succeeded to a greater degree than anyone could have believed, the Communist mayor agreeing to give Turin a total facelift for the exposition, embracing Ballestrero’s requirements, and costing in the region of a million pounds.

Stalinism, remaking Torino in the image of theocratico-capitalist iconography! Mopping up resistance in the streets!

So: who is being mopped up, right now?

(Incidentally, in the lead up to the last Shroud exposition in 1998, Torino’s Cathedral was set alight. Among the suspects? “The autonomi, a powerful Turin-centred anarchy faction descended from the former Red Brigades.” Ha!)

[ tags: commonwealth-games, olympics, torino, turin, turin-shroud ]

The other day I was introduced to some people with whom I expected to have little in common, and yet we quickly established that we were all Firefly fans. It was so weirdly sudden, and almost unspoken! The exponential dance of subtle cues that led to this understanding made me think about drug deals, or picking someone up at a beat, or other forms of negotiation that appear to lie outside declarative, transmissive models of rational communication. Which leads to this thought: the way these kinds of “subcultural social skills” exist outside the official domain of “the political” is very interesting.

[ tags: politics, firefly, subculture ]

After three years, I feel like this blog is looping endlessly, on a one-track meditation. I know I’m pushing it, but we’re back to what I had to say about Solaris, yet again (sorry, I re-watched Soderbergh’s version on the weekend):

Perhaps the unexplained heavenly body that is Solaris is really like a dense point in a crystal solution of our ideas about sociality. When humans are introduced to that space, our loving memory of the gesture cannot help but solidify and grow like crystals at that point. In a sensory deprivation tank, we float in salty water to re-experience the womb, to put the ego to rest, to temporarily re-establish the polymorphous. Perhaps Solaris is an unabashedly “mutant womb”, a critical, concretising tank of solution that perversely builds (inter-)personality-simulations as a dramatic theatre of the social, a testing ground for social models, a prototyping space. “Hard fax” tanks, in which actual 3D objects can be reproduced by congealing a solution via the intersection of lasers, are now a reality, and are employed in real prototyping processes.

It’s thus with great excitement (via my tendency to take metaphors and puns literally) that I’ve discovered Feel Tank Chicago, a surrealist political experiment that Lauren Berlant is involved in. From the Manifesto:

Feel Tank Chicago seeks to understand the economic and the nervous system of contemporary life; to feel the risk of unlearning the taken for granted and the risk of reclaiming optimism. We are interested in the potential for “bad feelings” like hopelessness, apathy, anxiety, fear, numbness, despair and ambivalence to constitute and be constituted as forms of resistance. While we are all too aware of how the state and the media mobilize and manipulate emotions to produce a loyal citizenry and prosecute the “war on terrorism,” we are also critical of the ways in which the left and social movements relegate emotions to the so-called “private” or “individual” sphere. In opposing the facile splitting of thinking and feeling, we are for a pedagogy of complex feelings, for a surrealist and imaginative politics that embraces ambivalence, the ridiculous, and the raw.

[ tags: affect, citizenship, film, lauren-berlant, politics, public-sphere, solaris, stanislaw-lem, steven-soderbergh ]